Then She Vanished

Fourteen

Inside was dark at first, even with the rush of sunlight following through the open door behind me. I closed it on a living room, indeterminately furnished, and a man sitting at one end of a short-legged, turquoise mid-century modern sofa.

“Please take the chair in front of me,” he said.

“Thank you.” I pulled the folding chair away from a wide, low coffee table and sat.

In the growing light I looked directly at Harris Broadman. Face shaded by a plain white ball cap, bill tugged down low. Aviator sunglasses. A crisp white dress shirt buttoned at the collar and cuffs. White pants, white canvas slip-ons, white socks. White tufts of hair below the cap.

“I’m sorry I have nothing to offer you,” he said.

“You’ve already been generous,” I said.

“Delete all pity.”

The room materialized around me: one wall of bookshelves neatly stocked, a TV in one corner facing a recliner, identically adjusted blinds on windows looking over the parking lot and pool, framed photographs on the walls.

“How is Dalton?” he asked. As through the intercom, his voice was calm and soft, as if coming from a longer distance than this.

“He’s running for reelection against some big money. More than he’s got to spend, anyway. He’s working hard, anxious.”

“He was a worrier,” said Harris.

“He tries not to let it show,” I said.

Harris seemed to think about this. His expression was impossible to read behind the dark sunglasses and the steep bill of the ball cap. In the shuttered half-light the flesh coiled and rose on his cheeks, records of fire and surgeries. Incomplete nose and lips, like features that had never matured.

I had no idea.

“I haven’t talked with Dalton since the war,” said Harris. “But how exactly can I help?”

I told him about Natalie Strait’s disappearance, the sheriffs recovering her car.

“He’s hired you to find her?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you are a licensed private investigator?”

I nodded.

“Do you suspect Dalton is responsible?”

“Should I?”

“I’m not qualified to say. I know little of Dalton except what happened sixteen years ago in Iraq. I know nothing of his wife except what you’ve told me. I can’t help but think you’ve wasted your time coming all the way out here.”

“I want to know how he behaved that day. When your Humvee hit the IED. That may tell me more about Dalton Strait than he’s told me himself. More than his campaign flyers and billboards on I-15.”

A long, air-conditioned pause. I could tell that Broadman was considering my request.

“I was in Fallujah, too, when that happened,” I said. “On foot patrol in the Jolan. House-to-house three-stacks. I think you were just east, in East Manhattan.”

“Do you think about it a lot?” he asked.

“Sure. But now, sometimes, a few days will go by…”

Broadman issued a soft grunt that I interpreted as a very dry chuckle.

“I think about it a lot, too,” he said. “Every day. I admire people like you, who can forget. Or almost forget. Do you use alcohol or drugs?”

“I drink. Only occasionally to excess.”

“I drank rivers of vodka and ate pills by the handful. Then one night an overdose, touch and go in the hospital for a few days. But the skies cleared. A terrific doctor. She got me through. I haven’t touched any kind of painkiller in five years. Except aspirin when my face heats up.”

“I admire that.”

“Delete the pity, Mr. Ford,” said Harris in his soft, slow voice. “I asked you once.”

I could have explained I meant no pity at all in my admiration but that would have been a small truth within a larger lie: I did pity him and the world pitied him. No way to avoid it. But why should Harris endure it? Why shouldn’t he live in a remote desert motel, unavailable and hidden?

“We had a run to make to Volturno,” he said. “Uday’s and Qusay’s old palace.”

“I remember it.”

“We were actually on a humanitarian mission that day,” said Harris. I heard the calm in his voice, its controlled emotion. “We had a transport truck full of food and medical supplies for the citizens we thought were friendlies. We were ordered to leave the supplies. None of the Iraqis would show up when we were there. Not even children. The imams would have them arrested or worse. You remember the saying: ‘You deal with Americans, you die.’”

“I certainly do.”

