It was all there in her eyes.
A split second before everyone else, Nina saw it was a trap. She saw Joe Reed appear through the back door of the bar with his big Browning automatic coming up in a two-handed grip. She yelled a warning, her hand flashing in a lightning reflex for the small of her back.
I can beat you…
But she came up empty. She’d left the pistol back at the motel on the table next to her sleeping husband. All she could do was watch.
“Janey!”
“I’m here, girl,” Janey yelled back, swinging around, yanking her Baretta, turning…
Too late. Reed shot her twice in the chest at a distance of ten feet. Lieutenant Janey Singer went down, and Reed came on another two steps and put the last one in her head.
Then Reed swung the gun, and Ace Shuster took the bullets meant for her. That’s when Ace’s crazy brother Dale stepped in front of Reed and stabbed her with the syringe of ketamine. The last thing she saw, as the paralyzing anesthetic dragged her into the black, was the contempt in Joe’s cold eyes. And blood. Ace’s blood on her chest.
Her eyes rolled up. Dread was mocked by the sinking euphoria in her veins. The thought that she’d never see her daughter again.
The pain, loss, and guilt had taken a freaky rebound; twisted around and got caught in her head. She’d let her buddies down. Worst thing in the world for a soldier like Nina Pryce.
No way she could have known…
Didn’t matter. She was stuck on those three seconds. If she hadn’t left her weapon behind, Operation Northern Route would have ended in that barroom. Janey would be alive, and Ace and Holly-Colonel Holland Wood. There would have been no attack on the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant.
He’d never seen her like this. Ever. Sure, he knew there was a downside to her job. He’d spent his time in special ops in the old days. He knew that killing people-or losing people-leaves a harsh sudden vacuum in the world. And sometimes this could rush into it. But you never thought about it, and you never voiced it. Now. Jesus. He was numb, blindsided, like he’d lost his place. His voice shook, searching for reference.
“Nina, hey kiddo…”
“Fuck you, Broker. Leave me alone.”
He studied the conflicted stranger who now occupied his wife’s body. Her taut face had lost its tone and aged ten years since breakfast, now just a clay mask of melancholy and fatigue. He could smell the rank sweat. More than fear; hopelessness, dread. Most of all he saw her shattered eyes, green splinters of pain jammed inward.
She took the cigarette from her lips and dunked it in the coffee cup, in the process scattering ash across the black type that spelled ARMY on the front of her sweat suit. Then she got up from the table, walked past him, went through the living room and up the stairs. As the bedroom door slammed shut upstairs, Kit cautiously stepped through the kitchen door and dropped her backpack on the floor.
“What’s wrong with Mom?”
“She’s just tired, honey; her arm is hurting her.”
Kit arched up on tiptoe, absorbing the tuning-fork tension still vibrating in the smoky air. She arched up more when she spied the pistol on the counter and the loaded magazine on the table. She measured the distance between the forced calm of her dad’s words and the hard, controlled look in his eyes, the way his body had changed. Then she regarded him with a wary cynicism no eight-year-old should have. She knew what it meant when her mom or dad adopted this physical tone. Stuff happened fast. Bad stuff. They sent her to stay with Grandpa and Grandma.
Seeing her rising alarm, Broker put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right…”
Kit shook off his arm and fought a rush of tears, forced them back down, and shouted at him. “You said it was going to be normal. It was going to be Christmas. You lied. People are gonna die and go to hell!”
She ran from the kitchen. Broker let her go as reflex kicked in. Deal with it. He snapped the trigger lock back on the.45, removed the key, and jammed it in his pocket. Up the stairs, past the two tightly shut bedroom doors, into the den closet, back down again with the other guns in the house. Out the back door. He was loading the guns in the heavy diamond-plate toolbox in the back of his truck-to which he had the only key-when he saw Dooley come out of his apartment doorway.
Seeing the guns going in the lockbox, Dooley walked over, leaned against his rusty Civic, checked Broker with his quiet brown yardbird eyes, and asked, “This something I should know about?”
“Nah. Housecleaning,” Broker said evenly as he snapped the lock on the toolbox. Too calm. Hurricane-eye calm. Standing dead still, his insides struggled for balance. A palpable sensation churned in his chest that his life had uprooted and was starting to rotate around him.
“Uh-huh,” Dooley said.
Still smarting from Kit’s outburst, Broker stared at his tenant, standing there next to the Civic with the weathered Bush/Cheney sticker on the rear bumper. Dooley, a felon, couldn’t vote, but he flew the sticker to keep bleak faith with the Christian Man in the White House.
“One thing,” Broker said. “Go easy on the religion stuff with Kit, okay? You got her spooked about people dying and going to hell.”
Dooley shrugged. “We were raking leaves last month. She’s a smart kid, she asks questions.”
“Whatever,” Broker said. “Look, Dooley, do me a favor.”
“Sure, what?”
Broker pulled two twenties from his jeans. “Go up to Len’s and get me some cigars, those Backwoods Sweets.”
“Light brown pack. Uh-huh. How many?” Dooley looked at Broker and then at the Toyota, as if to say, You forget how to drive, or what?
“All they got.”
Back inside, he scanned the kitchen calender scrawled with holiday commitments. He picked up the phone and canceled their dinner plans with his ex-partner, J. T. Merryweather, and his wife. He ordered pizza and paced the backyard, smoking one of the cigars Dooley had fetched for him. He checked on Nina, sleeping upstairs. More pacing and smoking, aware that Kit was watching him from the back porch. When the pizza arrived, he set Kit up in front of the VCR. In the middle of her second Harry Potter, she fell asleep. He carried her upstairs and put her to bed.
Not wanting to disturb his wife’s sleep, he spent the night on the floor at the foot of the bed, awake half the time, listening to her troubled breathing.
The next morning Nina was still in bed. Broker sat down with his daughter at the kitchen table. One of Kit’s favorite expressions, which she’d learned from her parents, was, “Say what you mean.” Broker was direct.
“This is just between us. Mom might be a little sick, she might need a lot of rest,” Broker said.
Kit stared at him; the sickest she had ever been was a couple colds and an ear infection.
“We might have to make some changes,” Broker said. “If anybody asks, just say Mom isn’t feeling well. Understand?”
Kit nodded obediently. She had spent the last two years living on the fringe of the special operations community in Italy. Usually it was the dads who went away; the moms and kids did not talk about it to outsiders.
Christmas came and went, a wreckage of canceled play dates and parties. No one visited. The kids down the street Kit played with were not invited into the house. The new skis leaned in a corner, barely unwrapped. Without water, decorated halfheartedly by Broker and Kit, the magnificent tree dropped needles and shriveled to brown tinder. Nina stopped running in the morning, quit her exercises. She ate and talked little. Mainly she slept.
Broker hovered. He monitored the pills in the bathroom cabinet and the knives in the kitchen. Finally, Nina surfaced through the oceans of exhaustion long enough to tug his arm and say, “We gotta talk.”