The Eye of Shiva

CHAPTER 8

It was the evening of the same day. Nick sat with Ronnie and Lamont at a table in The Point, a bar popular with current and former members of America's Special Forces. For a while the three of them had been barred from the premises, after a wild brawl provoked by a patron who'd taken exception to a song they were singing. Since then, all had been forgiven. The joint had a jukebox loaded with rock 'n roll. Sweet Home, Alabama played in the background.

Ronnie had a glass of club soda with a lime in front of him. Lamont and Nick were drinking beer. Lamont had lost weight in the hospital. The corded muscles that lined his wiry frame seemed more prominent than usual. His coffee colored skin was pale from being indoors. The scar he'd picked up in Iraq stood out like a thin, pink snake running across his forehead and the bridge of his nose. But the blue eyes he'd inherited from his Ethiopian forebears had lost none of their intensity.

It was early and the place wasn't crowded. It made conversation easy.

"How you feeling, Lamont?" Ronnie asked.

"Better with this beer."

The last few years had been rough on Lamont. He'd been badly wounded in Jordan. He'd almost died in Cuba. Now he was ready to come back and Nick was glad to have him. But he could tell Lamont had something to say.

"Better spit it out, Shadow," Nick said. Lamont's mother had named him for Lamont Cranston, The Shadow of radio fame. His Navy SEAL teammates had dropped the nickname on him. It was a natural.

"What do you mean?"

"Come on," Ronnie said. "You've been sitting there like you're hatching an egg, all quiet."

Lamont grinned at him. "Hey, I'm a quiet guy, you know that."

"Not when you've got a beer in front of you," Nick said. "Not usually."

Lamont fooled with his beer bottle, making rings of condensation on the table top.

"I've been thinking," he said.

"That's dangerous for someone like you," Ronnie said. "You ought to be careful about that."

"At least I can think, which is more than I can say for some people I know."

Nick signaled the waitress for another round. "So, what have you been thinking about?"

"I had a lot of time in the hospital to do nothing but think."

"And?"

"And I think it's about time for me to hang it up."

Nick and Ronnie looked at each other.

"Hang it up?" Nick said. "What would you do?"

"There's a dive shop for sale down in Florida. I called the real estate agent. It'd be perfect, just what I'd always dreamed of. I'd have to upgrade some of the gear but the price is right. I've got enough money saved up to take care of the down payment and I can borrow the rest."

The waitress came and set a new round of drinks on the table.

"You sound like your mind is pretty well made up," Nick said.

"Yeah, I think it is."

"There you go with that thinking stuff again," Ronnie said. He was joking but Nick could see he wasn't happy about what Lamont had said.

I should've seen this coming, Nick thought. Lamont had taken a lot of hits in the past two years. It would be enough to make anyone think about getting out. Hell, he had his own thoughts about getting out, and he hadn't been hurt as bad as Lamont. Sooner or later, everyone got out. The only difference was whether you went out on two feet or in a box with a flag over it, if there was enough of you left to put in a box.

"When were you planning on leaving?" Nick asked.

"It'll take time to replace me," Lamont said. "I don't want to leave the team short."

Nick knew that if Lamont had made up his mind to go, nothing he could say would change it.

"You'll stay until we find someone to take your place?" Nick said.

"Yeah. Until the end of the year, anyway. Harker ought to find someone by then. Then I'm gone."

"Ah, shit," Ronnie said. "Who's going to jump in the water if you're not around?"

Because of Lamont's time with the SEALS, anything involving boats and water on missions had fallen to him.

"Didn't they teach you Jarheads to swim in Recon? Course, that's kind of like the YMCA. I guess you're finally going to have to learn how," Lamont said.

"Marines are smart enough to stay out of the water. Fish crap in it." Ronnie sipped his club soda.

Lamont changed the subject. "Nick, how's it going between you and Selena? When's the wedding?"

"You're asking me? How would I know?"

"Oh, oh. Like that, is it?"

"I never know where I stand with her," Nick said. He told them about what had happened earlier at the jewelry store. "I wanted to surprise her. I thought she'd be pleased."

"You surprised her all right," Ronnie said. "You should've just bought the ring and given it to her without taking her into the store."

"What if she didn't like it?'

"What if she didn't? Then you could just go back to the store with her and have her pick a ring she liked."

"But that's why I went in there with her in the first place."

"You know what your problem is?" Lamont said.

Nick was beginning to get annoyed, thinking about what had happened with Selena.

"No, I don't know what my problem is. Why don't you enlighten me?"

"The problem is you're thinking like a guy instead of like Selena. A guy says to himself, self, I think I'll go in this store with my honey and buy a nice diamond ring. It's a jewelry store, right? Got to be a lot of rings in there. Shouldn't take long."

"So? What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, so far. Where it went wrong was when you picked the first one you saw and said, 'let's get that one.'"

"It was a nice ring."

"That's got nothing to do with it," Lamont said. "That's how a guy shops. We go to a store, we see something that works and we buy it. We don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Women don't do it that way."

Ronnie was nodding his head in agreement.

"What was I supposed to do?"

"You were supposed to let her look at rings until she decided she wanted to think about it some more."

"But what's there to think about?" Nick asked. "There must've been a hundred rings in that damn store. Any one of them would of worked."

Lamont turned to Ronnie. "See what I mean?"

"Hopeless," Ronnie said. He turned to Nick. "That's not what Selena wants."

"You, too? Okay, Einstein, what does she want?"

"She wants it to be special when she chooses a ring." It was Lamont's turn to nod his head. Ronnie continued. "You made it seem like buying a pair of socks."

Nick looked at his two friends and their serious expressions.

"I think you're wrong. I'm picking up on second thoughts about getting married."

"Hers or yours?" Lamont said.