Betrayal

9

From Ron Nolan's perspective, there was just no benefit to staying in Iraq and talking about it.

The inquiry into the incident looked like it was going to be a tricky thing. Onofrio was the only witness left in the immediate aftermath, and Nolan believed that his testimony wouldn't be harmful. Onofrio had been busy driving and wouldn't have had a clue about whether the following car was in fact stationary when Nolan had opened fire on it. But the word from the street, the result of Jack Allstrong's reaching out to the local Iraqi and U.S. military cops, had already filtered back about what had actually happened, and there was a reasonable chance that Nolan would be arrested.

The good news was that the Abu Ghraib scandal had just surfaced, and every American remotely connected to law enforcement in Iraq had been assigned to that investigation. Even Major Charles Tucker, that pain-in-the-ass bean-counter who'd been constantly in their shit about money, found himself reassigned to that scandal.

But in spite of that, and though he knew that jurisdictional issues were problematic at best in Iraq, especially when they involved contractors accused of criminal activity such as, in this case, murder, Nolan was unwilling to risk his own arrest. You never knew what could happen then. The CPA might decide to use him as an example for other trigger-happy contractors, or give him to the Iraqi prosecutors, both nonstarters from Nolan's point of view.

In fact, Nolan didn't feel particularly bad about what he'd actually done-hey, you're in a war, shit happens. The dumbasses should've stopped sooner, or better yet, stayed off the street entirely. What the hell were they thinking? If he had it to do over again, he'd do the very same thing, rules of engagement or no. And although he did very much regret the loss of life among his own convoy, again this was just another turd in the gigantic shitpile that was this war. Who could have predicted such a massive local retaliation for such a small, localized event? And then again, how was he supposed to know that this particular Mohammed Raghead, the father who'd stupidly driven his whole family into the killing radius of Nolan's Humvee, was in fact Jahlil al-Palawi, a major tribal leader and the most influential Shiite in the Masbah neighborhood?

Anyway, clearly the intelligent thing to do was for Nolan to blow Dodge until this incident blended into the chaos of all the other ones that were happening somewhere in the country just about every day. In a few months, Nolan could always come back with Allstrong or with another security outfit and pick up where he'd left off. In the meanwhile, Jack Allstrong certainly didn't want an army of investigators coming into BIAP without his say-so. Who knows what they'd see that they didn't like, and report back to the CPA?

So within a week of the incident, Nolan was back in Redwood City. After negotiations with Jack Allstrong that consisted of a couple of glasses of Glenfiddich each, the company chose to construe his departure as caused by an act of God, which meant it would honor his contract for a six-month hitch at full pay. And with some of this apparently inexhaustible supply of money, Nolan put a down payment on a modern and elegant furnished townhouse near the sylvan border between Redwood City and Woodside. Still employed by Allstrong, he was the company's chief Bay Area recruiter of ex-military personnel. He knew the kind of people Jack Allstrong needed over in Iraq and he generally knew where to find them.

Tara Wheatley was surprised to see Nolan back so soon. She'd spent the weeks he was gone coming to grips with her nagging sense of guilt. Which was, she told herself, ridiculous. She was an adult who could make her own decisions, and she and Evan had been broken up for months. She hadn't betrayed anybody. She was moving on in her life. She'd finally gotten around to reading the last four of Evan's letters, but after the night when she had invited Nolan back to her apartment, she couldn't make herself get around to writing back to him.

What was she supposed to say?

Oh, and under local news I slept with your friend Ron who came to give me your letter. I didn't really mean to, but I was confused and lonely, really lonely, and scared to be alone, he'd just more or less saved my life that particular night and I never thought you and I would ever work out our problems anyway. It was just time to act on us being finally apart, okay? We weren't together anymore and weren't going to be together, so I could sleep with another man if I wanted and you had no say over it. Okay, okay, there could have been some element where I was punishing you for going off the way you did-if you can leave me, then this is exactly what you're risking. And now-you see, you dummy?-it's happened.

No. She wasn't going to write that letter, not now, not ever.

And Evan, of course, never wrote to her again either.

Ron Nolan was a strong, powerful, attractive older guy and if her life wasn't going to work out with Evan, and it clearly wasn't, then with his charm, experience, confidence, and-admit it-money, Nolan would at the very least be able to help her get over her first love. She could use a simple, uncomplicated relationship until the next real one came along.

As if there'd ever be another one as real as Evan.

Nolan never saw the need to tell her about the ambush at Masbah, what had happened to Evan, or the role that Nolan himself had played in it all. As far as Tara knew, Nolan had voluntarily made the decision to come home, possibly even as a result of some of their discussions about the morality of the war. Explaining it to her, he had kept it all, as his old English teacher used to say, vague enough to be true.

And in fact, all Nolan knew about Evan Scholler was that he'd sustained a serious head wound from the last grenade they had taken and, by the time Nolan had flown out of Baghdad, still hadn't been expected to live. He might in fact already have died, although Nolan suspected that if that had happened, Tara would have heard about it from somebody.

But whatever had happened to Evan, nearly three months had passed. Tara had moved on. For Ron Nolan, there just didn't seem to be any benefit to talking any more about it.

She was standing in front of the artichokes in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store, two days after the start of her school's Christmas vacation. The canned music coming in to keep everybody merry and bright had just changed from the ridiculous to the sublime-the Chipmunks' version of "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" segueing rather inharmoniously into Aaron Neville singing "O Holy Night." The latter had been her and Evan's favorite recording of any Christmas song, and suddenly, hearing the first notes, Tara 's mind had gone blank. Looking down at the bins of produce arrayed in front of her, she suddenly had no idea why she was here, or what she wanted to buy.

Unconsciously, her hand came up to cover her mouth, and she sighed deeply through her fingers, her eyes welling beyond all reason. "God," she whispered to herself.

" Tara? Is that you?"

Letting out another breath, she started out of her reverie. "Eileen?"

Evan's mother was still quite attractive, and Tara had always thought it was not so much about her trim body or her pleasant, vaguely Nordic facial features, but because she exuded kindness. In Eileen Scholler's world, everybody was equal and everybody was good, even if the rest of humanity didn't think so, and she was going to like you and treat you fairly and gently no matter what. Now, her head cocked birdlike to one side, she frowned with concern. "Are you all right? You look like you're about to faint."

"That's what I feel like." Tara tried to put on a smile but knew it must look forced. "Wow. I don't know what just happened." Bracing herself against her shopping cart, she again forced an unfelt brightness. "Stress, I'm sure. The season. But how are you? You don't shop here normally, do you? But it's so good to see you."

"I was on my way home from work and remembered I needed some veggies. But I'm glad I stopped here now. It's so good to see you too." Her expression grew wistful. "We've missed you, you know."

Tara nodded, sober. "I've missed you too. I really have."

"Yes, well, I don't think you children realize what you put us poor parents through when you break up with each other. Here we were, considering you all but the daughter we never had, and the next thing you know, you're not in our lives anymore. It's the saddest thing."

"I know," Tara said. "I'm so sorry. I never meant that to be part of it."

"I know, dear, it's nobody's fault. It's just one of life's little heartbreaks. Or as Jim says, it's just another FOG." Lowering her voice, she came closer. "Fucking opportunity for growth. Pardon my French."

"It's pardoned. How is Evan, by the way?"

"Well, we still worry, of course, but he seems all right. There are still some issues, but we're going out to see him for Christmas, so we'll have a better idea how he's doing after that."

"You're going to see him for Christmas?"

"Yes. We're flying over next week."

"To Iraq?"

For an instant, Eileen Scholler went completely still. "No, dear." Her eyes narrowed-was Tara kidding her?-although the kindness remained in them. "To Walter Reed."

"Walter…"

"You didn't hear? I was sure you must have heard. In fact, I was a little bit annoyed, to be honest, that you never called us. If I'd have known you didn't know, I would have-"

Tara waved her off. "That doesn't matter, Eileen. Heard what? Did something happen to Evan over there?"

"He was wounded," she said, "this past summer. Badly, in the head. He was nearly killed."

"Oh, my God." Suddenly her legs felt as though they weren't going to support her. She tightened her grip on the shopping cart, looked plaintively at Eileen. "What happened?"

"They got attacked someplace in Baghdad. Most of his squadron was killed. They were all from the Peninsula. It was everywhere in the papers and on the news. Didn't you see anything about it?"

"I stopped reading all of those articles, Eileen, and watching the news on TV. It says Iraq and I tune out. I just can't stand it. I figured if anything happened to Evan, I'd hear about it. I couldn't face the news every day."

"Well, fortunately, he wasn't killed, and that's all they seem to report. It's like the wounded don't count. So you might never have seen his name anyway. But his squad…those poor boys."

"All of them died?"

"All but one, I believe. Two, counting Evan."

"Oh, God, Eileen, I am so sorry. How is he now?"

"Getting better every day. He's making more sense when he talks on the phone. The doctors won't say for sure, of course, but his lead neurologist predicts that Evan might be one of the very, very few to recover almost completely. Though it's probably going to be a while."

"He's what, doing therapy?"

"Every day. Physical and mental. But as I say, he's really coming along now. For a few weeks there, after he first arrived, we didn't even dare hope for that, so this is all really good news. Once they decided he was eligible for therapy, it's been better."

"Why wouldn't he have been eligible?"

Eileen pursed her lips. "There was some question about whether he'd had something to drink before he went out on his last convoy. Nobody said he was drunk, but…anyway, they had to clear that up first. If he was in fact under the influence, he might not have been eligible for benefits."

"Even though he was shot?"

Eileen took a calming breath. "He wasn't shot, Tara. It was a grenade."

That news stopped her briefly. "Okay, but even so, they weren't going to treat him?"

"If he'd been drunk, maybe not. Or not right away, anyway. And we've learned time is everything with his kind of injuries, believe me."

But Tara was still reeling from the revelation. "I can't believe they really might not have treated him. How could he not be eligible for benefits if he got wounded in a war zone?"

"It's one of the great mysteries, dear, but don't get me started on how they're treating some of those other poor wounded boys at Walter Reed. It's atrocious. But-you'll really love this-even after they ruled that he was eligible for benefits, the Army made it one of the conditions of Evan's treatment that he wouldn't complain about conditions at Walter Reed to the media or anybody else." She laid a hand on Tara 's arm, forced a tepid smile. "So the thing to do now is be grateful that they're finally helping him, and we are."

"You are a way better person than I'd be, Eileen."

"I don't know about that. It's the only way I know how to be. Of course it's frustrating and terrible, but at least Evan's getting better now. I don't see how making a stink at this point would do anybody any good."

Closing her eyes, Tara blew out her frustration. She didn't believe Eileen was right-she thought that making a stink might in fact help things improve. But suddenly the country's culture seemed to have shifted to where everybody was afraid to make a stink about anything-it meant they weren't patriotic. It meant they supported the terrorists. And this whole mentality was, to her mind, just stupid.

But she wasn't going to get in yet another argument about this ongoing and disastrous war-not with Eileen, not with Ron Nolan, not with anybody else. At least it appeared that, bad though it might have been, the worst medical part of Evan's ordeal was over. "So he's been there how long now?" she asked.

"About three months. We hope he'll be coming home in a couple more, but we're afraid to move him too quickly. At least he's got quality care now, and we don't want to rush his recovery. When he comes back, we want him all the way back, you know?" Eileen's serene gaze settled on her might-have-been daughter-in-law. "And how about you, Tara? How have you been?"

"Mostly good, I think."

"Mostly good, you think? That's not the most enthusiastic response I've ever heard."

"No. I guess not. I'm just…kind of at a loss somehow. I don't really feel whole in some way. It's like I'm waiting for something, but I'm not sure what it is, or even if I'll recognize it when it comes along. Does that make any sense?"

"More than you think. Are you seeing anybody?"

"More or less. I'm a little conflicted about him too. In fact…" She stopped.

Eileen's head fell off angling to one side in her trademark gesture. "Yes?"

Tara sighed. This close to Eileen's physical presence, now, she almost imagined she could feel emanations of her son in the air around them. And it affected her still, this sense of some deep-rooted connection between them that she'd never approached with anyone else. Certainly not with Ron Nolan.

So why, then, was she still seeing Ron? Was it only because she'd given up on Evan after he'd clearly stopped caring about her? Or was there something simply easier about Ron? Love didn't have to be all-encompassing and overpowering, did it? True, deep, abiding love was a fairy tale, a myth. She'd found that out the hard way. Now she'd moved on into an adult, reality-based relationship that could never hurt her the way she'd been hurt with Evan. And that was smart. She was in a better place, all in all. She had to believe that.

Besides, Evan would never take her back now. Not after what she'd done. She knew that, and she didn't blame him.

" Tara?" Eileen stepped closer to her. "What?"

She tried to smile, mostly failing in the effort. "Nothing really. Just what I said, being conflicted about this guy."

"Well, if you'll take some advice from an old woman who loves you, don't do anything irrevocable unless you're sure."

"Oh, don't worry. I'm a long way from either of those-irrevocable, or sure. I keep thinking it's the Christmas season, those old high expectations that don't seem to pan out." She swallowed against a surge of emotion that suddenly had come upon her. "Maybe Evan and I shouldn't have had such good times with you and the family back in the day. I keep waiting for it to feel that way again at Christmastime."

"It still can, you know."

"Well, maybe. I can keep hoping, at least." Putting on a smile now, Tara reached for some vegetables. "Anyway, I don't mean to sound so negative. Next to what you're going through, my life's great."

"Ours is, too, dear," Eileen said. "Evan's alive and we pray he'll be fine someday. It's been a bit of a challenge, but the worst is definitely behind us. Having gotten through the worst of it, I don't know if we could be happier."

"Well, that's the best news I could hear. You deserve it."

"Everybody deserves happiness, dear."

"Good people deserve it more."

"I don't know about that." Eileen laid a hand on Tara 's arm. "But either way, you do. You're a good person."

"Not as good as you think." Not even close, she thought. She could not shake the feeling that somehow she had cheated on Evan, even though they'd broken up, even though they weren't a couple any longer, even though she hadn't written him one letter since he'd gone overseas. "I shouldn't have been so pigheaded with Evan," she said. "I should have written him and…"

"Hey, hey, hey." Eileen moved up closer to her. "You two had a disagreement. You did what you thought was right and so did he. That's not either of you being a bad person. You're both good people." She rubbed Tara 's arm reassuringly. "Maybe you could write him now, just a friendly little note. I'm sure he'd like to hear from you."

"No, I couldn't do that. Besides, it's too late for that now. He's better off without me."

"Don't you think he should be the judge of that? Maybe I'll just tell him I saw you and you said to tell him hello. I know he'd be glad to hear that. Would that be too much?"

"I don't know, Eileen. It might be."

"If he wrote you, do you think you could write back?"

Tara 's head tracked a pathetic little arc. She bit at her lip. "I don't even know if I could promise that." She put her own hand over the other woman's. "We tried, Eileen, we really did. But now it's just"-she shrugged-"it's just behind us."

Eileen, ever serene, nodded. "And that's all right too. If you change your mind and want to see him when he gets back, you've got our numbers still, I'm sure. Or even if you'd like to drop by and see us before that, you're welcome anytime. You know that, I hope."

"I know that. Thank you." She leaned over and planted a kiss on Eileen's cheek. "You're great. I love you."

Eileen held herself against Tara for a moment, then pulled away. "I love you, too, girl, and you're also pretty great. Us pretty greats have to stick together. And try not to be so hard on ourselves."

"I'll try," she said. Tara 's vision had suddenly misted over. "I'll really try."

"I know you will. It was wonderful seeing you, dear. Be happy." With a quick last little kiss on the cheek and a smile, Eileen pushed her shopping cart by behind Tara, turned the corner at the end of the aisle, and was gone.

Nolan arrived at Tara 's place within twenty minutes of getting her call. Now Tara sat in her big chair, drinking her second glass of wine. It was nearly dark inside, the only light in the living room coming from the kitchen. With his own drink of scotch in hand, Nolan sat with his elbows on his knees, way forward on the couch, intent. "You've got to be kidding me. It must have happened within a week or two after I left."

"You didn't know anything about it?"

"Nothing. Why would I know anything about it?"

"Don't get defensive, Ron. You were there, that's why."

"I'm sorry, but no. It must have been after I left. Evan was trying to get himself and his guys transferred out of the airport and back to their regular unit the last couple of weeks I was there. It sounds like that's what must have happened. If they were still with us, Jack Allstrong would have mentioned it to me, I'm sure." Pushing himself back into the cushions, he sat back and crossed his legs. "His mom says he's at Walter Reed now?"

"For the last few months."

"Jesus," he said, "that's unbelievable." But if Nolan's pose was relaxed, he felt far from it-his assumption had all along been that Evan was dead, or at least permanently rendered mentally incompetent. After the RPG hit at Masbah, Onofrio had insisted that they pile Evan into the Humvee. Nolan had field-assessed the damage to Evan's head, and it didn't look like the kind of wound from which people recovered, so he'd let himself be persuaded.

Now Nolan drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch. "But his mother said they expect him to get better?"

