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  They picked Nina because she’d played a few undercover games for Seal Team Six in Bosnia-Herzegovina. A novelty. The guys in special ops called them “Swallows,” the extreme military gals attached to them, like Nina and Jane Singer, in lurid appreciation of how far they might have to go to get close to a target.

  What the hell. At the time her marriage was on the rocks; she and Broker were separated. So she rolled the dice. Even used Kit in the play, and drew in Broker for added backup.

  Her job was to get close to North Dakota bar owner Ace Shuster, who turned out to be a likable, handsome drunk with a chivalrous streak. Nina had spent several nights in Shuster’s bed. But he had slept on the couch.

  She had been totally unprepared to be courted.

  And when they descended on him and his load of contraband, it turned out to be Cuban cigars.

  The maverick operation was called off. Homeland Security was pissed. The Joint Special Ops Command at Bragg was furious at the spectacle of a Blackhawk helicopter and elements of a Delta troop being diverted into the North Dakota wheat fields. It looked like a career ender.

  These facts affected her mood that next morning when she impulsively decided to drop by the bar and say something to Ace. Her second lapse of judgment was leaving her personal weapon behind.

  Because when she and Janey walked into the bar, the real bad guys in the smuggling operation were waiting.

  In the end it all came down to that moment in the Missile Park bar.

  She played it over and over, like a tape on a loop. And she had the remote in her hand. Just wouldn’t stop thumbing the controls. Hit play: there’s Joe Reed coming through the back door, holding the pistol in a two-handed grip. She watched herself yell, reaching for her pistol. Saw her hand coming up empty. Janey swinging around, bringing up her nine. Ace Shuster in motion. Janey taking the first bullet in her chest. Stop. Rewind. Play the stunned expression on Janey’s youthful face. Reed efficiently shooting Janey a second and third time as she went down. Then Reed swung the gun on Nina. She played this part a thousand times. Never did get to see Ace’s face.

  When he put his body in front of the fourth and fifth shots.

  And saved her life.

  Then that asshole, Dale—Ace’s loony brother—stabbed her with the syringe of ketamine.

  Stop. Rewind. Play. Janey’s stunned expression again. The protest in her eyes. Hey! Wait a sec, this is way more tomboy shit than I bargained for…

  Janey gone.

  Ace gone.

  The tape played endlessly, the same several seconds over and over. Because that was Nina’s role that day. To watch.

  A witness to the death of Janey and Ace and by implication Colonel Wood—Holly—and the people who died at Prairie Island.

  And every day since, she watched the creases of worry etch deeper in Broker’s face when he looked at her, at Kit. As he contemplated the radioactivity that might have slipped into his blood and bones spawning tiny milky scurries of cancer and leukemia…

  So she fixated day and night on editing the tape. Make a new tape titled “If Only”…

  Rewind. Stop. Play Nina shouting, reaching for her pistol.

  If only…

  She got up, eased open the door, padded into the living room, and stood over the couch where Broker lay sleeping. His face was obscure in the darkness but she knew his face; the way, even under all the strain, it relaxed into an unlined boyish reverie when he slept.

  The first time she ever saw him, she was younger than Kit. Thirteen years separated them. Her dad had squired Broker through the bad fight in Quang Tri City. Brought him back, with his war twin, Griffin, to run the Ranger course at Benning. The two of them appeared in the cramped backyard of the tiny house where the Army billeted Major Ray Pryce and his family. The summer of ’73.

  Even at seven, Nina understood you sorted men by what they wore on their chests. Dad said there were two kinds of soldiers: the kind that fight, and the other kind. Broker and Griffin were identically lean and blooded in spitshined jump boots, new Ranger tabs, CIB and jump wings over the two rows of ribbons above the left blouse pocket of their summer khakis. Even the individual ribbons were the same: Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart on top.

  Her mom had called her to the kitchen and sent her back into the yard, carefully clutching three frosted bottles of Lone Star beer.

  She sat in her dad’s lap, long used to the smell of beer and cigar, while he harangued against the Army, the war. The stupidity of taking the 101st off jump status, putting them in helicopters.

