Buck Wilmington sat in a small dark booth in a tiny, hole-in-the-wall, Mexican restaurant; six shots of Patron lined up like little soldiers in front him. Four empty shot glasses were stacked neatly on the table alongside four equally dead soldiers in Adolph Coors' vast bottled army. Between shots, he thought about his baby girl.
She would have been twenty years old this year, his sweet child, the light of his life and she most likely would have looked a lot like her mother with golden hair and flawless skin but with his eyes. A true blue eyed blonde, something special indeed, he thought, and threw back another shot. He started in on his next beer and with any luck would have at least a full squad of empties laid out in front of him before the night was over.
Literally running out after that morning's meeting, Buck had headed up to Capitol Hill on foot to the seedier part of town. He hadn't even stopped to shut off his computer knowing that, after a few hours, someone would finally realize he wasn't coming back and shut her down. Having had the foresight to toss the keys to the Chevy onto the front seat, J.D. would have a way home while he would just get a room at one of the many cheap motels lining East Colfax and sleep off the battle that lay before him.
God, it hurt so much, the pain he'd kept locked so deep inside of him for so long. It had broken free a few years back when Sarah and Adam Larabee had died tragically and, for fear that it might be mistaken for a funeral cliché, he had never once told Chris that he "knew what he was going through". He could have said it without batting an eye for he had truly "been there, done that".
Loosing Adam was, in it's own way, almost as bad as loosing Hanna. He couldn't have loved the boy any more than if he had been his own. He was a bright boy, well behaved around his parents but was Uncle Buck's partner in crime on those many occasions when he was called upon to watch Master Larabee. He'd also been looking forward to the birth of the Larabee's second child and, like Chris, had been hoping for a girl.
Chris' children could never replace his loss but being with Adam and being a part of the Larabee family made him genuinely happy. When they had died, another big part of him had died, too, as the overwhelming grief and memories of his own child's death threatened to smother him once again.
Not being enough of a man to console his own wife, something he would regret until his dying day, Buck had matured over the years and during that dark time he had forced everything back inside for his oldest friend. He had sucked it all up and had been the rock Chris Larabee had anchored himself to by the thinnest of threads when his friend foundered in a sea of despair, beaten bloodied by fate and guilt.
Later, when the time was right, Chris had allowed Buck to tug ever so gently on that thread and gradually pull him to shore. Their friendship had weathered a fierce storm but Buck was now foundering, the old pain inside of him too private, too selfish for him to tie off to anyone. He had no lifeline because his grief was something he still couldn't bring himself to share with anyone - even after all the years.
If Buck Wilmington had shared his story and his feelings it might have explained his need for shallow and unproductive relationships, the more superficial the better, and his reluctance to even consider getting to know a woman well enough to settle down and start a family. He had married Carrie "'til death do us part" and no other woman had replaced his heart's desire, just as no other child could ever replace his Hanna.
Hours later, as Buck stared at the cache of dead soldiers and the double stack of empty shot glasses littering the table before him, he stood up slowly.
"Fuck it," he muttered and, swaying drunkenly, swept his arm across the tabletop sending everything crashing against the wall, littering the floor with broken glass and pissing off the two bikers sitting at an adjacent table.
Buck Wilmington hadn't needed a motel room after all that night, just a quick trip to the ER after which he was a guest of the City and County of Denver.