Do They Know I'm Running? (35 page)

Happy turned back to Lourdes. “Once this is done, Snell won’t harm you or your daughters. You have my word.”

OVER THE NEXT TWO HOURS HE HAD HER DRAW OUT THE FLOOR PLAN
for the house, upstairs, ground floor, basement. During the day, Snell worked as a claims adjuster out in the east county, an hour’s drive away most days, given traffic. Lourdes had only seen him
at the house once since he’d come back from Iraq. She didn’t know what time he got home in the evening, didn’t know where any guns might be other than that one locked room in the cellar. She’d never come across any in the closets, under the bed; there were no display cases upstairs. Snell had a safe down in the basement as well but Veronica, the one time she’d shown the place to Lourdes, had admitted she didn’t know the combination.

The couple had two children, but they’d be at school till four or so—a boy of thirteen named Samuel, a girl of nine named Samantha.

“Two Sams.” It was Godo. They were all in the room together now, watching her chart out the house. “Weird.”

“It is a strange family,” Lourdes replied.

HAPPY TOLD LOURDES TO CALL HER DAUGHTERS AND SAY THAT
one of her housecleaning clients had been in a bad wreck. The woman was in the hospital, she’d be there overnight; the husband was away, couldn’t get a flight back till tomorrow. The family needed Lourdes to stay with the kids. “They pay me,” Lourdes assured her oldest, whose name was Carla, “a lot.” Then the younger daughter, Angelica, got on the phone and Happy thought it would never end, back and forth: a kitten, the dentist, homework, a boy named Terrell. Finally he made a cutting gesture to his throat and Lourdes told her daughter she had to go.

“Your daughter’s needy,” Happy said as she flipped closed her cell.

Lourdes sank into herself. “She’s at that age.” It was decided she’d stay at the farmhouse, with Happy and Efraim trading shifts watching her. Efraim went off to fetch blankets and a kerosene lamp and one more meal. They’d do the takeover tomorrow, show up in the van, wearing coveralls from Vasco’s moving operation, get inside the house in the morning, tie up the wife and Lourdes, raid the secret room, then wait for first the kids to come home, then Snell, force him to open the safe. If they were patient, they’d be fine. Once Efraim was back, they ran through everybody’s role, rehearsing as best they could as it grew dark and even colder in the empty farmhouse: Chato
watching the front door; Puchi clearing the ground-floor rooms then guarding the back; Godo and Efraim upstairs to clear the bedrooms; Happy in the living room with Lourdes, a pistol to her head.

As they practiced their run-throughs, Godo seemed distracted, one minute almost incandescent in his focus, the next wrapped inside himself so tight he looked like he might lock up in a kind of trance. The problem wasn’t physical—the infection in his leg had settled down, he moved okay, looked strong. Happy drew him aside as he was doing a final weapon check, gestured toward the door. “Outside for a minute?”

The night was damp, a rustling roar from the walnut trees whipping around in the wind. The clouds were plump in the moonless sky. Chafing their arms against the cold, they tested their way along the gravel to where the van and pickup were parked, out of earshot from the house.

Happy lit up a smoke, needing two matches in the wind. He took one long drag, then said, “What’s wrong?”

Godo was still rubbing his arms. “Who says anything’s wrong?”

“Don’t fuck with me, not now. This is too important.”

“I know how important it is.”

“Then tell me the truth. What’s eating you?”

Godo’s breathing became slightly labored, then he coughed. “Hard to talk about.”

“That’s why it’s important to talk about it.”

“Who are you now—Dr. Happy?”

“This about Iraq?”

“What isn’t? Fuck you, by the way.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I don’t—”

“I told you my story. You think I was proud? I felt like a total chickenshit. But something’s got you by the nuts, it’s got some
power over you. Tell me about it. It’ll lose some of that power, I promise.”

A smile crept across Godo’s pitted face. “Where’d you learn that—Oprah?”

“Listen to me. You’re the one I gotta lean on, Godo. You’re the one who gets it. I can’t have you going in and out. Every second, you gotta be there.”

“I know what I gotta do.”

“It ain’t a question of what you know. It’s a question of what’s gonna get in the way at exactly the wrong time if you don’t wrestle it to the fucking ground. Now talk to me about it.”

