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It isn’t long before you hear a car climbing the ramp. The sound gets louder, fainter, then louder again as it winds to the top. You take a deep breath and remember the best night you ever had, how you mastered your fear and let yourself believe.
The problem with the best moment of your life is that every other moment is worse.
The car is a BMW. It cruises up the ramp smooth and soft. You keep your face pointing down, watching out of the corner of your eye, trying to picture a basement room with a dangling bulb and a heavy door. The car parks about twenty feet away, near the stairs, where Cooper stands with his hands in his pocket. Gently, you slide out from under, keeping the truck between you and the men, using the mirror to see.
Two of them, one in a suit, no tie; the other, bigger, in jeans and a muscle shirt. Muscle Shirt gives a casual scan of the parking lot. He doesn’t look concerned, lacks the edgy readiness of a man expecting trouble. Still, when he turns his back, you see a pistol tucked into his belt. Cooper raises one hand in greeting, says something you can’t hear.
Keeping low, you ease around the back of the Bronco.
Your heart slams in your chest, and you can taste copper. You slide one foot forward, then the other. The distance is only twenty feet. A couple of car lengths. It seems like miles. You feel strangely naked with your hands empty. Step, beat, step.
The man in the business suit says something to Cooper. You screen it out. Fifteen feet. Ten. The sun fires jagged glints off the polished BMW.
You’re almost to the man in the muscle shirt when he turns around.
The stars in the desert night were unlike anything you’d ever seen. They flowed across the sky like God had spilled them. Growing up in Chicago, the stars you saw were man-made, skyscrapers turning the night purple. Even when you went camping out in Wisconsin, it was nothing like this.
Sometimes, when things got bad, you closed your eyes and thought of those stars. Imagined yourself on a rise, alone, arms out, a figure cut from the sky. Looking upward. Waiting to be pulled into them.
Hoping.
Muscle Shirt’s eyes go wide, and he starts to speak, but you don’t hesitate, just take three quick strides and snap off a jab that catches his chin. Your bare knuckles sing. Adrenaline howls in your blood. The fear is gone. You feel better than you have in months. You throw another jab, and he gets his hands up in a clumsy block, and then you crack him hard in the side of the head, near the temple, a wildly illegal blow. His eyes lose focus and his legs wobble, but it’s in you now, the rage, the anger that swelled every time a mortar landed on the FOB, every time a man in a terrorist-towel stepped out of an alley leveling an AK, every time the counselor at the VA said that what you were experiencing was typical, that it would pass. You swing again and again. His head snaps back and blood explodes from his nose and he’d fall if only you’d let him.
A loud gasp pulls you from your trance. You forget Muscle Boy. Turn to the man in the suit and start his way, and in a panicky voice he says, “Cooper, what is this-” and then you break his nose. He whimpers and drops to his knees. He looks up with wide, scared eyes, one hand on his nose and the other up to ward you off, like a child menaced by a bully.
The anger and power vanish. You lower your fists. Then Cooper pushes past you, flips Muscle Shirt over. Grabs the pistol from his belt and comes up fast. The man in the suit screams.
You say, “No-” and then there are three explosions and the man stops screaming. Cooper turns to the one on the ground and fires three more times, two bullets in the center of mass and one in the head, just like they taught you in basic.
And you stand there, hands trembling, a shattered body on either side of you as the sun beats down.
“Nick,” Cooper says.
You stare.
“I had to. It’s done now.” He takes off his hoodie and uses it to wipe the sidearm clean. He drops it next to one of the bodies, then starts for the Bronco.
You look at what’s left of their heads.
Then Cooper says, “Nick!” His voice sharp. “Come on. Move your feet, soldier.” He walks around to the other side of the Bronco and opens the door.
You bend and do something without really thinking about it, and then the sun carves your shadow in concrete as you walk to your truck.
The drive out of Las Vegas is a surreal falling away, first the casinos and bright lights, then the subdivisions that spring up overnight-all those houses, all those people, all the same-and then retail and then diners and then garages and then warehouses and then nothing. Just dirt and sun on either side of US-15.
Cooper is all energy, the window open and fingers tapping, his whole body vibrating like a tuning fork. “Fuck, that was intense,” he says, gri
Your fingers on the wheel are raw and dark with drying blood. He slaps the side of your truck in time with the heavy metal screaming through the ti
You press the power button on the stereo. Cooper looks at you. A long stare. Some of the energy falls away. “I had to.”
You say nothing.
“I had to show Vance that coming after me is a bad idea. That it will cost him.” He scratches his chin. “Now we can deal. I’ll even pay him, when I get the money.”
“The guy,” you say. Hot dry air roars in the open windows. “He knew your name.”
“Who? On the parking deck? So what?”
“You told me you’d never met him. But he said, ‘Cooper, what is this?’”
He shrugs. “Vance must have told him.”
“It sounded like he knew you.”
“He didn’t.”
Your hands tighten on the steering wheel. You wait. You know Cooper. Silence he can’t take.
Finally, he laughs. “Ah, shit, okay, you got me.” He turns to you. “I did know him. But the rest of what I said, it was true. And Nickie, thank you. I mean it. I always knew I could count on you.”
You nod. It was true. He had always known that. You ride in silence for another couple of moments, then pull off at a lonely gas station. “I’m thirsty.”
“Get me something, would you?”
In the minimart you snag a couple of Gatorades and a pack of beef jerky and a can of lighter fluid. The woman behind the counter is as old as death. When she counts out your change, the motion of her lips fractures her cheeks like sunbaked mud. In the Bronco, Cooper has his feet on the dash. As you put the truck into Drive, he opens the jerky, says, “You got a destination in mind, or we just cruising? Because the chicks, man, they’re the other direction.”
The highway is nearly empty, cars strung out like beads on a necklace. You open the Gatorade and take a long pull. After a few minutes, you take the exit for US- 93, a two-lane straight into the cracked brown American desert.
“Seriously, Nick, where we headed?”
“What were you doing when I came in?”
“What?” His eyebrows scrunch. “Came in where?”
“In Mosul. The apartment. When I came in, you were bending over the guy’s body. What were you doing?”
He cocks his head. “I was checking for a pulse.”
“I’ve thought about that a lot since I got back. The way you were bent over him. It was strange.” You set your drink in the cup holder. “You weren’t looking for a pulse, were you? You were going through his pockets.”
“That’s crazy.”
You say nothing, just look at him sideways, put it all in your eyes. For a moment, he keeps it up, the facade, the Cooper Show. Then he says, “Huh,” and the mask falls away. “When did you know?”
“I guess I knew then. In Mosul. I just wanted to believe you.”
Cooper nods. “See, I knew I could count on you.”