Since returning to the States, Maven had battled reimmersion issues common among discharged Iraq veterans. A heightened startle reflex; avoidance of crowded places; sudden, overwhelming anxiety attacks. Discarded food containers, dead animals on the roadside, a man walking alone into traffic: in Iraq, the appearance of these things portended death. Any of them had the potential to detonate fatally without notice. His time over there had been one of unremitting suspense, which he had met with unrelenting vigilance, one of many habits he was still having trouble unlearning.
Two things conspired to distract him from his usual psychotic vigilance that night. The insulating rain was one of them. The other was a gleaming black Cadillac Escalade that pulled in around ten.
The Escalade was a big SUV, the driver sitting at about Maven’s eye level. Nothing about him jumped out at Maven: black hair, a no-nonsense face, perfectly shaped shirt collar, jutting chin. The dash was loaded with electronics, more sophisticated than anything in Maven’s entire apartment.
As the driver went poking into the sun visor for cash, a woman leaned forward in the passenger seat. She threw a brief glance Maven’s way — nothing more than a peek around a blind corner — just curious to put a face to the dark figure working in the rain. The liquid crystal display of the navigation screen lit her green and blue like some beau tiful android. Maven glimpsed a flawless neck, a delicately pointed chin, and a tantalizingly thick line of cleavage.
All in an instant. She eased back again — no spark in her eyes, no recognition, nothing.
“Messy night, huh?”
The guy was talking to him, a neatly creased fifty clipped between his fingers. The windshield wipers flicked rain into Maven’s face.
“Yeah,” said Maven, slow to recover, his hands disappearing inside his pants pockets within the poncho, making change.
The guy accepted the damp bills and coins and spilled them into his cupholder. “Stay dry, man.”
He pulled in and parked, exiting with a wide black umbrella, and Maven watched them walk away arm in arm, focusing on the woman’s bare shins beneath the cut of her dress, her heels picking at the sidewalk, the sound fading into the rain.
Maven knew her. Knew of her, anyway. A girl from his high school. Older than him by three years, a senior when he was a freshman, but as clear and as fixed in his memory as the bikini model who used to smile down at him from the poster on his bedroom wall. Smiled knowingly, with one crooked thumb hooked in the side string of her pink bikini bottom, drawing it an inch away from her cocked hip. That kind of memory.
Her name came back to him with the slap and sting of a snowball to the face: Danielle Vetti.
He said it aloud a few times in the rain. “Danielle Vetti, Danielle Vetti, Danielle Vetti.” Watching it steam and disappear. He was amazed to have seen her again, marveling at the gyrations the paths of their lives had to have taken in order to intersect once again, momentarily, that rainy night. The mere memory of her, and this one-second encounter — even the taste of her name in his mouth, after all those years — all put a charge into him the likes of which he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
Danielle Vetti had been the girl in high school. Passing her in the hall was the highlight of your day, something you’d brag about to your seatmate in the next class. Guys at their lockers — guys in the bathroom you didn’t even know — would spread the word: Check out Danielle Vetti today. They just didn’t make people like that in Gridley, Massachusetts.
Danielle Vetti.
“Hey, man, you see a little, wet dog come through here?”
A guy coming off the street. The Latino accent didn’t jibe with what Maven glimpsed of his face beneath the hood of an oily anorak. But this detail didn’t jump out at Maven — not until the second guy did.
The blow came from behind, Maven going down and rolling in a puddle. They pulled him up, his head throbbing, and a thick strap was fitted around his chest like the kind used to cinch down loads in a flatbed truck. It was ratcheted fast from behind, pinning Maven’s arms against him inside the poncho.
The first guy showed a knife, low and silver, turning it so that it caught the overhead light. A fat, three-inch blade. Maven’s focus went in and out.
The guy behind him tugged Maven back between two cars, out of sight from the street.
“The money, man,” said the first one, the one holding the knife. “I might just cut you anyway, so give it up fast.”
Steam from the mouth of the guy behind Maven smelled sour and chemical. Maven couldn’t clear his mind, couldn’t get any thoughts started. A cold automobile engine that wouldn’t turn over.
They pulled him toward the booth. The knife guy backed inside, Maven getting a better look at his face, his smile sharp and hungry, breath squeezing through widely spaced teeth like fog through a broken fence. He pecked at the register keys, hitting the big button, the drawer shooting open.
Empty.
The knife guy’s smile faded. He came back outside, the knife low at his waist. He was set on using it; Maven could see that much. This guy wasn’t going away until his blade was bloodied.
“Search him.”
Maven set his teeth hard, his tongue pressing against his gums — feeling the notch in the right front quadrant. This recognition relaxed him. A kind of deadness crept in, which was the prelude to combat readiness, a feeling he had once known so well.
Everyone who comes back has his one story.
Even if you come back with a lot of stories, there’s still always that one.
Maven’s was about a girl. Young, maybe fourteen, her head wrapped in a kaffiyeh of caramel-gold cotton. Maven was working a sneak-and-peek at a house in Samarra with his fire team. Young Iraqi girls often detoured past American soldiers, looking to draw a reaction they could ignore. The concept of America and the freedoms it represented frightened and attracted them, and so to be fancied by a Westerner was like having your forbidden dream beckon to you.
Maven, posted outside the house, didn’t see her until she was maybe twenty meters away. She wore a smile, but even at that distance Maven could tell that something was behind it. Her breathing was quick and shallow, and she walked with her arms raised from her sides.
His first thought was that she was in trouble, looking for help, and Maven actually took a step or two toward her, moving into her kill range. She reached inside the loose sleeve of her robe and yanked down, shivering, expecting to die.
Her hand came out holding a broken wire.
She looked at Maven with sweaty panic, then reached back inside her sleeve fast.
Maven brought up his M16. He could have cut her down right there, a chest-pattern, three-round burst. Brr-rrr-rrp.
She bent over, working hard, reaching up into her armpit. Maven spun behind a parked Humvee just as she exploded. Shat tering car windows sprayed his armor-plated vest, and he was thrown through a thin wooden fence. His fire team found him on all fours, spitting blood, and thought he’d been hit. A warmth spread over his gums, pooling in the right pocket of his cheek. He choked on something wedged in his throat, swallowing it down.
He had bitten off a chunk of his own tongue.
He saw many things during his tours there — many worse things — but it was always this girl who appeared in his dreams. Ended them usually, waking him up. Why she came at him, why she chose him, was a question for which there was no answer. Insurrectionists had been hiring head cases to do pay-and-sprays on American troops, even locking IEDs to noncoms against their will. He wondered if the near-death experience of the first misfire had made her change her mind. Maybe, in those last frantic moments, she was actually trying to get the device off her.