One September Morning. Rosalind Noonan
theories from a crazy man, but Emjay can’t think who else would have wanted to kill John. He removes his helmet and presses two fingers into each temple. Wish I had an NOD in that warehouse, a way to see the shooter.
Who was it? One of you?
Did one of you fuck with my NOD? Screw it up so I wouldn’t see your face when you took out my friend?
His eyes obscured by shades, Emjay studies the faces of the men in quarters. Hard to believe it could be one of your own. Noah and John are brothers, and Doc played football with John back in college, so those three are pretty tight. Antoine Hilliard isn’t the aggressive type. He’s been goldbricking the army since they got here, claiming a back injury so he could stay behind the wire to do paperwork—until a mortar round came through and took out an Alpha Company soldier while he was asleep in quarters. But Hilliard, he and John got on okay. Gunnar McGee is too much of a pansy, which leaves Lassiter, who was obviously jealous of John’s popularity. It could have been Lassiter, but Emjay would have trouble buying that, given Lassiter’s lack of follow-through. The guy is a big talker, but Emjay suspects he’s all talk.
So who else was in that dark warehouse? Who hated John that much?
Emjay removes his helmet and sits down on the edge of his cot. There will be no sleep for tonight. No rest. No escape.
“Just a tip, Brown,” Doc says, one blue eye squinting in half a wink. “You can lose the shades at night. Especially in this pit.”
Emjay stows his helmet and flak jacket but makes no move to remove his sunglasses. “Didn’t you know?” he says as he leans back on his bunk, hands crossed over his chest like a corpse. “I’m legally blind.”
Doc and the guys chuckle for a moment, but their attention quickly shifts to the poker game. Hilliard is munching through a can of macadamia nuts as Noah Stanton methodically laces his combat boots.
Through the dark shield of his shades, Emjay watches them all. It’s a damn shame the sunglasses can’t cover everything, can’t hide the shaking of his hands or the sour pucker of lips on the verge of sobbing. If only he could be alone, walk into the cocoon of nightfall, the dark wrapping around him like a forgiving blanket. You never get to be alone in the army. In that way, it’s like a prison.
He misses the privacy of home, the freedom to fly out the door and walk the farm, any time of the day or night, without getting his ass shot at. Sometimes he walked to the back acres of the farm, past the chicken coops, the thicket and the pond, night opening to him like a dark blossom. Walking to get away from his old man, to escape the arguments, the drunken fits, the smell of the stale beer and chicken shit and malice. Truth was, nobody enjoyed culling dead chicks or sucking in the ammonia smell, so acidic in the chicken houses it burned right through your sinuses into your brain. Emjay signed up to get away from that chicken farm on the Maryland shore, and damned if he didn’t trade one hell for another. Only, this new nightmare was bigger and more twisted than anything he could have imagined.
Without turning his head, Emjay can see Noah Stanton pulling on his boots. He doesn’t bother to lace them, but strides out of the bungalow without his helmet or flak jacket or rifle, defying regulations.
“What the hell’s he doing?” Lassiter asks, scowling toward the slamming door.
“Living dangerously,” Gunnar agrees, “but, really, what are the chances? Taking down two brothers in one day? Odds are against it, I’d say.”
“Sometimes grief will make a person act recklessly.” Doc picks up his helmet and removes the gold medal he keeps tucked into the camouflage mesh for good luck. It’s a replica of a Purple Heart he got in Afghanistan, and Doc’s so proud of it he wears it like a fishing hook in his hat, even when they go out on missions. Doc’s sort of a dick that way. “And I have to say, I get it. I still can’t believe he’s gone. Goddamned sniper. Goddamn them all.”
Emjay’s mouth goes dry as silence pervades the room. Usually he resents Doc’s declarations of pop psychology—the nuggets of mental health tips Doc tosses off each day in his role as what the army calls field counselor, which they all know means head shrinker. But this time Doc seems sincere, and rightly so. Before he was Dr. Charles Jump, Doc played football with John back in college. This had to cut deep, even for a cat like Doc. They were old friends, but then John was a friend to everyone. He was that kind of guy.
Doc goes to a calendar on the wall, grimaces at the breathtaking photo of a huge potato-head rock in the surf, and marks off a square with a felt pen. “One more down,” he says, and for a moment Emjay thinks he’s referring to a man down instead of a day to mark off on the calendar.
“You gonna take on the calendar now?” Lassiter asks.
“Guess I’ll have to,” Doc says, capping the pen.
John was the one who had hung the calendar with photos of the Pacific Northwest on the wall, the one who’d kept their spirits up, counting down the days until their deployment ended, crunching the numbers in countless different ways. Three months is ninety-one days. Less than a dollar in pennies. Less than eight dozen eggs for the son of a chicken farmer like Emjay.
Spinelli rolls up one pant leg and lifts a fat bandage to press at a raw cut underneath.
“You get that sewn up?” Doc asks.
“Noah gave me two stitches,” he says flatly. When Spinelli fell outside the building and sliced into his knee, he’d been sure it was a serious injury. “Look at all that blood,” Spinelli had said, awed by his gruesome knee. “You’ll probably have to medevac me to Germany.”
“I don’t think so,” Noah answered solemnly as he pressed gauze to the wound. “See? It’s deep enough for stitches, but no tendon damage. I can sew you up right here, if you want.”
Chenowith tipped his head to the side, obviously put out by Spinelli’s latest injury. “All right, okay. We’ll pull you two from the operation.”
Which left Doc partnering with Hilliard, who couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow under the best of circumstances.
Now Emjay bites into the licorice strand and wonders what it all adds up to. It must be the eighth time he’s gone through the details of this day, but he can’t seem to piece it together.
“I’d love to take down the bastard that got John,” Gunnar says, extending one arm and pretending to stare through the scope of a rifle. “I wish they’d let me go out of the wire and track him down. I would.”
“Who the hell did fire at him?” Hilliard asks, his jaw working on a handful of nuts. “Did anybody ever find the sniper?”
“Hell, no.” Lassiter reaches toward Hilliard and grabs some macadamia nuts for himself. “Alpha Company searched the perimeters after it happened, never located the insurgent. But let me ask you, Hilliard, did you see us nabbing the sniper? Where the hell were you, anyway?”
“I guarded the door, like Doc told me to do,” Hilliard says defensively. “You know I don’t want to be doing that crap.”
“Yeah, we know, Hillbilly,” Lassiter says. The platoon is well aware of Hilliard’s reticence to do the patrols.
Hilliard stops chewing. “You gotta wonder, what the hell were we doing in that warehouse in the first place?”
“The mission objective was to detain suspected insurgents and search for rocket-propelled grenades,” Doc says succinctly. Sometimes he acts as if he’s keeping everyone in line, though Emjay thinks it’s mostly an act. Without rank, nobody gives a shit.
“Anybody find RPGs?” Gunnar asks.
Lassiter shakes his head. “Chenowith said there were reports of insurgents taking back some buildings in the warehouse district.” He wipes his palms against each other, brushing off salt. “I’d love to know how we got that intelligence. From the goddamned sniper, probably. And some officer believed it, some boss with his head up his ass.”
For