The Five (36 page)

Neither of them say anything more for a while after that.

Jeremy knows that Gunny is right. There’s not much use in arguing with Gunny. If he wants to get out of here, he needs a car and he needs to go to a place where cars are parked.

Like that stripmall up the road.

He picks up the gun. He stands up and puts the gun in between his flesh and the waist of his jeans, under the shirt’s flagging tail. He needs to get this done in a hurry, but it occurs to him that he should leave his pickup hidden right where it is. He will need time to transfer his gear from the truck to whatever car he can jack. So with the Triple-T cap on his head and the .45 automatic under his shirt he leaves the house through the back door and sets out, walking around the house to the street and then along the street toward the stripmall.

A few cars pass him, but not many. This could go very, very bad. Or very good. Or it might not happen at all. Maybe when he gets to that stripmall, he’ll decide to buy a burrito and go back to his hide. He walks not briskly, but he doesn’t amble either. He is a man with a purpose, but to anyone passing by it wouldn’t look very important.

When he reaches the parking lot there are ten cars in it, most in front of the drugstore. They look to be grandpa cars. Sedans with lots of room and old American gas guzzlers, except for one white Honda Accord. As Jeremy stops and pretends to examine the sole of his right shoe, a man and woman in their fifties come out of the drug store. The woman is carrying a bag and the man has his arm around her shoulders; he looks toward Jeremy and nods, his eyes cautious. Jeremy nods back and moves on as if he’s heading for Mexican food, and the couple get into a silver Buick and lock their doors before the engine starts. Jeremy pauses at the door of the Mexican joint as the car pulls away.

Maybe he
will
get a burrito after all, he decides, because his heart is beating hard and he thinks he needs to sit down in some air-conditioning.

As he starts to go in, a woman with shoulder-length gray hair emerges carrying a brown paper bag. He waits for her to pass. The interior of the Mexican place is dark, nothing much to see in there but an old dude walking back through a swinging door into a kitchen. Then Jeremy sees that the woman is heading toward the Honda. She is well-dressed, crisp like someone who works in a bank or a real estate office. She is wearing sunglasses, and has the strap of a dark blue leather handbag around one shoulder. A red-white-and-blue scarf is tied around her throat. A real Grandmother America.

She is not very much overweight and has a young walk. She probably has young legs under her turquoise-colored pants suit. Jeremy decides she’s the kind of woman who could walk herself out of the desert.

She is unlocking the driver’s door when Jeremy comes up beside her and says in an easy, nonthreatening voice, “Excuse me, ma’am. Ask you something?”

She is startled just a little bit, and when she turns her face to him Jeremy sees a slight quiver of her pale pink lips that means she doesn’t know whether to be afraid or not. He quickly says, “I’m lost, can you help me?”

“Lost?” she asks. She has the throaty voice of a lifetime cigarette smoker. Maybe she’s in her middle sixties, with a sharp chin and deep lines bracketing her mouth. Lots of worry lines across her forehead. “What’re you looking for?”

“LaPaz Estates,” he answers, and instantly—
instantly
—he knows this is something he should not have said.

“Well…it’s—” She glances in that direction, and then Jeremy takes the gun out and holds it just south of her takeout food, and he says, “I’ll shoot you if you scream. Get in the car.” And he’s had to say this as if he really means it, because she must obey him before somebody else comes out to the lot.

She trembles all over. Her mouth is slightly open. Her teeth are also gray. “Put that bag in the car, down on the floor,” he tells her. “Get behind the wheel. Do it
now
.” She doesn’t move; maybe she
can’t
move. “Ma’am,” Jeremy says, the sweat crawling on his neck, “I’m not going to hurt you. I want your car.” She starts to give him the keys. “No, you’re going to drive and I’ll let you out up the road.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” she says in a smoky gasp.

“I’m going to let you out up the road,” Jeremy repeats, and he says, “Go on, now, be a good girl. Unlock the other side. If you touch that horn, I’ll get very upset. Okay?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” she says again. “I’m going to my sister’s.” She unlocks the passenger door and puts the paper bag on the floorboard as Jeremy quickly walks around to the other side, keeping his eyes on her. She gets in and he gets in, and neither of her trembling hands touches the horn. She is being a very good girl.

