Danny pulled the tan uniform shirt off over her head, necktie and all. No need to unbutton the entire shirt, only the top two holes. She tossed it on the rocking chair, along with the side-stripe pants. She would iron the whole rig in the morning before she went into town, set some kind of an example for the trogs of Forest Peak. Especially her three shambolic deputies. Danny glanced in the tall boudoir mirror that had been her mother’s. Arched an eyebrow. Dark, rusty hair, strong features, and a firm womanly figure with an ass you could cut steaks off, as Harlan used to say before he rolled over that bomb in Sadr City. Yes, indeed. Hell of a woman. Then she turned her back to the mirror, fetching a come-hither look over her shoulder. She caught sight of the scars. Someday she would turn the mirror around to face the wall.
For now, a couple of pills, washed down with the watery remains of the last whiskey of the night. Second-to-last. She slopped a little more in the glass, a finger or two, or so. Did she need more ice? Kitchen a mile away, Kelley probably sulking on the couch watching some dipshit cop show on TV—because the cop show right in front of her wasn’t suitable to her tastes. Forget the ice. Knock back the shot, neat, splash it down the throat without hitting the tongue. Burn, baby, burn. Her bedroom seemed to be slipping sideways, gravity moving out of plumb. Pretty soon she could catch some sleep. Danny fell back on the bed to watch the ceiling revolve. It was her favorite show.
I thought things would change when you came back. Instead you spend your days being a cop and your nights fighting the war again, and I’m still the invisible girl. You keep that police scanner on all night, but I can hear the things you yell in your sleep. Post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t make you a bad person. But it sure makes you a crappy sister
.
A fat tear plopped down on Kelley’s notebook page. She shoved the wet out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. There was something deliciously tragic in writing a note of such finality. All those bottled-up feelings, all those things left unsaid, they could all come out now, just as long as she could keep writing. And always assuming Danny didn’t emerge from her bedroom down the hall in one of those escalating rages, starting off with the irritable trip to the fridge for more ice, then the trip to the bathroom, then the circuit around the house to turn off the lights (muttering about the price of energy measured in blood, and so on), and finally pacing up and down the length of the place, ranting and shouting about anything there was to shout about. Often as not, Kelley.
Kelley’s boyfriends (any male under the age of fifty who looked in Kelley’s direction) were a favorite subject, and how soft and spoiled her generation was, as well as anyone else that had not served in combat; Danny was also fond of ranting about how nobody knew what it was like to be a cop, how hard it was, even if it wasn’t as hard as serving in combat. Sometimes Danny would stand there in her plain cotton panties and olive drab tank top and yell about the horrible brown-gold upholstery on the couch or the awful nicotine-colored wood-print paneling on the walls. Anything that took her fancy. She’d wind down around two in the morning, or sooner if Kelley left right away to sleep on the pull-out bed at her friend Ashleen’s house.
Why was she even writing to Danny? Because it felt good to put it on paper? There was so much else to say, so many things to slap her sister in the face with. But on some level all Kelley could blame Danny for was leaving her, who had no more choice in the matter than did Kelley. There was supposed to be some military rule regarding sole guardianship that could have gotten Danny out of the three tours she did over there. But the military machine was bending all the rules to keep boots on the ground without a draft, and in any case Kelley wondered sometimes if Danny would have waived the right, simply for another chance to get out of Forest Peak for a while. Maybe Kelley would have done the same. Danny had become a parent to her little sister far too early in life, head of the household at age eighteen. Maybe she had preferred patrolling death’s door to watching over a moody kid who wouldn’t eat the local hamburgers.
And yet, despite it all, Kelley felt a tug of sympathy in her heart for Danny, even pity. Losing Kelley was going to be hard for her sister. Probably. Maybe. Kelley wasn’t entirely sure.
She thought about crumpling the note up and burning it to ashes out on the driveway. Where Kelley was going, there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in having been cruel to her sister. But that was only part of the reason she was writing. She also needed Danny to know, going forward, that all was not right in her world.
Tomorrow on the Fourth of July, Danny would be receiving the so-called “Key to the Mountains” award, an idiotic publicity stunt dreamed up by the town council. Every year, the one person in town who accomplished anything beyond putting up the window screens was given an oversized, yellow-chromed churchkey. Congratulations, and by the way, it don’t open shit. Danny was dreading the presentation, as Kelley knew, but in some way it probably validated Danny’s dream-state of “okayness.” She might not be
great
, but she
was
okay. She got the Key to the Mountains, didn’t she?
