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John was asleep in the chair when they came to start preparing Bowers for his flight, and he felt a kind of dread when their motions finally forced him from the small halo of space between the curtain and the bed.

  Once they were in motion, John followed close behind the flight medics, trying to see if Bowers was conscious enough to hear him, trying to see if Bowers was searching for John with his one good eye. Then they were being crowded by other traveling gurneys being pushed by other teams of flight medics, all of them filing toward the entrance to the airfield and the dull roar of jet engines. Outside, the medics pushed the gurneys past the chain-link fence at the edge of the tarmac, and one of the medics turned and held John back with an open palm.

  John had hoped for a better good-bye than this.

  Panic seized him, and because he could think of nothing better to say, he shouted, “Don’t get me a damn thing, Mike! No gifts! Soon as we’re back home, I’m going to have something for you! All right, buddy? Deal?”

  Suddenly Bowers gave him a thumbs-up. John gave him a thumbs-up right back. Even though there was no way for Mike to turn around and see it, John kept his hand high as Bowers and the other patients were rolled in single file up the ramp and into the massive belly of the C-17 transport plane, its wings extending 170 feet on either side, the four jet engines attached to them powering to life.

  It was the last time John Houck saw Mike Bowers alive.

  1

  Nine Months Later

  John Houck was on his way back from the mailboxes at the front of the Devore Meadows trailer park when he saw Little Dan sitting on the bright redwood steps of his mother’s trailer. The nine-year-old boy was staring down at his feet as he traced a pattern in the dust with the tip of his right sneaker. The kid’s apple-cheeked pout could have melted the heart of a serial killer, but when he saw John approaching, the boy pulled his backpack up onto his lap and began carefully unzipping it, as if he had suddenly remembered he had some important bookkeeping to do. John figured the whole display was for his benefit, and he was happy to play along. The kid was sharp, but unlike a lot of the other kids being raised in Devore Meadows, he didn’t have the kind of smart mouth and bad attitude that suggested a future relationship with the California prison system.

  “What’s up, Li’l D?” John asked him.

  The boy squinted at this nickname, probably because it was a few days old and he had heard it only once or twice before. A few nights earlier, after John and the boy’s mother had watched the kid drift off to sleep in front of one of the Matrix movies, John had allowed her to pull him into the back bedroom of her trailer, where they spent an hour working their way to a finish so explosive she sank her teeth into John’s forearm to stifle her cry. Now the kid was giving him a smug expression that suggested John wasn’t the only guy in Devore Meadows to have used movie night as an excuse to hit the sack with his mom.

  “What’s that?” the boy asked quietly.

  For a fearful few seconds, John thought Li’l D was talking about the bite mark his mother had left on John’s arm. Then he realized the kid was gesturing to the stack of mail he held under one arm. John sat down on the steps next to him, tore open the large white envelope, and pulled out an Applicant Study Guide for the California Highway Patrol that he had requested several weeks before. After a few months working a construction job renovating a big resort up on Lake Arrowhead, John now had enough cash saved to get him through cadet training.

  The boy said, “Mom said you were already a cop.”

  “Sheesh. You can read already?”

  “I read all the time. I’m nine. So you’re not a cop yet? How come you have to study?”

  “CHP’s the best darn law enforcement agency in the country,” he said. “There’s a lot a man has to know.” Of course, John thought he knew most of it already, and he probably did, given his ten years in the Marine Corps, three of those as a sergeant with First Force Reconnaissance Company out of Camp Pendleton. Recon was the closest the Marines had to a special forces unit, even though most Marines would balk at the idea that one Marine was more special than another. CHP offered him a different uniform from the one he had been wearing when Mike Bowers lost his left eye for him, but still, John didn’t know if he had what it took to wear any uniform proudly again.

  As if he could sense this stream of doubt running through John, Li’l D watched John intently as he put the study guide back inside its envelope.

  “What you doing out on the steps, Li’l D?” John asked.