HIS UNIT WAS NEARING THE END OF THEIR SHIFT ON FALLUJAH’S WEST
ern outskirts, a flash checkpoint, no concertina wire, no sandbags, no glow sticks, just the Humvee with the engine running for the sake of the headlights, the diesel fumes increasingly noxious as the hours passed. Dawn smeared a thickening mustard haze across the east while overhead the night sky softened from black to a gritty shade of brown. The sand beneath their feet crunched with every step.

The usual shabby low-slung houses bordered the road, while beyond them, emerging in murky silhouette, were palm and eucalyptus trees, elephant grass, a distant camel, a water buffalo. Soon the day’s first prayers would blast by loudspeaker, courtesy of the local muezzin, from the nearest minaret, same thing all across the city, mosques that during the battle served as secret armories, pillboxes, sniper hides.

It was always a toss-up, which would start first, the morning prayers or the daybreak dog barking. Everybody’d come to hate the dogs, but shooting them for sport was a no go—the locals saw it as cruelty, not pest control—so Godo held his fire as he caught sight of a slinking form maybe twenty yards behind the Hummer,
sniffing its way forward, a skeleton with a tail and a nose. The wind was brisk, the dust thick, the cold piercing; all this time in-country, he still hadn’t adjusted to the sixty-degree temperature swings on any given day.

Among themselves, the marines sometimes joked that they’d made Fallujah the safest city in Iraq—by reducing it to a pile of rocks. On the plus side, there were fewer bats. As for the ruin, it wasn’t like they’d had much choice, given the way the mujahideen had prepped the battle space, the way they’d chosen to fight. Now, with the elections over, the new year in full swing, civilians were testing their way back into the city to sort through the wreckage and recover what remained of their lives.

Military-age males—MAMs, they got called, another joke—were fingerprinted, given retina scans, issued special ID cards they had to display whenever confronted. Few vehicles were allowed inside the city limits and the ones that were got tossed inside out, nothing left to chance. It was drudgery, it was tense, it was the fucking pits. It was the shores of goddamn Tripoli.

The problem was Ramadi. Thirty miles west, it hadn’t suffered the holocaust. A loose-knit bloc of insurgent gangs ruled the souk, the mosques, the winding alleyways where things got bartered for a favor down the line or sold outright for cash. Route 10, the open road between the cities, was the biggest but by no means only ratline connecting the two locales. Every way in and out of the city had to be tamped down tight.

Meanwhile, the gradual influx of redevelopment money had brought a certain breed of carpetbagger to Al Anbar, negotiating deals on landfills and power plants and water-treatment facilities, few of which seemed to be getting built. The men with the bags of money and the big ideas had to get around, though, and they did, with their well-paid condottieri, dressed in cargo pants and flak jackets and Oakley shades, armed to the tits and charging around the country in their SUVs at ninety miles an hour, slowing for no one, running down dogs and sheep, old men and kids. Accidental
deaths alone had caused untold grief for the marines. Intelligence dried up, resistance to the simplest request became routine, defying orders became a badge of honor, especially for MAMs.

Then a team of contractors with an outfit named Harmon Stern Associates gunned down two Sunni men repairing their pickup on the road between Ramadi and Fallujah. Iraqis near the scene said the two men shot down did nothing. Tribal leaders and imams pressed for a face-to-face with the colonel, they wanted justice. They were assured the men responsible would be apprehended but promised nothing more. A BOLO—be on the lookout—went out with the names of the contractors. Every unit throwing down a checkpoint knew what to do if the men showed up on their watch.

Chavous manned the up gun on the Hummer. Godo and Benedict and Pimentel and the new guy, Bobby Salgado—Mobley’s replacement, a transfer from the Three Five—did the hassle work on the ground.

Salgado hadn’t been welcomed much, not like it was anyone’s fault. The loss of Mobley still pissed everybody off but it wasn’t just that. You knew the next guy could get lit the same way, so why bond? The buddy-up camaraderie of the invasion and the first flush of battle got countermanded by death. Goodbye only got harder if you bothered too much over hello, so everybody just gave a nod, figured the new guy knew his job. If not, he’d get told.

Turned out Salgado—a true
vato loco
, Sycamore Street Mid-nighter from Huntington Beach—had some piss up his spine. He hadn’t enjoyed the color-blind unit cohesion Godo had so far. His previous platoon had included two die-hard haters and that’s all they needed, the one to back the other up when launching off on some phobic jag of anti-Latino bullshit. They were just as outrageous to the blacks but that wasn’t Salgado’s problem. He was still hot over the constant niggling wetback pepper-belly nacho-nigger bullshit. He told Godo not to be stupid.

