OVER THE NEXT TWO HOURS HE HAD HER DRAW OUT THE FLOOR PLAN for the house, upstairs, ground floor, bas.e.m.e.nt. During the day, Snell worked as a claims adjuster out in the east county, an hour's drive away most days, given traffic. Lourdes had only seen him at the house once since he'd come back from Iraq. She didn't know what time he got home in the evening, didn't know where any guns might be other than that one locked room in the cellar. She'd never come across any in the closets, under the bed; there were no display cases upstairs. Snell had a safe down in the bas.e.m.e.nt as well but Veronica, the one time she'd shown the place to Lourdes, had admitted she didn't know the combination.

The couple had two children, but they'd be at school till four or so-a boy of thirteen named Samuel, a girl of nine named Samantha.

"Two Sams." It was G.o.do. They were all in the room together now, watching her chart out the house. "Weird."

"It is a strange family," Lourdes replied.

HAPPY TOLD LOURDES TO CALL HER DAUGHTERS AND SAY THAT one of her housecleaning clients had been in a bad wreck. The woman was in the hospital, she'd be there overnight; the husband was away, couldn't get a flight back till tomorrow. The family needed Lourdes to stay with the kids. "They pay me," Lourdes a.s.sured her oldest, whose name was Carla, "a lot." Then the younger daughter, Angelica, got on the phone and Happy thought it would never end, back and forth: a kitten, the dentist, homework, a boy named Terrell. Finally he made a cutting gesture to his throat and Lourdes told her daughter she had to go.

"Your daughter's needy," Happy said as she flipped closed her cell.

Lourdes sank into herself. "She's at that age." It was decided she'd stay at the farmhouse, with Happy and Efraim trading shifts watching her. Efraim went off to fetch blankets and a kerosene lamp and one more meal. They'd do the takeover tomorrow, show up in the van, wearing coveralls from Vasco's moving operation, get inside the house in the morning, tie up the wife and Lourdes, raid the secret room, then wait for first the kids to come home, then Snell, force him to open the safe. If they were patient, they'd be fine. Once Efraim was back, they ran through everybody's role, rehearsing as best they could as it grew dark and even colder in the empty farmhouse: Chato watching the front door; Puchi clearing the ground-floor rooms then guarding the back; G.o.do and Efraim upstairs to clear the bedrooms; Happy in the living room with Lourdes, a pistol to her head.

As they practiced their run-throughs, G.o.do seemed distracted, one minute almost incandescent in his focus, the next wrapped inside himself so tight he looked like he might lock up in a kind of trance. The problem wasn't physical-the infection in his leg had settled down, he moved okay, looked strong. Happy drew him aside as he was doing a final weapon check, gestured toward the door. "Outside for a minute?"

The night was damp, a rustling roar from the walnut trees whipping around in the wind. The clouds were plump in the moonless sky. Chafing their arms against the cold, they tested their way along the gravel to where the van and pickup were parked, out of earshot from the house.

Happy lit up a smoke, needing two matches in the wind. He took one long drag, then said, "What's wrong?"

G.o.do was still rubbing his arms. "Who says anything's wrong?"

"Don't f.u.c.k with me, not now. This is too important."

"I know how important it is."

"Then tell me the truth. What's eating you?"

G.o.do's breathing became slightly labored, then he coughed. "Hard to talk about."

"That's why it's important to talk about it."

"Who are you now-Dr. Happy?"

"This about Iraq?"

"What isn't? f.u.c.k you, by the way."

"Tell me about it."

"I don't-"

"I told you my story. You think I was proud? I felt like a total chickens.h.i.t. But something's got you by the nuts, it's got some power over you. Tell me about it. It'll lose some of that power, I promise."

A smile crept across G.o.do's pitted face. "Where'd you learn that-Oprah?"

"Listen to me. You're the one I gotta lean on, G.o.do. You're the one who gets it. I can't have you going in and out. Every second, you gotta be there."

"I know what I gotta do."

"It ain't a question of what you know. It's a question of what's gonna get in the way at exactly the wrong time if you don't wrestle it to the f.u.c.king ground. Now talk to me about it."

HIS UNIT WAS NEARING THE END OF THEIR SHIFT ON FALLUJAH'S WEST ern outskirts, a flash checkpoint, no concertina wire, no sandbags, no glow sticks, just the Humvee with the engine running for the sake of the headlights, the diesel fumes increasingly noxious as the hours pa.s.sed. Dawn smeared a thickening mustard haze across the east while overhead the night sky softened from black to a gritty shade of brown. The sand beneath their feet crunched with every step.

