Razor Wire

by Lauren Gallagher

Little by little, his expression softened. “No one’s going to care. Girls in the Navy do it all the time.” He brought up his hand and touched my cheek. I wanted to bat away his warm, sickening caress, but I was paralyzed. “Rumors will spread, but as long as the problem goes away, people will forget about it. No one has to know the details.” The slight arch of his eyebrow emphasized the last part, and something so subtle had never been that menacing before.

  No one will know the details, his eyes warned. Will they?

  I gulped. No, Sir.

  Because it’s going to be taken care of, isn’t it?

  Yes, Sir.

  “I want it done discreetly. Preferably off-island.” He trailed his hand down my cheek, then over my jaw. As it went lower, the touch slowly became a grasp, his thumb across my windpipe and his long fingers around the side and back of my neck. “Drop a leave chit ASAP. Take a week. Two, if you need it. I’ll make sure the leave is approved.” His thumb ran up and down the front of my throat. “There are flights out of Kadena to Hawaii twice a week. Or go back to the States. I don’t care. Just”—another slow down-up—“get it done.”

  I cleared my throat, which pushed it against his thumb. “Yes, Sir.”

  He smiled. Really smiled.Call me Joel smiled. His hand left my neck and went back up to my face, and the other one cupped my other cheek. “Take my advice and everything will be okay, Kim. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  He leaned in like he was about to kiss me, but I stopped him with a hand to his chest and turned my head. I could feel the sudden rage in his posture, so I quickly murmured, “I was . . . sick. Before I came in here.”

  That gave him pause. He settled on kissing my forehead, which was marginally less nauseating than a full-on kiss.

  Then, thank God, he drew back. “I’ll expect that leave chit on your LPO’s desk first thing in the morning.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  I stepped into the precinct and exhaled as the cold air hit my face. The air-conditioning in my patrol car was broken, so walking into this place was a huge relief. Even if I didn’t feel like handling whatever bullshit my boss had called me in off patrol to deal with, it got me out of the heat and humidity for a little while.

  MA3 Weiss, my partner, fanned himself with his cover. “Man, it’s too fucking hot out there, but I’m going to go have a smoke.”

  “Go for it. I’ll be out as soon as I’m done with whatever MA1 wants.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That was fast, MA2,” Alejandro—MA1 Gutiérrez to everyone else—said as he stepped into the room.

  I shrugged and dropped my cover on the communal desk. “We were just up by the gate. Not too—” I paused when I noticed the wastebasket in his hand and watched him set it down. “Chief’s got you on trash detail, boss man?”

  He smirked, but it quickly faded. He toed the wastebasket closer to the desk, as if he wanted it as far away from himself as possible. “Listen, uh . . . I need a favor.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. Another one? Feigning infinite patience, I smiled. “What do you need?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the door leading to the hallway. When he faced me again, he lowered his chin and his voice and said, “It’s about MA3 Lockhoff.”

  Forget faking patience. I groaned. “Now what?”

  Usually, he’d have chuckled. He knew how much I hated being the go-to girl when other females in the command couldn’t get their shit together in this male-dominated environment. For some reason, he expected me to be the mother hen for all these chicks. Specifically, the mother hen who’d grab wayward girls by the hair, dunk their faces in a nice bucket of reality, and teach them how not to set gender equality back ten years every time they opened their goddamned mouths. Or legs, as it were.

  Alejandro always thought it was entertaining as hell, watching me straighten out girls who had no business in the Navy, never mind as cops. Especially when the girl in question was a vapid twit like MA3 Lockhoff. The kind who used her pretty little smile and her pretty not-so-little tits to bend every man on the island to her cute little will. MA3 Lockhoff was one of the reasons we got emails before every formal event reminding the female service members to please not dress like whores this time. Women like her drove me insane, and Alejandro lived to watch them do it.

  Today, though, he wasn’t joking. The tension in his neck and between his eyebrows hadn’t been there this morning, and he only pressed his lips together like that when he was deathly serious.