  “Waiting for a lady friend?”

  Without a smile the kid said, “My dad took me today. He was supposed to keep me until six but he said he dropped me off early. We were supposed to go get pizza but instead we had McDonald’s and went to some stupid park that didn’t have any ducks or swings or anything. Then he said he had to bring me back. He said he’d tell my mom but I guess he didn’t, ’cause she’s not here.”

  “Let’s give her a call. Where’s she at?”

  “Work.”

  “Where’s work?”

  The boy tilted his head, squinted against the bright sunlight but managed to focus on John’s face. “You have sleepovers with my mom but you don’t know where she works?”

  John shot to his feet, tugged the boy down the steps by one shoulder, and started them toward his own trailer, several plots away. “Is that what your mom called it? A sleepover?”

  “Yeah. I told her I thought only kids got to have sleepovers.”

  “And here we are!” John opened the door to his trailer and showed the kid inside. That morning, the harsh winds that regularly tore through Cajon Pass had buffeted the walls of his trailer like they were canvas, but they had died down now. He opened the freezer just to see the mess inside. A bottle of Corona had exploded inside it at six in the morning, and John awakened to find himself down on all fours next to the bed, sighting an invisible M-4 at the tiny television in the corner of his bedroom. He forgot he stashed the bottle in there the night before to get it cold. He wasn’t sure what to be more afraid of: his forgetfulness or his predawn acrobatics.

  Most civilians thought post-traumatic stress disorder caused murderous flights from reality. For John, it came up as a split-second failure of perspective that to the outside observer might appear as embarrassing as a loose bladder. You had to have spent most of your life being trained to react to every situation with immediate and decisive action to comprehend how demoralizing it was, like going to draw on an enemy and finding a banana in your gun holster. Maybe he was lucky. He knew some guys who checked out and stopped returning phone calls and e-mails and postcards. Guys like Lightning Mike Bowers. Or at least that’s what John thought was going on with the man. But it was also possible that Bowers had given some serious consideration to the cost of having saved John’s life in Ramadi and decided that postcards and phone calls from John just weren’t going to work for him. This thought bathed the pit of John’s stomach in ice.

  John was about to offer the kid a cold drink when he saw Li’l D standing at the foot of his bed. He drew the kid backward out of the bedroom by one shoulder and shut the door gently. “Off-limits, okay?”

  “Why?”

  Because there’s a Sig Sauer P-220 in a holster behind the headboard, he thought. It’s a .45-caliber handgun and I’ll go to my grave before I let you or any other child get your hands on it. As John groped for a response, Li’l D moved to the kitchenette’s tiny table and said, “I guess you have sleepovers, too.”

  “Your mom got a cell phone?”

  “It got turned off.”

  “So, back to place of employment…” The kid wrinkled his nose at this strange adult phrase. “Her job. Where does she work?”

  “A gas station.”

  “Which gas station?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t tell me. She says there’s no way in hell she’s going to work at a gas station long enough for no kid of hers to know where it is.”

  “Watch the language.”

  “It�
�s what she said!” There was pain in the kid’s voice, more pain than the embarrassment of being chastised for bad language by a man who was for all intents and purposes a stranger. John wanted to ask the kid how long he had been sitting on the front steps, but he figured that would only make him feel worse.

  The most he knew about Li’l D’s mother was that she was a regular at karaoke nights at a bar down in Highland called The Lantern—she had asked him to go with her next Thursday and he’d said he’d get back to her—and like every other girl he had been to bed with since returning home from Iraq, she had a dream of auditioning for American Idol someday. He also knew that she loved cats but was allergic to them, so she had to settle for two-dimensional versions of them on all her dishrags and in the pages of the calendar hanging over her kitchen counter.