Danny needed far more than a chrome-plated key, a prescription from the VA, and a couple of annual interviews with a shrink, though. She needed to reinvent herself from front to back. Maybe get out of Forest Peak. This house, this town, was full of ghosts: those of their parents, their ideals, their threadbare thrift-store lives. Danny might finally figure it out when even Kelley was only a ghost.
But I won’t be a ghost
, Kelley thought.
I’ll just be free
.
So for the sake of Danny, Kelley kept writing.
She wrote more about their neighbors, what she had discovered during
her years as the Invisible Girl, staying with people she hardly knew from whom Danny had extracted the favor of a few months’ houseroom, putting up with being a burden and an object of pity in equal measure, hiding herself in plain sight. When she ran out of local dish, Kelley turned back to the subject of being the younger sister to a modern-day Spartan. She wrote about her yearning to have Danny back while she was on tour in the distant desert, and how sad she was when Danny returned on leave and seemed even more distant, right in front of her eyes. She wanted to write about how Danny seemed to love her stupid Candyapple Red 1968 Mustang with the 302 V-8 more than she loved her little sister. But it all seemed petty, given the matter at hand; the car was probably easier to love.
Kelley found herself staring at the clock again, watching the second hand lurch around the face. It was time to finish this. She turned her attention back to the note, searching for the right way to end it.
Kelley pushed the pen along for a few more lines, swallowing the knot of grief in her throat. Then she signed her name at the bottom, squared up the pages of the letter, and blinked back another flood of tears. Enough. Kelley reached across the table and dragged the big, ugly gun toward her.
Danny watched the ceiling turn and listened to the scanner as the highway patrol took a drunk driver into custody down on the 10 Freeway. Maybe she should call the Forest Peak Sheriff’s Station to make sure everything was shipshape. Deputy Dave was on night shift tonight, and he had no problem with insomnia, on duty or not. Could be asleep at his post. But Danny didn’t think she could speak without slurring her words. The empty glass bumped up and down on her chest in time to the beating of her heart. The whiskey must have evaporated. Only a splash more, and she was definitely done for the night. She reached for the bottle on the nightstand among the pills. The bottle slipped out of her fingers and hit the plywood floor—
BANG
Danny bolted upright. Hell of a loud noise.
“Kelley? Are you still up?”
She listened. Nothing. If she had to get out of bed, Kelley was going to catch hell. Then Kelley’s faint voice came through the door:
“Go to sleep, Danny.”
“What are you doing awake?”
“Same thing you are. Waiting for you to go to sleep.”
Kelley opened the bedroom door and looked in. She had that hunted look that made Danny crazy. For fuck’s sake, nobody was hunting her. Kelley had no idea what it was like to be hunted—not for real. But her eyes looked red and puffy.
Maybe Kelley had her own troubles, overblown as they might be. Danny ought to ask if everything was all right, have a little sister-to-sister time. Incoherent and stinking of booze. Maybe not.
“I can’t remember if I took my pills.”
“I dunno.”
“I know you don’t. It was one of those questions.”
“You mean rhetorical.”
“Yes.”
Danny searched her brain for something else to say, something to move the conversation forward a few inches. Nothing occurred to her. Kelley broke the silence.
“You want some water or something? Some ice?”
Danny lay back down on the bed. Wanted to say something meaningful. Nothing volunteered itself.
“Good night, Kelley.”
Kelley closed the door. Danny tried to remember whether she had taken the pills or not. She was pretty sure she had, but they were a lifeline. She found a stray pill on the nightstand, pinched it between numb fingertips, and managed to get it into her mouth. It left a dry, bitter streak down her throat. She should talk to Kelley tomorrow, find out what her plans for the future were.
The summer was coming, the season for temporary jobs cleaning rental cabins, playing lifeguard at the recreational lake. Then college. Did Kelley want to go to college? She was smart. Smarter than Danny. Maybe she could get out of this one-horse shithole of a town.