The usual shabby low-slung houses bordered the road, while beyond them, emerging in murky silhouette, were palm and eucalyptus trees, elephant gra.s.s, a distant camel, a water buffalo. Soon the day's first prayers would blast by loudspeaker, courtesy of the local muezzin, from the nearest minaret, same thing all across the city, mosques that during the battle served as secret armories, pillboxes, sniper hides.

It was always a toss-up, which would start first, the morning prayers or the daybreak dog barking. Everybody'd come to hate the dogs, but shooting them for sport was a no go-the locals saw it as cruelty, not pest control-so G.o.do held his fire as he caught sight of a slinking form maybe twenty yards behind the Hummer, sniffing its way forward, a skeleton with a tail and a nose. The wind was brisk, the dust thick, the cold piercing; all this time in-country, he still hadn't adjusted to the sixty-degree temperature swings on any given day.

Among themselves, the marines sometimes joked that they'd made Fallujah the safest city in Iraq-by reducing it to a pile of rocks. On the plus side, there were fewer bats. As for the ruin, it wasn't like they'd had much choice, given the way the mujahideen had prepped the battle s.p.a.ce, the way they'd chosen to fight. Now, with the elections over, the new year in full swing, civilians were testing their way back into the city to sort through the wreckage and recover what remained of their lives.

Military-age males-MAMs, they got called, another joke-were fingerprinted, given retina scans, issued special ID cards they had to display whenever confronted. Few vehicles were allowed inside the city limits and the ones that were got tossed inside out, nothing left to chance. It was drudgery, it was tense, it was the f.u.c.king pits. It was the sh.o.r.es of G.o.dd.a.m.n Tripoli.

The problem was Ramadi. Thirty miles west, it hadn't suffered the holocaust. A loose-knit bloc of insurgent gangs ruled the souk, the mosques, the winding alleyways where things got bartered for a favor down the line or sold outright for cash. Route 10, the open road between the cities, was the biggest but by no means only ratline connecting the two locales. Every way in and out of the city had to be tamped down tight.

Meanwhile, the gradual influx of redevelopment money had brought a certain breed of carpetbagger to Al Anbar, negotiating deals on landfills and power plants and water-treatment facilities, few of which seemed to be getting built. The men with the bags of money and the big ideas had to get around, though, and they did, with their well-paid condottieri, dressed in cargo pants and flak jackets and Oakley shades, armed to the t.i.ts and charging around the country in their SUVs at ninety miles an hour, slowing for no one, running down dogs and sheep, old men and kids. Accidental deaths alone had caused untold grief for the marines. Intelligence dried up, resistance to the simplest request became routine, defying orders became a badge of honor, especially for MAMs.

Then a team of contractors with an outfit named Harmon Stern a.s.sociates gunned down two Sunni men repairing their pickup on the road between Ramadi and Fallujah. Iraqis near the scene said the two men shot down did nothing. Tribal leaders and imams pressed for a face-to-face with the colonel, they wanted justice. They were a.s.sured the men responsible would be apprehended but promised nothing more. A BOLO-be on the lookout-went out with the names of the contractors. Every unit throwing down a checkpoint knew what to do if the men showed up on their watch.

Chavous manned the up gun on the Hummer. G.o.do and Benedict and Pimentel and the new guy, Bobby Salgado-Mobley's replacement, a transfer from the Three Five-did the ha.s.sle work on the ground.

Salgado hadn't been welcomed much, not like it was anyone's fault. The loss of Mobley still p.i.s.sed everybody off but it wasn't just that. You knew the next guy could get lit the same way, so why bond? The buddy-up camaraderie of the invasion and the first flush of battle got countermanded by death. Goodbye only got harder if you bothered too much over h.e.l.lo, so everybody just gave a nod, figured the new guy knew his job. If not, he'd get told.

Turned out Salgado-a true vato loco vato loco, Sycamore Street Mid-nighter from Huntington Beach-had some p.i.s.s up his spine. He hadn't enjoyed the color-blind unit cohesion G.o.do had so far. His previous platoon had included two die-hard haters and that's all they needed, the one to back the other up when launching off on some phobic jag of anti-Latino bulls.h.i.t. They were just as outrageous to the blacks but that wasn't Salgado's problem. He was still hot over the constant niggling wetback pepper-belly nacho-n.i.g.g.e.r bulls.h.i.t. He told G.o.do not to be stupid.