  She also pretended to be interested in the Marine Corps, listened attentively as he described the Battle of Belleau Wood to her while he traced designs on her bare stomach, but that could have just been the boxed wine they had been drinking or an aftereffect of the orgasm she might have played up for effect. What he knew was that she was a short, big-boned, apple-cheeked blonde who came on as bossy and assertive and flirty all at the same time, and that was a package that had been making him weak with desire ever since he was a teenager. What he didn’t know was why she was currently unreachable and why she didn’t have enough cash to pay her cell phone bill.

  John had been raised by his older sister, Patsy, who had sacrificed everything to make sure that he and his brother didn’t end up in the custody of a drunken aunt after their parents were killed in a car accident. And Mandy, cat-lover and American Idol wannabe, was not living up to Patsy Houck’s stellar example. But there was no need for the kid to know this, so he rose to his feet and said, “You wait right here. When I get back, we’re going to get you some pizza.”

  The kid raised his eyebrows but didn’t crack a smile: he had already learned not to get too excited about any promise an adult might make to him. “Pizza Hut or Domino’s?” John asked him.

  “Golden Door.”

  “What the hell is the Golden Door?”

  “Um…language.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Loma Linda.” John tried not to curse. It was a good twenty-minute drive south and they were sure to hit bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way back. The kid continued, “And it’s not just pizza. They have everything—an arcade, a play area, live music—”

  “I got it. I got it. The Golden Door it is.”

  Live music. The only term that struck greater fear in his heart was enfilading fire. But he was a good kid and he didn’t deserve to spend the afternoon being ignored, even if it meant John might have to put up with a mariachi band in his face.

  Just as he had expected, John found his neighbor Emilio working on his truck in a makeshift garage he had built next to his trailer out of two-by-fours and canvas tarps that were so wind-battered they looked like they had been shot through with bullets.

  The truck’s hood was up, but Emilio was in the front seat, surfing stations on the radio. The forty-seven-year-old Mexican managed an auto body shop in Highland, and a few weeks earlier a cousin of his had brought some friends in who had needed serious fender work done at a serious discount. When the guys decided not to pay even the reduced price, Emilio’s cousin caved and told him the guys were all gangbangers who wouldn’t take kindly to multiple invoices, this after Emilio had called one of the cholos in question a no-account thug. His pants wet, Emilio had shown up on John’s doorstep one night and told him the whole story. John spent the entire next day teaching him basic defensive moves. Ever since then Emilio had been strutting through Devore Meadows like a rooster on steroids.

  When he saw John through the windshield, Emilio shot from the front seat and threw his arms around him. John gave him a pat on the back until he was released, and said, “If you see Mandy, tell her I took her kid to get some pizza.”

  “Mandy.” Emilio winced. “Aw, tell me you’re not gonna hit that shit, man.”

  John whacked Emilio across the back of the head, just as his own sister had whacked him across the back of the head every time he’d referred to a female by any term besides lady or woman or ma’am. “That’s no way to talk about a lady, Emilio.”

  “Dude, you’re a fuckin’ Marine. You could walk into any bar, have any woman you want. You just throw her right over your shoulder, walk out. Ace in every hole, man.”

  “I don’t just want any woman. I want Jessica Biel,” he said, turning from the truck. “When Mandy comes back you tell her that her kid’s dad dropped him off early and he asked me to take him to some pizza place in Loma Linda that sounds like a whorehouse.”

  “What?” Emilio called after him.

  “The Golden Door! Loma Linda!”

  “Got it,” Emilio called after him. John was almost back to his own trailer when he heard Emilio shout after him, “Hey man, you be careful of that kid’s stomach. One time I gave my sister’s kid some pizza—it was like a horror movie, man!”

  The Golden Door had everything Li’l D had promised and more, including a birthday party made up entirely of shrieking little girls, seated at the table right next to them. To keep himself from losing his mind, John kept his attention on the boy sitting across from him. A band played onstage, a band made up of giant animatronic animals who belted out the lyrics “It’s time to be happy to-daaaay! It’s time to be happy to-daaaay!” Their heads jerked from side to side. Their giant furry eyelids rose and fell in time to the music. A giant puppy played drums—he had big floppy ears that shot up into the air on the high notes and a long mouth lined with rounded white teeth that made him look like a barracuda. Li’l D was transfixed by this display, his eyes wide and glassy as he slowly chewed each bite of cheese pizza.