Jeremy closes the door, and when he feels her suddenly tense up as if she’s decided she needs to make a break for it, he says calmly, “Just do what I tell you.” He keeps the gun down low, so she can see it from the corner of her eye. “Start the engine and drive.”

“Alright,” she says, and something catches in her throat. “I will.”

Just then a heavy-set woman comes out of the consignment shop carrying a red table lamp with a shade that appears to be decorated with Indian symbols. Jeremy’s captive turns her head toward this other woman, who has paused to pick up a shopper’s newspaper from a wire rack.

“Start the engine and drive,” Jeremy repeats, and now he aims the gun at her side.

Grandmother America does as she’s told. The other woman with her red lamp and her shopper’s paper walks past the Accord, and continues on to her Ford Taurus a few spaces away.

“Which way do you want me to go?” Grandmother America asks, and now it sounds as if she can barely get the words squeezed out.

Jeremy realizes he’s made a big mistake. A big omission. He has forgotten something very important. He could grind his teeth down over this one.

He has forgotten to bring a bottle of water for her to drink in the desert.

He can’t just put her out somewhere nearby. Can’t put her out on one of these streets. So he decides he has to go get a bottle of water for her, so nobody can ever say he was a bad guy.

“Turn left,” he tells her.

Then, about a mile further on, at the stand of mesquite trees and the rock wall with the tarnished brass letters: “Turn right.”

He directs her to his street and his house. He directs her to pull the Accord up alongside the house where its blinding sunlit whiteness can be hidden. And then he tells her they need to go inside because he’s going to get her a bottle of water before he sets her free out in the desert.

“Alright,” she says, in that weak old smoky voice. “I’m going to my sister’s, she’s waiting for me.”

“This will just take a minute,” he tells her.

In the house, in the kitchen with its floor covering of disturbingly bright blue, Jeremy picks up a bottle of water as Grandmother America stands with her back in a corner. He has a thought, and he gives it a voice: “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

“Please,” she whispers. “Don’t hurt me.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” The way she’s standing, as if she’s trying to press herself into the wall, to also become invisible just as he wishes to be, touches Jeremy. “My name is…Chris,” he decides to say. He takes his cap off, to show her his shaven head. When the police find her, she will say a shaven-headed man named Chris took her car. “What’s your name?”

She doesn’t reply. Her head is down, her hair stringy over her shoulders, her crispness all burnt up and gone.

Gunny comes to stand in the doorway on the other side of the kitchen, just looking in, just marking the progress. Then he goes away again.

Jeremy can’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, and this bothers him. “Would you take your sunglasses off, please?” He motions with the gun.

Those thin, veiny, trembling hands come up and remove them. She has brown eyes, sunken down in nests of wrinkles. She will not or can not look at him.

“I’m from Texas,” Jeremy says, but why he tells her this he doesn’t know. “Do you live around here?”

She makes a noise that sounds like
muh
, like her lips are stuck together, and a slow tear courses down through the wrinkles on her left cheek.

“I’m in a little trouble.” Jeremy realizes this is the first person he’s spoken to, for any length at least, for…how long? Really
speaking
, that is. Human to human. Gunny is his angel, but Grandmother America looks to him like she would be a very good listener. “There are some
bad
people in this world,” he contiunues. “Some liars, about what happened in Iraq. They’re carrying lies around with them, and they’re poisoning the air. And you can bet…you can fucking
bet
…they wouldn’t have lasted one
day
over there. Because, you know, sometimes you don’t get a choice about the things you have to do. No, ma’am, you don’t. You go right along following the road, doing what you’re supposed to do…what you’ve been
trained
to do…and all of a sudden,
wham
!”

Grandmother America flinches at this, and tries to push herself further into that corner, and another tear slides down her face but on the other cheek.

“All of a sudden, something crashes into you from the side and you never saw it coming,” Jeremy says. “That’s what.”