"These cats ain't your friends," he said one night over a cold MRE. "Don't get your cholo cholo a.s.s in a bind and forget that." a.s.s in a bind and forget that."

G.o.do pretended to give that deep thought. He wasn't sure what to make of Salgado. Kind of guy, he thought, who might pitch himself off a roof, convinced all he wanted was a better view. "Mobley fought his black a.s.s off for me, I watched him die. Chavous is a f.u.c.king redneck but he never failed me once. Ditto Pimentel, who's crazy but that comes in handy sometimes. And I'd lay down my life for Gunny Benedict."

Salgado bit open a gravy packet. "You're a fool you think it's gonna stay that way."

"Maybe you should wait, give this team its due."

Salgado licked a smear of brown gunk off his finger. "Say you're right, cabron cabron. Don't change the fact they be looking to deport your whole f.u.c.king family before you get home."

"Too late." G.o.do chuckled acidly. "They already s.n.a.t.c.hed my cousin." It's the reason I'm here, he thought, but why share that?

Salgado fired up that crazed stare he was known for, like his focus was the only thing keeping the world from coming unglued. "Then you know. You f.u.c.king know. What you do over here don't translate to s.h.i.t. For real, man, ain't no f.u.c.king brown heroes. You go home in a box they'll kick the d.a.m.n thing over into Mexico for burial."

"I'm not Mexican."

"You know what I'm saying."

It was the two of them manning the forward positions that morning at the checkpoint, Gunny Benedict staggered behind. Pimentel had their six. They stopped every vehicle and demanded access cards and weapon permits, especially the bongo trucks-cutaway VW vans, a favorite of the so-called desert foxes, generally friendly paramilitaries who wore chocolate chip cammies, flak vests, balaclavas. The unit's BOLO list included not just the names of the Harmon Stern contractors but several dozen suspected insurgents, any of whom, if encountered at the checkpoint, were to get gagged and bagged and delivered to RCT-1 HQ.

The night had been relatively quiet, though, only a couple cases of misunderstanding, taken care of when G.o.do or Salgado, having their shout-and-show ignored, moved to shoot: a warning round at the deck each time, one follow-up bullet to the grill of a Mercedes sedan that refused to slow down. The driver was an old man, confused-he jabbered and wept when they dragged him out of the car, threw him down in the dust for a search. The rest of the night they threw back Rip Its and tamped foot to foot, slapping their arms and bodies trying to stay warm, chipping away at the silence between them with practice of the little Arabic they knew: O-guf! Tera armeek O-guf! Tera armeek for "Stop! Or I'll shoot;" for "Stop! Or I'll shoot;" Interesiada Interesiada for "Get out of the car;" for "Get out of the car;" Urfai edik Urfai edik for "Put your hands up;" for "Put your hands up;" Inshallah Inshallah for "Allah be willing;" and their personal nonoperational favorites: for "Allah be willing;" and their personal nonoperational favorites: kus kus ("p.u.s.s.y"), ("p.u.s.s.y"), zip zip ("p.e.n.i.s"), ("p.e.n.i.s"), theiz theiz ("a.s.s"). ("a.s.s").

Traffic started picking up about 0500 and got increasingly jammed as dawn leached across the sky. The family in the Cressida with the one working headlight reached the head of the line and Salgado stepped forward, asking the driver for doc.u.ments. G.o.do eyed the rest of the queue, five vehicles deep, his weapon in condition one: a chambered round, bolt forward, ejection-port cover closed, safety on. He was ready to thumb down the safety at the merest hint of trouble and was in a bad mood regardless, the days on end without washing during the siege having created a case of cancer-level crotch rot, lingering for weeks now. He'd scratched himself b.l.o.o.d.y in his sleep, only making things worse, so now he was obsessively rousting himself awake at night, lurching up in his bedroll if he was lucky enough to drift off at all. He hadn't slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch since he couldn't remember when and in the semi-hallucinatory edginess that had come to characterize his state of mind, he often found himself revisiting Mobley's death, the house they turned to smoke and ruin afterward. It wasn't the fiery itch from his b.a.l.l.s to his a.s.s crack or the war in general or the idiot command or the ungrateful locals or even the pitiless creeps they called the enemy that kept G.o.do so p.i.s.sed off lately. It wasn't even the nagging dead or the skeletal dogs they seemed to inhabit. It was the fact that, after weeks of shabby sleep, he couldn't feel the center of himself anymore. He had this daydream in which he was a kite that someone had let go of, G.o.d maybe, this little jet of bright paper and balsa wood bucking around in a cold wind, just a matter of time before it came crashing down.

