Voodoo Ridge

“I was going to.”

“When?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You didn’t call me when she got taken, either,” Carlisle said. “I could’ve done something. Brought in help, you son of a bitch.”

“I should’ve called you. I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that! ‘Sorry’ don’t bring my daughter back, goddamn it.”

“I don’t blame you for being mad at me, Gil.”

“You don’t blame me? Well, that’s mighty white of you, Logan. I’m go

I couldn’t much blame him for saying that, either.

“She told me she was pregnant. Couple months along. That true?”

“Yes.”

“You were go

“She already was a decent woman.”

“Well, whoopty-damn-do. You thought she was decent. That don’t mean a damn thing to me, you know that? You don’t mean a damn thing to me.”

Carlisle told me he would dispatch his private jet to retrieve Sava

“And one more thing,” Carlisle said. “Don’t even think about asking for any of her money. You weren’t married. You don’t get a dime. Not one pe

“Do you really think I care about her money?”

“Well, you sure as hell didn’t care much about her safety, did you?” He began to cry. “I don’t ever want to talk to you again. Do you feel me, boy? Never!”

The line went dead.

I’ve lost comrades in combat, classmates, buddies I’ve flown with. At Alpha, I watched brother go-to guys die in action. But the sense of loss I suffered in their passing was little more than emotional potholes compared to the black hole of grief that threatened to consume me as a result of Sava

I called Mrs. Schmulowitz to tell her the news because I knew she’d want to know. She listened solemnly and told me she wasn’t surprised. She’d had a dream the night before, she said, that Sava

“She’s OK, bubby. She’s in a better place.”

“I hope so, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

I hung up the phone and wept. Somewhere in the night, as falling snow muffled the sound of passing cars and trucks, but not the rhythmic rooting and orgasmic moaning of the couple in the room above mine, I finally drifted off.

That’s when they came to me — the ravens I’d seen that morning in the trees high above the ditch where Sava

NINETEEN

In Greek and Egyptian legend, the presence of a raven portends bad weather. Some African and Asian cultures believe that the bird forecasts death. For Shakespeare, the raven was evil incarnate; for Poe, it was the embodiment of lost love and despair.

The only reason I knew all that was because of Lieutenant Commander Andy Ziegler.

Andy was a naval aviator with big teeth and a skull filled to overflowing with pointless trivia, which he was only happy to uncork with minimal provocation. He flew EA-18Gs off the USS Nimitz, with Electronic Attack Squadron 135—the “Black Ravens.” With his hunger for useless information, he’d gone out of his way to learn everything he could about the deviously intelligent birds whose likeness he and his squadron mates carried into battle on the empe

We’d met stateside during a debrief after a particularly sensitive snatch-and-grab in which Andy and his squadron mates jammed hostile radars to cover Alpha’s extraction by helicopter from a Middle Eastern nation that shall go nameless. We became friends after I mentioned to him that I’d flown A-10s during my air force days.

“Are you aware that the Gatling gun on the A-10 Warthog was developed by General Electric?” Andy asked me.

“I am aware.”

“And you don’t find that fu

“I’m not getting it, Andy.”

“The ‘we bring good things to life’ company? Developing a weapon to end life?”

I had to admit, it was pretty ironic.

Andy invited me to spend Christmas at his parents’ 1,200-acre cattle ranch in eastern Montana after Sava

It was a gri

“Have no regrets,” Andy said. “You can’t move on, you can’t think straight, can’t see straight, if you’re flying backward.”

I awoke in a sweat in my silent and dark room at the Econo Lodge before the dawn. Andy’s words reverberated on my tongue.

Have no regrets.

Regret and guilt consumed me after my divorce. Sava

For a full day and night, I had lain there in that cheap motel room, unable to sleep. I wept until I had no more tears left, my stomach aching from convulsive waves of grief that surged through me on a relentless, anguishing tide.

The next morning, I willed myself out of bed and into the bathroom. I tore the plastic wrapper off a plastic cup, filled it from the sink, and drank it down, then turned on the light. The eyes that stared back at me in the mirror seemed not my own, haggard and shot through with veins, older than when I’d seen them last.

Would Sava

Have no regrets.

He was right. Was I really to blame for Sava

I ran the shower as cold as it would go and stepped in. The stream of frigid water stung like needle pricks, robbing me of breath, but it forced me to focus.

At Alpha, we were taught that the most difficult question to answer is always the one to which the answer is obvious. Like peeling an onion, you start from the outside and work your way in. To me, standing there in that freezing shower, the obvious answer was either Gordon Priest or Preston Kavitch. Deputy Streeter had warned me about approaching Priest and interfering with his investigation. Fair enough. It was Kavitch I was more interested in, anyway.