Page 119 of Nash Falls
Nash shook his head.
“Little guy name ’a Peanut. ’Bout five three, one twenty. Hell, girls were stronger’n him.”
“Then what made him so dangerous?” said Nash.
“He wouldn’t waste a second of his time thinkin’ ’bout whether to end your life. Man just do it and then hewalkaway like nothin’happened, ’cause for him nothin’ of importancedidhappen. No real way to defend ’gainst that.”
Nash sat up straighter. “And your point?”
Shock tapped his head. “Your body ain’t never gonna go where your mind ain’t been, Walter. Street soldiers like Peanut? Their whole lives are wrapped up in two things: dodgin’ death and causin’ it. Not only do you get real good at both, there ain’t no place on this earth your mind ain’t been. So that way your body won’t hesitate when the brain say, ‘Do it, just fucken do it.’” He looked at Nash. “You ain’t never killed nothin’, right?”
“A cricket with my BB gun when I was nine.”
“How’d that make you feel?”
“I cried,” Nash replied candidly.
“Right, you cried. Your mind did somethin’ your conscience don’t agree with and then your body carried out the mission, and you cried. Peanut ain’t never cried, guaranteed, Walter, and that man ain’t killin’ no crickets.”
“So you’re saying I need to think like a killer?”
“No, I’m sayin’ you need to be able to kill without hesitation. Sounds straightforward but it ain’t. It’s hard as shit less you like a serial killer. See, the two seconds arguin’ in your head ’bout whether to do it or not, one of Steers’s muthers will cut you in half. Now, I can tell you that you need to do it, and I can demonstrate how to do it, and why it’s important, but I can’t really make you pull the trigger when you need to pull the trigger ’cause I ain’t gonna be there. That between you and whoever you got in front ’a you.” He touched his temple again. “The answer to all that shit’s up here. Sounds weird, but thing is you got to make peace with yourself so you can inflict violence on others.”
“How did my father do it?”
Shock’s mouth eased to a grin. “I was hopin’ you’d get there.” He leaned back in his chair, interlaced his fingers, and cracked them. “Ty tell me one time over in Nam, ‘Shock, in this war we got us and we got them. Now, I don’t know them. I ain’t got no particularbeef ’gainst these folks. We in their country and we fightin’ ’em and maybe we shouldn’t be here fightin’ ’em, but here we are doin’ just that. So this is how it needs to play out. Every time one of them tries to kill me, every time I get one of ’em in my scope, every time I see one of ’em try to take out one of my boys, here’s what goes through my mind: They ain’t people no more to me, Shock. They are obstacles. They are like the shit the Army makes us slough through in boot camp while the man is breakin’ us down, erasin’ everythin’ we brought to the Army and then the man rebuilds us into the machines he needs to do his war business. Walls, trenches, ropes, water:obstacles. And it’s all ’bout goin’ from here to there. But in our casethereis livin’ and the journey through is ’bout dyin’, for the other guy. So an obstacle to me or my boys livin’ or dyin’ is somethin’ I can take on without one shred of personal dilemma.’”
Shock paused and studied Nash, ostensibly to see if he was getting the point being made here.
“Personal dilemma, that is the term your daddy said to me while we’re in this fucken jungle gettin’ et up by mosquitoes and dodgin’ snakes and poison frogs and then the dudes with the guns, machetes, and grenades and their own version of nopersonal dilemmas, while they seein’ us as only obstacles, too. What Ty meant was he takes his gun, or his knife, or his bare hands, and he removes not a livin’, breathin’ person, but anobstacle. And then the next obstacle and then the next one, till they ain’t no more in front of him.”
Nash let out the breath he was holding. “Can I learn to do that, really? I’m not a professional soldier. I’m not Peanut growing up having to dodge death every minute of his life. There is no way to really simulate that. You have to have lived it.”
“You the only one who can answer that, Walter. I can make you strong. I can teach you to whip ass. I can train you to shoot even better than you can now. I can build you up to haul butt all day and night without collapsin’. But obstacles and personal dilemmas?” He touched his head again. “That shit lives up here, son. That’s awallin your mind you got to obliterate. You gotta knock that right out yourconscious self. Ain’t no other way. That why I tell you this is way harder’n liftin’ weights, runnin’ your tail off, and shootin’ till you can’t lift your arms above your damn waist.”
“Does the wall have a name, Shock? That might help me.”
Shock sat forward even more, placed his elbows firmly on the table, and leaned into the other man.
“Sure it do, Walter. It’s called yourhumanity.”
CHAPTER
57
LAUREL BURKE PROVIDED RHETT ANalibi from ten o’clock at night to six in the morning, which was well within the forensic window of when his father pitched over the balcony to the stone pavers below. And it only cost him another ten grand. And he had confirmed there were no cameras between his father’s estate and Burke’s home that could definitively prove otherwise.
Thank God I didn’t drive through the gate, so no one other than Mindy saw me.
“And maybe you can come by and take me out to some nice places,” Burke had told him.
“Maybe I can, yeah,” he’d told her with no intention of ever doing so.
Barton’s funeral had been attended by VIPs from all over the world, and Rhett had accepted condolences from people he barely knew. The accolades bestowed upon his dead father by a litany of innocent-eyed celebrities, politicians paid off by Barton for decades to do his bidding, and fellow business titans who would have slit the dead man’s throat if they thought they could get away with it nearly made Rhett retch. But now, with the grieving period over, he was headed to the lawyer’s office to see what his father’s will said and what his piece of the empire would be.
If you screwed me over, old man, I will dig you up and feed you to the coyotes.
Mindy would be there too. Angie, of course, would not be, and DeeDee was still in Paris and only cared about her outrageous bills being paid. Rhett’s sister, Beth, was also not in the country currently.She had told her brother to let her know the terms. Though she had felt no need to hurry back in the wake of her father’s death, she apparently was sure she would be taken care of.
