“Sit down, Mrs. Whitaker,” Judge Richard Hanley commanded.
His gavel did not tap; it struck the sound block with a dull, subterranean *thud* that vibrated through the floorboards directly into my temporal bone.
Beside me, the knees of a dark-green dress uniform hit the stone with the heavy, un-ironed thrum of eight-ounce tropical worsted wool.
Two large, scarred fingers—smelling of carbolic soap, sterile latex, and cold rain—slid beneath the angle of my left jaw. They did not search. They locked onto the carotid artery with the practiced, hydraulic certainty of a combat surgeon who had palpated two thousand pulsing throats in the triage bays of Bagram and Landstuhl.
“Pupils are unequal,” Colonel Aaron Carter said.
His voice was not loud, but it had no bottom. It dropped thirty decibels of pure, un-forgiving Maine granite into the high-ceilinged room, cutting through Daniel’s lawyer’s rustling paperwork like an iron shear.