“These cats ain’t your friends,” he said one night over a cold MRE. “Don’t get your
cholo
ass in a bind and forget that.”

Godo pretended to give that deep thought. He wasn’t sure what to make of Salgado. Kind of guy, he thought, who might pitch himself off a roof, convinced all he wanted was a better view. “Mobley fought his black ass off for me, I watched him die. Chavous is a fucking redneck but he never failed me once. Ditto Pimentel, who’s crazy but that comes in handy sometimes. And I’d lay down my life for Gunny Benedict.”

Salgado bit open a gravy packet. “You’re a fool you think it’s gonna stay that way.”

“Maybe you should wait, give this team its due.”

Salgado licked a smear of brown gunk off his finger. “Say you’re right,
cabrón
. Don’t change the fact they be looking to deport your whole fucking family before you get home.”

“Too late.” Godo chuckled acidly. “They already snatched my cousin.” It’s the reason I’m here, he thought, but why share that?

Salgado fired up that crazed stare he was known for, like his focus was the only thing keeping the world from coming unglued. “Then you know. You fucking know. What you do over here don’t translate to shit. For real, man, ain’t no fucking brown heroes. You go home in a box they’ll kick the damn thing over into Mexico for burial.”

“I’m not Mexican.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

It was the two of them manning the forward positions that morning at the checkpoint, Gunny Benedict staggered behind. Pimentel had their six. They stopped every vehicle and demanded access cards and weapon permits, especially the bongo trucks—cutaway VW vans, a favorite of the so-called desert foxes, generally friendly paramilitaries who wore chocolate chip cammies, flak vests, balaclavas. The unit’s BOLO list included not just the names of the Harmon Stern contractors but several dozen suspected insurgents, any of whom, if encountered at the
checkpoint, were to get gagged and bagged and delivered to RCT-1 HQ.

The night had been relatively quiet, though, only a couple cases of misunderstanding, taken care of when Godo or Salgado, having their shout-and-show ignored, moved to shoot: a warning round at the deck each time, one follow-up bullet to the grill of a Mercedes sedan that refused to slow down. The driver was an old man, confused—he jabbered and wept when they dragged him out of the car, threw him down in the dust for a search. The rest of the night they threw back Rip Its and tamped foot to foot, slapping their arms and bodies trying to stay warm, chipping away at the silence between them with practice of the little Arabic they knew:
O-guf! Tera armeek
for “Stop! Or I’ll shoot;”
Interesiada
for “Get out of the car;”
Urfai edik
for “Put your hands up;”
Inshallah
for “Allah be willing;” and their personal nonoperational favorites:
kus
(“pussy”),
zip
(“penis”),
theiz
(“ass”).

Traffic started picking up about 0500 and got increasingly jammed as dawn leached across the sky. The family in the Cressida with the one working headlight reached the head of the line and Salgado stepped forward, asking the driver for documents. Godo eyed the rest of the queue, five vehicles deep, his weapon in condition one: a chambered round, bolt forward, ejection-port cover closed, safety on. He was ready to thumb down the safety at the merest hint of trouble and was in a bad mood regardless, the days on end without washing during the siege having created a case of cancer-level crotch rot, lingering for weeks now. He’d scratched himself bloody in his sleep, only making things worse, so now he was obsessively rousting himself awake at night, lurching up in his bedroll if he was lucky enough to drift off at all. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes at a stretch since he couldn’t remember when and in the semi-hallucinatory edginess that had come to characterize his state of mind, he often found himself revisiting Mobley’s death, the house they turned to smoke and ruin afterward. It wasn’t the fiery itch from his balls
to his ass crack or the war in general or the idiot command or the ungrateful locals or even the pitiless creeps they called the enemy that kept Godo so pissed off lately. It wasn’t even the nagging dead or the skeletal dogs they seemed to inhabit. It was the fact that, after weeks of shabby sleep, he couldn’t feel the center of himself anymore. He had this daydream in which he was a kite that someone had let go of, God maybe, this little jet of bright paper and balsa wood bucking around in a cold wind, just a matter of time before it came crashing down.