Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)
Barbara Nickless
ON WATCH
The call came late on an August evening while Jeremy Kane was upstairs, rocking his infant daughter.
When the phone buzzed, Kane shifted Megan in his arms and pulled his cell from his pocket. An out-of-state number he’d never seen. He pressed a button and silenced the call.
Megan’s breath hitched as if she would fuss, and Kane rubbed her back. She swallowed her cry and nestled into his shoulder, her tiny hand a petal against his throat.
His bum leg ached. Closing his eyes, he shifted his weight. He inhaled the baby’s clean, sweet scent and listened to his older daughter singing softly in the next room.
At moments like these, the war and its aftershocks seemed very far away.
Still, Kane knew there were some things you couldn’t fix. No matter how much help you had. No matter what interventions people ran on your behalf. No matter how hard you tried.
Some things stayed broken. A bum leg. A bad memory.
But he believed in work-arounds. If you had the sense God gave a goat, you learned to trim back, cut down, reroute. You accepted that no plan came with guarantees, and when life blocked one lane, you found another.
He had his family. He mostly had his health. And he had a good job as a security officer for Denver’s Regional Transportation District—the RTD. The gig wasn’t the life he’d dreamed of before the war. It wasn’t medical school. It wasn’t a bright, sunny office and a steady stream of patients and a world that admired a man’s intelligence and awarded him money and accolades for his dedication.
But there were compensations. Like these times with his girls.
The phone buzzed again. Same number.
A cold thread wriggled its way into Kane’s thoughts. Lester Crowe.
For Crowe, the war was always right there. In his face or on his back. In his dreams, and always on his mind. When things got too dark, he would call Kane from someone’s cell or use the phone in whatever dive bar he found himself in when the shakes hit.
Kane answered with a soft hello.
“Someone’s been following me,” Crowe said without preamble. “Trying to smoke my ass.”
An icy fear knifed into Kane’s neck, right at the base of his skull.
He kept his voice soft. “Hey, Crowe, you okay?”
“I was until some fancy suit started following me. Watching me eat my food and scratch my ass. Watching me every time I take a shit, I swear. Not safe anywhere. It’s fucking Iraq all over again.”
A week ago, Kane would have tried to talk Crowe down from whatever mental ledge his war buddy had crawled out on. But that was before Kane began digging into the past. Before he learned just how wrong things had gone in Iraq. And how it had spilled out over here.
Maybe someone had noticed his online research. The drive-bys and photos. Maybe he’d endangered his entire fireteam.
“Crowe—”
Megan woke with a mewling cry. Kane stood and jounced her in his arm. He walked to the window, taking a sentry’s position above the quiet street. “What are you talking about?”
“Some nutso shit, man.”
Kane caught the rumble of a truck through the line. A horn honked. Then Crowe said, “It’s like we’re the heroes in a fucked-up movie. And Iraq is the monster that won’t stay dead.”
“Where are you? I’ll come and get you. Doesn’t matter where you are.”
“I’m calling from a pay phone. Only way that’s secure. An hour from now I’ll be in another state. You hang with your family, take care of your own. Stay on watch and be careful. These guys are serious trouble. They’re probably listening in right now.”
Kane did not want to go down the path his friend had taken. “Crowe, c’mon. You been smoking something?”
“I’m telling you. It’s Iraq, back with a mouthful of teeth. We should never have done what we did. It was wrong, man. It was so wrong.”
Kane swallowed down the panic and reminded himself this was, after all, Crowe. Unstable in the best of times. Crowe had gone radio silent right after he returned to the States. And a man didn’t disappear from his Marine brethren unless there was something very wrong with what was bouncing around between his ears.
But still.
Kane considered what he’d learned this last week. Covert deals, illegal weapons, faked reports. There were enough pieces missing that he couldn’t yet make out the overall image. But what he could see made him think that what Crowe had going on was less PTSD than self-preservation.
“You been to see anyone, Crowe? You know, just to talk. You sound—”
“Paranoid?” Crowe snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit. These dudes will hand everyone on our team their asses and make us thank them for the pleasure. It’s something to do with that Iraqi kid whose mom got killed. He’s in the middle of this clusterfuck.”
This was a sucker punch. “Malik?”
“He saw something over there. Those weapons. Remember that?”
The panic clawed free and tried to pull Kane down. Megan began to fuss. He walked her back and forth across the room, struggling to pull up an image of the small boy who’d been adopted by the Marines after his mother’s murder. “You think they’re after you because of—”
He stopped himself, abruptly aware that if Crowe’s fear was grounded in reality, someone really might be listening.