"Completely, though maybe not soon."

"Well, that's good news, at least. And she told you all of the other troops were killed?"

"All but one, that's what Eileen said. And then Evan."

Nolan raked his palm down the side of his face. "God, those guys. They were good kids. I can't believe…I mean, they shouldn't have even been there. They should have been fixing big trucks." He looked across at her, so lovely and vulnerable in the dim December night. Her tears had begun again and now glistened on her cheeks. "How are you doing with this, T? You want to go see him?"

"No!" The word came out in a rush. Then, more reflectively, she said, "I don't know what good that would do. I just didn't really expect anything like this, that's all. Maybe I should have, you know, but it just…when it's someone you know, who you loved…" She let out a weary sigh. "I don't know what to do with it. I want him to be okay, but Eileen asked me if I wanted to get back in touch with him, and I couldn't say I did. Although sometimes I think…"

"What?"

"No, it just would sound bad. For us, I mean."

"I can take it."

"I know that, Ron. You can take anything. But maybe sometimes a person doesn't need to say everything. You've just got to get through stuff."

He sipped his drink. "Sometimes you think you would want to go see him, or talk to him, if it wasn't for us. Is that it? Because if it is, I won't stand in your way. I really won't, T." He came forward. "But let me ask you this: Were you thinking a lot about him before you ran into his mother and found out he'd been hurt?"

"Not a lot, no. Sometimes."

"So maybe-just a thought here-maybe it's guilt. Maybe on some level you feel like you need his permission."

"To do what?"

"Move on. Have a life of your own."

She sat on the edge of her big chair, biting her lip, holding her forgotten wineglass in both hands between her knees. Eventually, slowly, she began to shake her head. "No," she said. "I don't think that's it."

"Okay," Nolan said. "I've been wrong before. Twice, I think." A quick smile, trying to break the tension. It didn't work. "What's your theory?"

"It's not a theory so much as it's a change in the facts I was living with. I thought he stopped writing to me because he'd stopped…loving me."

"Maybe he stopped writing to you because you didn't write back."

"Okay, maybe some of that too. But that wasn't really him, I don't think. He's a stubborn guy. I mean, he wrote me ten letters and I didn't answer any of them, so why would he stop at number ten? I think he would have kept on until I told him to stop. Except he got shot and he couldn't."

"So he's still carrying a torch for you?"

"He might be."

"And that would make a difference?"

She blew out the breath she was holding. "I'd gotten comfortable thinking it was over, that's all. Mutually over. Thinking he was okay with it. It made it easier for me."

"With me, you mean?"

She nodded. "Which is really why I didn't write back to him. You know that."

"Yes, I do." He sat back, let out his own long breath, and took a drink. "Do you regret that? Us?"

Tara 's head kept moving slowly from side to side. "I don't know, Ron. I just don't know. You're a good guy and we've had a lot of good times…"

"But?"

She raised her eyes and looked at him, her lovely face drawn with indecision and regret. "But I think I might need some time to sort this out a little." Her eyes widened. "God, I don't even know where those words came from. I'm not saying I want to stop seeing you. I don't know what I'm saying."

Nolan pushed the ice around in his glass with his index finger. Sitting back now, an ankle on its opposite knee, he let the silence hang for a few beats. "Here's the deal," he said at last. "You take all the time you need, do everything you think you need to do. The downside is I might not be around anymore if the deciding goes on too long. That's just reality. I don't want to lose you, but I don't want half of you either. Just so it's clear where I stand."

"It's always clear where you stand. That's one of the great things about you."

He leveled his gaze at her. "You're going to call him?"

"I don't know. I shouldn't, at least not right now. His mother made it sound like he still wasn't all the way back to normal. I don't want to hear him or see him and start to feel sorry for him. That wouldn't be good."

"No, it wouldn't. It's easy to confuse pity and love, but it's bad luck."

"But I've still got to figure out where to put him. For my own peace of mind. And to be fair to us."

"I get it," Nolan said. "Truly." He drained his drink and got to his feet. "But as I say, T, don't be too long. I want for you what makes you happy, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope that that was me."

"It might be, Ron, but I'm just all confused by this right now. Please don't hate me."

"I couldn't hate you, T. You get this settled, maybe we can start over."

"That'd be good."

"I hope it would." He offered her a cold smile. "Well, listen. You've got all my numbers. I'll wait for you to call." Nodding, he placed his empty glass carefully on the coffee table, crossed over to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the night.

10

Evan Scholler was the enemy. Sometimes it was a split-second evaluation, and sometimes a long-considered one, but once you made the decision that an enemy had to be eliminated, it came down to tactics-how to do it. And in this case, there was no more time to be lost. Tara remained undecided about getting in touch with Evan, but that could change in the blink of an eye. For all of Tara 's apparent reluctance, at some point she'd need to see or talk to him. And any contact between the two of them would be a disaster.

Nolan had lied to Evan about what Tara had done with his letter; he'd lied to her about the incident in Masbah and many other things. Those lies and all the other ones would come out and he'd lose her.

He couldn't let that happen.

So Evan was the enemy.

Nolan left Tara's, went home and packed a bag with a heavy jacket in it, and made it to the Oakland Airport by ten o'clock. In the mobbed waiting room at the JetBlue terminal, he found a likely looking college kid, chatted him up, and ended up giving him three thousand dollars in cash to cancel his own ticket so that Nolan could get his own last-minute ticket on the otherwise sold-out red-eye flight to Washington. He caught four hours of solid sleep on the five-hour flight.

The sky was deeply overcast, a light snow was falling, and the temperature hovered at twenty-six degrees at ten twenty-five when he arrived by cab from National Airport at the main entrance to the enormous complex that was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The place brought him up a little short. Though he had some general understanding of the numbers of injured service personnel being treated at the center, he had more or less assumed that the place was in essence just a big hospital-a building with a bunch of patients and doctors.

It was more like its own city. The main reception area throbbed with humanity. It reminded him in some ways of the main hall of Baghdad's Republican Palace. By the information board, he checked out a rendering of the facility and saw that there were nearly six thousand rooms-he figured probably fifteen to twenty thousand beds-spread out on twenty-eight acres of floor space.

Turning back to the mob, he scanned the cavernous lobby, hoping to get his bearings somehow. A large information booth commanded a good portion of the reception area's counter space, but Nolan was here to neutralize one of the hospital's patients. It wouldn't be a good idea to call any attention to himself. Returning to the rendering, he found a building labeled Neurology and decided to start there. Grabbing the map from its slot, he started out across the huge campus.

The snow had begun to dump more heavily by the time he reached his destination, and he stopped inside the door to shake out his jacket and stamp his feet. The lobby here wasn't nearly as crowded as the main reception lobby, but it still was far from deserted.

He was surprised to see four gurneys lined up against one of the walls, each of them featuring hanging drips and holding a draped body. The line for surgery? For a room? He didn't know and wasn't going to ask, but it struck him as out of place and terribly wrong. These guys had no doubt been wounded in the line of duty-the least the Army could do, he thought, was get them some rooms.

But he wasn't here to critique conditions at Walter Reed. The Army he knew was so fucked up in so many ways that he'd given up thinking about it. Besides that, he had been running on a mixture of adrenaline and low-level rage ever since he'd left Tara 's apartment last night, and now, suddenly, the logistics of carrying out this particular mission demanded his complete attention.

As the tide of humanity continued to flow past him in both directions, Nolan experienced a rare moment of indecision: Why did he assume that Evan Scholler would be here anyway? The front door of the building identified it as the Neurology Surgery Center, but Evan's surgery had possibly been months before, and he was now probably somewhere among these fifteen thousand beds, recovering or in rehab.

How did Nolan propose to find Evan without asking directions, and without calling attention to himself? And then, once found, how did he propose to kill him, especially if-as seemed likely if overflow gurneys here in Neurology were any indication-he was in a room with other patients?

Of course, he could eliminate them all. Collateral damage was inevitably part of the equation in any military strike. But this wasn't Iraq, where he could simply disappear without a trace. Here, potential witnesses would have to inform him of Evan's location. Staff members or nurses might be mandated to accompany him if he visited any of the patients.

Beyond that, and perhaps most significantly, Nolan had to consider that Lieutenant Evan Scholler wasn't some raghead nobody shop owner in Baghdad. If he were the victim of a murder here at Walter Reed, every aspect of Evan's life would come under the microscope, including the incident in Masbah, the scrutiny for which Nolan had thus far managed to evade. The authorities would find a reason to talk to Tara, and that would eventually, inevitably, lead back to him.

Bottom line: it was mission impossible.

Fuck that, Nolan thought. The guy is going down.

"Excuse me." A young woman in a pressed khaki uniform smiled up at him. "You look a little lost. Can I help direct you somewhere?"

Nolan's face relaxed into a smile. "I'm afraid I'm having some trouble finding a friend of mine, one of your patients."

"You're not the first person that's happened to," she said. "I've got a directory over at the reception desk that is marginally up to date, if you'd like to come follow me."

He started walking next to her. "Only marginally up to date?"

Rueful, she nodded. "I know, but we're so slammed lately, sometimes it takes the computer a while to catch up."

"That darned computer," Nolan said.

"I know. But we're trying. The good news is if he's not where the computer says he is, at least there they'll probably know where he went."

"That would be good news."

"You're being sarcastic," she said, "and I don't really blame you. But believe me, good news around here is scarce enough. You take it where you can get it." They arrived at the reception desk. "Now, your friend," she said. "What's his name?"

"Smith," Nolan said. "First initial J. We called him 'J' but he might have been Jim or John. I know," he added, with a what-can-you-do look, "it's a guy thing."

Evan Scholler stared out at the falling snow.

He had either been asleep or didn't remember when it happened, but somebody had tacked up some Christmas decorations on the wall. There was a tree and those animals that flew and pulled Santa's sled-he couldn't remember what they were called, but he was sure the name would come to him someday. Then there was Frosty the Snowman-he remembered Frosty and even the song about him, sung by that guy with the big nose. They'd also hung up by the door one of those round things made out of evergreen branches and ornaments.

It was making him crazy. He knew what objects were. He just often couldn't remember what they were called.

What he did recognize as a real memory was that he was in his third room since he'd arrived at Walter Reed. His first stop for about ten days had been the Intensive Care Unit, where he'd mostly been unconscious, and about which he had little recollection except that while he was there, he was unwilling to believe that he wasn't still in Baghdad. It didn't seem possible that he could have gone from squatting next to his Humvee in Masbah directly to the ICU here.

Of course, that wasn't what had happened. His speech and language therapist, Stephan Ray, had made his physical and mental journey a kind of a recognition game that he'd memorized as part of his therapy. His first stop after Masbah had been to a combat support hospital in Balad, which was where they took out a piece of his skull. The operation, which gave his brain room to swell, was called a craniectomy-remembering that word had been one of Evan's first major successes in therapy. When he'd gotten it right, repeating it back to Stephan the day after he'd learned it, Stephan had punched his fist in the air and predicted that he was going to recover.

What the doctors did next, still in Balad, was pretty cool. They'd taken the piece of his skull that they'd cut out and put it into a kind of a pouch they cut into his abdomen. He could still feel it in there, a little bigger than the size of a silver dollar-they were going to put it back where it belonged in his head in the next month or so, when his brain had healed sufficiently.

From Balad, they'd evidently flown him to Landstuhl in Germany, where after a quick evaluation they decided to get him here to Walter Reed.

His second room here was in Ward 58, the Neuroscience Unit. His mom and dad told him that for his first days there, the doctors more or less left him alone while the Army decided if he was eligible for benefits. He didn't understand that-eventually they had worked it out-but nevertheless he had nothing but good memories of the ward because this is where he had met Stephan. Though Evan hadn't had a clear sense of where he was or what had happened to him, in fact his therapist was there to explain things and pull him through some of the tougher, disorienting times.

Basically, what they did in those first days was play games, do flash cards and puzzles and simple math exercises. Neither Stephan nor his doctors seemed to understand exactly why, but Evan's progress was surprisingly rapid, far better than that of most of the other soldiers who were in here for head wounds. After only about a week in the ward, they moved him again to the room he currently occupied, on the fourth floor above the Pediatric ICU.

There were nineteen J. Smiths at Walter Reed, but only one with traumatic brain injury similar to Evan's. The nice nurse/receptionist at Neurological Surgery checked her monitor at the desk and told Nolan that his friend was listed as being in Ward 58, the post-op Neuroscience Unit, but that if he was still under observation there-it was only one step removed from the ICU-she didn't think he would be allowed to see visitors.

"That can't be right," Nolan said. "I know his mom and dad have already been in to see him." He gave her a warm smile. "Why do I sense computer issues again?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "I told you it might take a little patience."

He kept smiling, relaxed. "Patience is my middle name. Is there someplace they send brain injury patients when they're starting to get a little better, after this Ward Fifty-eight?"

She screwed her lips in frustration. "I don't really know. But wait." Picking up the telephone, she leaned down to read something from the computer monitor, then punched in some numbers. "Hi. This is Iris Simms at Neurosurgery reception. I've got a guest here to visit one of your patients, Jarrod Smith, and the computer's still got him in your unit, and the guest doesn't think he could still be there. In which case, where would he be?"

She covered the phone and conveyed the message to Nolan. "There's a lot of overflow, but they're saying maybe you could check the upper floors of the Pediatric ICU building, but wait…"

She raised a finger, went back to listening. "He is? Oh, I see. But I understand his parents were able to see him." She waited for the reply. "Okay, thank you. I'll let him know."

Hanging up, shaking her head in continued frustration, she came back to Nolan. "I'm afraid Jarrod is still in Ward Fifty-eight, but they say he's still pretty incoherent. And they don't allow nonfamily guests in that unit. I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about," Nolan said. "You gave it a good try. I'll call first before I come next time. Thanks for all your help."

"No problem," she said, "anytime."

Evan might be recovering faster than most, but to him it was still agonizingly slow going. This morning, he'd tried to get once through all of his flash cards-he had six hundred of them now in a shoe box next to his bed-but by about number two hundred his head felt as though it was going to explode, so he'd closed his eyes just for a minute.

And opened them more than two hours later. All of his three roommates were gone, out with their rehab or other therapies. Outside, the snow was falling in heavy clumps, which he found depressing-so depressing, in fact, along with his failure to succeed earlier with his flash cards, that for a moment he succumbed to the blind hopelessness of his situation here. He was never going to recover, in spite of what they said. He'd never really be normal again. People would notice the dent in his head, even after they put his skull back together. He'd never again talk like a regular person. He'd never have another relationship like the one he had had with Tara. He wished the shrapnel had just cut a little deeper and had killed him, the way it had his troops.

So many of them gone now. So many gone. Regular guys. And he'd been leading them. To their deaths.

Sitting up in his bed, he closed his eyes against the unexpected sting of unwelcome tears. Bringing both hands to his face, he pressed hard against his eyelids, willing himself to stop. In an instant, before he was even aware of it, the self-flagellation and depression had turned, as it often did, to fury. He was goddamned if he was going to cry. But why had this happened to him? Why wouldn't they let him out of here? Why were we having this fucking stupid war anyway? Who cared if he ever learned his fucking flash cards? He turned his head, ready to slap the damn box of the things to the ground, when his eyes grazed the wall again, stopped for a second at the new decorations. Santa and…

Reindeer!

Those flying animals pulling the sled were reindeer. That was the word.

He started to laugh. At first it was just a small chuckle emanating from his throat, but it soon swelled to something completely out of his control, paroxysms that violently shook him until he could no longer catch his breath. His shoulders heaved and heaved some more as he tried to grab air into his lungs and now suddenly he was crying again, crying for real. Exhausted, his body shaking with the release of so much that he'd kept pent up, he collapsed back into his pillows, tears flowing unabated in a steady stream down his face.

Stephan was wiping his face with a warm towel. "What happened here?"

"Nothing. What do you mean?"

"I mean, your face is wet. Are you all right?"

"I got frustrated. Then the reindeer."

"Right." Stephan, perhaps more attuned to absurdist dialogue than most people, nodded as if he understood the meaning of what Evan had just said. "But you're all right now?"

"Fine."

"You're sure?"

"Sure."

"Because I've got a staff meeting in ten minutes, but I'll bail on it if you need me here. Even just to talk."

"No. I'm good. Really, Stephan. Everything's okay."

Nolan was thinking that this was why you didn't waste too much thought on what could go wrong. You just kept moving forward, you kept your goal in your sights, you pushed the niggling doubts out of your mind.

Walter Reed wasn't wallowing in chaos by any means, but clearly it was an understaffed and overburdened institution. In theory, maybe somebody was supposed to inquire whom he had come to visit, somebody should have checked his ID-he had almost hoped for that, since he had a Canadian passport in his pocket that identified him as Trevor Lennon-but no one had. Beyond those oversights, the crowding had become so serious that in many areas, and specifically on the upper floors of the Pediatric ICU building that had been pressed into service for recovering brain trauma patients, there was no video surveillance.

He was invisible.