“Dalton and I were part of security. Terrible road. Insurgents thick in Fallujah by then — twenty-four different groups considered ‘hard core.’ And of course even Saddam’s enemies were starting to hate us. We’d been making lightning raids every day and there was always collateral damage, or so the Iraqis claimed.

“We had no trouble on the way in. We sat in that Humvee like a couple of nervous rats while the rations and first aid kits were loaded out. Dalton was always a little above things. Confident that he wasn’t born to die or get blown up in this dirty little war. Beneath his calling. Looking back on it now, I think he was really, really afraid. I know I was. Our vehicle had just been up-armored with an add-on kit and some improvised stuff. Hillbilly armor. Which made it more prone to roll over. At any speed, that Humvee was a rollover waiting to happen.”

Broadman stood and walked into the kitchen. I heard a refrigerator open and close. He was a slender man of average height. He moved slowly, the same way he spoke, with a hint of the spectral in the sunglasses, the tufts of white hair, the white cap, shirt, pants, and shoes. He carried himself with heavy deliberation, like a man much older than he was. Or, like a warrior wounded once and forever.

He came back, set a bottled water on the table in front of me, then sat again and twisted open one for himself. He picked up a remote from the sofa and pointed it to the front window. The blinds pivoted open slightly, allowing in more light.

“Pretty simple, really,” he said. “They unloaded the boxes and we started back. We were point this time, not the rear guard. It’s all about your eyes. You’re looking for those roadside bombs hidden in anything that looks harmless and common — a ruined tire, a dead dog, a pile of trash, a blown-out vehicle that’s not familiar. Anything not there before. The insurgent bomb makers were crafty. As you know, the bombs that worry you most are the ones you never see, the ones set off by cell phone, and that’s what we hit. One of the big boys. Made by Rocket Man himself. You remember him?”

“Big news when we got him.”

“We caught him at home, with a bomb schematic up on his computer screen. Anyway, they’d dug in the bomb after we’d passed through, dodging the patrols and the helos and the surveillance drones in broad daylight. Somehow. I used to think their Allah was a better god than ours, the way they could get away with things like that.

“The next thing the world blew up and I was upside-down. I saw the road through the windshield and I smelled the gas. Dalton had been blown out of the vehicle. His door was gone — armor and metal blown off at the hinges. A blessing, because the Humvee doors liked to lock up in a blast, trap you inside to be cooked. I couldn’t get my restraint off. It was stuck and I had one shoulder dislocated and the other wrist fractured. They would not answer my will. I struggled in place, felt the gas on my legs. Prayed and screamed. The world went whump and the Humvee shivered, then Dalton was back inside but he couldn’t get the damned strap off, either, because the latch had melted. He started sawing away at the restraint with his utility knife. The vehicle was fully engaged. Fire roaring around me. Like a pyre. Dalton kept crawling back outside for breath, then back in to help me. His hair was scorched wiry black. I remember that. Finally he just collapsed my bad shoulder all the way and pulled me outside into the dirt. I rolled around to put the flames out. Rolled over and dug my face into that filthy sand. I heard the sniper fire but I couldn’t get my legs under me. Thought my nerves might have been ruined. Dalton ran to some K-rails for cover. I saw him when I was on my back. I was twisting like a dog to put that fire out, and he was upside-down in my vision, running for the K-rails to safety. I felt abandoned. I knew it was just a matter of time until the snipers shot me or I burned up.”

I imagined big, confident, above-it-all Dalton Strait proned out behind the big concrete barriers most people call K-rails. He’d gotten Harris out of the burning vehicle but no farther. Then barreled perilously through the sniper fire to safety. Did that make him half a hero and half a coward?

“We got air support and the snipers were blown to dust,” said Broadman. “The convoy circled us, got Dalton and me into one of the transport trucks and away we went. The pain was out of this world. It changed my life. I remember the corpsman giving me a shot of morphine and he couldn’t figure out why I was still awake and wailing. He hit me with another pen and the next thing I knew I was in Germany.”