  I cocked my head. “What’s going on?”

  He hesitated, then gestured for me to follow him. We stepped across the hall into the office he shared with MA1 Harris, who wasn’t there, and he shut the door.

  “Alejandro, what’s going on?” I practically whispered it, and not just because I didn’t want anyone hearing us on a first name basis.

  He cradled his elbow in his hand and chewed his other thumbnail. “You’ve, uh, probably heard the rumors, right?”

  “Which ones?” I struggled to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Rumors have been going around like crazy ever since she checked in.” She’d been at the command for six months, and I was pretty sure she’d fucked her way through the barracks, a couple of off-base apartments, and the temporary lodging on both the White Beach and Kadena bases for good measure.

  “Yeah, well.” He exhaled hard. “She got sick during PT yesterday. And at a meeting the other day. And”—he gestured back at the office we’d just left—“today.”

  “Got ‘sick’? As in . . .”

  He nodded.

  I covered my face with one hand. “Oh Christ. Please tell me she just can’t deal with the heat.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Fuck.”

  “It gets better.”

  I looked at him through my fingers.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “Were you at Senior Chief O’Leary’s retirement?”

  I wrinkled my nose and dropped my hand. “Unfortunately. I don’t think I’ll ever get the taste of his wife’s potato salad out of my mouth.”

  No humor. Not even the faintest laugh. Jesus. What the hell was going on?

  Alejandro swallowed. “She was, uh, flirting. With a lot of the guys.”

  “That’s news,” I muttered.

  Still nothing.

  Alejandro lowered his gaze, and his voice was barely audible. “I saw her leave with Lieutenant Stanton.”

  My heart stopped. “Oh my God. Stanton? Really? Didn’t he have his wife with him that night?”

  He shook his head. “Not that time. I think she was off-island. Or something. I don’t know. But I saw him and MA3 getting a little, uh, cozy, and the—”

  “And no one said anything?” I huffed sharply. “He’s how many pay grades above her?”

  “And they’re both of age,” Alejandro snapped. “Remember, every goddamned person at that barbecue wanted to make rank eventually. You really think any of us were getting between him and a piece-of-ass du jour?”

  I said nothing. Wouldn’t I have done the same thing if I’d seen them? Of course I would have. If I didn’t get promoted in the next couple of cycles, my Navy career was over, so stepping in between two consenting adults—even if they were drunk off their asses, which I had no doubt they were—when it meant career suicide? Not a chance.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked. “That was weeks ago.”

  “Yeah.” He looked me straight in the eyes. “About, oh, not quite eight weeks ago.” He gestured at the door again. “And now MA3’s getting sick all over the office.”

  The pieces came together in my head.

  “Oh God.” I put a hand over my mouth. “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah.” He ran his fingers through his short hair. “She’s in his office right now. He called her in right before I called you. And he is not happy.”

  “I don’t imagine he is. His wife is going to skin him alive.”

  “I’m a little worried about her, to
be honest. Lockhoff, I mean.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “She was a mess.” He grimaced. “Not just because she was sick. I mean, she was fine this afternoon right up until Stanton came into the precinct. Quieter than usual, but fine. Then he shows up, tells her to come into his office, and suddenly she’s shaking like a leaf.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?” I shrugged and folded my arms across my blouse. “If I had to tell Stanton I was having his kid, I’d be a wreck, too, and not just because I’d let that creep put his dick in me.”

  He still didn’t laugh. “Listen, I know I’m always asking you to help the new girls get their shit straight, but this time, I think she really needs someone.”

  “Alejandro . . .”

  “Please.” He spoke even softer now. “I might be imagining things, but my gut feeling is she could really use some support right now.”

  I pressed the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth, fighting the urge to roll my eyes again. “You want me to support her? When she’s gotten herself into a stupid situation like that?” I shook my head. “You know damn well I’m liable to tell her how it is and make her cry. I can’t even put up with the other girls using their periods to get out of PT. You really think I’m the best person for this?”