There was no need to be impatient. The building had six stories and he'd covered floors two and three already, walking the hallways with a purposeful stride, as though he knew exactly where he was going. He stepped into each room on both floors, checking for Evan. As he walked the halls between rooms, he nodded to patients lying on their gurneys, or shuffling with their walkers; gave a brisk hello to anyone who looked like a doctor or nurse or staffer. He even had a name, Jarrod Smith, if anyone asked him who he was coming to visit, but he didn't think that was going to prove necessary.

Turning into the third door down on the fourth floor, he saw Evan in the bed across the room, over by the window. The three other beds in the room were all unoccupied. He walked into the room and closed the door behind him, checking the terrain, thinking on his feet that the best way to do it would be out the window.

Depressed brain-injured guy, left alone by a high window. An obvious suicide.

"Dude."

For some reason, Evan found himself tempted to laugh. Inappropriate laughter, Stephan called it, a normal symptom of his kind of brain injury-this time he was able to resist the impulse. "I know you," he said after a moment.

"Of course you know me. I'm Ron Nolan."

Evan nodded. "That's it. Ron. How you doin', Ron?"

"I'm good. The question is, how are you doing?"

"They tell me I'm a miracle in progress, but I don't much feel like it. What are you doing here?"

"I was in town and found out you were too. I thought I'd come by and say hi."

"What town?" Evan asked.

" Washington, D.C., or close enough. They don't tell you where you are?"

"No, they probably do." He smiled. "I don't remember everything the way I should yet."

"Well," Nolan said, "wait a second." He walked around the bed and over to the window. Looking left outside, then right, he suddenly threw up the bottom half of the double-hung window and stuck his head out. Bringing his body back in, he asked. "Can you get up out of bed?"

"Slow but steady."

"Well, check it out. Come on over here. Next time you forget where you are, look out here-you can read the Walter Reed logo out there on the-"

"What's a logo?" Evan had thrown off his covers and was sitting on the edge of the bed. "I told you," he explained, "some words-"

Nolan reached out a hand, ostensibly to stop his talking. "Hey, a picture's worth a thousand of 'em. Come here." Taking him by the wrist, he pulled him gently off the bed to a standing position, then backed away from the window to let Evan look out.

Three steps and then…

Nolan put a hand on the center of Evan's back. A slight pressure, moving him forward.

Two steps.

"What's that window doing open?" Stephan Ray yelled from the doorway. "You're going to freeze yourself and the rest of the room to death." Then, pointing at Nolan, "And who the hell is this?"

Nolan recovered without missing a beat. Pasted the smile back on as he turned. "Ron Nolan," he said. "I was with Evan over in Iraq."

"He was with me in Iraq," Evan repeated.

"Glad to hear it, but let's close that window, what do you say? And, Evan, you shouldn't be walking around too much without the walker, right?" He softened his tone, spoke to both of them. "Falling would not be a good thing right now."

"No. I hear you. My fault," Nolan said. "Sorry."

The door was still open to the hallway, and now another man came in with his therapist and the two started to get the patient arranged on his bed.

The moment had passed.

Plan B wasn't going to be nearly as satisfying, final, or effective. In fact, it might not do any kind of a job at all, but at least it would give Nolan time. And keep Evan and Tara apart. But he had to work his way into it-besides, it was about the only possibility left, with the other witnesses remaining doing their therapy on the other side of the room. And with Nolan identified for who he really was. "Your nurse seemed a little upset," he said when Stephan had left them.

"He's not a nurse. He's a…" The word therapist suddenly wasn't there. Evan searched the corners of the ceiling for an instant and couldn't find it up there either. So he regrouped, came out with, "He's a…helper. He's here to help me. And sometimes I get upset. TBI will do that to you."

"TBI?"

"Traumatic brain injury. That's what I've got. Or had. They tell me I'm getting better. I'm not sure I believe them." Evan picked up the sheet that covered him, he wiped some sweat off his brow. It was, if anything, still cold on his bed, but something about this man Nolan's presence stoked him up, made him sweat with nerves. "What are you really doing here, Ron?"

"I told you. I had some business in D.C. and thought I'd drop by and see how they're treating you."

"They're treating me fine." The snow out the window held his attention for a beat, then he came back to Nolan. "And you're not here from Baghdad?"

"No. I left about a week after you did."

"What for? Were you hurt?"

Nolan's cheek ticked. "No. Me and Onofrio, we picked you up, then made a run for it and got out clean. It was a lucky thing."

"You got me out?"

"Yeah."

"I don't remember any of that."

"No, I don't suppose you would. I didn't expect you to live. Nobody did."

"I should thank you."

Nolan shrugged. "Line of duty, dude. We couldn't have left you behind."

"What about the other guys? What happened to them?"

Nolan took a breath. "They were all killed, Evan."

"No, I know that. But what happened to them, their bodies? If we didn't get them out? Nobody will tell me anything about that."

"You don't want to know, dude. Really." He paused. "And that ought to tell you everything you need."

His jaw set, Evan looked over again at the snow, then came back to Nolan. "So why'd you leave? If you weren't hurt…?"

"Politics. They were going to offer me up, maybe to the CPA, maybe to the locals. Either way, I lose. So I'm out of there, for a while, at least. Until it blows over or all the other shit that happens every day over there covers it up."

"What do you mean, exactly? What are they accusing you of?"

"Some lying witnesses over in Masbah said I fired too soon. That the car we hit had already stopped. Which is bullshit, since it kept coming and slammed into us way after I blew out the whole front windshield. But they were going to lay it all off on me. I didn't see any point in sticking around."

The nebulous memory in Evan's gut began to coalesce around Nolan's words, the all-but-forgotten moments just preceding the attack coming back to him with a sickening urgency. It wasn't some lying witnesses in Iraq -it was people who had seen what had happened and were coming forth with the truth. And the truth was that this trigger-happy son of a bitch was responsible for everything that had happened in Masbah, for all of Evan's men's deaths, for all of his own suffering.

Nolan, oblivious to Evan's growing awareness, continued. "Anyhow, this way, I'm home for Christmas, doing business development over here for Jack Allstrong. You wouldn't believe how many soldiers like me want back in on the private side. The contractors' market is going through the roof over there and we get the pick of the litter."

Evan's blood pounded in his brain. Pinpricks of bright light danced in the periphery of his vision. The pain forced him to close his eyes, to bring his hands up to cover them.

"But you know," Nolan went on, his voice suddenly taking on a confiding familiarity, "what I'm really here for is to talk about Tara."

Evan opened his eyes. The throbbing inside his head squeezed itself down to a tiny pulsing silent ball of focus. Bringing his hands down slowly to avoid drawing attention to the internal violence of his reaction, he forced a curious expression to gather in his facial muscles. " Tara? What about her? Is she all right?"

"She's fine. She's terrific, in fact." Nolan cleared his throat. "The thing is, though, the main reason I wanted to see you in person, I thought I owed it to you…"

"What?"

"To tell you to your face that Tara and me, we're kind of an item. We're going out together. I thought the right thing would be to let you know."

Evan felt his hands tighten into fists again under the sheets, but he couldn't find a response in words right away. Until at last he said, "All right. Now I know."

"I don't blame you for being pissed off," Nolan said.

Evan's nostrils flared and his breath seemed to be coming in ragged chunks. But he said, "I'm not pissed off. It's none of my business. We were broken up."

"Yeah, sure, but I met her doing an errand for you. That's got an odor on it. You being hurt makes it worse."

"So? You want some kind of forgiveness? You're barking up the wrong tree, dude."

"I don't think so. And I don't have a guilty conscience. I just wanted you to know how it happened, so you'd know it wasn't me. I didn't start it."

"I don't care how it happened."

"No. You'd want to know. It was when I came to tell her you'd been hit."

"You did that? What for?"

"I thought I owed it to both of you." Nolan raised his right hand. "I swear to God, I went over to her place as your comrade-in-arms. I told her the whole story, that you'd been talking about her the night before the attack, that you knew she'd ripped up your last letter and were still going to try to work things out with her."

Beyond the bare truth of Tara and Ron's involvement with each other, a far more important fact leapt out at Evan, and he wanted to make sure of it. "You're saying she knew I was hit from before I even got here to Walter Reed?"

Nolan nodded. "Within a week of it anyway. All she said was that this is what she assumed was going to happen when you went over in the first place. When you actually left, she was done. That's why she never wrote. It's why she never contacted you here. It was over, dude. When she knew I was coming out here this trip, I told her I was going to come see you and at least try to explain my side of it…"

"There's nothing to explain. Who wouldn't want her? You think I blame you for that? I barely knew you for a few weeks in Iraq. You didn't owe me squat, Ron. And, okay, you got her. Good luck. I mean it. Now get out of here, would you? Get out of here."

"I'm going," Nolan said. "But there's one last thing. I asked if there was anything she wanted me to say to you. You need to hear this. You know what she said?"

"I can't imagine."

"Here's the quote: 'I'm sad he got hurt, and I hope he's okay. But I've really got nothing to say to him. He made his bed, he can lie in it.'"

It took Tara three days to work up the nerve to call Evan. Still uncertain exactly about what she was going to say, even once she'd made up her mind to call, she actually wrote some ideas down so she'd hit all the notes-she didn't know he'd been injured, she missed him. Mostly-she wrote it five separate times-she was going to say she was sorry. She was going to tell him that when she'd found out what had happened to him, she was resolved to reach out and try to connect with him again. In spite of how badly she'd treated him by not answering his letters, she hoped he could forgive her. She had been wrong, and she was sorry, sorry, sorry. Now she had to know where she stood with him before she could go on with her life anymore. In spite of their philosophical differences, they'd had something rare and special. He knew that. She was sure they'd both changed since he'd left, and possibly it could never work between them, but maybe they could at least start talking again and see where that led.

Sitting in the big chair in her living room, she listened to the ring at the other end of the line, three thousand miles away. Her mouth was dry, her heart pumping wildly. She realized that she was holding her breath and let that go with an audible sigh, reminding herself to breathe again.

"Hello."

"Hello. Evan, is that you?"

"No. This is Stephan Ray. Do you want Evan Scholler? I'm his therapist."

"Yes, please, if he's there."

"Just a second. Can I tell him who's calling?"

"Tara Wheatley."

Stephan repeated her name away from the phone and then she heard Evan's voice, unnaturally harsh and unyielding. "Tara Wheatley? I don't want to talk to any Tara Wheatley. I've got nothing to say to her."

Stephan must have covered the mouthpiece with his hand, because his next words were muffled, but even through the muffling, there was no mistaking what Evan said next. It was loud enough they probably heard it at the Pentagon. "Didn't you hear me? I said I'm not talking to Tara Wheatley. Get it? I'm not talking to her! Tell her to get out of my life and stay out! I mean it." Next she heard what sounded like a heavy object being thrown against a wall, or knocked onto the floor. And swearing, Evan insane with rage.

Or just insane from what he'd been through.

Back in Redwood City, Tara stared at the mouthpiece that she held in her shaking right hand, then slowly, as though the violence she'd heard in it might escape and hurt her further, she lowered it into its cradle.

11

Five months later, at the main Redwood City police station, Evan Scholler sat waiting in a hard chair just outside the room to which he had been summoned, the small wire-glass-enclosed cage that was the office of his boss, Lieutenant James Lochland. Evan's shift had ended twenty minutes ago, at five o'clock. The summons had been taped to his locker downstairs. Now, as he sat, he could see Lochland at his desk, moving paperwork from a pile in the center of it to one of the trays at the far right corner. When the surface of the desk was clear, the lieutenant drew a deep breath, looked through his wired glass, met Evan's eyes and, in his no-nonsense style, crooked an index finger at him, indicating he should come on in.

Lochland was a young forty and considered a good guy by most of his troops, who, as patrolmen, were by and large, like Evan, young themselves. The scars from a severe case of teenage acne marred what would have been an otherwise handsome face, so that now he came across as approachable. He wore his brown hair a little long by cop standards, and cultivated a mustache that could use a trim. Now he told Evan to shut the door behind him, to take one of the two seats that faced his desk. He had his hands clasped loosely in front of him on the pale green blotter and waited while his visitor was seated.

"What's up, sir? You wanted to see me?"

"Yeah, that's why I sent the note. I thought maybe it'd be a good idea if we had a little informal chat and maybe nip a couple of habits, or tendencies, in the bud before they get you in trouble. But before we go into any detail on those things, I wanted to ask you how you think things are going in a general way. In your life, I mean."

"Pretty good, sir, I think. But, listen, if there've been complaints-"

Lochland held up a restraining hand. "If there have, we'll get to 'em, promise. But we're not there yet. Meanwhile, what I'm really asking about is your state of mind. How you feel about being back here, in the job."

"Pretty good. I feel okay about it. I'm glad to be back."

Lochland nodded, put on a tolerant look. "You sleeping?"

Evan let out a breath, started a smile that went nowhere. "Most nights. Whenever I can."

"You need help with it?"

"What's that?"

"Getting to sleep?"

"Sometimes I'll have a drink or two, yes, sir. When I can't get my mind turned off."

"What are you thinking about?"

Evan shrugged.

"Iraq?"

He let out a long sigh, lifted his shoulders again. "I can't seem to get it out from inside me. The guys I lost. My girlfriend. The whole thing."

"You talking to somebody?"

"A shrink, you mean?"

"Anybody."

"I talked to some woman at the Palo Alto VA until my discharge came through."

"And that was just before you started here, right?"

"April nineteeth. Not that I'll have a party on that date for the rest of my life or anything. So, yeah, a couple of weeks before I started here."

"And you're not talking to anybody since then? They didn't give you any referrals for when you were done with them?"

This brought a snort. "Uh, no. I'm reading between the lines here, but you're saying you think I've still got issues."

"I'm asking, that's all. I'm asking if maybe it's a little too soon. If you feel like you're under too much stress."

"You mean post-traumatic stress?"

Lochland shrugged. "Any kind of stress. Stress you don't need if you're trying to do a good job as a cop. What I'm saying is that there are programs we've got here, and people we could recommend if you think you need it."

"I don't want to go down that road."

"What road?"

"PTSD. You get that label, you're damaged goods. The Army says I'm good. Physically and mentally I'm the miracle child. Now, if one of our own shrinks says I've got PTSD, I'm done."

"That's not exactly accurate."

Evan shook his head. "It's close enough. Post. Traumatic. Stress. Disorder. Disorder, Lieutenant. That's a mental illness. I'm not copping to that, period. That's not what I'm dealing with. I'm fine, sir. Maybe I just need to let a little more time go by." Again, Evan let a long breath escape.

"There!" Lochland said. "That's what I'm talking about."

"What?"

"You don't feel that when you do it? You're sighing like a bellows, Evan. Every time you open your mouth, it's like you're lifting this burden and dropping it on the side before you can say anything."

After a second, Evan hung his head. He came close to whispering, "That's the way I feel." Raising his eyes, he looked across the top of the desk. "So how am I screwing up? On the job, I mean."

In spite of military guidelines supposedly guaranteeing that police officers who got deployed to active duty from the reserves or the National Guard would be returned to their civilian work without demotion or loss of time served, Evan's assignment since he'd come back to work as a Redwood City patrolman was roving grammar school officer for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program. In that role, he visited classrooms of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders all over the city, spreading the doctrine of clean and sober living. Though it wasn't a technical demotion and paid what he was making when he'd been called up, it still was not a job normally held by someone with three full years on the force. But it was the only opening they'd had when he was discharged and ready to go back to work, and he had taken it.

Now Lochland reached out and took a small stack of papers from his top tray. Removing the paper clip from the top, he leafed through them quickly-there were perhaps a dozen pages-then put them all down on his desk. "I don't think we have to go over these one by one, Ev. They're pretty much the same."

Evan sat stiffly, his back pushed up tight against the chair. He had little doubt as to what the complaints had been about. "I just can't stand to see these kids who've got everything-I mean everything, Lieutenant-iPods, two-hundred-dollar shoes, designer clothes-I can't stand to see how spoiled they are. How they don't take anything seriously. I mean, this whole DARE thing, it's a joke to them. And when I think of the kids I saw over there in Iraq, with nothing, no shoes, no food, begging for MRE handouts…" He shook his head, the rave worn down by its own momentum.

Lochland sat forward, elbows on the desk, hands templed in front of his mouth. "You're not there to yell at them, Evan. You can't let yourself lose your temper."

"They don't listen, Lieutenant! They don't listen to a word I say. They've got everything going for them in the whole world and they don't give a good goddamn!"

"Still…" Lochland pushed the papers around in front of him. "The point is, school's out soon enough anyway. Anywhere you get assigned next, I solemnly promise you'll have more aggravation than these kids could give you on their best day. Serious aggravation. You can't go out there on the streets half-cocked and ready to explode. That just can't be any part of the job." He pulled himself up in his chair, lowered his voice. "Look, Evan, we're all proud as hell of you, of what you've done, of the fact that you've come back at all. You're our poster boy too. But you've got to get yourself under control. You've got to let this stuff go."

"Yes, sir. I know I do. I'm sorry."

