“Why?”
“Until the end it was a good place for me. I do better with rules.”
“Sergeant,” I said, glancing at her file. “Two tours. Impressive.”
“I was good. And then I wasn’t.”
“When you were good, where did you see yourself going in the Army?”
I thought I’d gotten through a crack, but she shut it down. She said, “They discharged me, Dr. Cross. Dreaming about something that can never happen is not healthy.”
She watched me like a chess player looking for an indication of my next move.
Should I ask her to imagine a future for someone else? Or prompt her to take the conversation in a new direction? Before I could decide, Kate decided for me.
“Are you investigating the IEDs?” she asked. “On the Mall? I saw a news story the other night. Your wife was there, and I thought I saw you in the background.”
“I was there, but I can’t talk about it beyond what you’ve heard,” I said. “Why?”
She stiffened. “Familiar ground, I guess.”
I grasped some of the implication, but her body said there was more.
“Care to explain?”
Struggling, she finally said, “I know them. They’re like rats. Digging in the dirt. Hoping you’ll happen by.”
“The bombers?”
Kate took on a far-off look. It seemed she was seeing terrible things, her face twitching with repressed emotion.
“Stinking sand rats,” she said softly. “They only come out at night, Doc. That’s a good thing to remember, the sand rats and the camel spiders only come out at night.”
The alarm on my phone buzzed, and I almost swore because our hour was nearly up. I felt like we were just getting somewhere. By the time I silenced the alarm, Kate had come back from her dark place and saw my frustration.
“Don’t worry about it, Doc,” she said, smiling sadly as she stood. “You tried your best to crack the nut.”
“You’re not a nut.”
She laughed sadly. “Oh, yes I am, Dr. Cross.”
Chapter 15
Wiping at tears, Mickey left the VA Medical Center and ran to catch the D8 Metro bus heading south. He barely made it, and wasn’t surprised to find the bus virtually empty at this late hour.
Breathing hard, Mickey went to his favorite seat, barely glancing at the only two other passengers, an elderly woman with a cane and a heavyset man wearing blue work coveralls.
As the bus sighed into motion, Mickey felt tired, more tired than he’d been in weeks, months maybe. Rather than fight it all the way to Union Station, he pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes and drifted. Feeling the bus sway, hearing the rumble of the tires, he fell away to another time, in a place of war.
In his dreams, the sun was scorching. Mickey had buried himself in a foxhole as the Taliban mortared an advanced outpost in the mountains of Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Each blast came closer and closer. Rock and dirt fell and pinged off his helmet, smacked the back of his Kevlar battle vest, made him cringe and wince, wondering at each noise if his time was finally up.
“Where the Christ is that mother?” he heard a voice shout.
“Upper south hillside, two o’clock,” another voice called back. “Three hundred vertical meters below the ridge.”
“Can’t find him,” a gruffer voice yelled. “Gimme range!”
A third man yelled, “Sixteen hundred ninety-two meters.”