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her.
    â€œI put the MRI on the viewbox, not Margaret,” Carrie said. “It was my error.”
    With that, she lowered her head and began a solemn march to the exit door.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    By the time Steve Abington made his decision, the April sun had hit its midpoint for the day. Steve had hated Philadelphia since arriving there almost a year ago. It wasn’t really any worse than Bridgeport, or Manhattan, or East Brunswick, or any of the other cities through which he’d passed. Maybe it was the homeless shelters in Philly that had gotten to him, or maybe it was just life itself.
    Still, the Philadelphia shelters were an abomination. Steve hated being jammed inside an airless room with a hundred other misbegotten men. The stale stench of cigarette smoke escaping from the ratty fabric of soiled clothes. Rows of metallic bunk beds like those on a submarine topped with thin mattresses squirming with vermin, sometimes even live mice. Corroded showerheads on tiled walls caked with mold revolted him.
    It was chaos, a constant chatter that grated on Steve’s eardrums so he couldn’t ever relax. Not for a second. Of course a shelter does not pretend to be a Holiday Inn, but with the reception area located behind reinforced glass, it felt like a country jail segregating the inmates from the cons. The drunks were the worst. Screaming, belligerent, and always getting hurt—either tripping over nothing or cracking their skulls on the concrete floor after tumbling out of bed. There was food, at least, breakfast and dinner. But tuna fish sandwiches most every day could make a man want to give up eating.
    Steve preferred the streets.
    Or he did until he was robbed.
    They came at him in the middle of the night, four teenagers, while he slept on a heat vent, wrapped inside a threadbare blue blanket he’d fished out of a trash can. They came with pipes, steel rods, and a bat. They smashed the side of his face pretty good and throttled his leg, but the blows were meant to intimidate, not kill. They made off with his life savings—a few hundred dollars he had scraped together from change tossed in his jar and the occasional crinkled bill. The next morning the bruise on his cheek still stung, his leg felt a bit lame, and the vision in his eye where one of them managed to land a solid right hook was blurry. Could have been worse; he had shocked them when he fought back. Some skills get drilled into you so hard they become reflex.
    Funny how just a few years ago Steve had a fancy uniform with plenty of eye-catching chest candy. He had a purpose in life. Now he had the streets and not much else. At least the little bastards didn’t get his SIG Sauer, a trophy he’d snuck back from Afghanistan that was hidden at the bottom of an oily knapsack.
    That gun meant the world to Steve. It was like a time machine. Soon as he gripped the cool steel handle he was right back in his CHU—containerized housing unit—on Forward Operating Base Eagle. In a lot of ways the CHU was a mirror of a Philly shelter. It was a crowded, noisy affair that smelled like a sweaty gym most of the time, but it had been home when he was Staff Sergeant Abington. He had felt at ease inside the chaotic womb, among his friends, his brothers in arms, the soldiers he would have given his life for. Back in the theater they had depended on each other. It was simple, pure, and in a way, beautiful. When he got home, the world stopped making sense.
    But now Steve had made a decision. He had a new plan, a little flash of inspiration. He’d had enough of the streets, the shelters, the cold, and the beatings. He used to be somebody—a staff sergeant in the United States Army, a husband to Janine, a father to Olivia. They were phantoms now. Steve did not blame Janine for cutting him out of her life. He had pushed her to it. She feared for their daughter’s safety. He had threatened them, been violent at times, sober rarely, and a