Sniper's Justice (Caje Cole Book 9) by David Healey (best classic books txt) 📗

get itself captured. This wasn’t good news, because it meant that the tanks would not be able to unleash their guns on the Germans, for fear of hitting the Americans held in the village. When the soldiers attacked the village, they would be fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. If the weather cleared enough for the planes to get back in the air, it meant that they couldn’t be used against the village, either.

If Wingen sur Moder was to be taken back from the Germans, it was going to be up to the soldiers to wrest it away using nothing more than rifles and machine guns.

“I’ve heard better news,” Mulholland said. “This is shaping up to be a bloody fight.”

While the stalemate between the Americans and Germans dragged into a second day, Cole used the time to sleep as his fever slowly ebbed. He woke from time to time in confusion, his fever dreams mixing with snatches of memories.

One memory had to do with Christmas. He supposed that his feverish sleep, along with just coming off the holiday season, had prompted the memory. Growing up in the mountains during the Depression, money had been scarce. They never had anything like a Christmas tree or any presents. When he heard the other soldiers wax nostalgic about their own childhood Christmases, Cole sometimes had to wonder if he had grown up in the same country as these other men. The closest that the Cole family ever got to celebrating Christmas was that they ate a big meal with nobody going to bed hungry for a change. His ma would even save up sugar, butter, and eggs so that there was enough to bake a pecan pie. Everyone got one slice. Cole usually collected the pecans himself before the snow fell, harvesting them from a patch that grew in a mountain clearing.

His pa always got drunk at Christmas, but then again, his old man never needed an excuse to get drunk. If the sun rose and set that day, that was usually enough reason for his pa to drink the moonshine that he cooked up in the hills. He might even have made some money with that endeavor if he hadn’t kept drinking most of what he produced.

Once when Cole was a boy, his pa had arrived at the cabin on Christmas Eve just before dark, clearly pleased with himself and grinning from ear to ear. Weaving as he walked, he was drunk as a lord.

“I been to town and done bought you all a stick of peppermint for Christmas,” he said grandly.

He reached into his pocket and brought out … nothing. Puzzled, he patted his other pockets. Empty.

“Pa, where’s the candy?” one of Cole’s younger sisters asked. The thought of a peppermint stick was such a rare treat that she was close to tears.

“Dang it,” he said, reaching into his pocket again and staring at his empty hand. “Didn’t eat it, did I? I reckon I must have dropped all that candy.”

Cole’s mother had heard enough. She was usually too afraid of her husband to speak up. They were all afraid of him. There was no meaner drunk. But Christmas had made her bold. “You drunken fool,” she said sharply. “It ain’t right to tease the children so. You go on inside. Go on.”

His father shrugged and made his way toward the shack.

Cole’s mother gathered them around. “I reckon he done dropped that candy along the way. If you walk back along that road, you’ll find it,” she said. “Stick by stick. Hurry up now, before it gets dark.”

When Pa said that he’d gone to town, he meant the lonely crossroads that had a country store and another building with a gas pump. From their shack, it was six miles down dirt roads to that crossroads. Walking with sharp eyes, they found four sticks of candy along the road. The snow was late coming this year, so it helped that the colorful candy stood out against the drab ground. These were penny sticks, striped red, nearly as thick around as a cornstalk. None of the Cole children had ever had such a thing as a stick of candy. It was an unimaginable luxury. Finding each one was like discovering treasure. The candy sticks were a little dirty, but the dirt brushed off easily enough.

Where the fifth peppermint stick had gone was anybody’s guess—if pa had even been sober enough to actually buy five sticks.

As the oldest, Cole had gone without. His little sister had cracked an end off her stick and tried to give it to him, but he wouldn’t take it.

“Gone on now, I don’t need it,” he’d said, curling her hand back around the candy and giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.

Candy was for children and he was eleven years old. Cole couldn’t ever remember thinking of himself as a child. In a way, he had been born old.

In the foxhole, Cole shivered. Now, why had he remembered all that, he wondered? It was because of the candy that Vaccaro had given him.

He slept again and woke in the dark, men snoring around him. He noticed the stars glittering above and realized that he felt better. His fever had broken.

And none too soon. In the distance, a machine gun chattered. Cole might have slept, but the war had not.

In the center of the village, Sister Anne Marie hurried toward the Eglise Saint-Félix-de-Cantalice, carrying a heavy basket. The church near the village center looked small but sturdy, a bastion of red brick, like a bulwark of faith and hope against sin. The stucco exterior gave the structure a vaguely Tudor appearance. Because it looked as if it had been there for ages, many were surprised that the church had only been built in 1914. This morning, she thought that perhaps the eglise was truly an island in a turbulent sea, considering that the village had found itself caught in the storm of battle. There was