“You adopt survival mechanisms,” she said.
“Fuck survival. You beat the other guy.
“ Beirut. I’m thirteen. Men drove into the neighborhoods, gave us kids AK-47S. I never thought to ask who the ammo really really came from. Barricades cut up my home blocks. Sandbags, barbed wire, fuel barrels. Fuck what our parents said, we were cool and saving our world. I learned to run fast, because I was small, and the fucking snipers’ priority was wounding kids because that suckers out rescuers.
“One day, down the block at some other crew’s barricade, those guys made an old man step out front, hands in the air. We see he’s one of us, a Muslim. They tell him to walk to us. So he does, him and us thinking it’s a swap. They let him get ‘bout nine feet from our sandbags. Shot him dead.
“We couldn’t leave cover to pull his body in, so it laid there. After three days, we had to abandon our barricade. The stench. The flies.
“Two weeks, different barricade, same thing-only now it’s a teenage Muslim guy just like me, hands up, had taken three steps toward our spot.
“I nailed him. Head shot.” Sami paused. “He was dead as soon as he walked my way. I just got to choose his time and place, his meaning.”
Night held the city.
“Is that why you left Beirut?” asked Rose.
“PLO guys I idolized took custody of a sniper we captured, set him free. Started me thinking: Whose side is anybody really on? Then my father got a job at the Marine barracks. One of our factions blew it and him up. The Marines took care of my family. Put me in a Detroit high school. Soon as I could, I joined the Corps. Semper fi.”
“Me, too,” she said.
He leaned into a kiss she captured. She kicked off the covers, cupped his hand over her breast. Seven minutes later, he guided her on top of him, straddling him, arcing over him like a quarter moon as he whispered, “I see you. I see you.”
Afterward, Rose lay across him. “Don’t say anything. Neither of us. Not unless we can say it again and again and again.”
“Until,” he said. “Until, not unless.”
Their flesh goose-bumped. He reached for the sheet and blanket.
“Are you hungry?” she said.
“Not now. Now you have to fall asleep.”
“Why?”
“I have to use your computer when you don’t know it.”
“Oh,” she said.
“But I can spend the night.”
And he did, his last waking moment echoing a fluttering wing.
A mile away in her go-to-sleep teddy bears bedroom, seven-year-old Amy Lewis whispered to her best friend through a cell phone bought for the adventure, “Gramma says I’ll really be going to bed a whole three hours later because the world is round!”
Wake up! Sami bolted upright in Rose’s bed. Glided through the dark to her main room, grabbed her phone, tapped in the panic number, got routed to a woken bear who heard Sami whisper, “The Ameer! Keys! Medical imaging office! He’s got access to-”
“Fuck!” Harry killed their call.
Sami calmed his jackhammering heart. Made himself go back to sleep. Have faith in himself and a bear.
Gray clouds covered the morning sky. Sami drove to where the Ameer had sent Maher. Maher waved. Too friendly for just a cab, but this feral kid’s street skills had beaten Harry’s tails. Maher climbed in front. Another mistake. Sami thought: Where do you live? How do you get money? Did you come up with using Facebook?
“What’s that smell?” said Sami as they drove around the Beltway
“Sorry, chemicals from the dry cleaners. The Koreans are nice. Took me a month to get the job through that Christian youth hostel.”
Maher carried a backpack. “The newspaper calls it the Track-side Slaughter. Ballistics say the gun was also used to shoot a gangbanger from the Clifton Terrace crew. The cops can’t figure Latino and black bodies.”
The future filled Maher’s eyes. “We’ll be something to write about. Brother,” he said, “I know Ameer is worried. But I’m chill. He’s so smart! Combining what you’ve got to do with checking me out while I get the last of my shit, like, how tight is that?”
“Very tight.” Sami grinned. “Is that how American kids say it?”
“Yeah.” Suburbia flowed past the taxi. “Look out there. Redondo Beach. Akron where my cousins live. Here. It’s all the same TV shows. Stupid news about dumb rich girls who do nothing but get their pictures taken. The holy Jesus in the Koran, blessed be His name, what if He were driving with us today, seeing all this meaningless crap? We gotta stop all the ruining. If not us, who?”
“We’re in the same car, my brother.”
The gun shop sat in a Beltway exit mall. A pine wreath decorated the barred door. The clerk behind the glass counter wore a holstered Glock and a red Santa Claus hat.
“Hey, guy!” The clerk smiled at Maher. “Good to see you again.”
“Yeah.” Maher handed the clerk his California driver’s license for routine processing by the law with a five-year backlog.
The clerk filled his eyes with nonblond Sami.
“This is my uncle,” explained Maher. “He’s Jewish.”
“Oh, well Sha-lum Ha-nooka.”
“Shalom,” said Sami.
Maher rented a 1911 Colt.45 automatic and ear protectors, bought four boxes of ammo and a black silhouette from a target display that featured a pistol-pointing, grizzled Arab in a bur-noose and bumper stickers proclaiming that an aging, antiwar movie actress should still be bombed back to Hanoi.
The store’s shooting range had ten lanes, three occupied. Gunfire boomed. As Sami shot holes in their target, Maher dumped three boxes of ammo into his backpack.
“The.45s are the biggest bullets,” said Maher, taking his turn on the firing line. He showed no post-traumatic stress syndrome from the last time he’d fired a gun.
As they left the gun shop, the clerk said, “Happy New Year!”
At the next mall, the sporting goods store roared with crazed shoppers. Sami gave a clerk the order printed from Rose’s computer. The clerk said, “You know these bikes are unassembled in boxes, right?”
“Cheaper that way.”
“It’s for orphans,” said Maher.
“God bless you.” The clerk took their cash so they could skip the line.
“Um,” said Maher. “Do you guys sell steel cup protectors? You know. For… for down there. For hockey.”
“I think they’re all plastic.”
As they carried three bike boxes to the taxi, Sami said, “Hockey?”
Maher shrugged. “Won’t happen tomorrow, but when I become a holy martyr, the virgins waiting for me in paradise will get one, too. I wanna be able to have kids.”
“You want to have children in paradise?”
“Got to be a better place to raise them than here.”
They crammed the bike boxes into the taxi. Drove to a subway stop. Only then did Maher relay the Ameer’s orders for that night, where to be tomorrow, what to do precisely when. Before he vanished into the crowd, Maher said, “I love you, brother.”
Thirty-four minutes later, Harry rode in the taxi beside Sami and said, “Before dawn, NEST black-bagged Ivan’s building- not the Nuclear Emergency Search Teams, their shadows whose ‘S’ stands for Strike. They pulled all hazmat out of the medical imaging office, substituted fake material, and broke the machines so nobody will wonder when they don’t work. We’re still balancing records hacked from the office computers, but it looks like all radioactive material is accounted for. Put that together with your horny teenager looking for a metal cup to shield his balls, and they’re probably building a put-together-at-the-last-minute dirty bomb.”