by Greg Rucka
Bell shakes his head.
The small smile fades.
Want to go for a walk? Bell asks.
Athena nods.
“Go,” Amy says.
Bell thinks it sounds like an order.
They walk without talking, along Edinborough, then south, roughly in the direction of the water, following the Island Line Trail until they’re into Leddy Park. It’s cool in the shade, and they take their time, and Bell doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing. He’s beginning to think Athena’s adopted the same tactic when she veers onto a side trail and takes a couple quick steps to get ahead of him. She pivots so she’s walking backwards, her hands flying.
You should have come back with Mom and me you left us alone.
I know, Bell signs. I did not want to leave you alone I wanted to be with you.
Always job I do not like your job now I know your job Dad.
She’s still walking backwards, glaring at him, and Bell feels a nervous spur that she’ll trip over something, that she’ll fall. The same feeling when she was learning to walk and he and Amy tried to baby-proof the house in Arizona, fitting foam cushions to every sharp corner they found. It’s the same feeling he had when he would watch her run to meet him after he returned from deployment, or as he was coming up the driveway, or at any number of other moments. He thinks that this is the nature of being a parent; always trying to protect your children from the inevitable fall.
Maybe watch where you are walking? Bell signs.
The glare ratchets up to include scorn, and Athena throws her hands up in the air, pivots without stopping, her steps brisk. He has to hurry to move abreast of her, then catches her eyes long enough to sign again.
Angry at me.
She lets her look say it all. There’s a bench made from recycled plastic painted to look like green wooden planks. She springs toward it, onto the seat so she stands half a foot taller than he does, looks over his head as she signs.
I see the blood out of her mouth.
Bell nods.
That woman died she saved my life she has no name.
Her name was Shoshana Nuri, Bell answers, spelling it out. Very brave.
Athena’s jaw clenches, and her eyes narrow, and Bell can see she’s fighting tears.
Mom says Joel feels better.
She ignores the change of subject, ignores what he’s signed. I see the blood out her mouth I see Mr. Howe’s broken head I feel that man touch me.
It’s that last one that cuts deepest. None of the hostages was assaulted, Bell knows this, just as he knows that the threat of rape was implicit against his daughter and ex-wife and the other female students from Hollyoakes. He’s never been held against his will himself, not outside of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training. SERE tries to run as close as possible to the real thing, and it does a mighty good job of it, too; Bell has no fond memories of his experiences. Instilling helplessness is what a captor does, and unwanted hands on your person is just another means to accomplish that. But it’s not the same, and it’s another thing entirely for women for all the obvious reasons.
Bell finds himself thinking about Chief Petra Nessuno, wondering where she is now.
Nightmares? he asks his daughter.
Athena nods slowly. If she clenches her jaw any tighter, Bell thinks, she’ll shatter her molars.
You tell your mother?
Her brow furrows for an instant, her lips compressing to white lines, forcing the blood from them. She shakes her head.
She has nightmares too I think.
Bell exhales, looks down the narrow trail, feels like an ass for not granting Amy what he so readily gave Athena. His own sleep is not so much that of the just as that of the exhausted, and he rarely can recall his dreams. It’s always been that way for him; nightmares, when they do come, when he can remember them upon waking, consistently revolve around the mundane. Less about bloodshed directly than about bloodshed through his mistakes, failings as a soldier, failing his squad. Most often, when he remembers his bad dreams, they center on his daughter and his ex-wife.
Nightmares go away if you talk about them, Bell signs. You should talk about them.
Athena shrugs, signs quickly. Just did.
Maybe talk about them with Mom.
She blinks at him slowly. Mom worries.
I worry.
She takes a moment, then signs, Always am careful.
Tell me.
She gives him a look that is pure teenager, the look that says she knows this already, and doesn’t want to repeat the obvious for the thousandth time.
Tell me, Bell signs.
Know who is around know where to go know how to get out know where to hide know where to get help.