When he reached for his water, I saw Broadman’s cabled face and neck caught in a faint slat of sunlight.

“How did the pain change your life?”

“It made me realize you can crave your life and hate it at the same time. It was the beginning of my idea that character is not fate. The proof of that idea came later, when Dalton received the Silver Star for saving my life.”

“Did you oppose it?”

“I wanted him to get it. I was learning to embrace the life he’d given me while detesting the man I’d been changed into. This…” He set the water bottle on the coffee table and opened his empty hands as if presenting himself to me for inspection.

I realized in that moment that Dalton hated himself.

“Dalton could have been anyone,” said Harris. “The least of my problems was who pulled me from the fire, and if he could have done better. Could I do better? I doubt it. A burning man under fire cannot always defeat a military-grade body restraint that’s been soldered shut by an explosion.”

“So your fate was not your character? And Dalton’s fate was not his?”

“Far from it. That is the brutal truth of life. Clearly exposed by war.”

I thought of Dalton’s eventual fate in Fallujah, the IED that blew his leg off just days after his act of “heroism.” I recalled Jim Young’s assessment of Dalton’s later patrol behavior “went all the way to risky.” I wondered if that was purposeful: atonement. What was Dalton’s true character? Was it pulling Broadman from the Humvee, or abandoning Broadman in order to preserve his own life, or recklessly leading himself into the hidden bomb that took half his leg?

“What do you know about the missing wife?” Broadman asked.

“They were high school sweethearts,” I said. “Married after graduation. Two sons. She’s been gone since last Tuesday.”

I told him about Natalie Strait’s breakdown fourteen months ago, her gambling and spending enthusiasms, and I suggested that the Strait finances were possibly under strain. He used the remote on the blinds again, this time to close them tighter. I wondered at the agony of living with burned eyes in a bright desert. And more to the point, why Broadman had settled here.

“Do you suspect another psychological break?” he asked.

“I suspect abduction.”

“Quite different from a runaway wife on a bender.”

“Quite different.”

“I’ve donated to Dalton’s campaigns over the years,” he said. “Modestly. He doesn’t stand for my politics, but he’s a brother and he saved some of my life.”

“But no contact with him, since Fallujah?”

“None. Some memories you don’t want to see, face-to-face.” Again, his dry chuckle.

“What are your politics, Mr. Broadman?”

“I have none,” said Harris. “It’s liberating. It frees one up to begin at the beginning.”

“The beginning of what?”

“All things.”

Another moment of air-conditioned quiet. Broadman sat still, hands on his knees, a white apparition with a voice.

Then he slowly reached up and took the sunglasses off. Dark brown eyes in a face that looked like a heated thing, still melting.

“What did you bring home from the war, Mr. Ford?”

“I left as much as I could over there.”

“But something always follows you back. It doesn’t have to be a ruined face or a blown-off leg.”

I nodded. And remembered the Jolan. Close and hot and just beginning to boil with hate. Door-to-door searches. All of us eager to find the Blackwater killers, and all of Fallujah turning against us, like a tide rising by the hour. Outside a small home, one of thousands, the smell of lamb and coriander and cumin. Interior dark, always dark. Sudden movement, face-close fire, muzzle flash, air thick with lead and gunpowder and screams. Brennan down. Avalos down in the doorway. By the time I got back to him, Avalos was still where he had fallen, floating in blood. It seemed to take us forever to shoot those insurgents. Forever to drag Avalos back inside, out of sniper sight. Forever to get his helmet off and pack the hole in his face with a roll of QuikClot, twelve feet of medicated gauze and even that couldn’t fill the gushing space. He was staring at me with his one good eye when that eye fogged over and his body went still.

“I lost Avalos,” I said. “A good man. We entered a dwelling and we met heavy fire.”

“You lost him?”

“He was lost,” I said. “And I was there. I replay those minutes sometimes. Fairly often.”

“You replay it, looking for what you did wrong,” said Broadman.

