opinion of themselves with so little justification. In their minds, it was everyone else who was stupid.
It was easy to be among them, easier than it should have been. Like all deep-cover operatives, he had felt himself slipping away, felt himself starting to like the freedom. Even amid the dissolution, the depravity, the debauchery that was killing his soul and sucking the life from his eyes, God help him, he had enjoyed some of it.
Now and again he would remember that. He would feel it in his stomach, like a sucker punch deep in his guts. When those times came he couldn’t escape the memories fast enough, couldn’t tamp them down hard enough, couldn’t displace them with thoughts of his home and his family and the wife he had betrayed and neglected for his job. He had taken hot shower after hot shower, trying to get the stink of their rat holes and their cigarettes off him. He had gone to doctors, hoping for reassurance, hoping for a rubber stamp on a test form somewhere that told him he was going to be okay, he wasn’t scarred forever, he wasn’t damaged goods.
It was his weakness, he knew, that had eventually undone him. One of Hyde’s toadies had gotten curious and followed him. Once there, the skinhead had seen something, read something, found something out that exposed Troy for other than what he seemed. Troy never knew exactly what it was. A name on a clinic form, an incautious word on the phone to his wife…there was no way to know. He was distracted; he had thought his cover inviolable, had begun to think of himself, in unguarded moments, as one of Hyde’s street soldiers. He had gone to the clinic in…where was it? He couldn’t remember. Places, names, people, they swirled through his head like wisps of fog, evaporating when he tried to catch them. The doctors had told him it might be like that, especially concerning anything to do with the trauma. What trauma? Something had happened. He didn’t remember. It didn’t matter.
He looked down at the rubber ball in his fingers. Sara. It had belonged to Sara. His daughter.
Troy was up before he realized he was on his feet, ripping the mirror from the wall above the entertainment center, throwing it to the floor. It cracked when it landed, but he put his foot through it anyway, feeling the glass splinter under his shoe, relishing the sound of destruction. Still holding the ball, he drew the .40-caliber Glock from the holster clipped to his waistband and smashed the barrel into the television, sundering the flat screen. The telephone flew across the room when he hurled it. He kicked over the wooden chair next to the bed.
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