  “I can’t think of anyone else, Reese,” he whispered. “I know you don’t have any patience for girls getting themselves into shit situations, but you’ve got your head together and your feet on the ground. Just . . . talk to her. Make sure she’s all right and let her know you’re there if she needs you.”

  “And what am I supposed to say if she wants my sympathy for getting into this mess?”

  Alejandro blew out a breath. “If I knew, I’d do it myself. Right now, it’s all I can do not to drag her in here and chew her out for being stupid enough to have an affair with a higher-up. That kid’s going to fuck both of their careers, especially Stanton’s.”

  I pursed my lips. Alejandro liked Lieutenant Stanton a hell of a lot more than I did, but I wasn’t about to get into another argument with him about the man’s lack of virtue.

  One thing we did agree on, though, was that girls like MA3 Lockhoff were part of the reason women in the military still didn’t get the respect we deserved.

  But whether Alejandro and I agreed with her choices or not, she was still his Sailor. She was technically my Sailor, since I outranked her. And rank aside, she was a fellow cop. For that matter, as geographically isolated as we were on this island, people had no choice but to rely on their command for support because friends, families, and civilian resources were an ocean away from all of us.

  I didn’t have to agree with what she did, but I couldn’t throw her to the wolves, either.

  Swearing under my breath, I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Then I dropped my hand and glared at him. “You owe me so big for this.”

  And finally—finally—he smiled. “Thank you.”

  “I need a cigarette,” I muttered.

  Usually that would have elicited an ironic Those things will kill you, you know comment from him, but he’d already pulled a can of dip out of his back pocket and would probably have a pinch of it tucked into his cheek before we made it out the door. Lucky bastard.

  We left his office and headed back toward the communal one, but before I could get outside to smoke, someone out in the hall said, “You okay, MA3?”

  Alejandro and I both stiffened and turned to each other.

  “I’m fine.” Even from here, Lockhoff sounded anything but fine.

  Alejandro glanced at me, eyebrows up in an unspoken Please don’t bail on me. I gave a slight nod, and he relaxed a little.

  A second later, she stepped into the front office.

  And good God, she looked like hell.

  Her uniform was squared away as always, and she’d pulled her near-black hair back into a tight bun, but she was paler than anyone on a tropical island had a right to be. Her eyeliner wasn’t as perfect and smoky as it usually was. I suspected that had something to do with the redness in her eyes.

  She stopped in the doorway, her cover in both hands. Her eyes flicked back and forth between me and Alejandro.

  “How’d it go?” he asked quietly.

  She glanced at me again, eyes narrowing as if to say, A little privacy, please?

  Don’t mind if I do.

  I put on my cover and made a beeline for the door. “I’m going to have a smoke.”

  Alejandro nodded but didn’t look at me.

  As I stepped out, I’d never been so grateful for that rush of tropical heat. In ten minutes, I’d be praying for sweet death and looking for any reason to either step into an air-conditioned building or strip out of this suffocating blouse and heavy police belt, but for the moment I basked in it.

  I went up to the smoke pit—a gazebo twenty meters from the precinct with a couple of chairs and a coffee-can ashtray. There, I lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. As the nicotine seeped into my bloodstream, some of the tightness in my shoulders unwound. I rolled them slowly and replayed my conversation with Alejandro.

  I loved the man to death, but it drove me crazy the way he believed I was the one who should handle situations like this. If it was because she was a junior Sailor and it was my damned responsibility, fine. But he and I both knew that wasn’t the case. Alejandro hadn’t called on me when some idiot seaman had been caught having an ill-advised affair with Senior Chief Ellis’s wife or last year when one kid’s drinking problem had gotten out of control and almost caused an international incident.

  But when a woman who’d gotten on my nerves since the day she’d checked in decided to get herself into a situation like this? Suddenly he was speed-dialing MA2 Marion, the female- Sailor whisperer. As if my tits and ovaries made me more qualified than anyone else—including her boss, damn it—to tell Lockhoff she was being stupid.