Back in the here and now, though, there was nothing especially screwy to get worked up about. The slender Iraqi in the coin-gray suit behind the wheel of the Cressida was merely slow, not suspicious, fumbling for his doc.u.ments with his wife beside him, two kids in the back.

It was that lack of zip, though, that upset the Chevy Blazer right behind. The driver started hammering his horn, five blasts, ten-it only upset the slowpoke father more, his wife in her hijb hijb headscarf craning around to squint into the headlight glare. Then the Blazer surged up and out, jockeying forward to squeeze past the Cressida, nudging the b.u.mper and flattening Salgado against the driver-side door. headscarf craning around to squint into the headlight glare. Then the Blazer surged up and out, jockeying forward to squeeze past the Cressida, nudging the b.u.mper and flattening Salgado against the driver-side door.

G.o.do charged into the SUV's path and shouldered his sixteen. Chavous fired off an air burst from the Humvee's .50cal, tracers flaring into the ash-brown sky in a hypnotic arc, landing somewhere near the camel. G.o.do called out, "Whoa the f.u.c.k, a.s.shole," and the Blazer finally lurched to a stop, kicking up a shower of pebbled dust. Turning his face away, he saw the same emaciated dog, closer now, trembling beside the Hummer's rear wheel. He resisted an impulse to reach down to his crotch and dig at his itch, at the same time feeling something unclick along his spine, a shimmer of pent-up rage shooting through him and he had to check the safety on his weapon, fearing he might fire out of pure gall. He hacked up an egg-size clot of crusty air, spat, checked again to be sure Chavous had him covered, then eased toward the Blazer's driver-side door, shouting, "The f.u.c.k you thinking, s.h.i.t d.i.c.k?"

The driver cranked down his window: older cat, maybe fifty, wire-gray hair, probably police back home, maybe a vet, eyes a bloodshot brown, mustache and sideburns straight out of Death Wish of Death Wish. "Got a convoy out at Akashat, they're a squad short. Thing's gotta move in an hour. Let us through."

"Akashat? You're heading the wrong way."

"We got another man to pick up. Come on. Serious. We got exactly no time to waste."

Oh boo the f.u.c.k hoo, G.o.do thought, fighting a sudden twitch in his eye. Somewhere in the distance a chopper rotored over the city, invisible in the swirling dust and russet sky. Behind him the dog made a thin mewling sound. "Back the f.u.c.k up to where you were or you'll spend the whole d.a.m.n day here."

Salgado, jacked up from almost getting run over, blistered the Cressida's driver with obscenities, like it was all his fault.

The Blazer's wheelman said to G.o.do, "Look-"

"You jumped the G.o.dd.a.m.n line."

"You hear me? There's a convoy, ready to move-"

"Access cards and permits." G.o.do shot out his hand, glancing past the driver at the others. The guy in the pa.s.senger seat looked half in the bag, sungla.s.ses staring straight ahead, weapon clenched between his knees. Behind him sat the rest of the team, three men abreast in the backseat, equally hungover from the general slump and cast of their eyes, every one of them dressed in the same contractor drag, like there was a store out there somewhere in the desert where they all got outfitted.

Gunny Benedict duck-walked forward to calm Salgado down and provide a forward presence. A gust of keening wind sugared everything in grit.

"Listen." The Blazer driver leaned forward, like it was the distance between them causing the trouble. "Time window's closing here."

In a moment of insomniac, rage-laced weirdness, G.o.do pictured the man growing a snout. "You with Harmon Stern?"

The driver's jaw tightened. The bloodshot eyes turned hard. "What's your problem?"

Good as a yes, G.o.do thought. "Access cards and permits."

"Look. You know who we are."

"f.u.c.k I do. Access-"

"We're on the same side, d.a.m.n it."

G.o.do glanced away, like the guy wasn't worth eye contact, spotting that same dog edging ever closer, nosing the ground for garbage, then he coughed up another wad of dust-choked phlegm. For a second he thought he saw a flurry of black-winged bats veering in crazy arcs in the dawn-lit east. He blinked-nothing there. The dog, though, was real, he felt pretty sure of that. "Cards and weapon permits, every man in the vehicle. Now."

"You're being an a.s.shole."

G.o.do couldn't help himself, he laughed. "Coming from you?"