"Sorry's a good start, but I'm thinking maybe you want to think about anger management, maybe take a class, maybe talk to somebody, some professional. I'm afraid that if I get any more complaints after this little talk, it won't be a request. And next time we'll have an HR person in here with us. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"You think you can do this?"

"Yes, sir."

"I think you can, too, Evan. But get some help. And some sleep."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I'll try."

He wasn't supposed to engage in any sports that had a physical risk or contact element for at least another year and, depending on his follow-up neurological examinations, maybe forever. This left out his favorites, softball and basketball-he'd been active at least a couple of nights every week on a city-league men's team in both sports before he'd been deployed. But the police department had a bowling league and while it wasn't much in the way of exercise, it was something to do to get out of the apartment at night and mix with some of his colleagues, even if they were generally from a somewhat different subset-heavier, slower, and older-from the softball and basketball guys.

The positive aspect of this population was that it included men who had attained seniority or rank-Evan's three teammates included two sergeant detectives and a lieutenant. All of whom were more than happy to have recruited a returning young war hero with an average of 191-they all thought the kid had a chance to seriously turn pro. He was a natural. Tonight his three-game score of 621 was fifty points better than any of them individually, and more than enough to ensure the Totems' victory over their opponents, the Waterdogs.

"So here's to the Totems," intoned robbery-division sergeant Stan Paganini, hoisting a gin and tonic in the Trinity Lanes bar after the games, "and their upcoming undefeated season."

Lieutenant Fred Spinoza raised his glass of bourbon on the rocks. "And to our own uncontested rookie of the year, Doctor Evan Scholler!" Spinoza often bestowed random honorifies, such as "Doctor," on his colleagues when he got enthusiastic or excited. "Six twenty-one! That's got to be close to the record set. I know I've never heard of a higher one. Three two-hundred games in a row! That just doesn't happen in this league. In any non-pro league."

"They ought to write you up, Ev. Get your name in the sports page." This was white-collar-division sergeant Taylor Blades, drinking a Brandy Alexander.

"Thanks anyway, guys." Evan had acquired a taste for scotch but couldn't afford any of the single malts, so he was drinking a Cutty Sark and soda on the rocks. "But I've been in the paper enough to last me for a while."

"Yeah, but not as a sports hero," Paganini said. "You get known as a sports hero, you become a babe magnet. It's a known fact."

"He's got a point," Spinoza acknowledged. "Your teammates could benefit too. We could pick off stragglers from the swarm around you. Think about that, what it could mean to us and our happiness."

"Yeah, but you guys are all married anyway," Evan said. "You'd just get in trouble. And besides which I think the whole babe-magnet question in an amateur bowling league, even if it's a really good article, is going to be more or less underwhelming."

"No!" Blades said. "There's got to be bowling groupies. In fact, I think I see a bunch of 'em coming in right now. Maybe the word got out about your set already." He snapped his fingers. "YouTube. Somebody was filming you on their cell phone, and they posted it right up, and all these chicks…"

But Spinoza was holding out a hand, stopping Blades midrant. "Ev?" he said. "Is everything all right?"

In the bathroom, Evan threw water in his face a few times, checking his reflection in the mirror to make sure nothing showed in his expression. When he went back to the guys, he told them that he'd just gotten whacked by a wave of dizziness-an occasionally recurring symptom from his head wound. He excused himself, apologizing for raining on the postgame parade, saying he thought he'd better go home early, like now, and lie down, if he was going to be any good for work the next day.

Instead, he went outside and moved his car to the back of the parking lot so they wouldn't see it when they left. A half hour later, after he'd seen them all leave, he got out of the car and walked back into the alley, where he took a stool at the bar and ordered another Cutty Sark, a double this time, on the rocks.

Tara's lane wasn't fifty feet from where he sat. She was with three girlfriends, all of them acting animated and happy. She wore a short white polka-dotted red skirt that showed off her shapely legs, and on top, a red spaghetti-strap silk blouse that he fancied he could see shimmering to the beat of her heart.

Drinking off his scotch in a couple of swallows, he ordered another double and watched the group of young men from the next alley strike up, if not a conversation, then from the body language a running, flirtatious banter. At least, Evan thought, she wasn't here with Ron Nolan. That would have been very hard to take, far harder than seeing her alone, which was difficult enough. Was she still seeing him, he wondered, or could she in fact be unattached again? And if she was unattached…?

But what was he thinking? This was the woman who hadn't even cared about his near-death in Iraq. Whose self-righteousness made her write him off forever when he was simply trying to do his duty. Who never even wrote him one letter or returned one e-mail from the minute he left.

Looking at her now, so carefree, it suddenly seemed impossible to him that the person he'd known and loved for two years had changed so much. She had always had strong opinions, but one of her best traits, and what his mother had always loved about her the most, was her innate kindness. Tara had always been a good person. What had happened that had changed her so very much?

Well, he was going to find out.

Putting a twenty-dollar bill in the bar's gutter, he again emptied his glass like a man dying of thirst. When he stood up, the dizziness he'd invented for his teammates came and whopped him upside the head for real. He stood leaning against the bar for a few seconds, getting his bearings, surprised at how tipsy he'd become-he'd only had four or five beers during his games and then the five shots of scotch in the bar. Or were they all doubles? He took a step or two and had to grab the back of a nearby chair at one of the tables for support.

This wouldn't do.

He wasn't about to approach Tara as a stumbling and slurring drunk. He didn't want to make it easy for her to dismiss him out of hand as a common nuisance. He would pick another time, when he was sober. Looking down at her and her friends one last time, he concentrated on his walking and made it to the front door without mishap, then down the steps and out to his CR-V in the darkness at the back of the lot.

Settling into the front seat, he locked the car doors and fastened his seat belt, lowered the backrest nearly to horizontal, leaned all the way back, and closed his eyes.

Evan heard the reports from heavy rifles, bullets pinging now off the asphalt all around him. He was screaming at Alan and Marshawn. "Get down! Get down! Take cover!"

The barrage continued, a steady staccato as the car was hit and hit again. He turned to look and the second car behind him now was a twisted wreck, the bodies of two more of his men bleeding out onto the street where they'd been thrown from the force of the blast. And then suddenly he was aware that it was dark and that the beam from Nolan's headlamp was on him, blinding him as he tried to get his Humvee moving from his position up on the roof of it. His hands up in front of his face, he yelled down to the driver. "Kill that light! Now!"

More bullets raked the car, but as the muffled sound filtered into his consciousness, it became more of a repeated thudding, a knocking. When he opened his eyes, the light was still in his face, but this time he recognized it for what it was-a flashlight outside the car. Still shaking from the fear and immediacy of the dream, he took another second or two before he knocked on his own driver's window, then held his hand up to block the light. He could see enough in the pool of the streetlight above them to make out a couple of uniforms.

Cops. His brethren.

He rolled down the window halfway. "Hey, guys, what's going on?" He shot a glance at his watch. It was three thirty-five.

The officer with the flashlight moved back a step or two. "Could you please show us your driver's license and registration, sir?"

"Well, sure. I, uh…" He reached for the door handle and pulled it to open the door.

But the near officer outside slammed it back closed, spoke through the half-open window. "Please stay in your vehicle. License and registration, please. Where've you been, buddy?"

Evan stopped digging for his wallet for a moment and sat back, closed his eyes, tried to remember. "Trinity Lanes," he said at last. The view of a suburban street out his car's windshield had him disoriented. "I was bowling."

"And drinking."

"It would appear so."

"Which leads to the question of how you got here." But as he opened Evan's wallet, the officer would have had a hard time missing the badge. "Holy Christ," he said with disgust, and flashed it at his partner, handing him the ID. Then, back to the car, he said, "You know how you got here from the lanes? Somebody must have driven you, right?"

Evan just looked at him.

"Cause you wouldn't have tried to drive in the state you're in, would you?"

But then the second cop butted in. "You're Evan Scholler?"

This one he could answer. "Yeah."

Number two said to his partner. "The guy from Iraq." Then, to Evan, "Am I right, pal?"

"Right."

"You don't have your gun on you, do you?"

"Nope. In the glovebox."

The first cop shook his head in frustration, then said, "You want to get out now, you can." He pulled open the door. "Smells like a distillery in there, pal."

"Not surprised," Evan replied.

"You might want to open the windows, let it air out for the next time you're driving," the first cop said. "So, for the record," he continued, "do you remember who drove you over here?"

By now, Evan knew where he'd gotten to and where he'd parked, although the piece of the puzzle concerning the actual drive over was a complete blank. "My girlfriend." He pointed to the apartment building across the way. "She lives right up there. We had a fight and she left me in the car to sleep it off."

"That's a good story," the first cop said. "You want to lock up here and go up there now, we'll stick around till you get in."

Evan leaned back against his car. He swayed slightly from side to side. "We're not living together. She won't let me in. I've got to get back to my place."

The second cop handed the wallet back to Evan. "How you gonna do that?"

Evan took a beat deciding whether or not he should laugh; he decided against it. "Good question," he said. "Excellent question." He looked from one of them to the other. "I guess I'll walk. It's not that far. Thanks, guys. Sorry for the hassle."

He'd gone about five steps, none of them very steady, when one of them spoke from behind him. "Scholler. Maybe you want to lock up your car."

Stopping, he turned back to them.

The first cop said, "It'd be a bad idea to pretend to walk until we pulled out and then come back and try to drive."

"Yeah," Evan said. "That'd be dumb."

"Where's your place?" the second cop asked.

"Just up by the college," Evan said.

The second cop said to his partner, "Not that far. Only about four miles, all uphill."

The one with the flashlight said, "Get in the squad car with me and he'll follow us to your place in your wheels. You barf in my car, you clean it up."

"Got it," Evan said.

12

Evan was at his parents' home for a Sunday dinner that had become a more or less regular event since he had come back out to California. Once Daylight Saving Time arrived every year, Jim Scholler barbecued almost every night, and on this warm evening in late May he'd grilled chicken, which they'd eaten with fresh spring asparagus, a loaf of sourdough bread, and Eileen's "famous" tomato-potato salad with cilantro and red onions. Now, still long before true dusk, they were sitting outside, in the Schollers' large backyard in the long shadows cast by their mini-orchard of plum, fig, lemon, orange, and apricot trees.

Over their last glasses of cheap white wine, and with Evan now reemployed with the police department, ensconced in his new apartment, and with the immediate physical danger from his head wound behind them, at long last Eileen had mustered the courage to ask Evan about his love life.

He dredged up a chuckle. "What love life?"

"You're not seeing anybody at all?"

"That's not been at the top of my priorities, Mom. I'm not really looking."

His father cleared his throat. "What about Tara?"

"What about her?" The answer came out more harshly than he'd intended. "Didn't I mention that she never answered one of my letters-not one, Dad!-and I wrote about a dozen of them? That said it all clear enough. Plus, last I heard, she had another boyfriend."

"When did you hear that?" Eileen asked.

"At Walter Reed. In fact, the guy came to see me."

"Who did?" Jim asked. "Tara's new boyfriend? Why'd he do that?"

"I don't know. Guilt, probably."

"Over dating Tara?" Jim asked.

"Over stealing my girlfriend after I sent him over with one of my last letters to hand deliver to her? And instead he snags her away while I'm half-dead in the hospital? Could a person feel guilt about that? Or maybe if you were the reason a whole squad got wiped out?"

"You mean your boys?" Eileen asked. "Are you saying that Tara's new boyfriend is the man in your convoy who shot too soon?"

"You got it, Mom. Ron Nolan. I believe I've mentioned him once or twice."

"Never nicely," Jim said.

Evan slugged some wine. "What's nice to say?"

"Evan." Eileen frowned and threw him a quizzical glance. "I don't think I'd heard before that he was seeing Tara."

"But wait a minute," Jim said. "I thought you and Tara broke up over the war. Wasn't this guy Nolan over there too?"

"Yeah," Evan said. "Funny, huh? So I guess maybe it wasn't the war with me and Tara after all. Maybe she just wanted out and that was a good excuse."

"No." Eileen's voice was firm. "That's not who Tara is. She would have just told you the truth."

He shook his head. "I don't think we know who the real Tara is, Mom. Not anymore, anyway."

But Jim came back with his original question. "So this guy Nolan came to Walter Reed to apologize, or what?"

"That was the spin he put on it. But you ask me, it was to rub it in."

"Why would he do that?" Eileen asked.

"Because that's who he is, Mom. He's a mercenary who shot up that Iraqi car because he wanted to, period. Because he could. And if you want my opinion, he came to Walter Reed, among other reasons, to show me he'd gotten clean away with it. And while he was at it, he stole my girlfriend. This is not a good guy, believe me."

"Then what does Tara see in him?"

"That's what I've been getting at, Mom. She's not who you think she is."

"I still don't see how you can say that."

Facing his mother's implacable calm, her hard-wired refusal to think ill of anybody, Evan suddenly felt his temper snap. He slapped a palm flat down on the table, his voice breaking. "Okay, how about this, Mom? When Nolan told her I'd been wounded, you know what she said? She said I made my bed, I could sleep in it. Her exact words." His eyes had become glassy, but the tears shimmering in them were of rage, not sorrow. "She just didn't care, Mom. That's who she is now."

For a few seconds, the only sound in the backyard was the susurrus of the breeze through the leaves of the fruit trees.

"I can't believe that," Eileen said finally. "That just can't be true."

Evan drew a deep breath and raised his head to look straight at his mother. Exhausted and angry, he nevertheless had his voice under control. "No offense, Mom, but how can you know that? That's what she said."

Eileen reached out across the picnic table and put a reassuring hand on her son's arm. "And when was this?" she asked.

"When was what?"

"When she heard that you'd been wounded and said you'd made your own bed and you could sleep in it."

"I don't know exactly. Sometime in early September, right after Nolan got back home, about the time I got to Walter Reed."

"No, that's not possible." She told him about meeting Tara just before Christmas in the supermarket. "I may be terminally predisposed to seeing the good in people," she said, "and I know that sometimes I'm wrong. But there is no possible way that she had heard about your being wounded before I told her. And that was in December."

"If that's true, why didn't she call me then? Just to see how I was doing? Wish me luck? Some-?" He stopped abruptly, suddenly remembering the reindeer on the wall across from his bed, and that her call to him at Walter Reed-when he'd refused to speak to her-had been just before Christmas.

Or, if his mother was right, within a few days of when Tara had heard for the first time that he'd been injured.

Eileen patted Evan's arm. "She didn't call you because maybe she was already going out with this Nolan man by then. Maybe she felt guilty about that, or maybe she just thought it would be too awkward. But my point is, she certainly didn't know back in September that you'd been hurt. And it really doesn't sound like her to say you'd made your own bed."

"But then why would-?"

Jim, who'd been listening carefully to the debate, suddenly couldn't keep the enthusiasm from his voice. He knew the answer before Evan finished asking the question. "Why would Nolan come all the way to Walter Reed to tell you a lie? Could it be so that you'd get to hate Tara so much that you wouldn't be tempted to call her when you got back?"

Evan's flat gaze went from his father, over to his mother, back to his father again. "You know, Dad," he said, "you've gotten pretty smart in your old age."

The sun was just settling in behind the foothills as Evan ascended the outside steps at Tara's apartment building and rang her doorbell. When there was no answer, he walked down to the kitchen window and peered inside, where the lights were off and nothing moved. He should have called first and made sure she was home, but the determination to go directly from his parents' house and talk to her had come as an impulse, and acting on the impulse-he was mostly sober, well-rested, recently showered and shaved, there'd never be a better time-he'd told his parents good-night, jumped in his car, and driven down.

Since she hadn't been with Nolan at the bowling alley, Evan had more than halfway convinced himself that her relationship with him was over. And if that were the case, he'd talk to her and see once and for all if there was any trace of a spark left to what they'd had, in spite of everything. At least they'd be dealing with the truth.

He'd parked not in the building's parking lot, but out in the street, in the same space his unconscious had apparently picked the other night. Now he went back to the car and got in. Taking out his cell phone, he began to scroll down to her numbers, both cell and home, but then stopped. If she was still going out with Nolan, or worse, if she was out with him at this moment, the timing would be disastrous.

He turned on the car's engine for a minute so he could roll down the driver's window, and saw that the clock on the dash read nine-fifteen. One of the inviolable rules of Tara's life while they'd been going out was that she wouldn't stay out too late, or party too hard, on a school night. And Sunday was a school night. Setting his seat back down a couple of notches, but to where he could still see above the ledge of the window, he turned the engine off and settled down to wait.

It didn't take long.

There was still a trace of natural light left in the day when a yellow Corvette, top down, turned into the lot. Tara was in the passenger seat and still with Nolan, all right. He got out and came around and opened her door and they walked, casually familiar, hand in hand, across the parking lot and up the stairs. She opened the door and they both went inside and Evan felt the blood pulsing in his temples. He put his hand gently over the area when he'd been wounded and imagined that it felt hotter than it had been.

In the apartment, the kitchen lights went on in the front window. A shadow passed into the frame, occupied it for a moment or two, then moved out. The room-and the entire apartment-darkened again.