  I rolled my eyes and blew out some smoke.

  Truth be told, I had hoped Lockhoff wasn’t that kind of girl. I’d been disappointed as fuck when I realized she was, well, her, because on the surface, she was very much my type. She had the fit physique that the military demanded, but there was also something about the way she carried herself that made my heart race. Chin up, shoulders back, looking the world in the eye. And the few times I’d seen her in civvies with minimal makeup and that dark hair falling down, she’d been . . . Hell, who was I kidding? She was stunning.

  Maybe that was why she irritated me so much. She was everything I wanted physically in a woman, and she was everything else that made my teeth grind.

  The door opened a few minutes later, and Lockhoff came out and joined me in the smoke pit. She’d taken off her police belt and downloaded—no gun, no pepper spray. While I finished my cigarette, she stared off into the distance and eventually broke the silence. “Listen, um, Gutiérrez wants me to go over to Camp Courtney. To medical. He said you were heading that way.” After a moment, she met my eyes. “Would you mind giving me a lift?”

  Alejandro, you bastard . . .

  I dropped my cigarette and crushed it under the toe of my boot. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  I poked my head into dispatch to let Weiss know I had to run an errand for Gutiérrez, and then Lockhoff and I walked across the parking lot to my patrol car.

  “The AC’s busted.” I rolled down my window. “Sorry.”

  “Does it work in any of the vehicles?” she muttered and rolled hers down, too.

  “Not really. Just the one Stanton drives around.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I thought she shuddered.

  In silence, I drove us through the gate and out onto the main road. At least now that we were off-base, I could drive faster. Twenty clicks an hour didn’t generate much of a cross breeze in the car, but fifty plus did the trick, and after a few minutes, the air was nice and cool.

  Beside me, Lockhoff stared out the window.

  “So, um.” I cleared my throat. “You okay? You seem a little . . .” Pregna
nt with Stanton’s kid? Yeah, that would be tactful.

  “I’m fine.” She didn’t look at me.

  “Okay. Uh . . .” I idly played with the peeling cover on the wheel. “Well, Gutiérrez wanted me to take you to medical. Do you need me to stick around to give you a ride back after?”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Just doing what Gutiérrez asked.”

  “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I do need a ride back. Thanks.” She was quiet for a moment, then finally turned to me. “Do you mind if I ask you something? That doesn’t leave this car?”

  That question was a dangerous one when it came from the woman carrying our married superior’s kid, but I managed to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth and give a quiet, “Go ahead.”

  She didn’t say a word for almost a full minute, instead just staring straight ahead, a hand on her stomach right above her seat belt. I wondered if she hadn’t heard me and was still waiting for permission to ask, but then she said, “How confidential is a sexual assault report?”

  I damn near ran off the road. “What?”

  Lockhoff squirmed in the passenger seat. “If I wanted to talk . . . If someone wanted to talk to the SARC, is it confidential? Or an official report?”

  You want to talk to the Sexual Assault Response Coordinator? About . . .

  Seriously?

  I will fucking choke her. Pull this goddamned car over, fly into the passenger seat, and fucking choke her. Sexual assault?

  Oh hell no, sweetie. Half the command saw you leave with Lieutenant Stanton. No way they would’ve stood by and let him drag you out against your will.

  Gripping the wheel tighter, I focused on the road. Women like her didn’t just give the rest of us a bad name. They were the reason the real sexual assaults weren’t taken seriously.

  It’s sexual assault when you wake up tasting blood. Not when he doesn’t want to leave his wife and raise your kid, you little bitch.

  “I’m not sure.” I forced myself to speak evenly. “I’ve never needed to . . . I’ve never reported one.”

  Silence fell. I didn’t realize she’d been staring at me until I glanced at her again.

  Her tone was flat when she finally spoke. “You don’t believe me.”