He stops speaking, because he feels there is a movement in his face that he can’t control. He feels like insects are in the muscles and bones of his face, winnowing down in there, breaking up all the structures that make him appear to be a human being, and when they are through eating at him, when they are finished eating and laying their eggs and destroying his face in their eagerness to consume him so that
they
might live, whatever will be born inside him will be a monster that used to be a really good guy.

He stares down at the blue tarp on the floor, at the sickeningly bright blue, and he remembers. In remembering, there is a hot passing flash and a shockwave that tells him exactly why he is here.

The young lieutenant that everybody knew as a Fobbit came in the middle of the night to get Jeremy and Chris out of their bunks. They were taken to an Ops tent at the center of the base, and at a table with directional lights around it sat a captain neither of them knew, and a civilian in his mid-thirties, wearing a khaki jacket, a white shirt and jeans. He looked like cowboy material, or maybe a Christian In Action.

Color photographs and the map of a section of Baghdad were arranged on the table.
This is the task
, said the civilian, who was not introduced.
You will be accompanied by a squad to this position at
oh-five-hundred
.
You’ll make your way here, to this building, and set up by oh-five-thirty
.
The target will walk along this alley between oh-seven and oh-eight hundred.
Our source tells
us he will in all probability be wearing either black or gray cargo shorts, a red, black or camo T-shirt that might bear a Nike swoosh and either a red Houston Rockets cap or an orange cap with a Fanta logo. I understand Houston is your home, Sergeant Pett, so this might be called ‘fate’, if you believe in that. The target will be moving toward this opening here, in this building on the northeast corner. He should be removed before he reaches it. I can’t answer or acknowledge any questions, but I can say that the removal of this target will help us put a stop to some of these goddamned IEDs. One more thing: we need positive verification of the kill. That can be done by bringing back an article of clothing. His cap will do. One more thing, gentlemen: however this mission turns out, our meeting never happened. Good luck and good hunting.

At the site, hunkered down in the yellow building under the dust-hazed sun at oh-seven-forty-one, Chris had been watching the alley through his spotter scope when he said quietly, “Target. Orange cap.”

Jeremy had peered through his own scope. Yeah, there he was. A gangly little bastard wearing black cargo shorts, a camo T-shirt—plain, no swoosh—and the orange Fanta cap. That little dickwhacker
wanted
to be seen, because in addition to the orange topper he was wearing bright blue plastic sandals, a common type of cheap footwear for these ragheads. That little dillweed was lit up like fucking neon, and he was burdened under a black backpack that was not built for speed.

It was barely a two-hundred yard shot, easy squeezy, but Chris started feeding in the ballistics numbers to his small PDA. Chris took another scope-look, and then another, and the target was walking along getting ever closer to the opening in that building he was not supposed to enter before he was hit, and then Chris looked over at Jeremy and said, “That’s a little kid.”

“A kid? No, he’s—”
One of those really small Johnnies
, he was about to say, and then Jeremy had adjusted his scope to get a sharper view of the face, and he saw that their target was maybe ten years old. He pulled his eye back as if a hot ember had spun into it.

The kid in the orange cap was walking right along. Maybe thirty feet now from that opening, a square dark hole in the rubbled building on the northeast corner.

“That’s our target,” Chris had said, in the grim voice of finality. “The motherfuckers have sent us out here to kill a kid.”

“No way.” Jeremy had exhaled it. “No way, no way.
No
.”

“He’s moving, man. What are you gonna do?”

“That’s not the target.”

“The
fuck
it’s not. Man, he’s almost to his hole. You want the wind call?”

“Don’t push me,” Jeremy had said, with only a hint of the panic that was rushing upon him. Kill a
kid
? Somebody had to be fucking
insane
. Who was this kid, Saddam’s baby brother? Was he a messenger, about to go down into a lamplit pit where the IEDs were being loaded with nails, broken glass and ball bearings? Did he have a couple of dozen cheap cellphones in that backpack, to be used as triggering devices?

The kid was there, and now he started to bend over to get into the hole because it was a narrow opening not much bigger than himself