Evan placed his shaking hands on the steeering wheel and tried to get some physical control back into his body. Swallowing was difficult. Sweat had broken on his brow and down his back.

What was he going to do?

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon," he said to himself. But it was an empty imperative with no meaning. Seeing them together, knowing that they were in fact a couple, rendered unimportant the day's discovery that perhaps Tara hadn't cruelly ignored his injuries. What did that matter if she was sleeping with Nolan? If he was in her life, and Evan wasn't.

Suddenly, rocked with self-loathing and hatred, he allowed a steely calm to wash over him. Like most off-duty cops, he kept his weapon available for emergencies. His.40 semiautomatic was locked in his glove compartment, and now he took it out. Checking the chamber and the safety, he took a breath and then opened his car door, tucking the gun under his Hawaiian shirt into his belt.

He stepped out into the street.

Evan sat at one of the computers at police headquarters. There wasn't much call for accessing the Department of Motor Vehicles database with his work in the DARE program, and this was the first time he'd actually had occasion to use the department's software. So far, it hadn't gone as quickly as he would have liked. In a perfect world, he could have already been in and out and nobody would have seen him, which would have been his preference.

But his world hadn't been perfect for a long time.

And sure enough, suddenly, at nine-thirty on a Sunday night, when the whole station should have been all but deserted, somebody called out his name from the doorway. Straightening his back, he hit the "ESC" button and jerked his head to the side so quickly he felt a crick in his neck as he looked over to see Lieutenant Spinoza from the Totems now coming toward him. Breaking a casual smile, he said, "Hey, Fred, what's going on?"

"People keep killing each other, that's what. So we poor public servants have to burn the midnight oil and then some." He gripped Evan's shoulder. "But, hey, how are you feeling?" he said. "I didn't like the way that dizziness came up on you all of a sudden the other night."

"No, I'm fine. I don't know what that was. My brain whacking out on me again."

"Well, whatever it was, you looked like you got hit by a train, and I mean that in the most flattering possible way." He pulled around the chair next to Evan and straddled it backward. "You're aware, I hope, that when you're not feeling good, you can call in sick. Everybody knows what you've been through. You don't have to push it. Nobody's going to bust your chops if you need a little time off. Plus, the major issue, just to keep life in perspective, we need you sharp for the game next Tuesday, rather than frittering away your energies trying to convince kids not to smoke dope."

"I'm all right, Fred. Really. I don't need to take time off."

"Obviously, if you're down here now. What's so important on a Sunday night?"

Evan gestured vaguely at the screen in front of him. "Honing up on my computer skills." He crossed his arms over his chest, all nonchalance. "But why are you here?"

"I'd say the usual, but it's not." Spinoza had clearly put in a long day already. "Does the name Ibrahim Khalil mean anything to you?"

"Should it? Is that an Iraq question?"

The response slowed Spinoza down. "No," he said, "but where you're coming from, I can see that's how it would hit you. But no. Mr. Khalil lives-lived-in this mansion in Menlo Park. He owns about half the 7-Elevens on the Peninsula. Owned. He and his wife don't own anything anymore, though. If it is him and his wife…"

"What do you mean? You don't know?"

Spinoza shook his head. "Well, we know it was their house. And we know there were two bodies in it. But it's going to be a while before we can put the pieces back together."

"The pieces of what?"

"Their bodies."

Evan digested that for a second, then asked, "Did somebody cut 'em up?"

"No. Somebody blew 'em up, like with a bomb or something. Which of course set the house on fire and burned half of it down around them. So we won't for sure know much of the details for a while. But the neighbors all heard an explosion and then the fire."

"Somebody trying to get rid of the evidence."

Spinoza broke a small weary smile of approval. "Not only does he bowl," he said, "he also thinks. I think I see a detective badge in your future, my son."

"Let's get me out of DARE first."

"That's a good idea. How much longer you on that?"

"Well, after school's out." Evan let out a tired breath. "I can handle it if I can just keep from strangling any of the kids."

"Yeah, don't do that. Parents get all upset." Suddenly Spinoza's gaze went to the computer and he clucked in a schoolmarm fashion a couple of times. "This, boys and girls, is a bozo no-no."

"What is?"

"'What is?' he asks. I'm sure. You think I'm an idiot?" He spoke in an exaggerated stage whisper. "We-and by 'we' I mean the department-we officially frown upon this method of meeting pretty young women." He lowered his voice further. "But really, privacy issues, don't go there. If you got busted, it wouldn't be pretty."

"I'm not trying to find a girl, Fred."

Spinoza nodded. "Of course you're not. Perish the thought. I just thought, on the off chance that you were, that I'd point out to you the department's policy. So whose address are you looking for, then?"

"Just this guy."

Spinoza raised his eyebrows. "Same rules go for cute guys," he said. "I know we're not supposed to ask about sexual orientation, but-"

"I'm not gay, Fred. Some of my DARE kids say this guy's selling dope."

"So why don't you just kick it over to vice?"

"'Cause they'd just put it on a back burner, and if I find out this guy is really selling drugs to my kids, I'm going to hunt him down and kill him."

"That's different, then. Why didn't you just say so?" Spinoza moved in closer to the keyboard. "So you got a plate number?"

For the first time since he'd left Walter Reed, Evan felt he needed to talk to his therapist, Stephan Ray. He didn't know if there was a technical term for what he was experiencing, but subjectively it felt somewhat similar to his inability to recall the names for things in the first months after his surgery. Except that now, and several other times in the past few days, he had found himself in the middle of some activity, or in the grip of some emotional reaction, and didn't seem to have a memory of how he'd come to be there. Or any control over his actions.

Earlier tonight by the Corvette with the gun, for example.

What did he think he was going to do with the gun? What did he want to do with the gun? He didn't know, didn't recall any moment of actual decision. First he was sitting in his car, waiting for Tara to come home so he could have a reasonable discussion with her. And the next thing he knew-the next thing he remembered-he was standing by the Corvette in the parking lot with his gun in his hand. Wondering why his gun was in his hand.

Surely he wasn't planning to shoot Nolan. Or Tara. Or, God forbid, both of them. Maybe he'd decided to shoot out one or more of Nolan's fancy-rimmed tires. In the dim light of early evening, that at least seemed like a semibaked idea. But his sentient mind realized that this would produce a loud noise and the very likely possibility that he'd at least be seen and possibly be recognized. It would also-perhaps-announce himself as interested in Nolan's activities in a way that he'd rather keep to himself, until he made some rational decisions about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

With Tara.

The stop at the police station had been a rational decision. He knew what he wanted there, though he wasn't sure why he wanted it, and he knew how to get it.

But now, having learned where Nolan lived and having driven up there, he found himself sitting in his car, parked curbside, again with his gun in his hand. If Nolan came home alone, it wouldn't be the same situation at all as it had been when Tara was with him. This was a quiet street, far less traveled than Tara's, lined with mature trees.

The address was a nice-looking, stand-alone townhome with attached garage amid a cluster of similar units. Separate, yet somewhat isolated. Perfect for…

For what? he asked himself.

And suddenly, again, the awareness of where he was, of what he was doing, flooded back. He was doing something here-figuratively staring at a drawing of a reindeer and wondering what the name of it was-but the exact nature of what he hoped to accomplish continued to elude him.

Looking down at the gun, he reached over and placed it back into the still-open glove compartment, then closed the door behind it, turned the key to lock it up. Then, the keys in his hand, he realized that he had to get out of here before he did something stupid. Something that he couldn't even explain to himself.

So he hit the ignition. The dashboard clock read ten forty-two.

Putting the car into gear, he pulled out from the curb and hadn't gone twenty feet when he jammed his foot on the brakes enough to make the tires squeal. His windows were down, he hadn't turned his headlights on, and running dark with a warm breeze over him sparked a jolt of familiarity.

In the months since he'd been injured, it had left the forefront of his memory, but now, suddenly, all the elements of this night rekindled a vision of the episode with Nolan when they'd raided the insurgents' lair in the neighborhood close to BIAP. The bright light and the terrific explosion blowing out the windows; the flames licking into the night as gunfire erupted behind him.

A mercenary mission to kill.

An explosion and then a fire.

A dog barked somewhere in the neighborhood.

Evan let out the breath he'd been holding, turned on his headlights, and eased his foot off the brake.

13

"Well, my son, the latest theory, which might still be wrong," Spinoza said, "is that it was a thing called a fragmentation grenade. You ought to know about them. They're evidently using ' em in Iraq right now. Blow the shit out of everything so you need a snow shovel to pick up the pieces. Which pretty much fits what happened here, by the way." He sat back in his chair and picked up his sandwich. Putting his feet up on the desk, he took a bite. "So why do you want to know? You teaching execution techniques in DARE to the little fuckers?"

"No reason, really," Evan said. "I just thought it was interesting. I don't think I've ever heard of somebody being killed that way. At least not here in the States."

"Yeah, well." The lieutenant chewed thoughtfully. "It's not the norm, I'll give you that. Somebody wanted these people completely dead, in a big loud way. It wasn't some gangbanger taking potshots at a residence and hoping somebody gets hit."

"Could the guy, the victim, have done it himself?"

Spinoza shrugged. "Not impossible, I guess. There's no evidence pointing to anybody else. But also there's absolutely no sign so far of why Mr. Khalil would want to do that. The businesses were going great. He apparently loved the wife. No health problems. At least that's what we got from the rest of the family. And, believe me, there's a lot of the rest of the family. So I'm betting against murder/suicide, which leaves a pro. 'Cause I'll tell you one thing. Whoever did this did it right. At this moment, the only evidence we've got is-maybe-the bits of the frag grenade. And just between you and me, I'm kind of hoping we don't have that."

"Why not?"

"Because as we stand now, we've got a local murder of a businessman. At least we can get away with calling it that, since Ibrahim was a naturalized citizen."

"Where'd he come from?"

"I thought I told you that last night. Iraq. Half his family, evidently, still lives there. The other half has the 7-Eleven concession for the Bay Area wrapped up here."

"So what's the issue if you've got a frag grenade?"

"You can't own a frag grenade. It's a federal offense. Which means the ATF's involved. Which, in turn, sucks."

"So how do you find out if it was a frag grenade?"

Spinoza came down in his chair, brought his feet to the floor. "Fear not, my son. The ATF has already picked up samples from the scene. They'll have it analyzed by tonight and soon we'll all know for sure. If it is what it is, the FBI's in before morning. The preliminary call is yep, frags. So it's gonna be their case."

"Why's that so bad, Fred? Don't they have a lot more resources than we do?"

"Oh, no question," Spinoza said. "More resources, more money, more access to data, the whole nine yards. The thing is, though-they don't share. So we wind up spending a week finding stuff they already have. It's kind of a race to see who can get there fastest, but we've got one leg tied behind our backs."

"I don't think that's exactly the expression."

"No?" Spinoza popped his last bite of sandwich. "Well, that's what it feels like."

He knew the locksmith from Ace Hardware both from his high school class and from his men's softball team. Now, at a few minutes before two o'clock on an afternoon after Evan had told his lieutenant, James Lochland, that he was suffering from a migraine and needed to go lie down in his dark bedroom, Dave Saldar pulled up outside of Nolan's townhouse and parked in back of Evan's CR-V.

Evan, in his police uniform to reinforce his legitimacy, got out of his car and they high-fived each other on the sidewalk. After a couple of minutes of catching up-Saldar had heard some of Evan's story from guys on the team-they got around to what Evan had called Dave up here for.

"You didn't hide a spare under a rock or something?" Saldar asked.

"No. I didn't think I'd ever forget my keys. Who forgets their keys?"

"My wife does every time she leaves the house."

"Yeah, well, I don't. I never have before."

"I would love one thin dime for every time I'd heard those exact words. Why do you think the world invented locksmiths?"

"I never could figure that out."

"Well, now you know." Saldar inclined his head toward the town-homes. "Okay, which one's yours?"

They went down to Nolan's doorway, partially enclosed and blocked from the street by an L-shaped, glass-block privacy screen. Saldar got out his tools and went to work. Evan found that his legs were weak enough that he had to lean against the screen for support. With each passing second, the enormity of the implications of what he was doing worked on his system. He felt as lightheaded as he'd been on Nolan's night raid outside of BIAP. A jackhammer pulse pounded where they'd cut open his skull. The migraine he'd invented for Lieutenant Lochland threatened to become a reality-pinpoints of light exploded at the outer edges of his vision. He kept looking to the street, nearly passing out when a yellow Miata convertible crested the incline and drove by.

Saldar, noticing something in his reaction, glanced up at him. "You all right?"

"Good," he said. In fact, he could feel the sweat breaking on his forehead. Summoning all the control he could muster, he brought his hand up and dragged it across his brow.

At last, Saldar turned the knob and pushed the door open. "There you go, a minute and fifteen seconds. This could be a new record."

"I'm sure it is, Dave. That's awesome."

Saldar was holding open the front door. "Hey, are you okay, Ev? You really don't look so good."

"I'm all right. The head's acting up a little, that's all." He reached back for his wallet, thinking, I've got to get him out of here! What if Nolan shows up? But keeping it casual, he said, "So what's the damage?"

"Let's call it thirty, since we're friends. You want, you can go grab your set of keys and I can make you a couple of quick copies right out of the truck, five bucks each."

"That's all right." Evan fished out two twenties. "I know I've got some dupes inside. I've just got to remember to put 'em out here somewhere for next time. But right now I think I'd better get in there and lie down a minute."

"Sure, okay. But let me run and get you your change."

"No, keep it."

"I can't take tips from teammates, Ev. It's one of my rules. I've got some cash back in the truck. Won't take me thirty seconds."

He put a firm hand on his friend's shoulder. "Dave, really, I'm hurting a little here. Thanks for your help, but I've got to get horizontal pretty quick or I'm going to get sick. Seriously. Take care of yourself. I'll see you around."

"You need a doctor?"

The effort for even half a smile was almost too much to bear. "You don't let me get inside pretty quick, you're gonna need a doctor. You hear me?"

"All right, all right. But stop by the field sometime. We're still playing Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"I will. Promise."

"I'll buy you some beers with your tip money."

"Deal," Evan said, stepping inside the door. "Later."

He stood in the living room. Part of him had a hard time believing that he was truly here, illegally inside another man's home. It felt surreal. This wasn't who he was. It wasn't the kind of thing he'd ever done, or even thought about doing.

But now, once inside, he couldn't let those considerations slow him down. There was no telling when Nolan might return. Evan had no idea what hours he worked, or what he did on a day-to-day basis, or even if he had any regular schedule at all. If there was something incriminating to be found in this place, and Evan's guts told him there was, he had to find it and then get out fast. It wasn't a matter of finding evidence that could be used in court-he simply wanted the knowledge.

Or at least that's what he let himself believe. He would decide then how to use what he knew at his leisure.

The room he was in was Spartan, furnished with a leather couch and matching twin leather chairs in front of built-in, mostly empty, bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. A large mirror over the mantel gave an impression of space, but the room probably wasn't more than ten feet wide. Half of the back wall was a glass doorway that opened onto a small brick patio, shaded by large oak trees. A potted plant squatted in the corner. The first glance told him that there would be nothing of interest here, but he forced himself to slow down and make sure.

When he was done, he parted the blinds in the front window, saw nothing out in the street, and crossed the tiled entry area that led into the kitchen, which didn't have much more personality than the living room. It was, however, quite a bit more exposed, since the double-wide window over the sink looked out over the small lawn to the street beyond.

It didn't appear that Nolan did a lot of cooking for himself-the refrigerator had eggs, beer, a pack of American cheese, and milk, with tomatoes and lettuce in the vegetable bin, and some condiments, while the freezer held three boxes of frozen spinach, a carton of ice cream, and a few packages of chicken breasts and ground beef.

A door next to the refrigerator led out to the small single-car garage, where Nolan had hung his empty duffel bag and two empty backpacks on hooks on the far wall. An uncluttered workbench obviously hadn't seen much use, and neither had the drawers under it.

Back in the kitchen, Evan finally got his nerves under control as he scoped out the street again and then ducked under the window passing through. Just off the living room in the back of the house, he entered a decent-sized den with a desk and a computer. The wall featured a tacked-up map of Iraq with several color-coded pins stuck in various spots-Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, Abu Ghraib, Anaconda. Evan tried the mouse first to see if the monitor screen came on, and when it didn't, he hit the button on the CPU. While it booted up, he went through the next door into the bedroom and stopped in his tracks.

Drawing a heavy breath, he crossed over to the bureau next to his enemy's perfectly made bed and picked up the photograph of Nolan and Tara in a heavy silver frame. They were hugging each other for the picture, obviously from the deck of a boat out on the Bay, both smiling out at him on a lovely day. He held the picture long enough that the urge to smash it against the wall came and went. Then, replacing it carefully in its original position, he went back to his searching in earnest. Dresser drawers, bathroom drawers, cupboards, and closets.

The headboard of the bed yielded up the first weapon, another M9 Beretta, the same weapon that Evan had carried in Iraq. He smelled the barrel and picked up no odor, then removed the clip and verified that it was full. But a pro like Nolan, if he had used the gun, would have cleaned it and reloaded immediately afterward.