  She remembered every word he said. “See these two boys, Kit. They’re American Praetorians. That’s what the airborne and the marines divisions are, the volunteer backbone. This special operations crap we’re stuck in just goes on missions—hell, airborne and marine divisions win wars…”

  But not that war, Daddy.

  She remembered his words because they were some of the last words she ever heard from his mouth. Two days later he took his two boys back to Vietnam. He left before dawn, coming into her room and kissing her gently on the forehead, whispering so as not to wake her, “I love you, Kit. I’ll always love you.” Softly his blunt

  fingers caressed her chest. “Remember, you have a Pryce heart in your chest. Don’t quit, honey; don’t cry.”

  She had fought her way up through sleep and reached out her arms.

  “Daddy?”

  But he was gone. And this time he didn’t come back. Not even his body.

  Nina bent over her sleeping husband and wanted to reassure him; she knew he feared the consequences of being exposed to radiation at Prairie Island. Feared that cancer was simmering in his blood, his bones. You won’t get cancer, Broker. You’re not the type. Her mother had died of breast cancer. But her mother had given in. Five years after her husband was taken off the missing list and presumed dead, she compromised and married a creep. She gave up.

  Nina believed that Broker would never get cancer because he didn’t know how to give up.

  She backed out of the living room and pulled the door shut behind her. What Broker didn’t understand was that the greatest fear and sense of loss she suffered was not for her dead comrades.

  Of course she grieved. With her arm in a sling, she attended three funerals. Janey’s in North Carolina. Ace Shuster’s in Langdon, and Holly’s—closed, mostly empty casket—in a military chapel in Arizona. They found about as much of Holly as they did of some 9/11 victims. Some tissue that fit in a DNA-coded envelope.

  The point was, her arm in that fucking sling. She had lost the use of her right arm, and after eight months of rehab, it wasn’t coming back. In the fight with George Khari last July, she had saved her life but destroyed her shoulder. She suspected that the doctors at Bragg had studied her MRIs, knew the problem, and were just giving her time to come to terms with it.

  Patronizing her.

  She backed away from the thought. Better to keep playing the tape over and over, backing it up, splicing into the seconds, trying to make it come out right. Because that was the real her going into that gunfight. Major Nina Pryce. D-Girl Nina Pryce.

  Broker called it her Joan of Arc fantasy. Her uphill fight against the Army patriarchy. She’d soldiered through all the dumb jokes, sent two would-be military rapists staggering away clutching their genitals—you wanted me to touch it, asshole, you didn’t say how… She’d made up her mind: I will be the first woman general to fight a brigade in combat. Gone now, all that headstrong bravado.

  But if she gave up the drama of that moment, she had to face herself as she was right now: a woman, another mom, closer now to forty than to thirty, with a bum shoulder…

  Depression was just a waiting room where she paced in a circle until her name was called. She’d go into the doctor’s office. The doctor would run her through a simple set of range-of-motion exercises, note that she couldn’t remotely bend her elbow and reach up behind her back. Would write on a piece of paper: “Unfit for duty.”


  Nina shook her head, unwilling to look her demons in the eye: her pride, her arrogance, her willingness to let Broker and Kit follow in the wake of her career like baggage…

  Shit.

  She had always been an unusually gifted tactician. So she knew exactly what she had to do. Just hit the fast-forward button. Accept her life in real time. The way it was now.

  Uh-uh. Can’t deal with that yet.

  So she hit rewind. Then she hit play and watched that last moment: Nina, always getting the jump, ahead of the situation, a kinesthetic fucking intellectual calling the play, going for her gun. There was still that split second before her hand came up empty.

  When she was still somebody…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Broker awoke, alert and rested after seven hours on the couch. He reached into the back of the couch cushions, retrieved the shotgun, and unloaded it. He listening carefully for Nina, who was in the kitchen and had been since 4:00 P.M., after a few fitful hours of sleep. He quickly raised the wall quilt, opened the locker with the key around his neck, and replaced the gun and shells. Locked it up and lowered the quilt.

