Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Read Online Free PDF Page B

die. And when she did not die, she held her hands up in front of her face and looked at her wrists. The right still bled, though not much, and the other had begun to close already. Blood clotted and dried and crusted over. She had not cut deeply enough.
    Sarah screamed, enraged that she still lived.
    And then she cried.
    So lonely, but alive.
    In time she rose, weak and disoriented from blood loss, and followed the train tracks until she found her car. She managed to open the door and slid behind the wheel. Sarah wrapped her jacket tightly around her wrists, tangling herself up to stop any further bleeding, but could do no more. Unconsciousness claimed her.
    Some time later, with the sky beginning to lighten in the east, her eyes fluttered open. Her cell phone had been in her jacket pocket, and it was ringing. Freeing one hand, she managed to retrieve it.
    Paul.
    Sarah opened the phone and fumbled it to her ear.
    “Hello?”
    “Oh, God,” he said, “you had me so scared.”
    “I miss Jonah,” she mumbled.
    He cried then, for the first time in a very long time, and Sarah knew that they had both bid farewell to ghosts that night.

UNDER COVER OF NIGHT
    Long past midnight, Carl Weston sat in a ditch in the Sonoran Desert with his finger on the trigger of his M16, waiting for something to happen. Growing up, he’d always played army, dreamed about travelling around the world and taking on the bad guys—the black hats who ran dictatorships, invaded neighbouring countries, or tried exterminating whole subsets of the human race. That was what soldiering was all about. Taking care of business. Carrying the big stick and dishing out justice.
    The National Guard might not be the army, but he had a feeling the end result wasn’t much different. Turned out the world wasn’t made up of black hats and white hats, and the only way to tell who was on your side was looking at which way their guns were facing. Weston spent thirteen months in the desert in Iraq, and for the last three he’d been part of a unit deployed to the Mexican border to back up the Border Patrol.
    One fucking desert to another. Some of the guys he knew had been stationed in places like El Paso and San Diego. Weston would’ve killed for a little civilization. Instead, he got dirt and scrub, scorpions and snakes, land so ugly even the Texas Rangers had never spent that much time worrying about it.
    Army or Guard, didn’t matter that much in the scheme of things. None of it was anything like he’d imagined as a kid. All just waiting around. If he’d earned a trip to Hell, he was living it. Never mind the heat, or the grit and desert dust in his hair and every fucking orifice . . . the boredom was Hell enough. It was all just so much waiting around.
    Once upon a time, he’d have been excited about a detail like tonight. Border Patrol and DEA were working together to take out a cocaine caravan, bouncing up from South America on the Mexican Trampoline. The traffickers were doing double duty—taking money from illegals to smuggle them across the border, and using them as mules, loading them up with coke to carry with them. Where the DEA got their Intel was none of Weston’s business. He was just a grunt with a gun. But from the way the hours were ticking by, it didn’t look good. They hadn’t seen shit all night, and it had to be after two A.M.
    South of the ditch, Weston couldn’t see anything but desert. Out there in the dark, less than half a mile off, locals had strung a barbed wire fence that ran for miles in either direction. The idea that this might deter illegals from crossing the border made him want to laugh and puke all at the same time. Yeah, Border Patrol units traversed this part of the invisible line between Mexico and the U.S. on a regular basis, but if you were committed enough to try crossing the border through the desert, you had a decent shot at making it. Border Patrol captured or turned back hordes of illegals every day, but plenty