The bedroom closet, neat like the rest of the house, contained another backpack on the top shelf. This one he emptied out on the bed piece by piece. It held another Beretta 9mm, ten clips of ammunition, and six hand grenades. Evan didn't know for sure if they were fragmentation grenades or the so-called flash/bangs, which were nowhere near as lethal. But either way, he was willing to bet that they were illegal in the hands of private citizens. Evan was sure that they would be of interest to the police, once he figured out a way to get some law enforcement person interested in Nolan as a suspect in the Khalil murders.

Replacing the backpack, he went back into the den and sat in front of the computer. Clicking on the icon labeled "Allstrong," he scanned through a few documents-mostly what appeared to be copies of or amendments to government contracts or work orders that the company had secured overseas. There were also a significant number of e-mail files, and several résumés of people who had served in the military, which attested to the kind of work Nolan was probably doing over here Stateside. Evan entered a few more of the documents and searched for the name Khalil, but came up empty.

Lacking a password, though he tried several obvious ones, he couldn't get into Nolan's regular e-mail file. The icon named "My Pictures," by contrast, came right up. Immobilized by what he feared he might see there-more photos of Nolan and Tara in much more intimate settings than the deck of a boat-he finally clicked on the first folder and, finding not even one picture of Tara, sighed in relief.

These appeared to be shots Nolan might have taken when he was shopping for a house. Here was a tree-lined street just like the one he lived on, cars parked along the curb. Then different angles, in different lights, on another house, large and grandiose. In fact, on closer inspection, on the clearest picture from directly in front of the building, the place was actually a pink-hued monstrosity. What in the world, Evan wondered, could Nolan have seen in the place that would have prompted such a detailed study?

Suddenly recognition straightened him upright. In the paper that morning, Evan had seen a black-and-white picture of the remains of Mr. Khalil's house, which of course no longer looked very much like the residence in this picture. But in the article, hadn't he read something about the house being pink?

Hurriedly he started pulling open the drawers to the desk. There was a digital camera in the middle drawer and for a second he considered looking at what it contained. But he couldn't take the time. He checked his watch-two forty-five. He'd been in here too long already. In the lower right drawer, he found an open ten-pack of floppy disks. Four remained in the box, and with his hands shaking now, he took one out, inserted it into the A-disk slot, and copied the file from the "My Pictures" photo onto the disk.

Ejecting the disk, he put it in his breast pocket, then sat back, took a breath, and walked himself through turning the computer off the careful way, through the "Start" menu.

Keenly listening for the sound of the garage door opening, or of a car pulling up out in the street, he forced himself to wait until the terminal screen went black. Then he got out of the chair and replaced it where he hoped and thought it had been. He pushed all the desk drawers flush against their inserts. Checking one last time to make sure that he still had the disk in his pocket, he walked back up through the living room, locked the front door from the inside, looked out through the window, saw that it was safe, and let himself out.

14

The last child had gone home two hours ago; the sounds from the hallway were small and distant. The occasional whirrings of the Xerox machine way down in the office barely registered on Tara's consciousness as she looked out at the view from her classroom window. She'd always considered it a particularly fine view, with the small grove of scrub oak hugging the hilltop just across the street. She could imagine that the hilltop was far from anything mundane or suburban-say, in Tuscany, where she'd never been. Sometimes in the late afternoon like this, with the springtime scents of lilac and jasmine coming up on the breeze mingling with the closer smells of pencil and chalk, this classroom was her favorite place in the world.

She felt that she could count on her fingers the times when she'd been the absolute happiest and most content, and many of them had been right here. Some of the long-timers here at St. Charles had gotten perhaps a little cynical over the years, but either Tara hadn't been here long enough yet, or she didn't have the genes for cynicism; she wasn't that kind of a person. She still loved her kids. Every year a new batch, and every year with fresh challenges-oh yes, thank you, challenges-but also with something new to learn, to connect with, to love. New clay. That was how she always thought of her classes when the year began. New clay.

Sitting back in her desk chair, she daydreamed, her face relaxed in contented repose, an almost infinitesimal upturn to her lips. It had been a day almost exactly like this one, soft and scented-had it been three years now? She remembered that the whole day she'd felt almost sick with herself since she'd been so easy on the first date with this new guy, Evan. Too easy. She'd been too attracted and let him know it and wasn't really inclined to fight herself. Not against that kind of heat.

But what if it turned out to be that old cliché and he didn't respect her and never called again? Hell, she was an intelligent woman with a fine career and knew that she would never build her world around some man, but the thought of never again seeing this man she'd met only one time just suddenly didn't seem bearable.

And she had gotten up from her desk, sick at herself, and went to smell the outdoor smells by the window, which always helped when she was worried or depressed, and she looked down and there Evan was, getting out of his car with a bouquet in his hand. The happiest single moment of her life.

Sighing, she opened her eyes, surprised at how quickly the contented daydream had retrieved enough emotion to nearly bring her to tears. Breathing deeply, she dabbed at her eyes and pushed back from her desk, thinking that, oh, well, it was time to go home. No need to dwell on the past. It was still a beautiful day, with the incredible floral perfume outside on the breeze.

She crossed over to the window to smell the day one last time. And then she looked down.

In the street, Evan was getting out of his car. No flowers. But it was him nevertheless, coming to see her at last.

Tears welled again, and her hand went to her mouth. Then, after a moment, she brought it down to rest over her heart.

"HI."

"Hi."

"I thought you might be here."

"You were right. It's a beautiful afternoon. My favorite time."

"I remember."

A silence. She'd been standing when he got to the classroom door, and now she boosted herself back onto her desk. "So how are you?" she finally asked. "You look good."

"I'm okay. I still get headaches, but basically I'm Mr. Lucky."

"That's what I've heard. I'm glad for you. Glad you're alive."

"Me too." He moved a step closer to her. "Are you all right? You look like you've been crying."

She shook her head, smiled with a false brightness. "Allergies. The downside of all these blooming flowers." She sucked in a quick breath and let it out, then tried another smile that died on the vine. "I tried to call you."

"I know. I was a shit. I could say I was still recovering and don't remember anything about it, but that'd be a lie. I'm sorry."

She shrugged. "I was a shit too. Too inflexible. Too stupid."

"Okay," he said, "we're a couple of shits."

"Stupid shits," she corrected him. And finally a small smile took.

"Better," he said. He looked away, over at the window to the oak-studded hillside. Coming back to her, his jaw somehow had a harder line. He drew a breath and blew it out sharply. "You still seeing Ron Nolan?"

Biting at her lower lip, she nodded, answered in a very small voice. "Sometimes."

"Love him?"

She shrugged, shook her head, shrugged again. "I don't know, Evan. We've had some good times, but I don't know. Love's a big word."

"Yes, it is. What are we going to do about it?"

"What do you mean, we?"

"You and me. We. The usual meaning. The fact that I love you."

"Oh, God, Evan." She shook her head from side to side. "Don't say that."

"Why not? It's true."

"Well…" She slipped herself off the desk and walked over to the windows again, stood still a moment, then turned back to him. "Please don't say that," she repeated. "I don't know what to do with that."

"You don't have to do anything. Although that's one of the reasons I came here. To tell you that. Just so that if you were wondering, you'd know."

Her gaze settled on his eyes. "Okay," she said softly. "Okay, now I know." Bringing her hand up to her forehead, she pushed until her fingers went white, then pulled her hand away. "Were there other reasons?"

"Other reasons for what?"

"For why you came here. You said one reason was to tell me you loved me. What was another one?"

Evan's brow clouded over-he couldn't remember. For an awful moment, he thought he might have forever lost the real reason he'd come to see Tara today. He hadn't come to tell her he loved her. He hadn't been sure of that until he was with her. But then they'd started talking and that had come out and now he was unable to retrieve the real purpose of his trip here. "I'm trying to remember," he said. "Can you give me a couple of seconds?"

This was the first time she was seeing an effect of his injury, and he was acutely aware that this moment might change everything forever between them. He might, in her eyes, now be damaged, challenged, handicapped-somehow not as sharp as he'd been, not quite exactly the same person. Not quite her equal.

He couldn't let that happen.

Closing his eyes, concentrating, he thought, "Come on, brain, come on. Retrieve it." Then he opened his eyes as the answer found its way to his tongue. "The other reason I came here," he said, "is I wanted to ask you a simple factual question."

At once, she was all the way with him again. Her expression now relaxed, she moved a few steps toward him, her arms crossed over her chest. "I can do simple factual," she said. A smile played around her mouth.

"Okay. Do you remember when you first heard about me getting hurt?"

Her quizzical look stayed on him for a long moment, as though she were surprised that he would have to ask that question at all. "Sure," she said. "I ran into your mom at the grocery store one night. I think it was a few days before Christmas. I know it was a few days before I called you."

"You mean called me at Walter Reed? When I didn't talk to you?"

"Right."

"You're sure of that? The time, I mean. Just before Christmas."

"Of course. That's when it was. When else would I have heard?"

"How about back when it happened? Say, September?"

"No way, Evan. How could I have known then?"

He shrugged. "Well, when did you start seeing Ron Nolan?"

"What does Ron have to do with that?"

"I would have thought he'd have mentioned it, that's all."

"He never knew about it, Evan. You guys all got transferred out of his base the week he got back."

Evan canted his head a bit to one side. Studying her expression, he read only sincerity, openness, perhaps a bit of confusion. But one thing was clear-she was telling him the truth as she knew it.

"We got transferred?"

"That's what Ron said."

"Where'd we get tranferred to, Tara? Did he tell you that?"

"No. I don't think he knew."

"Right. He didn't know. You know why? Because we weren't transferred. We ran our last mission out of Baghdad Airport, where we'd been with Ron all along. You can look it up."

The germ of confusion spread like a plague over her features. Mouth tightened, brow furrowed, eyes darting, seeking a place to land. "But…" The word hung in the room between them. Her arms hung down, inanimate at her side. "I don't get this."

"Ron was with us in the convoy, Tara. He was in my Humvee. He was next to me when I got hit."

"No. That can't be true."

"Why would I make it up, Tara?"

"I'm not saying you're making it up, Evan. Although I could see a reason why you might. But I don't think you'd do that."

"I wouldn't. I'm not making it up," he said. "It's what happened."

She held his gaze for a minute, and then, her voice barely audible, grabbed at the next straw. "Maybe…I mean, I'm just thinking, could it be with what happened to your head…maybe you don't remember it all exactly?"

He nodded-sober, patient, restrained. "That's a legitimate question. I have forgotten some stuff. I don't remember whole days and weeks from when I woke up. But Ron was with us in that convoy. I remember everything about that. If you still don't believe it, you can look it all up on the Web. Just Google Masbah." He spelled the name of the neighborhood in Baghdad. "It's all there. He's the reason it all went down. And that's the reason he had to get out of Iraq so fast. They were starting the investigation, and he knew it led straight to him."

The color had drained from her face. Her eyes flitted to the corners of the room as though she hoped to find some answer there. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Placing her hand flat on one of the students' desktops for support, she lowered herself into the connected chair. "He told me he had no idea you'd been hurt," she said, "that he found out about it from me after I ran into your mom that night and she told me."

"Christmastime."

She nodded. "Definitely."

"And he told you he knew nothing about it before?"

"Nothing. I swear, Evan. No, he swore. He'd never heard a thing about it."

"He didn't have to hear about it, Tara," Evan said. "He was there. He fired the first shots."

Spinoza poured them both a cup of coffee and took Evan out into the backyard so they wouldn't interrupt the movie Leesa and their four young kids were watching in the family room. The day, with at least another half hour of light in it, continued warm and fragrant. The two men sat down at a picnic table under a vine-covered trellis. "So," Spinoza began, "did you get your dope dealer yet?"

"Not yet," he said. "He's out of town."

"Timing's everything," Spinoza said.

"I don't know," Evan replied. "Timing's important, but I'd give points for location too. A quarter inch either way and my story's different. That's been pretty good nightmare material."

"I'd imagine so." Then, going back to his original subject, Spinoza said, "You know he's out of town?"

Evan shrugged. "His car's gone. Nobody answers the door."

"Don't do anything stupid, Ev," the lieutenant said. "If you think there's really something to this guy, send him to the narcs." Spinoza blew on his coffee and took a sip. "And in other news, you know Mr. Khalil, who we talked about at lunchtime? As of a couple of hours ago, Mr. Khalil is officially a joint-jurisdiction case. You remember the frag grenade issue we talked about? Well, the feds have conclusively determined that that's what blew up the room and started the fire. So they're in the case, in spite of the fact that it also looks like Mr. Khalil and his wife were first shot in the head with a nine millimeter bullet."

Evan's face must have betrayed something. Spinoza abruptly put his coffee cup down on the table. "What?"

"Nothing," Evan said.

Evan left Spinoza's home in great frustration. He'd planned-hoped-somehow to get the picture from Nolan's computer in front of Spinoza, but there was no way he could tell his lieutenant how he'd gotten it-that he'd broken into someone's home-and that rendered hopeless his entire ill-conceived plan. But cruising down to the Khalils' ruined house, Evan had satisfied himself that the house in the picture was in fact theirs, then decided that the thing to do would be simply to send the disk to the FBI. The Bureau would have Nolan in their database and know all about his history. The advantage to his new idea was that both the ATF and the FBI were known to play fast and loose with due process and probable cause. If they came to think that Nolan had killed the Khalils, especially if there was an Iraqi or terrorist connection, they would find a way to question him and perhaps even get inside his house, where they would discover the grenades, the other pictures, the guns. In any event, after they got the disk, Nolan would be on their radar. After that, it would only be a matter of time before they could take him down.

Now night had fallen. In his kitchen, Evan's head throbbed and again the pinpricks of bright light at the edges of his vision presaged the onset of a migraine. He'd already taken a couple of Vicodin, and as soon as he finished the last of his business, he had to get to bed if he was going to work tomorrow.

Wearing blue latex gloves, he pulled the self-adhesive manila envelope over closer to him. It had taken a while, left-handed, to write down both Nolan's address on a piece of notepaper and the FBI's address on the envelope. But now he was satisfied-the writing was legible yet unidentifiable as his own. He slid the slip of paper with Nolan's address into the envelope along with the disk, then pulled the paper strip from the adhesive and closed the top. He peeled off ten self-adhesive stamps from the roll he'd bought and stuck them on. Tomorrow he would stop off in another neighborhood and drop the envelope into a mailbox.

Now he set the thing on his table and gave it a quick once-over. Satisfied that it couldn't be traced back to him, he walked back through his apartment to his bedroom, turning off the lights as he went. Lying down on the bed, his clothes still on, he pulled a blanket up over his shoulders, turned on his side, and closed his eyes.

A little while after it was truly dark, Tara called Evan's mother, Eileen, and got his address. She waited and thought and second-guessed herself and eventually left her place sometime after eleven o'clock and drove. Parking out in the dark street across from his apartment, she sat for another five minutes or so with her car windows down, her hands in a prayerful attitude in front of her mouth.

By the time she got to the door, she barely heard her own timid knocking over the beating of her heart. After a minute, she knocked again, harder. And waited.

A light came on inside and hearing his footsteps, she held her breath.

The door opened. He'd been sleeping in his clothes. His hair was tousled, his eyes still with that sleepy look she remembered so well. She looked up at him, realizing that she loved having to look up, had missed that; loving the size of him, so different from looking across at Ron Nolan. Everything was so different and so much better with Evan. How could she have forgotten that?

She couldn't get her face to go into a smile. She was too afraid, the blood now pulsing in her ears, her hands unsteady at her sides.

He just looked at her.

"Is it too late?" she asked. "Tonight, I mean."

"No."

"I needed to talk to you some more. Would that be all right?"

"Everything's all right, Tara. You can do whatever you want. You want to come in?" Stepping back away from the door, he gave her room to pass and then closed the door quietly behind her as she kept walking through his living room, stopping by the counter that delineated the kitchen and turning back to face him. Her shoulders rose and fell.

From over by the door, he said, "I can't guarantee talking too well. I've been having some trouble sleeping, so I'm a little doped up. Plus I've had a couple of drinks. I'm drinking too much. I need to stop."

"Are you in such pain?"

He managed a small shrug. "Sometimes, but that's not it really." He took a second to continue. "I know that whatever they say, I'm not all the way back. Maybe I'll never be. To tell you the truth, it freaks me out sometimes. When I'm alone mostly. But I don't want to have anybody feel like they have to be with me all the time either."

"Your mom?"

"For one example, yeah. Anybody, really. But it's"-he shrugged again-"it's just what I'm doing now, Tara. Holding on. Getting better, I hope. Getting over what happened."

Evan still stood by the door, making no effort to close the space between them. She felt the distance tugging at her, causing a pain of its own, and took a step toward him, then another.

"But that's all just me," Evan said. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Ron. I never…I wanted to tell you that it was never like it was with us. It was just a completely different thing."

"Was? Past tense?"

She let out a heavy breath. "Yes. After what you told me today."