  Then he took a quick shower and checked himself in the bathroom as he shaved. Last night’s events still glowed in his eyes. Calling for revenge.

  But you won’t do anything dumb. You’ll call Harry, talk it through. Not go rip Klumpe’s fat throat out. Agreed? Agreed.

  Okay. Because of the readmission conference, he woke Kit at eight, an hour later than usual for a school morning, bringing her a short glass of orange juice and a Sesame Street multivitamin, which he placed on the shelf next to her bed. Then he raised the blinds on her small room’s one window. No help there, just gray overcast. Nina would have another bad day. He turned back to the bed, grabbed Kit’s toes under the covers, and wiggled them.

  “C’mon, get up. Daylight in the swamp.”

  Kit emerged from a tangle of covers and quilts, stretched, flexed her hand, and studied the stiff scab forming on her skinned knuckles. After she drank the glass of juice Broker held out to her and took her vitamin, she stared straight ahead, blinking the sleep from her eyes. Aware that Broker was watching her especially closely this morning, she said in a stoic voice: “You didn’t find Bunny, did you?”

  “Not yet.” He pictured the toy standing lonely vigil out on the ski trail.

  “Did Ditech come home?”

  Broker shook his head.

  Kit wrinkled her forehead. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She got in the woods, and some critter ate her.”

  “We don’t know that, not for sure,” Broker said. The bunny and the cat. Sounded like a kid’s book. Maybe the first real lies he’d ever told his daughter. Two small utilitarian lies.

  Kit studied her father. “Where do we go when we die?”

  Broker came back glib. “Us, or cats?”

  “I mean, when I die, will I get to see Ditech again?”

  Blindsided by eight-year-old early-morning judo, Broker gestured vaguely, slow on the uptake. Too slow.

  Kit spoke first. “Dooley says, if you believe in God and you’re saved, you go to heaven, and it’s a perfect place where you have the best times of your life all at once. How come he knows that, and you don’t?”

  Broker proceeded gently in this terrain. “Dooley doesn’t know that, honey; he believes that.”

  Kit scooted closer under the covers. “Uh-uh. Dooley is sure. You don’t know because you don’t believe.”

  “Well, I believe things that I can prove,” Broker said carefully.

  “Like?”

  Broker looked around, saw a smooth, slightly oblong Lake Superior cobblestone on the dresser. The size of a goose egg. His mother, Irene, had painted it red with white dots and a green sprig, like a strawberry. He reached over, picked it up, and told Kit, “Like…hold out your hand.”

  Kit raised her palm. Broker placed the stone in her hand.

  “Now toss it up. Not too high. Just up.”

  She flipped it up. It rose about a foot and a half and fell back to the comforter.

  “Again,” Broker said. “Do it four more times.”

  The stone went up and down five times. Kit picked it up and looked at it. “So?”

  “There are physical laws. Everything in the world obeys them. What goes up comes down.”

  “So?”

  Broker tried to say it a different way. “Well, some people, maybe like Dooley, have faith that the stone will keep going up someday. That it won’t come down.”

  “Maybe you got to throw it harder,” Kit said.

  “No, it’s always going to fall back to earth.”

  Kit knit her brow, plucked up the stone, and deposited it in Broker’s hand. “Maybe God isn’t a rock. What if God’s a bird? A bird won’t come down when you throw it in the air.”

  Before he could respond, Kit let him off the hook by vaulting off the bed and asked, “What’s for breakfast?”

  Broker blinked several times, not sure he entirely followed what had just happened. “Oatmeal. Now hubba-hubba. You get dressed, and don’t forget to comb your hair.”

  Broker went down the stairs and into the kitchen, which since 4:00 P.M. had been an insomniac zone of nicotine, coffee, and the War in the Box. “Tanks from the 3rd ID have been pushing up this road all night taking small-arms fire…” Nina stood by the stove making an attempt to blow her cigarette smoke up into the powerful vent fan, watching the drag race to Baghdad.

  Broker cleared the debris from her night watch off the counter, scrapped the remains of a sandwich into the garbage—good, at least she was eating.

