Danny kept his hands well within the boat as the sun slipped lower on the horizon.
Danny wakes to Aimee’s kiss.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers.
“I feel like Sleeping Beauty,” he says, “except woken by a princess.”
“Were you dreaming?” she asks, pulling her fingers through his short hair.
“Yeah. About you.”
“You seem better,” she says, dragging her chair closer. Danny notices that he’s in a regular hospital room with a door, not the ICU.
“What about Chucho? Is he hurt?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“They arrested him, but he’s out on bail. Your uncle put up the money.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“Drunk driving. Speeding. Resisting arrest. The works. You were too, you know.”
“I was what?”
“Under arrest. You were chained to the bed. Don’t you remember?”
“No. How long have I been here?”
“Five days.”
“Am I still chained to the bed?”
“My God, no. Someone taped the whole thing. A police officer shot you without provocation. Now he’s on leave and under investigation. Don’t you remember anything?”
Danny tries.
“I can get flashes of things, like little snapshots. He told me to get up. I put my hands up, exactly like he said. But he shot me anyway.” Danny feels himself heating up just thinking about it.
“Well, a couple of lawyers have called. They want us to sue the bastard. They say we have a good case.”
“I’m supposed to rejoin my unit in a week.”
Aimee throws back her head and laughs. “Soldier, you ain’t going nowhere.” Then she leans over and hugs him, and bursts into tears.
Danny itched even after he’d had the good fortune to shower, which happened maybe once a week; the constant dust and grit irritated his skin. It worked its way under his watchband, under his waistband, under the sweatband of his hat. When he took his boots and socks off, there was a fine mud between his toes that he tried to remove with baby wipes.
Danny wanted to wear a bandana over his face when he worked the checkpoint, but his sergeant said no, it would spook the Iraqi civilians if they couldn’t see his face. When he coughed and spat, his phlem was brown.
A man Danny doesn’t recognize reaches up and pops a videotape into the slot in the television bolted to the wall. Gray screen suddenly goes to black with white walls, an upswing motion as the camera seems to be thrust upward, then pointed down.
Danny recognizes Chucho’s metallic blue Corvette, the front bumper crumpled, white streaks from side-swiping something.
“Get out. Get out!”
A figure on the right is holding a gun with both hands. The door opens and Danny puts his feet on the ground. He doesn’t see Chucho, although he can hear him yelling.
“It’s okay,” says Danny. He has his hands up.
“Get out of the vehicle and down on the ground.”
Danny hesitates.
“I said get down on the ground!” The voice is agitated, angry.
Danny kneels down slowly, then rolls onto the ground.
He remembers how he had been asleep, or so drunk as to be virtually asleep. That’s why he had left his car and ridden with Chucho.
The camera is jostled as the operator tries to focus on the policeman, on Danny lying on the ground. He is a light-colored, prone figure on a black background. The quality is poor, bluish for lack of light. It reminds him of night vision goggles.
“Get up!” the voice barks. It cracks with tension, near hysteria.
“Okay, I’m getting up now,” says Danny. “I’m going to get up.”
He rises to his knees, starts to put his hands up again.
That’s when the shots ring out, three of them. The camera wobbles wildly, but Danny does not see this part, because he’s shut his eyes and turned away.
“It’s okay, darlin’,” says Aimee, clutching his right arm, the good one without all the tubes in it.
Danny can hear Chucho yelling again. He must still be in the car. Danny opens his eyes and sees himself slumped sideways, close to the open door of the car.
“I told you to lie down!” screams the policeman.
Another police car pulls up, and Chucho is pulled roughly from the driver’s seat.
“He killed my friend!” Chucho screams. “He shot him in cold blood!”
“Shut up,” says a voice.
Chucho is spread against the far side of the car, searched.
“We are not armed, officer!”
“Just shut up. I’m arresting you on suspicion of drunk driving and eluding an officer.” He is led out of camera range as the officer tells him his rights.
There is the crackling sound of radios. An ambulance pulls up. The camera seems to sag with fatigue, again showing Danny prone on the ground.
The ambulance crew hustles out a stretcher, sets it on the ground next to Danny.
“What happened?”
“He has a gunshot wound. He tried to attack me.”
Someone clamps a collar around Danny’s neck, and two men turn him onto his back.
“Jesus!”
He is placed on the stretcher and taken away. There is a lot of shouting, doors slamming, and the sound of the ambulance siren starting up and fading away.
More radio noise, and a figure slams the door on the car. The video ends.
The man who played the video has been standing in the corner, watching it silently, observing Danny. “The officer’s name is Troy Amboy,” the man announces, “and we are going to sue him into the Stone Age.”
“Who are you?” asks Danny.
“I’m your attorney, Jason Ritchie.”
Danny glances at Aimee.
“He called,” she explains. “He says we don’t pay him. He only gets paid if we win the case.”
“Why did he shoot me?” asks Danny.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” replies Ritchie. “He claims you lunged at him, that he thought you were armed, but it’s pretty clear he was entirely unprovoked. Look here.” He points a remote at the TV and rewinds the tape back to where Danny is about to exit the car. “Right there,” Ritchie says, waving the remote and stopping the video where Danny has gotten up from the ground to a kneeling position. “He says you reached into your shirt, but you didn’t even touch your chest.”
Danny tries to look down at his body. In addition to the tubes, a complex web of bandages cover his chest, and he feels the pull of adhesive tape across the back of his left shoulder. “When can I get this damn neck brace off?” he asks.
There was the incident outside of Kirkuk. Two soldiers had died earlier that day, and everyone was jumpy. A rumor was spreading that a new shipment of weapons had just arrived from Afghanistan, including IEDs.
Danny had spent the previous day escorting a group of Iraqi detainees from one prison to another, always a dangerous business. One man in particular haunted Danny. As he was led out of the foul-smelling holding area along with fifteen others, the man had fixed an eye on him and said in broken English, “I know you. You promised to get me out of here! Where we are going, they will kill me.”
Danny did not recognize the man, had never been to that prison before. Did the man have him mixed up with someone else? Was it a ruse?
Danny didn’t answer, had merely gestured with his rifle for the man to move along onto the truck that would take them to another foul-smelling prison. Danny knew there was torture. He knew there was death. On their way to reinforce the battalion that had lost two soldiers, they had stumbled across a trash heap with five more Iraqi bodies, hands fastened with plastic ties behind them, no IDs.
Danny did not want to be recognized by anyone in Iraq. He just wanted to do his job and get home.
The following day, he was back on the AFB checkpoint. Forbes, Yamada, Meyer, and he had been checking IDs and searching cars for five hours. Their shifts had ended an hour before, but their relief had not shown up. They couldn’t leave their posts. All they knew was that there had been an “unexpected delay.”