"Okay. And how was it with us that was so different?"

Tara put her hands together at her waist. She deserved that question. And he deserved the real answer. "Because we connected, Evan. So basically."

He nodded. "I know."

"I don't think that ever goes away."

"No. Me neither."

She looked across the living room into his eyes. "Why are you staying over there? It's almost like you're afraid of me."

"I am. As much as I need to be."

"How much is that?"

"That depends on how much being done with Ron means you're back with me."

She waited another few seconds and then closed the space between them. Looking up at him again, now the smell of him so close. "Does it hurt you to touch the scar?" she asked.

"It's just a scar." But he inclined his head so that she could see it. Almost a perfect circle, slightly indented.

Slowly, she reached out her hand and brought it up to his head. As soon as she touched it, she felt something give in her legs. As she traced the shape of the scar, tears sprang into her eyes and she made no effort to stop them. Evan brought his head down, leaning into her.

Bringing her other hand up into his hair, she cradled his head in both her hands.

Holding on to her, his arms behind her, he went to his knees in front of her, his face first pressed to one side against her thigh. But then, her hands on his head now directing him, she turned him to be up against her, his hands gripping her from behind, pulling her into him, while she pressed herself against him. She pulled him gently away for an instant, only long enough to let her step out of her clothes, and then brought him back to where he'd been.

Beyond any time, then, she was on the floor with her legs around his neck, until the surge of blood and heat she'd only known with him took her and then there was the taste of her on his mouth and his own cry as everything between them came back and came again and left them both flung out on the floor, wasted and sated, and connected in every part.

15

The relevant portion of the e-mail from Jack Allstrong that had put Nolan on the road had read: "When the CPA hands over the government to the Iraqis, Uncle Sam is going to be shipping over $2.4 billion-that's right, billion-in shrink-wrapped 100s. That's twenty-eight tons of greenbacks, Ron, almost all of it earmarked for infrastructure and rebuilding, which means us. My standing directive to you is to recruit as many qualified personnel as you can find. Starting now."

Now Nolan was just getting back home from a productive couple of days. Frequenting the bars around some of California's military bases-Pendleton, Ord, Travis-he'd recruited four men for Allstrong's ongoing and growing operations in Iraq. Though Allstrong's security work was dangerous and demanding, ex-officers who were bored or broke or both in civilian life often jumped at the chance to resurrect their careers, their self-esteem, and their bank accounts, and to once again utilize the special skills that had served them well in the military.

And nowhere were they needed more than in Anbar. As Jack Allstrong had predicted in August, the rebuilding of the electrical tower infrastructure in that province was turning out to be a gold mine for the company, albeit a costly one in terms of human life. Allstrong had by now put more than five hundred men to work on this latest contract, which initially bid out at forty million dollars, although it had grown to more than one hundred million in the past seven months. Allstrong Security, Jack liked to point out, was in 2003 the fastest-growing company in the world, outstripping Google, compliments of U.S. largesse and Jack's ability to surf the chaos of the reconstruction.

But in Anbar, the company also had already lost thirty-six of Kuvan Krekar's men, and Kuvan's supply chain of bodies was growing thin and dispirited. Beyond that, Kuvan had been facing severe competition from another broker named Mahmoud al-Khalil, who was not only supplying cheaper workers but was perhaps terrorizing and even killing Kuvan's people to discourage others from signing on. Why? So that Mahmoud and not Kuvan could pocket the extremely lucrative cash commissions. Well, with the recent untimely demise of his paterfamilias in Menlo Park, Mahmoud would hopefully soon conclude that competing directly with Allstrong's chosen subcontractor was not a sound business decision.

Hefting his duffel bag, Nolan let himself into his townhome through the garage door to the kitchen. He walked through the living room, stopped in his office and turned on his computer, then went into his bedroom, where he dropped the duffel bag on his bed, then returned to his desk and checked his e-mail and-first things first-made sure he'd been paid. He had.

With that taken care of, Nolan went back into his bedroom and started to unpack. Grabbing a pair of pants, he turned and opened the closet, and stopped short.

Something was not right.

Nolan didn't spend much time thinking about his military-ingrained penchant for order, but when he woke up in the mornings, he automatically made his bed with hospital corners so that the covers were tight enough to bounce a coin off them. The spare shoes were always shined and perfectly aligned on the floor of the closet. He hung his shirts and pants in order from light to dark, the hangers spaced with an automatic and practiced precision.

Now he stared at the row of hangers. He didn't specifically remember taking down the shirts and pants that he'd packed for his trip, but could not imagine that he would have taken down his clothes and left the hangers spaced unevenly as they were now. His eyes went to the backpack on the top shelf. He had lined it up exactly with the break in the hangers between his shirts and his pants, and now it was clearly centered over the shirts. Reaching up, he pulled it toward him, relieved by the familiar weight. He opened it and saw that nothing-not the grenades, the gun, or the ammo-was gone.

Which was weird.

Maybe he'd imagined that the hangers had been moved. It didn't seem possible that someone would have broken in here and not taken the grenades and the gun.

But it wouldn't be smart to take chances. Reaching into the backpack, he removed the Beretta and slammed one of the clips into place, then racked a bullet into the chamber. He dropped the backpack next to the duffel bag on his bed and went to check the bathroom, where an intruder might still be lurking. Finding no one there, he went back out into the living room to the front door, where the piece of Scotch tape that he'd laid over the connection between the door and its jamb was now stuck under the jamb.

Somebody had definitely been here.

Methodically now, he went back out to the garage, where he patted down the empty backpacks hanging against the wall. He was about to start opening the drawers when he straightened up, stopping himself.

He didn't see how it could be remotely possible, but it occurred to him that if one of the members of Khalil's extended family could have somehow traced the patriarch's execution back to him, their method of retribution might include a bomb-open a drawer and it goes off. By the same token, his experience with IEDs in Iraq told him that if there was a bomb, someone would have been hiding somewhere outside, seen him drive up, and sent an electrical pulse to detonate the device after he was inside. Alternatively, Nolan could trigger the bomb himself by switching on any one of a dozen electrical connections in the house. But any of those scenarios contemplated the possibility that someone had identified him as the Khalils' killer.

Which from Nolan's perspective was flatly not possible. He'd made no mistakes. Therefore, there was no bomb. He'd also already turned on his computer, and several lights. Walking back out to the garage, this time he opened all the drawers. Back in the kitchen, he did the same. Opened the refrigerator. He had no idea what, if anything, he was looking for, but someone had been in his house in his absence, and if it hadn't been to take something, what did that leave?

He just didn't know.

Back in his office, he sat at his desk, laid the gun on it, and stared for a minute again at his computer. Picking up his telephone, he got the pulsing dial tone that meant he had messages, and entered his password.

The first message was from an obviously very distraught, though composed, Tara, who had called him on Monday night. "Ron. Evan Scholler came by to visit me today at the school. We had a long talk with one another and he told me some things that shocked me-you probably have a good idea what they were.

"I don't know what to say to you, other than that I just want you to know how completely violated I feel. And how used. I don't know how you could have lied to me so much. I'm leaving this message on your machine on purpose because I don't want to talk to you, or even see you anymore. I can't believe you've done this. It just doesn't seem possible that anyone could be so cruel and so selfish. I'm so sorry for who you are, Ron, but not for what I'm saying. Good-bye. Don't call me. Don't come by. Just stay away. I mean it."

The phone still at his ear, he hadn't let up his grip yet on the receiver when the next message began. The call had come this morning, about six hours ago. "Mr. Nolan. My name is Jacob Freed. I'm a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I wondered if we might be able to take a few minutes of your time to talk to you about a routine matter involving national security that's come to our attention. I don't mean to be unnecessarily vague, but I'm sure you understand that these days some things are best left unsaid over the telephone. If you could call me for an appointment at your earliest convenience when you get in, or alternatively, I'll try to get back to you in the next day or two. My number is…"

When Nolan finally hung up, he sat unmoving with his right arm outstretched and his hand covering the Beretta. After a minute or two, he let go of the gun and moved his hand over to the mouse. As soon as he saw the "My Pictures" icon, he realized that he'd made an error by not erasing that file before he'd gone away. Opening it now, intending to close the barn door after the horse had escaped, he checked the access record and saw that someone had, indeed, looked at the file two days before-the same Monday that Tara had spoken to Evan Scholler.

Though it might be too late, he still thought it would be better to delete the file now, so that if the FBI came and looked…

Except he knew that there wasn't really any such thing anymore as truly deleting something. Experts could always retrieve whatever it was from the hard disk.

Still, his finger hovered over the mouse as he stared at one of the many pictures he'd taken of Mr. Khalil's house while he was working on access and egress. One click and all of that would at least be gone for now.

Sitting back, his eyes narrowing, he took his hand abruptly off the mouse. Suddenly, he decided that he did not want to delete the picture file after all. Although he would have to remove the memory chip from the digital camera in the desk drawer and get rid of it. Tapping his index fingernail against his front teeth, he sat as if in a trance for a full minute, and then another one.

The idea looked perfect from every angle.

He reached again for the telephone.

"Agent Freed, please."

"This is he."

"Agent Freed. My name is Ron Nolan. You left me a message about a national security matter and asked me to call for an appointment."

"Yes, sir, I did. Thanks for getting back to me."

"I think maybe I should be the one thanking you, sir. I've just returned from a business trip. While I've been gone, somebody let themselves into my house. I was going to call the regular police, but then I got your message. I don't know if you know it, but I do some sensitive work with Allstrong Security, a government contractor in Iraq, and I thought what you wanted to talk about might have something to do with that."

"Well, as I mentioned, perhaps it would be better to meet in person to talk about the issue that's come up with us, although if you're reporting a robbery or burglary, you should probably call the regular police. That's not really our jurisdiction."

"Agent Freed, this wasn't a robbery. Whoever it was didn't take anything. They left something. Plus, they messed with my computer. I don't know what it's all about, but it's almost like somebody's trying to plant something on me."

"Like what?"

"Well, I just found one thing, but there might be more. I'm afraid to look in case he's planted a bomb someplace."

"Who's he?"

"I don't know. I mean the person who broke in."

"Okay. So what's the one thing?"

"This is what's so weird. It's a backpack full of ammunition and, you're not going to believe this, it looks like about a half dozen hand grenades."

"Hand grenades?"

"Yes, sir. As you may know, I've been over to Iraq several times. I know the ordnance. And these look like fragmentation grenades to me."

Freed and his partner, a middle-aged fireplug named Marcia Riggio, sat with Nolan on the small, oak-shaded back patio. Inside the townhouse, a three-man team of forensics specialists, having already confiscated the backpack with its contents, were fingerprinting every clean surface and cataloging anything that might be of interest-Nolan's other gun from the bed's headboard, the digital camera in the desk drawer, downloading his hard disk.

Nolan didn't want to rush anything with these federal cops. He didn't want to appear to point them in any specific direction. But now, as Agent Riggio looked up from her notepad, Nolan decided that it was getting to be the time. "Let me ask you something," he said. "Is there any scenario you can think of that makes any sense of this to you?"

The two agents exchanged a glance. Riggio got the nod from Freed and took point. "Do you have any enemies?" she asked.

Nolan frowned. "Even if I did," he said, "what does this do to hurt me? Unless I pulled the pin on one of those grenades, which anybody who knows me knows I'm not going to do."

"Maybe it's not about hurting you," Riggio went on. "Maybe it's about framing you."

"For what?"

But Freed stepped in. "Before we get to that," he said, "let's go back to your enemies."

This time, Nolan broke a grin. "I don't see it, really. I like people. I really do, and they tend to like me. My boss thinks it's a flaw in my character." He shrugged. "So I'd have to say no. No enemies."

"Okay," Riggio said. "How about rivals?"

"In business?"

"Business, pleasure, whatever."

He took his sweet time, savoring the anticipation. "The only even remotely…" He shook his head. "No, never mind."

Freed jumped on it. "What?"

"Nothing, really. Just a guy I knew in Iraq who used to date my girlfriend. But that was a long time ago."

"If he's in Iraq," Freed said, "he's out of this."

"Well, he's home now. Here."

"And he's not over her? Your girlfriend?" Riggio asked.

"I don't know. He had a hard time with it at first, but now I haven't seen the guy in months. But, look, this is a dead end. He's a good guy. In fact, he's a cop. He'd never-"

Freed interrupted. "He's a cop?"

"Yeah, here in Redwood City. His name's Evan Scholler. He got hurt over there and they let him out early."

"So he would have had access to these types of grenades over there?"

"Yeah, but he wouldn't have taken any home. He did a few months at Walter Reed before he came out here."

"Soldiers have been known to send illegal ordnance and contraband stateside as souvenirs on the slow boat," Riggio said. "It's a problem. It happens all the time."

"Well, I don't know what Evan would have…I mean, what's the point of putting hand grenades in my closet? I'm not going to blow myself up with them. It's not like they're going to get rid of me as his rival."

Riggio and Freed again shared a glance, and again exchanged the imperceptible nod. Riggio came forward, elbows on her knees. "Do you know a man named Ibrahim Khalil?"

"No," Nolan said. "Should I?"

"He was a local businessman with ties to Iraq. He and his wife were killed last weekend."

"Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but I've been out of town. I haven't heard about it."

"Would Evan Scholler have known you were gone?"

Nolan shrugged. "If he knew where I lived, he could have just checked to see if my car was in the garage. If it is, I'm home."

"Has he ever, to your knowledge, been up here?" Riggio asked.

"No. As I say, we're not exactly pals anymore." As though it had just occurred to him, Nolan added, "But he's a cop. He could find out where I live easy enough, couldn't he? That's what it looks like he's done."

Freed picked it up. "So Sunday morning early you were with this same girlfriend that this Evan Scholler likes?"

"Tara," Nolan said. "Tara Wheatley. And, yes, she's the one. So what's this all about?"

"Those pictures you couldn't identify on your computer?" Riggio said. "They were pictures of Mr. Khalil's house before somebody killed them and hit it with a fragmentation grenade, and before it burned down."

"A frag grenade…" Nolan didn't want to overplay his apparent naïveté. Both Freed and Riggio knew that he had seen combat, and they might even know more than that. This was about the moment in the interview that, against his own deep-seated reluctance to believe ill of a fellow soldier, he might finally come to accept the apparent truth. So he nodded somberly and met both of their gazes in turn. "He's trying to set me up. Christ, he killed them, didn't he?"

16

The early evening sun baked the parking lot and the landing outside Tara 's apartment. She could feel its warmth in her hand through the closed and locked front door as she stood behind it. "I told you, I won't see you. I don't want to talk to you."

"I need to talk to you, though, T. Please. I need to explain."

"There's nothing you can say to me. Nothing I'd believe. I can't believe you'd even come by here and try this. You lied to me, Ron. You've been living a lie for all these months."

"No. I've been living the truth. And the truth is that I love you."

"You don't lie to someone you love."

"You're right. That was a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. I am so sorry."

"Sorry's not enough. I don't want to talk about this. I need you to go away now."

"I can't, T. I can't leave it like this. Could you please open up? Just so I could see you." When she didn't answer, he went on, talking at the door. "Listen, I knew you were confused about Evan, especially the timing about how we started. I thought that if you heard he'd been wounded…that you'd feel sorry for him, or like you owed him another chance…and that whatever happened, somehow I'd lose you."

"And now that's what's happened."

"I can't accept that, Tara. I didn't think he was going to live. I didn't think it would matter."

"That's not the question, Ron. You lied to me. Everything we did was false, don't you understand that? If you couldn't stand to have Evan in the picture on any level, even if he was dying, how were we-you and me-ever going to amount to anything anyway?"

"We did amount to something."

"No, we didn't. That's the worst part. We supposedly trusted each other. Now that can't ever happen again. Don't you see that?"

"Because of one mistake?"

"You really don't see it, do you?"

"I see somebody who was terrified he was going to lose the woman he loved, who wanted to make sure they had some time together without the distraction of a wounded ex-boyfriend, who might never be coming home alive anyway."

"That's all you thought Evan was to me, a distraction?" The chain lock rattled and the door opened the couple of inches that the chain allowed. "I'm not going to yell at you through the door anymore. I just need you to go. You're actually scaring me now, all right?"

"How can I be scaring you, T? I'm here begging you just to listen to me, to give me another chance." He shifted his weight. "Is it because of him?"

"Do I still love him, you mean? I don't know about that. I lost track of who he was, and now I don't know what I feel. But I know you're scaring me now. And why? Because you lied. And lied and lied."

"I lied once, T. Once to try to protect what we were starting to have, that's all."

"No, it isn't, Ron. What about Masbah?"

"What about it?"

"You firing on that innocent family. I Googled you and read all about it. You started that whole thing."

Ron hung his head, wiped his brow against the glaring heat. "I was trying to protect the convoy. I thought the car was on a suicide mission. You had to have been there, but I can't apologize for what I did."

"The report said they'd stopped way back."

"You can't believe everything you read. It was a damn close call and if I waited another two seconds, we all could have been dead."

"Most of you died anyway. How about that?"