  Her sleep patterns were erratic. Sunny days she had a limited amount of energy and did her exercises. Cloudy days she was a zombie, slept in the afternoon, and walked the kitchen all night, watching cable TV.

  He adjusted to her pattern. If she was in the bedroom, he slept on the couch. If she took the couch, he took the bed upstairs. Nights she slept with Kit, he had a choice. Sleeping in the same bed just did not work.

  He stacked the plates and glasses and cups in the sink, wiped down the counter, and launched into his routine. Nina moved off as he measured Quaker Oats and milk into a pan and set them on the stove. From the corner of his eye, he checked her fast.

  She stared at the dishes stacked in the sink like they were ancient ruins; not quite sure where to start deciphering the puzzle of their archaeology. She’d lost the ground she’d gained last night “Broker, I…” The thought lost its trajectory and burned up midway across the space between them. Efficiently, not losing a beat, he put two slices of bread in the toaster. He turned to Nina and asked, “Bad night?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.” Her eyes darted out the windows and fixed on the overcast sky with a look of palpable dread.

  He nodded and said nothing as she walked past him, left the kitchen, and went up the stairs. She’d take a shower, try to sleep.

  “One eight hundred sandals…” Fast glance at the TV. The tanks had disappeared. A happy couple in bathing suits sprinted joyfully into an emerald surf. Broker took a jar of peanut butter and a plastic honey container from the cupboard. “At Sandals we can please all of the people all of the time…”

  He checked the oatmeal, stirred it a few times, then walked to the front of the house and shouted up the stairs, “Five minutes.” Then he returned to the kitchen, selected a pear from a bowl on the island, washed it, and sliced it. The toast popped. He checked the oats, turned off the burner, took a wooden tray from the top of the refrigerator, put a bowl on it, shoveled in the oats, sprinkled cinnamon, brown sugar, a pat of butter. Grabbed the remote, turned off the damn televison.

  Okay.

  Peanut butter and honey on the toast. Milk. He assembled the breakfast on the tray and took it to the living room just as Kit came down the stairs, pulling a comb through the snags in her hair. Best for her to take it in here, away from the lingering cigarette smoke. Broker left Kit with the tray, spooning oatmeal with one hand, pulling the comb through her hair
with the other.

  “I thought we’re going to school late because of the meeting with the principal,” Kit said.

  “We are, but I gotta drop off the flat tire at the garage.”

  He stepped into his boots, pulled on a coat, went outside, started the Tundra, cranked up the heater, left it idling. As he walked back to the house, he stopped and scanned the misty gray tree line. The black trunks hanging like roots from the gray fog reminded him of what his dad, a veteran of the Bulge, called Hitler weather.

  Then he caught the brown mass of the garbage truck parked up the road, just sitting there in its own cloud of exhaust. To get a better look, he walked down the drive.

  The truck started up, then slowed and stopped in a squeal of brakes next to the garbage bin he’d wheeled down to the road last night. A hydraulic whine. The jointed mechanical arm with the pincer arched over the top of the truck descended and fastened on the bin. Then halfway up, the rack jerked and shook the bin sideways, and the cover swung open.

  “Hey!” Broker yelled, breaking into a jog as a week’s garbage spewed out along the snow-covered ditch. Then the rack released the bin, and it crashed down on its side.

  Gears ground as the truck accelerated, but not fast enough to deny Broker a clear glimpse of Jimmy Klumpe’s profile, eyes fixed straight ahead, in the foggy windows as the truck pulled away.

  Penny-ante bullshit. This time Broker coldly controlled his anger and spent the next couple minutes swearing under his breath as he collected the soggy garbage barehanded and shoved it back in the bin. Then he walked up the drive, got in the truck, drove down, got out, lowered the tailgate, hoisted the heavy bin into the bed next to the flat tire. His conversation with the reasonable man in the bathroom mirror was nowhere in sight.

  Well, two can play this silly game.

  Broker stopped in town at Luchta’s Garage and told Kit not to unfasten her seat belt. Stay put. Then he got out, lifted the tire from the truck bed, and carried it in through the service door. A wiry older man in blue overalls regarded him over a short-stemmed pipe.