He smiles. Good memory.
Shotgun in closet with towels.
Mom says shotgun in basement.
She glances down at her feet on the faux planks, then back to him. The sign is fast. Moved it.
Loaded?
A look that says duh, and then she signs, Expensive bat.
Bell laughs softly. She’s quoting him.
Not safe tell Mom.
Athena nods.
She will worry less if you share with her, Bell says.
You talk to her?
She does not want to talk to me I think.
Athena considers that, then nods again, agreeing. Bell offers her the hug and she hops down from her perch into it, and he wraps her tightly again in his arms. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to let go when the time comes.
“I love you,” he whispers into her hair. She can’t hear him, but she feels him speaking.
“I love you, too, Daddy,” she says.
The airport in Hailey, Idaho, is just long enough to accommodate a private jet, which is, of course, one of the factors that recommended the place. The National Guard barracks nearby is another. The fact that it’s a small community occasionally favored by the rich and famous as a getaway is a third, because that brings with it a fourth; it is a community that values privacy, that has taught itself not to stare, that’s small enough to be close but isn’t so isolated as to be closed. Those who come and go draw only a modest amount of attention.
Bell steps off the plane just after 2200 local, crosses the tarmac, and proceeds on through the small terminal into the parking lot and the night beyond. He finds the F-150 exactly where it should be, double-checks the plates to be sure, then uses the wireless key from the packet the duty sergeant gave him before he boarded the plane at the Air National Guard base back in Burlington to open the pickup. He tosses his duffel on the seat beside him, starts the vehicle, and checks the sat nav. There’s a destination programmed, and he keys it, then follows directions along near-empty streets until he’s parking in front of a house he’s never visited before that is now, he’s been told, his. He climbs out, locks up, and for a moment pauses, just to take everything in, to take stock. It’s a quiet street, only six other houses, each of them with plenty of elbow room along the property lines. Lights in two of the six, more pickups and SUVs parked outside. The sky has the faded darkness and abundance of stars you can only get when away from the urban light dome, and the air smells of grass and pine and summer.
He’s got a set of keys from the same packet, and one of them opens the door to the house. He knocks the door closed behind him with the heel of his boot, throws the lock, finds the switch. Still with the duffel on his shoulder, he spends the next fifteen minutes or so on a walk-through, peering into each room, opening and closing cupboards and pantries and closets. There’re three bedrooms, two baths, a finished basement, and a kitchen that looks to have been recently renovated. Whoever handled the decorating and furnishing kept things modest, regional, and almost impersonal. If you didn’t look too closely, you could believe that someone was already living here.
In the master bedroom, Bell unpacks his duffel, a process that takes him almost no time at all. There are already clothes in the dresser, and he knows they’ll fi
t. He takes the .45 in its holster from his hip, empties his pockets, then strips down and steps into the bathroom for a quick shower. The soap is Ivory. The shampoo is something called American Crew, and he’s amused by that. There’s even deodorant in the medicine cabinet, a Speed Stick.
He’s getting dressed when the loneliness hits him, the thoughts he’s kept at bay now breaking through. This was supposed to be his last house, for Amy and Athena and him. This was the house where he’d have told them that they could unpack all the boxes. This was the house, the community, where Athena could make friends she would keep, stay until she left for college, to come back to on holidays. His house.
His alone.
“Beer’s in the fridge, bourbon’s on the counter, vodka’s in the freezer,” Sergeant Jorge Velez, the fourth man on Bell’s team, call sign Bonebreaker, calls out to Bell.
“So we have three of the four food groups, then.”
“Isaiah’s bringing pizza,” Freddie Cooper says. “So we’ve actually got all four covered.”
Bell heads to the kitchen and the fridge, finds a bottle, and snaps off the cap. Jorge’s house is similar to Bell’s, similar layout, just smaller, a one-hundred-and-some-odd-meter straight shot from one backyard to the other. Freddie’s home is two down from Jorge’s, the biggest of the three; he’s somehow managed to maintain his marriage, and he’s got two kids as proof. Isaiah lives down the block from Bell, at the corner, another two-bedroom, like Jorge’s.