"Not my fault. The point is that if I fired too soon, and I'm not saying I did, it was on the side of caution."

"Ron. You killed an entire innocent family! Doesn't that bother you at all?"

"It bothers me a lot, T. It makes me sick to think about it. But I can't say, given the circumstances, that I wouldn't do the same thing again. It was a split-second, life-or-death decision, and I decided I had to try to save my men."

"That's not what Evan says, Ron. And he was there too."

"I guess he doesn't mention the part about me pulling him out of the line of fire and getting him out of there alive."

"So now you're the hero?"

"I'm not saying that. I'm saying Evan's memory maybe isn't the most reliable thing in the universe right now. I'm also saying that he's got a reason to make me look bad."

"He didn't make you lie."

"How many times do I have to apologize for that? However many it takes, I'll do it."

"And what about the other lies?"

"What other lies? There were no other lies."

"How about me ripping up that last letter that you delivered to me?"

"You didn't rip it up."

"Right. But you told Evan I did."

"No, I didn't. Did he tell you that?"

"Yes."

"Then he's lying."

"I don't believe that, Ron. And what about when you visited him at Walter Reed, when you told him I said he'd made his own bed and he could sleep in it?"

Nolan looked down and shook his head.

"What?" she asked him.

"That's not true, either, T. Why would I say that? I went to see him to see how he was doing, if he was going to be all right. That's all. He's the one who didn't want to hear anything about you."

"That's not what he told me."

"No, I guess not. And why, do you think, would that be?"

Through the crack in the opening, he saw her close her eyes, lean her head up against the wall next to the door. He was wearing her down, getting to her. "Do you want to hear something else?" he asked. "Something truly scary, especially if you think your friend Evan is so innocent and so nice. You want to hear what he left in my house after he broke into it last weekend?

After Tara watched Nolan finally drive away, she went into her living room, sat down, and put her feet up on the coffee table. Templing her fingers over her lips, she closed her eyes and tried to get herself to breathe deeply. A whirlwind of conflicting possibilities and emotions was literally causing her body to shake.

Ron Nolan had maintained a sustained falsehood, but did that mean that every word out of his mouth was a lie? She hadn't expected him to show up here, or to own up to the lies upon which he'd based their relationship. Perhaps the truth was that he loved her and had made a mistake. A terrible mistake, yes, and one he sincerely regretted.

Just like killing the Iraqi family.

What was the truth in that story? Had he been justified shooting when he did? And in fact, had he pulled Evan to safety and saved his life? They'd been outnumbered and surrounded. If there had been a bomb in the car, none of them would have survived. Might she have made the same decision to fire under the same circumstances?

It struck her forcefully that maybe it was she who was being unfair. Ron Nolan had always treated her well, better than well. He'd literally saved her life that time in San Francisco. And surely his appearance today to beg her forgiveness-even while admitting he'd done the unforgivable-spoke to a depth of character she'd never given him credit for.

People grew, people changed, people learned from their mistakes. And if what Ron had told her about Evan were true? He might himself be in danger.

No. She could not believe that. That was more of Ron's poison, trying to get inside her.

After seeing Evan in her classroom, and then the intimacy last night, she knew what she felt-not just the still-powerful physical bond, but a connection that went down to the bottom of her soul. It was irrational, chemical, fundamental, and she knew that she would never feel it with anyone else.

But now, according to Ron, Evan had lied to her too. A known liar accusing another of lying. It was like game theory, where "A" always told the truth, and "B" always lied, but you didn't know which was the truth-teller and which the liar. Who did you believe?

Could Evan have made up the story about Ron saying she'd ripped up his letter? Or the Walter Reed moment? Evan admitted that his memory had been faulty, especially early on. Could he have lied to her and not even known he was lying? Finally, could Evan have broken into Ron's house and tried to frame him for a murder? A murder that he himself had committed?

Tara could not believe any part of that. She knew who Evan was. Even after all this time and all of their problems, she knew his heart.

He was not a liar. He was not a murderer.

And this meant that Ron Nolan was lying to her again. And lying to the FBI. And possibly to the local police.

Liars deal in lies.

Suddenly she opened her eyes and sat up.

She needed to get to Evan. She needed to warn him.

17

Though it wasn't really a hangout for cops, the Old Town Traven wasn't far from the police station downtown, and it served a decent-tasting though nutritionally suspect happy-hour spread of chicken wings, peanuts in the shell, tiny meatballs in gravy, and popcorn. Even though happy hour had officially ended more than two hours before, there was still plenty of food available. The Traven didn't exactly pack 'em in, and now Evan, who'd changed out of his uniform at the station, and his bowling partner Stan Paganini, also in street clothes, held down one end of the bar all by themselves.

Between his low-watt nervousness over the envelope he'd mailed to the FBI and his need to keep himself occupied so that he wouldn't do something stupid and try to get in touch with Tara until she'd dumped Nolan, if she actually was going to dump him after all, Evan felt that a drink or ten wouldn't be amiss. Pass the difficult night in a haze and see what tomorrow brings.

Now it was half past nine and he and Paganini were on to the name of the place. Due either to the marginal intelligence of its owners, a drunken mistake, a simple typo, or all of the above, the neon sign above the door read "Old Town Traven." The place's business cards also had tavern spelled incorrectly, so Evan decided it was probably that the proprietors just weren't too bright and certainly had not been the San Mateo County Spelling Bee champions, as he had been when he'd been in eighth grade.

"No, you weren't." Paganini stabbed the last meatball on his plate with a toothpick and washed it down with a good swig of his gin and tonic.

"Was too. I won on hygiene, which is almost unfair, it's such an easy word."

"Wait! Don't tell me." Paganini took in a little more of his drink. "H, Y," he began.

"Good so far."

"G." He paused, glanced at Evan.

"I before E." Evan tipped his vodka rocks all the way up. "Except after C."

"Don't tell me!"

"I just did. 'Or when sounded like a as in neighbor or weigh.'"

"Okay, trying the old head-fake double reverse. I get it. But I'm on to you, boy. So here goes, again. H, Y, G, E…"

"Buzz! You're out." Evan shook his head. "I just told you, i before e, Stan. I told you the whole damn poem. You think I was making that up?"

"I thought you were trying to trick me. And then g is close to c sound-wise, so it was the exception."

"Nope. It's the rule." Evan spelled the word out.

"That doesn't sound right. I'm going to look it up at home."

"You want to bet?"

"No, I don't want to bet. But you're right, that's a pretty simple word to win the whole county spelling bee on."

"Well, harder than tavern, anyway. And they got that one wrong here. Twice. Three times? Who knows, maybe more. They might have it on the matchbooks."

"Yeah, well…" Paganini shifted his bulk and cried out. "Hey!"

"What?"

"Sat on something." Paganini slid himself off his stool and was digging in his pants pockets. Plopping down a large set of keys in the bar's gutter, he reached in again and produced a heavy item that he plunked onto the bar. "Knucks," he said.

At one of their bowling league nights, the cops had gotten into a discussion about various common enhancements to a man's natural defensive arsenal. Brass knuckles had featured large in Paganini's experience, and Evan said he'd never actually encountered them.

Now he picked up the hunk of fitted metal. "Heavy sucker."

"Get hit with it, you're clocked," Paganini said. "Although who fights with their fists anymore, huh? Nowadays, you know you're going to be in a fight, you pack heat, am I right?"

"Maybe you don't want to kill who you're fighting?"

Paganini chuckled. "Yeah, like that happens anymore. Go ahead, put ' em on. Keep 'em if you want. I collect the ones I get off perps. I got a half dozen like these at home."

As Evan was pocketing the brass knuckles, the bartender, a midthirties slacker with a wispy effort at a beard, suddenly appeared in front of them. Paganini looked down at his glass. "We empty again?"

"Seem to be," Evan said. "Let's double us up here, would you, Jeff?"

Jeff looked from one of them to the other. "You guys walking home from here? You pull a DUI, they can come back and get us."

"We're not going to get any DUI," Paganini said. He reached around into the back of his pants and pulled out his wallet, opened it to the badge. "Pour us a couple more, would you, please, and I won't report the obvious health violation keeping those meatballs out so long. Awesome meatballs, by the way. Remind me of my mom's." He cocked his head over toward Evan. "I believe the gentleman requested a couple of doubles."

Jeff took a beat, nodded, and then turned to get fresh glasses and ice.

Evan lowered his voice, leaned into Stan. "Am I slurring?"

"Nope. You're as eloquent as Cicero. How about me?"

"How about you what?"

"Am I slurring?"

"No."

"You keeping track of where we are?"

"The Traven," Paganini replied.

"Drinkwise, Stan. Drinkwise. I know where we physically are."

"Four, I think, maybe. Couple of doubles is six, and we've been here"-he checked his watch-"three hours. So I figure we're blowing point oh five, six, max, which means we're totally cool to drive and will be for the foreseeable future."

But Evan-all too familiar with the average cop's rationalization genius when drinking-was doing his own math. He was fairly certain they'd had more than four drinks already, maybe as many as six or seven, and if they had a couple of doubles on top of that, two doubles each, that would take him up to eleven generous pours. He was just about to say that maybe he'd better stick with singles to give them a better chance to metabolize off, when the bar's door opened. Glancing up at the mirror behind the bar, he put a hand on Paganini's arm and without a word stood up and turned around.

"Your mom said this was where she might look for you." From their table in the back, where they couldn't be heard by anyone else, Tara looked around the seedy bar. "Nice place. You come here often?"

"Sometimes. Nights get long, and I go crazy at home. Some nights I bowl. Or read or something. Two days ago I was at Mom and Dad's. I've got a life."

"Of course you do. I didn't mean that."

"Yeah, you do." He sat back and folded his arms. "You disapprove of me being here." He looked at her, flat affect. "You come down here to bust my chops?"

"No," she said. "No. I don't mean to do that. I came down here to…well, just to talk to you again."

Jeff showed up with two drinks and put them down at their table. "And for the lady?"

"Maybe I'll just have one of his. And some cranberry juice."

When Jeff left, Tara pulled her chair up, reached out across the table, and touched Evan's hand. "I'm really not here to criticize you, Evan. It's just that the other night you said you'd been drinking too much and were trying to slow down a little."

"Yeah, well, I guess I'm not succeeding tonight. What's that look? You don't think a couple of drinks is a good idea?"

"I didn't say that. If you need it, you need it." She pulled his hand from his glass and covered it with hers. "Look," she whispered, "I don't know even any small part of what you've been through. You're the one who said it would be better if you didn't need so much alcohol."

"That would be better. I agree." Defiantly, he picked up his glass and took a long drink. "But that doesn't seem to be what I'm doing right now, which is trying to keep things together."

"What things?"

"My job, for one. What happened with my guys in Iraq. Why I'm still alive. Anger. Guilt. You name it." He brought his eyes up, unfocused, heavy-lidded. "And all those are before we even get to you."

Jeff showed up with Tara's cranberry juice, placed it on the table in front of her, turned, and left. A silence settled. Evan again lifted his glass, then put it back down. "You want to tell me about you and Ron?"

"There isn't any me and Ron. Not anymore. How can you even ask that after…?" She swallowed. "I called him after I saw you at school on Monday. It's over." Sighing, she went on. "But then this afternoon he came by."

"Didn't take the hint, huh? How did that go?"

"I never let him in. He told me he never said I'd ripped up your letter."

Evan took that in with a solemn nod. "The guy's a congenital liar."

"Evan, look at me." Her eyes bored into his. "You're swearing to me that he said that? You didn't make that up to make him look bad? I know it's awful of me to ask, but I've got to ask you straight out. I've got to know for absolute certain."

Evan covered Tara's hand with both of his. "I swear to God," he said. "I swear on the memory of the lives of my men, I have never lied to you."

Tara let out a long, shuddering breath, as though something that had been squeezing her had suddenly let go. "He also denied what he told you I said in the hospital, about making your own bed and you could lie in it."

Evan shook his head, almost in admiration. "Old Ron was on a roll." Lifting his glass, he finished his drink, reached across, and took the second one from in front of Tara. "He said it, all right."

"He said something else today too."

"I can't wait to hear it. What? Did I kill somebody now?"

But Tara had straightened up. "God, Evan, why do you say that?"

"What?"

"That you'd killed somebody."

"I didn't. I was kidding. What?"

She started to talk and stopped herself, then started again. "Ron told me you broke into his house last weekend and left stuff that you'd somehow smuggled out of Iraq to make it look like Ron had killed this man and his wife, when in fact it was you who'd killed them."

Evan's shoulders sagged. He slumped in his chair. He lifted his drink and put himself on the outside of it in one gulp.

"Evan?"

"That fucker. That motherfucker."

She went on. "He said you'd brought over hand grenades and guns to his place that you'd smuggled out of Iraq. And planted incriminating pictures on his computer."

Evan's body molded itself back into his hard chair. He spoke slowly, with great caution lest his thick tongue betray him. "This guy who got killed, Khalil. He was Iraqi. Think about it. Think about Ron's real job over here…"

"What do you mean? Ron's a recruiter mostly. He's…"

"No, listen. He's a mercenary mostly. Those were his weapons, his grenades, his pictures."

Tara sat back and crossed her arms. "You mean you do know about this? How could you know about this? Or about Ron?"

He just looked at her, opened his mouth, closed it again.

She came forward now. "Are you telling me he wasn't lying about you breaking into his house? Did you do that, Evan? Tell me you didn't do that."

"No, I…" Evan shook his head, hard, trying to clear away the fog of alcohol. "I mean, okay, I went in."

"You broke into Ron's house? And did what?"

"Nothing. I didn't do anything. No," he said, "that's not true. I got on his computer and got pictures of this guy's house before it burned down."

"Why did you do that?"

"'Cause Ron's a murderer, Tara. He killed this guy and this was the evidence…"

"So what did you do with it?"

"Mailed it to somebody."

"The FBI, you mean?" She hit the table with her palm. "Did you send your diskette to the FBI, Evan? Because Ron had the FBI over at his house today, and he told them you'd planted all that stuff there. And now you tell me you were actually inside, so they'll find your hair or fingerprints or something, don't you see that? He's trying to have you framed for this." She ran both of her hands through her hair, over her scalp, down to her neck. "God, God, God, how can this be happening? They may be at your apartment right now, wanting to talk to you, do you realize that? And then what are you going to do? What are you going to tell them?"

He stared blankly at her for a long minute, then brought his hand up and chewed at the knuckle of his index finger. "Enough of this shit." His words starting to slur.

"Evan." She gripped at his hands. "He's already got the FBI in on it, don't you understand? It's already happening."

"Can't be. I've got to stop him."

"No. Don't you do anything. Get a lawyer or talk to one of your bosses. Maybe they can deliver a message, get something through to Ron. But you stay out of it personally. Ron's dangerous, Evan. And he's out to get you. You've got to be smart. Get sober and get a plan."

Evan slammed a heavy hand on the table. "What do you mean, get sober? Is that what everything's about, whether I'm sober or not? I'm sober right now, enough for fucking Ron Nolan."

"Evan," she pleaded, "you're not. Listen to yourself. You don't swear when you're sober. You don't slur when you're sober." She stood up, reached out and touched his arm. "Look, why don't you come home now with me. I could drive us."

"And then what?" Evan's thick voice trembled with rage. "And then the FBI finds me there? Or at work tomorrow? What do I do then?"

"Come home with me. We can talk about it and work something out." She let her arm fall along his sleeve and took his hand. "Come on. Really."

"No!" He pulled his hand from hers, turned away. His shoulders rose and fell and then he turned back to her. "I am not fucking dealing with him anymore! This has got to end. It can't go on."

"You're right, but it can't end tonight, Evan."

"Yes, it damn well can."

Tara kept her voice low, conciliatory, restrained. "Evan, come on. There's no way you can do anything the way you are now, so don't be crazy. You're just really mad-"

"Way more than that, Tara. I'm going to kill the son of a bitch."

"Shh, shh, shh." She moved up and put her fingers to his lips. "Don't talk like that. That's just crazy drink talk. Let's just the two of us get out of here and-"

"Hey!" Taking her hand down, roughly, away from his mouth. "Listen to me!" Low and deadly earnest. "It's got to stop! It can't go on! It's not about fucking drinking. Are you hearing me? It's about honor. Who I am. What he's done to us! Don't you see that?"

"Yes, I do see that. You're right. You're completely right. But this isn't the time to fix all that." She moved in close and stood straight before him, arms at her side. "Please, Evan. I'm going to ask you one more time. Please come home with me. Whatever it is, we'll work it out together. I promise."

But the glaze in his eyes was all that answered her. Standing, weaving slightly, he gripped the back of his chair. "Enough's enough," he said.

She looked him in the face one last time. "I'm begging you," she said. "Please."

If he heard her at all, he didn't show it. He stared blankly ahead at her, shaking his head, shaking his head. Then he started walking toward the door.

"Evan, please," she called after him. "Wait."

He stopped, and for a second she thought that she'd convinced him. He turned back to her. "Leave me alone," he said. "I know what I've got to do and I'm gonna do it."

And then he turned and again started walking unsteadily toward the door.