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“We have to call on this.”
“I know, but…” He rocks his clasped hands back and forth. Stares in your eyes. “I was scared, Nickie.”
Everyone is scared but no one says so, and when you see Cooper looking at you that way, something in you shivers. It could have been you alone in here, could have been you who pulled the trigger. You think of basic, him putting an arm around your shoulders and telling you not to let everybody down.
“Did anyone…” Your voice comes out a croak, and you cough, start again. “Did anyone see you come in here?”
“Just you.”
You nod. Look again at the body on the ground, the way he is twisted. The blood is thickening on the woven rug. Another dark-ski
Then Cooper says, “Please, Nickie. Please.”
In the movies, former soldiers wake up in a sweat, fresh from nightmares of a war that never ends. Not you. You don’t dream at all these days. You stretch, make coffee, shower, pull on your boots. Kill a couple of hours at a coffee shop, staring out at nothing.
The Bronco you stored in your parents’ garage while deployed is sun-faded, and the air conditioner doesn’t work, but driving it you feel something like your old self. Cooper is waiting on the corner, hands tucked into the front pouch of a hoodie the day is already too warm for. He climbs in, pulls a CD from his pocket, Slayer’s Reign in Blood. You know it well. Maybe in Vietnam it was Wagner, but in the desert, it was always heavy metal.
You ask, “Where?”
“A parking garage.” He gives you the intersection. “I’m supposed to meet him with the money in an hour. Figured we’d get there first, scope it out.”
The garage is off the Strip, set amidst warehouses being converted to lofts for whoever lives in lofts. The ramp spirals up through six stories. The top floor is open to the sky. A handful of expensive vehicles are scattered far apart. Car fetishists, terrified of every ding and scratch. You park forty feet from the stairwell, on the far side of the ramp.
The sun is brutal, burning the sky white. The windows are open, and the sweat slicking your chest feels familiar. “It’s good.”
Cooper nods.
“How many?”
“At least two.”
“Armed?”
He nods again. You take a breath, look around. Electricity crackles and snaps between your fingers, the same old feeling you used to get as the squad mounted up. With terrain like this, there’s no reason even to discuss the plan. “Okay,” you say.
Cooper opens the door, pauses. Turns to look at you. “Nick—”
“Forget it,” you say. The two of you share the kind of look that only men who’ve gone to war together can. Then he slides out of the car and walks over to the stairwell, leans against the wall.
You sit behind the wheel for a moment, listening to the relentless hammer of the heavy metal guitars. Remembering Fritz, the gu
You turn off the engine and get out. Stand for a moment in the sun, the same sun that lights the other side of the world. You twist the passenger mirror up at an angle, then take a breath, go prone and wriggle underneath the truck.
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.