Stone Cold

CHAPTER 92

IT WASN’T MILD-MANNERED, middle-aged cemetery caretaker Oliver Stone who strode out into battle that night. It was a killing machine called John Carr, thirty years younger, with all the skills and ferocity of a lifetime spent ending other people’s lives in ways unimaginable to most people. He used every one of those skills that night. And yet there seemed a greater power at work. Bullets that should have ended his life numerous times missed by less than an inch. Disaster that should have struck never did. Maybe it was finally his time for justice. He only thought about that later. Tonight, he just killed. And the unfinished visitor center ran red with blood. Finn had killed only one more man. Stone had finished off the other six, two with shots that Finn had never seen anyone make before. He still couldn’t fathom how Stone had done it. It seemed the man had simply willed the bullets to find their marks.

To Stone, there was another explanation as to how he had survived. Undoubtedly, Gray’s men were younger, stronger, faster, superbly trained. These days they always had overpowering force before they attacked. They had killed thousands of times-in practice.

It was altogether different when one did it for real. And counting Vietnam, Stone had probably killed more people than all of Gray’s men combined. And he had never had overpowering force. He had often only had himself. That just made you better than the other guy.

When the last man had dropped, Finn and Stone left via the emergency exit, reaching the Jefferson Building and leaving from there as Caleb had told them. An anguished Stone carried Milton’s body over his shoulder. While he waited behind some bushes with the body, Finn managed to sneak out and snare a spare EMT uniform from a body recovery truck stationed near the epicenter of the mock terrorist attack. Next he spotted an ambulance that was parked near the library with the keys still in the ignition. A few minutes later Milton’s body was loaded into the ambulance by Stone and Finn on a gurney, a sheet placed over his face. With all the chaos going on everywhere around them, no one could tell a fake corpse from a real one. With Stone riding in the back, Finn drove away, the ambulance lights flashing.

Finn glanced in the rearview mirror. Stone was sitting next to his friend, his head hanging down. He had not escaped the battle unscathed. A bullet had sliced through his right arm, leaving a bloody gash. Another had left a crease on the left side of his head. The man took no notice of them. Finn had had to bandage them up using gauze and tape from the ambulance’s supplies while Stone had just stared down at his dead friend.

Stone lifted the sheet, took Milton’s still warm hand in his and squeezed it. He started mouthing words that Finn could not hear clearly, but he instinctively knew what the man was saying.

“I’m sorry, Milton. I am so sorry.”

A tear trickled down from Stone’s weathered face and dropped onto the sheet.

Finn didn’t want to break into this very private moment but he had no choice. “Where do you want to take Milton?”

“Home. We’re taking him home, Harry.”

Leaving the ambulance about three blocks from the house, they carried Milton’s body through the woods at the rear of his neighborhood. Stone placed him gently in his bed and turned to Finn.

“Give me a minute.”

Finn nodded and respectfully withdrew from the room.

Stone was a man who had suffered more heartbreak in life than any human being should have to. He had done so stoically, trying to look ahead rather than focusing on the past. Yet as he gazed down at his friend’s body, every memory of every personal tragedy in his life came charging at him from the darkness.

And for one of the very few times in his life, Oliver Stone sobbed without restraint. He cried so hard his knees buckled and he ended up on the floor, his body curled tight like a child in distress, suffering the anguish of a million nightmares that had collected inside him all these decades, nightmares that had suddenly been released, like the crush of water over a collapsed dam.

Thirty minutes later he had no more tears left to shed. Stone rose and touched his friend’s face with his hand. “Good-bye, Milton.”