Salgado had the Cressida driver out of the car now, opening his trunk. Gunny Benedict spotted a pedestrian trekking forward from the hazy darkness, past the other vehicles in the queue, a strangely tall and awkward woman in a black abaya abaya, her head and face wrapped in a white niqaab niqaab, only her eyes uncovered.

The Blazer driver, trying to regroup, ventured a buddy-up smile. "Okay, you win. But there's no need for this ha.s.sle, okay?" He nodded toward the front b.u.mper. "How about you write down the plate number, we'll be outta your hair."

It was galling, the c.r.a.p they thought you'd swallow. "How about you s.h.i.t backwards on this att.i.tude you got and do like I told you." The aggression was camouflage, he was trembling from adrenalin. Above and beyond the contractor's bulls.h.i.t there was something about the walk-up bothering him, putting him on edge-plus the wastrel dog. For just a second he caught Gunny Benedict's dusty blue eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, first at Salgado, then G.o.do, checking his men, taking care.

Do your job, G.o.do thought, another over-the-shoulder glance at Chavous then turning back to the Blazer. "My man there on the .50cal? He'll send a few live ones through your windshield you try to move, so you're going no place till you comply-we clear? Now cards and permits, I'm not asking again."

The driver c.o.c.ked his head around, tracking Gunny Benedict advancing toward the odd-looking woman, ordering her to stop. G.o.do felt it stronger now, still not knowing why. His whole body felt like an antenna for the w.i.l.l.i.e.s. He thought of shouting something but didn't want to come off half-c.o.c.ked. Gunny knew his business.

The driver said, "That your team leader there?"

G.o.do snapped back. "You don't get to choose who you deal with, a.s.shole."

The guy laughed, slapped the arm of the hunched man beside him. Back to G.o.do: "Touch a nerve there, did I, Poncho? Your sergeant know what a wound-up little girl you are?"

"What my sergeant knows, Elmer, is I need to see your f.u.c.king access cards and-" In the corner of his eye, G.o.do saw the gawky woman slip past Benedict, reaching inside the black abaya abaya one-handed. The slinking dog began to bark. one-handed. The slinking dog began to bark.

"Know what?" The driver jammed the Blazer in gear. "I'm calling your bluff, hotshot."

At the sound of the engaged transmission G.o.do snapped. "That's it, f.a.ggot. Out of the f.u.c.king vehicle." He pulled open the Blazer's door with the dog's barking growing louder, fiercer, just as a man's pitched cry broke from behind the woman's veil: "Inshallah!" "Inshallah!"

Two weeks later, the doctors in Landstuhl would tell him that simple thing-yanking back the door-probably saved his life. They'd also tell him that Gunnery Sergeant Raymond Benedict, among several others, marines and civilians both, didn't make it. It was up to G.o.do to imagine the details. And he'd been doing that, while pretty much trying not to, ever since.

G.o.dO COULDN'T SAY IT WAS RELIEF HE FELT, OR IF IT WAS, RELIEF AT what exactly. Exorcising the demon, maybe, whatever the h.e.l.l that meant. Relief he'd gotten through the story without sniveling like a b.i.t.c.h. He'd never said any of that out loud before, not that he could remember and he doubted he'd forget such a thing. Maybe in the ward at Landstuhl, when the morphine made him daffy. In the cold moonlight Happy's face looked a little less grimly calculating, a little more accepting. G.o.do tried to tell himself that wasn't pity. He wouldn't take pity, not from Happy, not from anybody.

"You blame yourself."

G.o.do shivered. "Minute I felt something wrong, you know? I shoulda lit that f.u.c.ker up."

"You do that over there? Wax women?"

"He wasn't no woman, Hap, that's the-"

"You didn't know that, is my point."

"No. No. Some level, I knew. It was wrong wrong, you know?"

"You guessed, G.o.do. You suspected. And you take out a woman on a bad guess, think of the s.h.i.t you'da been in."

G.o.do shook his head helplessly, miserably. "You're not getting it."

"You're letting hindsight f.u.c.k with you. Time don't work like that."

"Wow. That's deep."

"Go ahead and mock, a.s.shole. I'm trying to help you."

"I got locked in, you know? The c.r.a.p between me and that d.a.m.n driver." G.o.do looked up into the night sky, the fat clouds, the spray of stars. "So f.u.c.king like me."

"No, what's like you? Letting it eat at you like this. There's nothing you coulda done. I know you wish there was but ..." Happy let his voice trail off suggestively, the silence into which all wishes vanish. "Sure as s.h.i.t no way you can change it now."