Mal shook the wedding ring in one hand for a while and finally dropped it down the sink. She didn't know what to do with it, wasn't sure where to fence it. Had no use for it, really.
When she went down to the mailbox the next morning, she found an oil bill, a real estate flyer, and a plain white envelope. Inside the envelope was a crisp sheet of typing paper, neatly folded, blank except for a single thumbprint in black ink. The print was a clean impression, and among the whorls and lines was a scar, like a fishhook. There was nothing on the envelope: no stamp, no addresses, no mark of any kind. The postman had not left it.
In her first glance she knew it was a threat and that whoever had put the envelope in her mailbox might still be watching. Mal felt her vulnerability in the sick clench of her insides, and had to struggle against the conditioned impulse to get low and find cover. She looked to either side but saw only the trees, their branches waving in the cold swirl of a light breeze. There was no traffic along the road and no sign of life anywhere.
For the long walk back to the house, she was aware of a weakness in her legs. She didn't look at the thumbprint again but carried it inside and left it with the other mail on the kitchen counter. She let her shaky legs carry her on into her father's bedroom; her bedroom now. The M4 was in its case in the closet but her father's.45 automatic was even closer — she slept with it under the pillow — and it didn't need to be assembled. Mal slid the action back to pump a bullet in the chamber. She got her field glasses from her ruck.
Mal climbed the carpeted stairs to the second floor, and opened the door into her old bedroom under the eaves. She hadn't been in there since coming home and the air had a musty, stale quality. A tatty poster of Alan Jackson was stuck up on the inverted slant of the roof. Her dolls — the blue corduroy bear, the pig with the queer silver button eyes which gave him a look of blindness — were set neatly in the shelves of a bookcase without books.
Her bed was made, but when she went close, she was surprised to find the shape of a body pressed into it, the pillow dented in the outline of someone's head. The idea occurred that whoever had left the thumb-print had been inside the house while she was out, and took a nap up here. Mal didn't slow down, but stepped straight up onto the mattress, unlocked the window over it, shoved it open, and climbed through.
In another minute she was sitting on the roof, holding the binoculars to her eyes with one hand, the gun in the other. The asbestos shingles had been warming all day in the sun and provided a pleasant ambient heat beneath her. From where she sat on the roof, she could see in every direction.
She remained there for most of an hour, scanning the trees, following the passage of cars along Hatchet Hill Road. Finally she knew she was looking for someone who wasn't there anymore. She hung the binoculars from her neck and leaned back on the hot shingles and closed her eyes. It had been cold down in the driveway, but up on the roof, on the lee side of the house, out of the wind, she was comfortable, a lizard on a rock.
When Mal swung her body back into the bedroom, she sat for a while on the sill, holding the gun in both hands and considering the impression of a human body on her blankets and pillow. She picked up the pillow and pressed her face into it. Very faintly, she could smell a trace of her father, his cheap corner store cigars, the waxy tang of that shit he put in his hair, same stuff Reagan had used. The thought that he had sometimes been up here, dozing in her bed, gave her a little chill. She wished she was still the kind of person who could hug a pillow and weep over what she had lost. But in truth, maybe she had never been that kind of person.
When she was back in the kitchen, Mal looked once more at the thumbprint on the plain white sheet of paper. Against all logic or sense, it seemed somehow familiar to her. She didn't like that.
He had been brought in with a broken tibia, the Iraqi everyone called "The Professor", but a few hours after they put him in a cast, he was judged well enough to sit for an interrogation. In the early morning, before sunrise, Corporal Plough came to get him.
Mal was working in block 1A then and went with Carmody to collect The Professor. He was in a cell with eight other men: sinewy, unshaved Arabs, most of them dressed in fruit-of-the-loom jockey shorts and nothing else. Some others, who had been unco-operative with CI, had been given pink, flowered panties to wear. The panties fit more snugly than the jockies, which were all extra-large and baggy. The prisoners skulked in the gloom of their stone chamber, giving Mal looks so feverish and hollow-eyed, they appeared deranged. Glancing in at them, Mal didn't know whether to laugh or flinch.
"Walk away from the bars, women," she said in her clumsy Arabic. "Walk away." She crooked her finger at The Professor. "You. Come to here."
He hopped forward, one hand on the wall to steady himself. He wore a hospital Johnnie, and his left leg was in a cast from ankle to knee. Carmody had brought a pair of aluminium crutches for him. Mal and Carmody were coming to the end of a twelve-hour shift, in a week of twelve-hour shifts. Escorting the prisoner to CI with Corporal Plough would be their last job of the night. Mal was twitchy from all the Vivarin in her system, so much she could hardly stand still. When she looked at lamps, she saw rays of hard-edged, rainbow-shot light emanating from them, as if she were peering through crystal.
The night before, a patrol had surprised some men planting an IED in the red, hollowed-out carcass of a German Shepherd, on the side of the road back to Baghdad. The bombers scattered, yelling, from the spotlights on the Hummers and a contingent of men went after them.
An engineer named Leeds stayed behind to have a look at the bomb inside the dog. He was three steps from the animal when a cell phone went off inside the dog's bowels, three bars of "Oops, I Did It Again." The dog ruptured in a belch of flame, and with a heavy thud that people standing thirty feet away could feel in the marrow of their bones. Leeds dropped to his knees, holding his face, smoke coming out from under his gloves. The first soldier to get to him said his face peeled off like a cheap black rubber mask that had been stuck to the sinew beneath with rubber cement.
Not long after, the patrol grabbed The Professor — so named because of his horn-rimmed glasses and because he insisted he was a teacher — two blocks from the site of the explosion. He broke his leg jumping off a high berm, running away after the soldiers fired over his head and ordered him to halt.
Now The Professor lurched along on the crutches, Mal and Carmody flanking him and Plough walking behind. They made their way out of 1A and into the pre-dawn morning. The Professor paused, beyond the doors, to take a breath.That was when Plough kicked the left crutch out from under his arm.
The Professor went straight down and forward with a cry, his Johnnie flapping open to show the soft paleness of his ass. Carmody reached to help him back up. Plough said leave him.
"Sir?" Carmody asked. Carmody was just nineteen. He had been over as long as Mal, but his skin was oily and white, as if he had never been out of his chemical suit.
"Did you see him swing that crutch at me?" Plough asked Mal.
Mal did not reply, but watched to see what would happen next. She had spent the last two hours bouncing on her heels, chewing her fingernails down to the skin, too wired to stop moving. Now, though, she felt stillness spreading through her, like a drop of ink in water, calming her restless hands, her nervous legs.
Plough bent over and pulled the string at the back of the Johnnie, unknotting it so it fell off The Professor's shoulders and down to his wrists. His ass was spotted with dark moles and relatively hairless. His sac was drawn tight to his perineum. The Professor glanced up over his shoulder, his eyes too large in his face, and spoke rapidly in Arab.