“Correct.”

“If you don’t find anything at first, you keep trying until you do. And when you find it, you play it again and again and again. The smallest thing. Something new, or something invented?”

“That’s the method,” I said.

“You torture yourself with a changeable truth.”

I took a deep breath, shifted in my chair. “I would like there to be an answer. As to whether or not I am at fault.”

“And to why it took you so long to do things.”

“Yes,” I said. I could feel my heart beating against my shirt. “Was I slowed down by fear? Was I afraid of what I would find? I heard that round hit him. It’s an unmistakable sound. As you know. Even in all that chaos I heard it and in the periphery of my vision I saw him fall. I was that close to him.”

I listened to the air conditioner hum in the half-light. Saw through the blinds the fractured images of children jumping into the swimming pool.

“Which leads you to the curse of the living,” said Broadman.

“Why him and not me?”

“It should be embossed on our motto, right beside Semper Fi.”

“Sometimes I thank Avalos,” I said. “Sometimes, he won’t accept.”

“In the dreams and nightmares.”

“Sure. Less now.”

“We’re the lucky ones,” said Broadman. “We have managed to move forward. Of course, we can’t call ourselves lucky. That leads us back to the curse.”

I offered him a somewhat formal nod.

“Please give my best wishes to Dalton,” he said. “Tell him I bear no grudge for what he did. Or didn’t do.”

I sat in a bar called the Quetzal, just off of Christmas Circle in town. Ordered a double bourbon and knew there could easily be more. Drink up, get a room, fly home in the morning. I looked at that drink for a good long while before taking the first sip. When I took it, the bourbon was all there for me: strength, confidence, luck. There was a mirror behind the bar that aimed my face back. I raised the glass and sipped again. The TV volume was off as the news stars crowed from their red, white, and blue sets. I was glad for the silence.

Especially glad when Dalton’s smiling image appeared beside that of head-scarfed Ammna Safar, then video of Dalton waving a fistful of papers at a group of supporters in what looked like a pizza parlor. The caption strip: “Campaigning California Assemblyman Dalton Strait of San Diego says his opponent Ammna Safar ‘almost certainly’ has blood relatives among Islamic State fighters in Syria, and is unfit to represent his 82nd district… Safar, who was born in the United States, denies the claim and has promised to file suit against Strait for defamation and slander…”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted Dalton to be lying or telling the truth. Either way, after my talk with Harris Broadman, what could I possibly make of Dalton Strait?

As the bourbon spread through me, things began to expand. I smelled the wood smoke again from that day, the lamb and the cumin. I thought of Dalton and Broadman and Avalos, and the net of the war that had snagged us all. And the millions more. The Five. I tried hard to put us in perspective, cast us all as blips of light in the universe. But I couldn’t. We’re forced to see ourselves as the center of life. Because we have only one self with which to experience it. Just me. Just once. Just now.

I glanced back up into the reflected snout of Roland Ford, PI, and thought, One foot in front of the other, man. You’re okay. You’re okay.

I sat almost an hour. I’m always surprised how far a mind can wander and find its way back, how many memories can pass through one slim hour of life. Harris Broadman left me a text saying he’d call if he thought of anything that might help me.

I left the rest of the bourbon in the glass. The bartender gave me a look and I shook my head, dug out the wallet, left a nice tip.

Halfway to Borrego Valley Airport I got a phone picture and a brief message from FBI Special Agent Mike Lark:

I pulled onto the road shoulder. My rental car shivered in the wind and a dirt devil spun its way through a meadow of past-their-prime wildflowers. The security video image was better than the earlier post office picture of the Fallbrook bomber. But not much. An average-build, dark-haired woman, hair loose and large Jackie O sunglasses. A plaid flannel shirt. The same in-a-hurry clench of jaw. Same woman. I’d bet on it.

I stared at her, letting the details sink in. Ten seconds later the picture and Lark’s message vanished in a pixelated explosion.