Bell comes back to the living room, where Jorge’s seated on the couch, leaning against the arm to favor his uninjured ribs. Freddie’s taken the easy chair, and both men are focused on a soccer game on the television, what Bell concludes must be a rebroadcast, judging by the late hour.
“Dig your digs?” Jorge asks.
“High speed,” Bell says.
“Nice thing about being off rotation. I got to redecorate.”
Bell looks around and concludes that the only real redecorating Jorge has done was to bring in a larger television, a sound system, and a gaming console. “Yeah, you’ve definitely put your stamp on it.”
“I’ve got broken ribs. I have to work slow.”
“He’s malingering,” Freddie says. “Trying to get sympathy from the local fillies.”
“I don’t need sympathy to get the local fillies.” Jorge taps his chest with his palm. He’s shorter than Bell and Freddie, but still taller than Isaiah, long in the leg and lean, a dancer’s body. If he had the personality to be hunting hookups he’d have no problem finding them, but in all the time Bell has known him, Jorge’s gone on all of two dates. With his friends and his comrades, when he’s on the job, he’s deep in the give-and-take. Outside of those spheres, Bell—along with Freddie and Isaiah—knows Jorge to be painfully shy.
Isaiah arrives with pizza, two boxes, and their contents are rapidly decimated, and more beer is just as quickly consumed. The soccer game ends, and talking heads replace them, and Jorge turns the television off in annoyance. Conversation bounces from topic to topic, but centers at first on this community, on Hailey. Freddie’s been here the longest, just under a year, time enough to settle his family, and then Jorge was placed next, just six months ago. Isaiah got his keys two weeks before moving to join Bell on the operation in California and, like Bell, had been placed undercover, which means he’s had no chance to establish himself.
“Sticking out like a sore thumb,” Isaiah says. “Black guy in white town.”
“The eyefucking stops pretty quick,” Jorge tells him.
“You’re not black.”
“I sure as shit ain’t white.”
“True dat.”
“We’ll put you behind the counter at the store,” Freddie says. “Keep the customers away.”
“What do we sell?” Bell asks.
“Repurposed and recovered antique wood products.” Jorge raises his beer in respect. “We are like Jesus. We are carpenters.”
“Tradesmen,” Freddie says.
“You seen the website, Top?” Isaiah asks Bell. “Apparently we’ve got an armoire we’re selling for fifty grand.”
Bell laughs. “We line it with gold?”
Isaiah wipes his palms on the thighs of his jeans, holds them up to illustrate the grandeur of the armoire in question. “This is an antique hand-carved country French armoire from the Auvergne region, circa 1770, now restored in loving detail from the fixtures to the beveled mirror. We have spared no expense in returning it to its former glory, scouring the globe to find just the right sources in our quest to return it to its pristine condition.”
Bell looks at Freddie. “You can’t put him at the counter; he’ll sell the damn thing, and then where will we be?”
“I’m sure the colonel could supply us with one if we really needed it.”
“And take it out of our pay,” Jorge says.
The business, the cover, is called Saw and Plane, chosen—Bell assumes—because it’s so vague as to be useless. Part antiques resale, part restoration, it’s a business that quite reasonably is maintained by four men who, naturally, travel often in support of their work. It’s the kind of boutique specialty affair that justifies prices that beggar belief, a business that nonetheless is entirely plausible. It’s the kind of cover that Ruiz would give his First Team operators to allow them to hide in plain sight, here in central Idaho, with convenient transport available at a moment’s notice. Here, in theory, all of them are secure, safe, and hidden. Here Freddie doesn’t have to worry about his wife, Melinda, or his daughters, Bettie and Georgia, and their safety and security. If Melinda is keeping a loaded shotgun in with the towels, it’s because she wants to, not because she might need it.
