“Who were they?” My voice was quiet. Deadly calm. It was the voice I used before breaching a door.
Sawyer exchanged a nervous glance with her aide. “I can’t disclose that right now due to privacy laws. The investigation—”
“My son is in a coma,” I interrupted. The air in the waiting room seemed to drop ten degrees. “Six boys beat him with a weapon. You can tell me their names, or I can find them out myself. And I promise you, you want me to hear it from you.”
The principal swallowed hard. Her resolve crumbled under the weight of my stare.
“Bobby Estrada. Carl Merritt. Pete Barnes. Alberto Stone. Steven Coons. And Samuel Randolph.”
I knew the names. Everyone in town knew the names. They were the royalty of Riverside High. The football stars. The untouchables.
“They’ve done this before, haven’t they?” I asked.
Sawyer’s silence was a scream.
“Get out,” Lynn whispered, her voice trembling with grief. “Get out before I say something I can’t take back.”
As the principal retreated, I sat down and held my wife’s hand. But my mind wasn’t in the hospital anymore. It was back in the field. I was building a dossier. I was marking targets.
And I realized, with a terrifying clarity, that the war I thought I’d left behind had just followed me home.
Chapter 2: The Wall of Silence
Over the next forty-eight hours, I lived in the grey twilight of the hospital waiting room. I watched the rise and fall of Carl’s chest, dependent on a machine to breathe for him. I listened to the nurses whisper.
Shannon Fry, a nurse with kind eyes and a daughter at Riverside, approached me during the graveyard shift. She checked the hallway before speaking.
“Mr. Elliot,” she murmured, adjusting Carl’s IV. “You need to know. Those boys… they run that school. Bobby Estrada’s father owns half the commercial real estate downtown. The coach looks the other way because they win state titles. They bring in money. They bring in prestige.”
“Has this happened before?” I asked, my eyes never leaving my son’s bruised face.
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