David Morrell - The naked edge

Jamie quit aiming her pistol and looked at him. "You make it sound like…"

"I went to high school with him in Iowa."

"But you told me you were raised in Oklahoma."

"Until my dad beat my mom and me once too often, and she took me and left him. Eventually, we landed in Iowa City, where she got paralegal training, went to work for an attorney, and married him."

"How is it we need to be running for our lives before you tell me about your past?"

"Why should I talk about what I want to forget?"

"Your stepfather wasn't kind to you, either?"

"He didn't know how to react to a child. He was a better husband than he was a father. Let's put it this way, he disapproved of mistakes, and in his eyes, I made a lot of mistakes. But he didn't raise his voice. He didn't beat me. He didn't beat my mother or the daughter my mom and he had. By comparison with what we'd been through, he was a saint. I was grateful that he gave us a home. Still am. Even so, I did my best to stay out of his way. When it came to sternness, though, nothing could equal Carl's father. That guy was a pusher. In his youth, Carl's father played football for the University of Iowa. In Iowa, few things are as important as college sports. Carl's father had ambitions to be a pro quarterback. Might have done it, too. To hear him tell it, he was a fantastic athlete. But he broke his leg in a game in his junior year. It crippled him, and he never got over the bitterness. So the old man decided that Carl, by God, was going to be the pro quarterback in the family. He pushed Carl, and pushed him, until Carl was so determined to please his father that he needed to prove he was better than anybody else on the West High team. Needed to prove he knew more than the coach. Needed to prove he was smarter and tougher than anybody, and proved it so well that the coach kicked him off the team. So Carl's father beat the hell out of him and sued the school and-"

"What a mess," Jamie said.

"It got worse. Carl's father was a stockbroker. He was also a secret drinker. Finally, he got better at one than the other, and his company fired him. The drinking problem got so bad that the family was forced to sell their house. They moved to an apartment. Then they moved out of state, trying for a new start."

"And was it successful?"

"Eventually, word came back that Carl's father died from liver disease. Carl never went to college. He certainly never had a chance for that pro-football career. But while we went to high school together, he and I were friends."

"I don't understand why you thought about him in connection with what's happening," Jamie said.

"Carl had a thing about knives."

Jamie looked at him. "Knives?"

"This was before those two kids shot up that high school in Colorado and suddenly every school had a zero-tolerance policy about bringing anything that might be a weapon onto campus. Carl was obsessed about knives. He carried one in his pocket every day he went to school. Or under his sweater. Or in his knapsack. He showed them to me when nobody was looking. Once, he even hid one under his uniform when he was playing football."

"And this was your friend?"

"It's hard to explain. We lived on the same street." Cavanaugh's memory was painful. "Hafor Drive. He was the first kid I met when my mother and I moved to my stepfather's house. There was a soccer field at the end of the street. Woods. A creek. Carl and I used to play in those woods a lot. He didn't like to go home. Neither did I. The thing about a friendship is, once it's formed, you get used to how your friend behaves. No matter how strange he acts, you think it's normal."

"You mean the knives."

"Folders. Fixed blades. Utility knives. Tactical knives. Fishing knives. Skinning knives. Carl and I had jobs delivering for one of the local morning newspapers, the Gazette. This was before newspapers decided it was safer and cheaper to have adults deliver them by throwing them from cars. My stepfather insisted I put the money I earned in a bank account. But Carl's father-at the time, I thought this was cool-let Carl spend his money however he wanted. I didn't think the knives themselves were cool. The truth is, they made me nervous. But Carl's father was really pleased with the knives, as if they proved Carl was macho enough to have a chance at being a pro-football player. So Carl played with knives, and because he was my friend, I joined him. We had contests to see how fast we could pull them from our pockets and open them. We practiced throwing them. We imagined scenarios in which we saved somebody's life with one. Then Carl discovered in a knife magazine that a top knife maker lived right outside town, on a farm near a place called West Liberty."

"You're talking about a hammer and anvil and forge?" Jamie asked.

"The old-time real deal. One day, Carl showed up at my house to say that he'd phoned this knife maker and convinced the old guy to teach us how to forge blades. He was more excited than I'd ever seen him, so I thought, 'What the hell, I'll go along and see what it's like.' My mom wound up driving us every Sunday afternoon. It turned out that the old knife maker belonged to something called the American Bladesmith Society. He had the rank of 'master,' a big deal when you realize there are only about ninety masters in the world. Making knives was the old man's life. His name was Lance Sawyer. The first time I heard it, I thought that name was hilarious. A knife expert whose name was Lance. He was seventy-five years old. He wore bib overalls. He was stooped and scrawny and bald and had brown tobacco juice on his white beard, but his arms were as muscular and strong as anybody's I've ever seen. For a year and a half, until Carl's father moved the family out of state, Carl and I learned how to stoke a forge, how to use a hammer and an anvil to shape a blade, how to cool the metal and then do the reverse, heat-tempering it. The old man made us use leaf springs from old pickup trucks as our rough material. It was hard, heavy work. My arms used to ache all week. But I must say we turned out some awfully fine-looking knives."

"Did you continue the lessons after Carl moved away?"

"For a while. But it wasn't the same without Carl's enthusiasm, and then the old man died. I wasn't there, but I heard he keeled over in the middle of hammering a blade. Went out happy, doing what he liked." Cavanaugh smiled wistfully to himself. "After that, I went to the University of Iowa. I'm pretty sure my stepfather wanted me to be what he was: an attorney. But I surprised him and my mom by leaving school before my first year ended and joining the military. That hatred-of-bullies thing I told you about. Eventually, I got into Delta Force." Cavanaugh paused. "And not long after, Carl showed up."

Jamie, who'd resumed aiming her pistol, now stopped and looked at him again. "Seems a hell of a coincidence, don't you think?"

"Except it wasn't a coincidence. From bits and pieces of what Carl told me, I eventually realized what happened. As his father's alcoholism got worse and the family's fortunes disintegrated, Carl kept looking back on Iowa City and his friendship with me and the lessons with the old knife maker as the best time of his life. He never went to college as his father planned. He never played football. He never had a chance for the big career his father wanted for him. He used to phone me a lot. The calls always felt as if they came from a ghost. I didn't talk long. Then one day he phoned, and my mother told him I was in the Army. As near as I can figure, he joined the Army shortly afterward. I realize now that he was hoping to get stationed with me and continue the ideal friendship he imagined we had. He kept following my career, taking special-ops training, eventually trying to get into Delta Force as he knew I had. Suddenly one day, there he was at the Fort Bragg Delta compound. I turned from completing a training exercise and saw him grinning at me. That was one of the few times in my life when somebody took me totally by surprise."