Freddie maybe knows what Bell is thinking, because he says, “How’s the family?”
The instinctive response is the cordial lie, that they’re fine, but Bell doesn’t say that, because he doesn’t need to, not here, not with these men. “Rattled.”
“Amy’s made of steel,” Jorge says. “She’ll bounce back. So will Athena.”
“It’s not just what happened to them,” Bell says after a moment. “It’s all of it. You stack the divorce on top of it…Amy understood what we do, but she always kept her head down, and it’s not like we ever talked about it, not like she ever knew the details. She can’t forgive me, she thinks it’s my fault, that I should’ve told her what would happen.”
“Nobody knew what would happen,” Isaiah says. “That’s why we were there in the first place.”
“But the fact is she’s right. They should never have been there. I should’ve put Ruiz on her, had him shut the whole trip down.” Bell empties the bottle in his hand, uses his thumbnail to pick at the peeling label. “But instead I gambled that it would be safe, and it was a bad bet, and I lost.”
“They lived through it,” Freddie says.
“Nuri didn’t,” Bell says.
Isaiah and Freddie leave just after one, each of them back to his own home, and after they’re gone, Jorge says, “So.”
“So?”
“Bitches Incorporated.”
Bell gives him a dark look. “Somebody’s been talking out of turn.”
Jorge shrugs. “Just because I wasn’t on the op doesn’t mean I’m not on the team. Unless you’re saying O’Day’s got my job now.”
“Not by my word.”
“Good to hear. Freddie says she was in his bed when you hit jackpot.”
“Freddie wasn’t in the room.”
“So you’re saying she wasn’t in his bed?”
“Sergeant, we are not talking about this.”
“I didn’t think they existed. Bitches Incorporated, I mean.”
“They exist.”
Jorge thinks about that. “Damn. I thought we were hard-core.”
“Yeah,” Bell says. “Me, too.”
Chapter Seven
“I THINK YOU should get laid.” Heath pours more Maker’s Mark into the glass in front of Nessuno. “That’s probably against doctor’s a
dvice, but then again, I think doctors are mostly full of shit. I think you should get laid, sleep late, read a dozen books, eat out at restaurants that serve your favorite foods, see every movie you’ve missed, spend some of that money you’ve saved up on things you don’t need but you certainly deserve, and then get laid again. So there you go.”
Nessuno takes the drink, holding it from the top by her fingertips, tented, and she can feel the slight chill from the ice beneath her palm. The cubes knock together in near silence.
“Or get drunk,” Heath says. “Blind falling down throwing-up until you think you’ll turn inside out drunk. You talk to your parents yet?”
“I talked to my parents.” The answer comes flat, and Nessuno tries to remedy that, adding, “They want me to come home for a bit.”
“So maybe you should listen to your parents.” Heath finishes refilling her own glass, sets the bottle down before picking up her drink and leaning back against the couch. The bottle is more than half empty. It was full when they started. They’re sitting in the living room of Heath’s small home in Montgomery Village, Maryland, and it’s past midnight.
“Maybe I should.”
“Chicago in August. Might be nice.”
“Have you been to Chicago in August?”
Heath raises her drink in mock toast, takes a swallow. Nessuno rocks her glass from side to side, slightly, watching the plane of alcohol shift, then brings it to her lips and finishes most of the pour in two swallows. She’s not tasting the bourbon so much as feeling it, the scorching race of alcohol through her breast. She looks out the window to her left again, out over the front yard of the comfortable house, into a neighborhood that is silent and still. It’s been more than thirty minutes since she’s seen anything moving outside. Not even a car since then. It all feels deceptively safe and reassuring.
“The verbal debrief will hold,” Heath says. “I’ll stall the brass, you can take your time with the written. Seriously, take the time you need to get your head straight.”
Nessuno tilts the glass, finds that it’s empty.