They should talk. Danny tried to follow events surrounding a burglary on the scanner, the Fontana cops dealing with a freaked-out woman speaking rapid Spanish in her backyard. Somewhere around the third time they tried to get a description of the perpetrator, who might have been the woman’s nephew, Danny drifted into unconsciousness.
They followed the M1A1 Abrams tank toward the MSR—the main supply route around Al Fallujah. Second Tank Battalion was rock-solid. You couldn’t relax merely because there were tanks for protection, but you
knew they would pitch in fast and hard if there was a fight on. The trick was to drive straight down their tread tracks if you could, because there wouldn’t be any operational ordnance buried there. Danny hadn’t felt safe in months, but she figured she was with the best guys she could ask for on a regimental combat team. Harlan had her back, and Ramirez, too, even if all he did was give her shit. Spasskey and Duke were good men, but she didn’t really know them—they had replaced the casualties of last week
.
They found the burning mud-brick house about a mile before the appointed rendezvous. Whoever owned the house had been building a concrete addition when the war broke out, because there were three walls with rusted rebar sticking out of them, empty doorways and window sockets cast in place but without doors or windows. No roof. Just as well because the place was a write-off now. There was gunfire in the air, but they couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It didn’t seem to be headed their way, but nobody knew who was doing the shooting, or who was being shot at. Could have been some of the multinationals or a squabble between the locals and the so-called Iraqi security forces, a bunch of dangerous tribal gangbangers
.
Whatever it was, gunfire was combat team business. They pulled around the burning house and in the flat distance, men were running. Requests and orders cracked around the radios. Air support on the way. But sometimes these incidents were intended to draw air support. The Black Hawks limped home with holes in them. Danny’s team was going to have to go out there and attract some attention. Tanks first, however. But there was a woman in front of the tanks. She was standing beside the house. Danny’s instincts told her it was a setup. But her instincts always told her that. Because the whole fucking war was a setup
.
The woman looked like the Grim Reaper, black-veiled from head to feet. Maybe a hardcore Shia Islamist. These were still rare in Iraq, though less so now that fundamentalism was on the rise. Or maybe she was the woman of a mercenary from Iran or Saudi Arabia. Harlan flicked his eyes at Danny: Would she do the honors? Danny dropped down out of the Humvee, Spass-key covering her topside with the M249 SAW gun. Her eyes probed every shadow, her hands were wet on the grip of the Mossberg 12 gauge, but she strode almost casually across the dirt patch that served the house as a front yard. Just a friendly visit, neighbor, couldn’t help notice your house was on fire. You mind stepping aside so the tanks can roll through?
The radios inside the vehicles were going crazy. Danny couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, but something big was going on. Not here. She didn’t see anything here. But somewhere, something was going down. The bell wouldn’t stop ringing—
Danny sprang awake as if shot up from the bottom of the ocean. Her alarm clock was ringing. It was eight o’clock on Saturday morning, Fourth of July weekend, and she was an hour late for roll call at her own Sheriff’s Station. Dispatcher Dave was calling for her on the radio:
“Sheriff Adelman, where the heck are you? Come in, Danny.”
Danny rushed through the house, shoving her rumpled shirt into her pants, jamming feet into boots. Hat over there. Gun belt on the chair. Gun on the table. Note from Kelley. What the hell was this? Out of the official notebook, no less! Danny shoved the gun in the holster, snatched up Kelley’s note, and ran out the door. She had been awake for no more than three minutes.
As she jumped in the cab of the Sheriff’s Department Ford Explorer, another bell rang in the back of her mind.
Danny’s blood turned cold. Something was missing besides Kelley. She blinked at the driveway.
Kelley took the Mustang
.
The road descending from the Adelman place into Forest Peak was a scribble of tar a lane and a half wide through the steep woods. It curled upon itself like a rattlesnake gliding through the immense trees: heavy-browed ponderosa pine, Douglas fir with their thick scored skins, young black oaks coming up in the gulleys where the big trees let a little sunlight get through. The slope of the mountain was so steep here that the crowns of the trees on the downhill side were at the same height as the roots of the trees on the uphill side. It was a beautiful place, especially with the morning sun cutting through the mist. Danny took the hairpin turns at forty miles an hour, the Explorer’s tires screaming as they skated from shoulder to shoulder. She could make town in five more minutes. One hand grasping the radio mic, one hand on the wheel, she called in an all-points bulletin on her runaway sister.