“Please take the chair in front of me,” he said.
“Thank you.” I pulled the folding chair away from a wide, low coffee table and sat.
In the growing light I looked directly at Harris Broadman. Face shaded by a plain white ball cap, bill tugged down low. Aviator sunglasses. A crisp white dress shirt buttoned at the collar and cuffs. White pants, white canvas slip-ons, white socks. White tufts of hair below the cap.
“I’m sorry I have nothing to offer you,” he said.
“You’ve already been generous,” I said.
“Delete all pity.”
The room materialized around me: one wall of bookshelves neatly stocked, a TV in one corner facing a recliner, identically adjusted blinds on windows looking over the parking lot and pool, framed photographs on the walls.
“How is Dalton?” he asked. As through the intercom, his voice was calm and soft, as if coming from a longer distance than this.
“He’s running for reelection against some big money. More than he’s got to spend, anyway. He’s working hard, anxious.”
“He was a worrier,” said Harris.
“He tries not to let it show,” I said.
Harris seemed to think about this. His expression was impossible to read behind the dark sunglasses and the steep bill of the ball cap. In the shuttered half-light the flesh coiled and rose on his cheeks, records of fire and surgeries. Incomplete nose and lips, like features that had never matured.
I had no idea.
“I haven’t talked with Dalton since the war,” said Harris. “But how exactly can I help?”
I told him about Natalie Strait’s disappearance, the sheriffs recovering her car.
“He’s hired you to find her?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you are a licensed private investigator?”
I nodded.
“Do you suspect Dalton is responsible?”
“Should I?”
“I’m not qualified to say. I know little of Dalton except what happened sixteen years ago in Iraq. I know nothing of his wife except what you’ve told me. I can’t help but think you’ve wasted your time coming all the way out here.”
“I want to know how he behaved that day. When your Humvee hit the IED. That may tell me more about Dalton Strait than he’s told me himself. More than his campaign flyers and billboards on I-15.”
A long, air-conditioned pause. I could tell that Broadman was considering my request.
“I was in Fallujah, too, when that happened,” I said. “On foot patrol in the Jolan. House-to-house three-stacks. I think you were just east, in East Manhattan.”
“Do you think about it a lot?” he asked.
“Sure. But now, sometimes, a few days will go by…”
Broadman issued a soft grunt that I interpreted as a very dry chuckle.
“I think about it a lot, too,” he said. “Every day. I admire people like you, who can forget. Or almost forget. Do you use alcohol or drugs?”
“I drink. Only occasionally to excess.”
“I drank rivers of vodka and ate pills by the handful. Then one night an overdose, touch and go in the hospital for a few days. But the skies cleared. A terrific doctor. She got me through. I haven’t touched any kind of painkiller in five years. Except aspirin when my face heats up.”
“I admire that.”
“Delete the pity, Mr. Ford,” said Harris in his soft, slow voice. “I asked you once.”
I could have explained I meant no pity at all in my admiration but that would have been a small truth within a larger lie: I did pity him and the world pitied him. No way to avoid it. But why should Harris endure it? Why shouldn’t he live in a remote desert motel, unavailable and hidden?
“We had a run to make to Volturno,” he said. “Uday’s and Qusay’s old palace.”
“I remember it.”
“We were actually on a humanitarian mission that day,” said Harris. I heard the calm in his voice, its controlled emotion. “We had a transport truck full of food and medical supplies for the citizens we thought were friendlies. We were ordered to leave the supplies. None of the Iraqis would show up when we were there. Not even children. The imams would have them arrested or worse. You remember the saying: ‘You deal with Americans, you die.’”
“I certainly do.”
“Dalton and I were part of security. Terrible road. Insurgents thick in Fallujah by then — twenty-four different groups considered ‘hard core.’ And of course even Saddam’s enemies were starting to hate us. We’d been making lightning raids every day and there was always collateral damage, or so the Iraqis claimed.
“We had no trouble on the way in. We sat in that Humvee like a couple of nervous rats while the rations and first aid kits were loaded out. Dalton was always a little above things. Confident that he wasn’t born to die or get blown up in this dirty little war. Beneath his calling. Looking back on it now, I think he was really, really afraid. I know I was. Our vehicle had just been up-armored with an add-on kit and some improvised stuff. Hillbilly armor. Which made it more prone to roll over. At any speed, that Humvee was a rollover waiting to happen.”
Broadman stood and walked into the kitchen. I heard a refrigerator open and close. He was a slender man of average height. He moved slowly, the same way he spoke, with a hint of the spectral in the sunglasses, the tufts of white hair, the white cap, shirt, pants, and shoes. He carried himself with heavy deliberation, like a man much older than he was. Or, like a warrior wounded once and forever.
He came back, set a bottled water on the table in front of me, then sat again and twisted open one for himself. He picked up a remote from the sofa and pointed it to the front window. The blinds pivoted open slightly, allowing in more light.
“Pretty simple, really,” he said. “They unloaded the boxes and we started back. We were point this time, not the rear guard. It’s all about your eyes. You’re looking for those roadside bombs hidden in anything that looks harmless and common — a ruined tire, a dead dog, a pile of trash, a blown-out vehicle that’s not familiar. Anything not there before. The insurgent bomb makers were crafty. As you know, the bombs that worry you most are the ones you never see, the ones set off by cell phone, and that’s what we hit. One of the big boys. Made by Rocket Man himself. You remember him?”
“Big news when we got him.”
“We caught him at home, with a bomb schematic up on his computer screen. Anyway, they’d dug in the bomb after we’d passed through, dodging the patrols and the helos and the surveillance drones in broad daylight. Somehow. I used to think their Allah was a better god than ours, the way they could get away with things like that.
“The next thing the world blew up and I was upside-down. I saw the road through the windshield and I smelled the gas. Dalton had been blown out of the vehicle. His door was gone — armor and metal blown off at the hinges. A blessing, because the Humvee doors liked to lock up in a blast, trap you inside to be cooked. I couldn’t get my restraint off. It was stuck and I had one shoulder dislocated and the other wrist fractured. They would not answer my will. I struggled in place, felt the gas on my legs. Prayed and screamed. The world went whump and the Humvee shivered, then Dalton was back inside but he couldn’t get the damned strap off, either, because the latch had melted. He started sawing away at the restraint with his utility knife. The vehicle was fully engaged. Fire roaring around me. Like a pyre. Dalton kept crawling back outside for breath, then back in to help me. His hair was scorched wiry black. I remember that. Finally he just collapsed my bad shoulder all the way and pulled me outside into the dirt. I rolled around to put the flames out. Rolled over and dug my face into that filthy sand. I heard the sniper fire but I couldn’t get my legs under me. Thought my nerves might have been ruined. Dalton ran to some K-rails for cover. I saw him when I was on my back. I was twisting like a dog to put that fire out, and he was upside-down in my vision, running for the K-rails to safety. I felt abandoned. I knew it was just a matter of time until the snipers shot me or I burned up.”