Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (23 page)

    The Professor crawled past wire fence, along the edge of the road. Plough told Mal to ask him where his friends were now, his friends who blew up the American GI. He said if The Professor would tell about his friends, he could have his crutches and his Johnnie back.

    The prisoner said he didn't know anything about the IED. He said he ran because other men were running and soldiers were shooting. He said he was a teacher of literature, that he had a little girl. He said he had taken his twelve-year-old to Disneyland Paris once.

    "He's fucking with us," Plough said. "What's a professor of literature doing out at 2:00 a.m. in the worst part of town? Your queer fuck Bin-Laden friends blew the face right off an American GI, a good man, a man with a pregnant wife back home. Where do your friends - Mal, make him understand he's going to tell us where his friends are hiding. Let him know it would be better to tell us now, before we get where we're going. Let him know this is the easy part of his day. CI wants this motherfucker good and soft before we get him there."

    Mal nodded, her ears buzzing. She told The Professor he didn't have a daughter, because he was a known homosexual. She asked him if he liked the barrel of her gun in his ass, if it excited him. She said, "Where is the house of your partners who make the dogs into bombs? Where is your homosexual friends go after murdering Americans with their trick dogs? Tell me if you don't want the gun in the hole of your ass."

    "I swear by the life of my little girl I don't know who those other men were. Please. My child is named Alaya. She is ten years old. There was a picture of her in my pants. Where are my pants? I will show you."

    She stepped on his hand, and felt the bones compress unnaturally under her heel. He shrieked.

    "Tell," she said. "Tell."

    "I can't."

    A steely clashing sound caught Mal's attention. Carmody had dropped the crutches. He looked green, and his hands were hooked into claws, raised almost-but-not-quite to cover his ears.

    "You okay?" she asked.

    "He's lying," Carmody said. Carmody's Arab was not as good as hers, but not bad. "He said his daughter was twelve the first time."

    She stared at Carmody and he stared back, and while they were looking at each other, there came a high, keening whistle, like air being let out of some giant balloon… a sound that made Mal's racy blood feel as if it were fizzing with oxygen, made her feel carbonated inside.

    She flipped her M4 around to hold it by the barrel in both hands, and when the mortar struck - out beyond the perimeter, but still hitting hard enough to cause the earth to shake underfoot - she drove the butt of the gun straight down into The Professor's broken leg, clubbing at it as if she were trying to drive a stake into the ground.

    Over the shattering thunder of the exploding mortar, not even Mal could hear him screaming.

* * *

    Mal pushed herself hard on her Friday morning run, out in the woods, driving herself up Hatchet Hill, reaching ground so steep she was really climbing, not running. She kept going, until she was short of breath and the sky seemed to spin, as if it were the roof of a carousel.

    When she finally paused, she felt faint. The wind breathed in her face, chilling her sweat, a curiously pleasant sensation. Even the feeling of light-headedness, of being close to exhaustion and collapse, was somehow satisfying to her.

    The army had her for four years before Mal left to become a part of the reserves. On her second day of basic training, she had done push-ups until she was sick, then was so weak she collapsed in it. She wept in front of others, something she could now hardly bear to remember.

    Eventually, she learned to like the feeling that came right before collapse: the way the sky got big, and sounds grew far away and tinny, and all the colours seemed to sharpen to an hallucinatory brightness. There was an intensity of sensation, when you were on the edge of what you could handle, when you were physically tested and made to fight for each breath, that was somehow exhilarating.

    At the top of the hill, Mal slipped the stainless steel canteen out of her ruck, her father's old camping canteen, and filled her mouth with ice water. The canteen flashed, a silver mirror in the late morning sun. She poured water into her face, wiped her eyes with the hem of her T-Shirt, put the canteen away, and ran on, ran for home.

    She let herself in through the front door, didn't notice the envelope until she stepped on it and heard the crunch of paper underfoot. She stared down at it, her mind blank for one dangerous moment, trying to think who would've come up to the house to slide a bill under the door when they could just leave it in the mailbox. But it wasn't a bill and she knew it.

    Mal was framed in the door, the outline of a soldier painted into a neat rectangle, like the human silhouette targets they shot at on the range. She made no sudden moves, however. If someone meant to shoot her, they would have done it - there had been plenty of time -and if she was being watched, Mal wanted to show she wasn't afraid.

    She crouched, picked up the envelope. The flap was not sealed. She tapped out the sheet of paper inside and unfolded it. Another thumbprint, this one a fat black oval, like a flattened spoon. There was no fishhook shaped scar on this thumb. This was a different thumb entirely. In some ways, that was more unsettling to her than anything.

    No - the most unsettling thing was that this time he had slipped his message under her door, while last time he had left it a hundred yards down the road, in the mailbox. It was maybe his way of saying he could get as close to her as he wanted.

    Mal thought police, but discarded the idea. She had been a cop herself, in the army, knew how cops thought. Leaving a couple thumbprints on unsigned sheets of paper wasn't a crime. It was maybe a prank, and you couldn't waste manpower investigating a prank. She felt now, as she had when she saw the first thumbprint, that these messages were not the perverse joke of some local snotnose, but a malicious promise, a warning to be on guard. But it was an irrational feeling, unsupported by any evidence. It was soldier knowledge, not cop knowledge.

    Besides, when you called the cops, you never knew what you were going to get. There were cops like her out there. People like that you didn't want getting too interested in you.

    She balled up the thumbprint, took it onto the porch. Mal cast her gaze around, scanning the bare trees, the straw-coloured weeds at the edge of the woods. She stood there for close to a minute. Even the trees were perfectly still, no wind to tease their branches into motion, as if the whole world were in a state of suspension, waiting to see what would happen next, only nothing happened next.

