"Sounds pretty thin to me."
"That laptop is the closest thing we have to evidence," she said. He started to argue, but Cruz cut him off. "Look, you know how you were talking about trust? Goes both ways."
He sighed. "Yeah."
The waitress came by with the check, telling them to stay as long as they liked, no rush. Jason nodded, took a slug of the coffee, lukewarm now, forked a Tabasco-soggy fry. Chewed slowly, trying to steady his tingling nerves. For the moment they were all right, but he knew it was a temporary respite, like ducking under an awning against a storm. It didn't stop the rain.
Cruz reached for her tea, took a sip, set it down with her lips curling. "I don't know how you do it," she said.
"What?"
"Eat. My stomach is completely off."
"First rule of soldiering. When there's food, eat. Never know how many miles you'll have to run before chow."
"I wouldn't make it. I need food every two hours or my body shuts down." She paused. "Did you like it?"
"Being a soldier?" He thought of the feeling of pride he'd had when he made sergeant, the thrill of walking with his unit, the camaraderie and faith. "Yeah. I liked it a lot."
"So why leave?"
He wiped his lips with the napkin. "What about you, you like being a cop?"
He could tell she noticed the evasion, but she didn't call him on it. "Yes, I like it."
"Good at it?"
Cruz opened her mouth. Closed it. The condensation from her water glass had dripped into rings on the table, and she dipped a finger in one, traced wet lines. "I used to think so."
"Hey," he folded the napkin and laid it atop the remnants of his meal, "don't let this get to you. There was no way you could have guessed what was going on."
"It's not that."
"What then?"
She paused. Said, "No one trusts me."
"Why not?"
"They think that I got assigned to the squad as a PR move." Her cadence slow, like she were picking her words. "Or that it's favoritism. No one believes that I belong there. How can I be a good cop if no one trusts me?"
"Prove them wrong."
"It's not that simple. There are a lot of… issues." She sighed, shook her head. "Can we talk about something else?"
"Sure." He waited a beat. "Cubs or Sox?"
Cruz looked surprised, and then laughed. She had one of those honest laughs, rich and good, and he grinned back at her. Realized he didn't think he'd heard her laugh before, and liked that it was his doing. It felt normal, a man and a woman sitting in a restaurant booth, talking, joking. No guns, no gangbangers.
"I didn't leave the Army," he said, the words just kind of coming out. "I was discharged."
She cocked her head, but didn't say anything.
"They call it an 'other than honorable' discharge. What they give when you don't merit a formal court martial."
"What happened?"
He looked out the window. Everyday people, coming and going. The sun shivering the concrete. Girls on blankets in the park. In all, a perfectly normal morning in Chicago. Even now, months back, he still sometimes had moments when he couldn't believe it existed. Bikinis and billboards, neon and green grass.
"We were on-mission, guarding a house. The brother-in-law of somebody's nephew, one of those things. There was a lot of that stuff there. Still is. Anyway, it was just another mission, nothing special."
The squad bulky with body armor under desert gear. The acrid smell of sweat and the way the clinging dust itched. A silent head count, his hundredth of the day, terrified, always, of leaving a man behind: Jones, Campbell, Kaye, Frieden, Crist, Flumignan, Borcherts, Paoletti, Rosemoor, and Martinez, ten men. His ten men. Martinez clowning, saying that to really guard the house, they ought to be inside, where the owner was watching the Red Wings on his satellite television. Joining in the laughter, feeling good, the air soft with the approach of sunset, already tasting the ice-cold Gatorade that would be waiting in the chow hall.
Then the sound of the engine. The joking vanishing instantly, replaced by operational paranoia. They'd moved as a team, weapons fixed, positions good, covering the entrance to the courtyard. He'd led from the front, the first to step onto the winding alley that fronted the place.
"It was an ambulance, an old diesel job with black smoke coming out the back," he said. "I heard a loud pop, sounded like a blown tire."
More real than the street outside the diner was his memory of that moment. The comforting weight of his weapon against gloved palms. The taut pull of the chin strap of his helmet. Dinner smells, cumin and black pepper and smoke.
The ambulance had stopped a hundred yards north, in the center of the alley. Jason could see the doors wing open. Two dark-skinned men looked around edgily. One vanished around the back, then returned with a tire iron, squatted beside the front right of the truck while the other kept a nervous watch. Knowing, as Jason did, that in the center of a back street in insurgent territory, with no protection, with medical supplies and possibly drugs on board, they were only one thing.
A target.
Jason's orders were clear: Guard the house. Stay put until relieved. But there could be wounded in back. Maybe women, or children.
"You never know, is the thing. Over there. One minute somebody is smiling and waving, the next they're aiming an AK-74." He shrugged. "But it was an ambulance."
He'd ordered the squad to stay put, taken Paoletti and Martinez. Moving carefully, not hugging the sides. In a firefight, bullets rode the walls. Dark eyes watching from windows, always gone when he turned to look. The ambulance drew nearer a step at a time. A long hundred yards. He watched the men working on the truck, saw one of them stop, shade his eyes with his hands, wave them forward. Yelling something in Arabic, fast and guttural. Jason ignored him. The previous week a truck disguised as an ambulance had been loaded with bathtub-brewed dynamite and detonated amid a crowd of men applying for positions in the Iraqi National Guard.
"Funny, but you remember the littlest things. The sun was setting, and I remember thinking how someday I would miss those sunsets. It's all the dust. Makes it look like heaven is on fire."
The man squatting beside the tire had a thin dark mustache. A perfect bead of sweat hung at one end. He'd looked up and smiled, pointed to the spare beside him, said something unintelligible.
Jason signaled Paoletti to watch while he and Martinez moved to the rear of the ambulance. His heart pounding. Not something you ever got used to, the realization that if things went wrong, you could suddenly not be there any more. Not be, period.
At the rear, he'd leveled his weapon as Martinez put one hand on the handle. Nodded to him, ready to fire, thinking short, controlled bursts, thinking don't let this be the moment, and then Martinez had yanked open the rear door and raised his own rifle, both of them yelling Arabic phrases they'd learned phonetically.
A wide-eyed boy about five years old stared at them from the floor of the ambulance. A man knelt over him, crimson fingers moving in his chest. The doctor glanced at them, turned back to the boy without a word. Didn't ask what they wanted, who they were, just worked to save the life of a child.
"It'd been a shell, a mortar shell. Insurgents lob them all the time, and their aim sucks. No training and old Soviet hardware smuggled in from Afghanistan. This kid had been playing with his brother a mile from our FOB. The shrapnel tore him to ribbons."
"Jesus," Cruz said. Her voice quiet. "What did you do?"
"We set down our weapons and cranked up that ambulance like we were swapping a tire at the Indy 500."
When they were finished, the little man with the driver had shaken Jason's hand, then put his right hand over his heart. Jason had repeated the gesture, feeling good. Watched them start the ambulance, black smoke farting out the exhaust, and stood aside to let them drive away. He and Martinez and Paoletti had smiled at one another. Started walking back beneath the burning sky. He remembered the warmth in his chest, the sense that he loved these men and would do anything for them.