  If John had known how loud the place was going to be, he might have begged off. But he had learned since coming home that it wasn’t a series of loud noises that got to him. It was a single unexpected one: a car backfiring, the deafening crash an empty automobile carrier truck made when it hit a bump in the highway. Sounds like these reminded him of the first gunshot, the first explosion, the first sign that your life was about to be altered irrevocably. These were the hardest for him. These were the sounds that reminded him that he’d had a life before Iraq, a life that had been altered by events not of his choosing, events not on anyone’s battle plan.

  Li’l D pushed his empty plate back without taking his eyes off the monsters onstage. He scanned them nervously, as if he thought they were about to jump down onto the floor and start for the table. John said, “How you doing there, big guy?”

  “I don’t like that dog,” he said, a low tremor of fear in his voice.

  “Me neither. What do you say we hit the play area?”

  Li’l D nodded emphatically, put their plates in the nearby trash can just as John instructed him to, and then led John right into the arcade, where John felt his wallet tense up in his back pocket. He handed the kid a dollar and told him to make it last as long as he could, then he found a spot in the corner of the room where it would be almost impossible for the kid to leave his sight.

  A little while later a hand came to rest on his shoulder, gently, as if whoever it was knew how he might react to a sudden touch. At first he didn’t recognize the woman standing next to him. She had gained almost twenty pounds, and her once shoulder-length brown hair had been chopped off. There were bags under her eyes and a fresh sunburn on her pale skin. The last time he had laid eyes on Trina Miller had been at a BBQ in Oceanside, after he came back from Fallujah and before he had made the indoc for First Recon, where she had cried a river as she thanked him for saving her husband’s life. Now she threw her arms around him with the same level of emotion, even though her fatigued appearance didn’t match up with this gesture.

  John hugged her right back. He assumed it was a coincidence, running into the wife of a Marine whose life he had saved, and his heart did a jump he hadn’t
thought it to be capable of doing. Surely this was some sort of sign from an otherwise cruel universe that he was on the right path—that just bringing this kid to this pizza place was a good act. How many hours did he spend replaying what Bowers had done for him nine months earlier? And he spent almost no time acknowledging himself for the life he had saved.

  “What are you doing here?” John asked.

  “Looking for you,” she said. “We stopped by your…place, talked to some guy named Emilio.”

  “You and Charlie? Where is he?”

  “Outside. He needs to see you, John.”

  “How is he?”

  She nodded and looked at some spot over his shoulder, then glanced down at her feet as if she might find her next words there. But all she could manage was, “I don’t know. He just says he needs to see you.” John had no trouble believing it, given that they had driven all the way up to his trailer park, and then another twenty minutes south to find him.

  After he had introduced Li’l D to the woman who would be watching him for the next few minutes, John headed for the patio where Trina had told him he could find Charlie. It’s Bowers, he thought. Charlie knows why Bowers isn’t calling me back. Something’s happened to him and he’s here to tell me.

  After taking a couple of deep breaths, John realized how absurd this thought truly was. For all he knew, Bowers and Charlie Miller had never even met each other. The two men came from separate halves of John’s Marine Corps career—he’d met Charlie in boot camp, only to end up fighting next to him during the Battle of Fallujah years later. Bowers, on the other hand, had been the first captain John had ended up under after officially becoming a “Reconnaissance Man,” a title that had been assigned to him only after he completed twelve weeks of backbreaking training that made boot camp look like summer camp.

  In some ways, Charlie Miller was from a former life, a life in which John had been a hero, pure and simple, a life in which no one had been forced to give up an eye to save his life.