    She left the balled up paper on the porch railing, went back inside, and got the M4 from the closet. Mal sat on the bedroom floor, assembling and disassembling it, three times, twelve seconds each time. Then she set the parts back in the case with the bayonet and slid it under her father's bed.

    Two hours later, Mal ducked down behind the bar at the Milky Way to rack clean glasses. They were fresh from the dishwasher and so hot they burned her fingertips. When she stood up with the empty tray, Glen Kardon was on the other side of the counter, staring at her with red-rimmed, watering eyes. He looked in a kind of stupor, his face puffy, his comb-over dishevelled, as if he had just stumbled out of bed.

    "I need to talk to you about something," he said. "I was trying to think if there was some way I could get my wedding ring back. Any way at all."

    All the blood seemed to rush from Mal's brain, as if she had stood up too quickly. She lost some of the feeling in her hands, too, and for a moment her palms were overcome with a cool, almost painful tingling.

    She wondered why he hadn't arrived with cops, if he meant to give her some kind of chance to settle the matter without the involvement of the police. She wanted to say something to him, but there were no words for this. She could not remember the last time she had felt so helpless, had been caught so exposed, in such indefensible terrain.

    Glen went on: "My wife spent the morning crying about it. I heard her in the bedroom, but when I tried to go in and talk to her, the door was locked. She wouldn't let me in. She tried to play it off like she was all right, talking to me through the door. She told me to go to work, don't worry. It was her father's wedding ring, you know. He died three months before we got married. I guess that sounds a little, what do you call it, Oedipal. Like in marrying me she was marrying daddy. Oedipal isn't right, but you know what I'm saying. She loved that old man."

    Mal nodded.

    "If they only took the money, I'm not sure I even would've told Helen. Not after I got so drunk. I drink too much. Helen wrote me a note, a few months ago, about how much I've been drinking. She wanted to know if it was because I was unhappy with her. It would be easier if she was the kind of woman who'd just scream at me. But I got drunk like that, and the wedding ring she gave me that used to belong to her daddy is gone, and all she did was hug me and say thank God they didn't hurt me."

    Mal said, "I'm sorry." She was about to say she would give it all back, ring and money both, and go with him to the police if he wanted - then caught herself. He had said "they": "if they only took the money" and "they didn't hurt me." Not "you."

    Glen reached inside his coat and took out a white business envelope, stuffed fat. "I been sick to my stomach all day at work, thinking about it. Then I thought I could put up a note here in the bar. You know, like one of these fliers you see for a lost dog. Only for my lost ring. The guys who robbed me must be customers here. What else would they have been doing down in that lot, that hour of the night? So next time they're in, they'll see my note."

    She stared. It took a few moments for what he had said to register. When it did - when she understood he had no idea she was guilty of anything - she was surprised to feel an odd twinge of something like disappointment.

    "Electra," she said.

    "Huh?"

    "A love thing between father and daughter," Mal said. "Is an Electra complex. What's in the envelope?"

    He blinked. Now he was the one who needed some processing time. Hardly anyone knew or remembered that Mal had been to college, on Uncle Sam's dime. She had learned Arabic there, and psychology too, although in the end she had wound up back here behind the bar of the Milky Way without a degree. The plan had been to collect her last few credits after she got back from Iraq, but sometime during her tour she had ceased to give a fuck about the plan.

    At last Glen came mentally unstuck and replied: "Money. Five hundred dollars. I want you to hold onto it for me."

    "Explain."

    "I was thinking what to say in my note. I figure I should offer a cash reward for the ring. But whoever stole the ring isn't ever going to come up to me and admit it. Even if I promise not to prosecute, they wouldn't believe me. So I figured out what I need is a middleman. This is where you come in. So the note would say, bring Mallory Grennan the ring, and she'll give you the reward money, no questions asked. It'll say they can trust you not to tell me or the police who they are. People know you, I think most folks around here will believe that." He pushed the envelope at her.

    "Forget it, Glen. No one is bringing that ring back."

    "Let's see. Maybe they were drunk, too, when they took it. Maybe they feel remorse."

    She laughed.

    He grinned, awkwardly. His ears were pink. "It's possible."

    She looked at him a moment longer, then put the envelope under the counter. "Okay. Let's write your note. I can copy it on the fax machine. We'll stick it up around the bar, and after a week, when no one brings you your ring, I'll give you your money back and a beer on the house."

    "Maybe just a ginger ale," Glen said.

    Glen had to go, but Mal promised she'd hang a few flyers in the parking lot. She had just finished taping them up to the street lamps when she spotted a sheet of paper, folded into thirds and stuck under the windshield wiper of her father's car.

    The thumbprint on this one was delicate and slender, an almost perfect oval, feminine in some way, while the first two had been squarish and blunt. Three thumbs, each of them different from the others.

    She pitched it at a wire garbage can attached to a telephone pole, hit the three-pointer, got out of there.

* * *

    The 82nd had finally arrived at Abu Ghraib, to provide force protection, and to try and nail the fuckers who were mortaring the prison every night. Early in the fall, they began conducting raids in the town around the prison. The first week of operations, they had so many patrols out, and so many raids going, they needed back-up, so General Karpinski assigned squads of MPs to accompany them. Corporal Plough put in for the job, and when he was accepted, told Mal and Carmody they were coming with him.

    Mal was glad. She wanted away from the prison, the dark corridors of 1A and 1B, with their smell of old wet rock, urine, flopsweat. She wanted away from the tent cities that held the general prison population, the crowds pressed against the chain-links, who pleaded with her as she walked along the perimeter, black flies crawling on their faces. She wanted to be in a Hummer with open sides, night air rushing in over her. Destination: any-fucking-where else on the planet.