Mal thought police, but discarded the idea. She had been a cop herself, in the army, knew how cops thought. Leaving a couple thumbprints on unsigned sheets of paper wasn't a crime. It was maybe a prank, and you couldn't waste manpower investigating a prank. She felt now, as she had when she saw the first thumbprint, that these messages were not the perverse joke of some local snotnose, but a malicious promise, a warning to be on guard. But it was an irrational feeling, unsupported by any evidence. It was soldier knowledge, not cop knowledge.
Besides, when you called the cops, you never knew what you were going to get. There were cops like her out there. People like that you didn't want getting too interested in you.
She balled up the thumbprint, took it onto the porch. Mal cast her gaze around, scanning the bare trees, the straw-coloured weeds at the edge of the woods. She stood there for close to a minute. Even the trees were perfectly still, no wind to tease their branches into motion, as if the whole world were in a state of suspension, waiting to see what would happen next, only nothing happened next.
She left the balled up paper on the porch railing, went back inside, and got the M4 from the closet. Mal sat on the bedroom floor, assembling and disassembling it, three times, twelve seconds each time. Then she set the parts back in the case with the bayonet and slid it under her father's bed.
Two hours later, Mal ducked down behind the bar at the Milky Way to rack clean glasses. They were fresh from the dishwasher and so hot they burned her fingertips. When she stood up with the empty tray, Glen Kardon was on the other side of the counter, staring at her with red-rimmed, watering eyes. He looked in a kind of stupor, his face puffy, his comb-over dishevelled, as if he had just stumbled out of bed.
"I need to talk to you about something," he said. "I was trying to think if there was some way I could get my wedding ring back. Any way at all."
All the blood seemed to rush from Mal's brain, as if she had stood up too quickly. She lost some of the feeling in her hands, too, and for a moment her palms were overcome with a cool, almost painful tingling.
She wondered why he hadn't arrived with cops, if he meant to give her some kind of chance to settle the matter without the involvement of the police. She wanted to say something to him, but there were no words for this. She could not remember the last time she had felt so helpless, had been caught so exposed, in such indefensible terrain.
Glen went on: "My wife spent the morning crying about it. I heard her in the bedroom, but when I tried to go in and talk to her, the door was locked. She wouldn't let me in. She tried to play it off like she was all right, talking to me through the door. She told me to go to work, don't worry. It was her father's wedding ring, you know. He died three months before we got married. I guess that sounds a little, what do you call it, Oedipal. Like in marrying me she was marrying daddy. Oedipal isn't right, but you know what I'm saying. She loved that old man."
Mal nodded.
"If they only took the money, I'm not sure I even would've told Helen. Not after I got so drunk. I drink too much. Helen wrote me a note, a few months ago, about how much I've been drinking. She wanted to know if it was because I was unhappy with her. It would be easier if she was the kind of woman who'd just scream at me. But I got drunk like that, and the wedding ring she gave me that used to belong to her daddy is gone, and all she did was hug me and say thank God they didn't hurt me."
Mal said, "I'm sorry." She was about to say she would give it all back, ring and money both, and go with him to the police if he wanted — then caught herself. He had said «they»: "if they only took the money" and "they didn't hurt me." Not "you."
Glen reached inside his coat and took out a white business envelope, stuffed fat. "I been sick to my stomach all day at work, thinking about it. Then I thought I could put up a note here in the bar. You know, like one of these fliers you see for a lost dog. Only for my lost ring. The guys who robbed me must be customers here. What else would they have been doing down in that lot, that hour of the night? So next time they're in, they'll see my note."
She stared. It took a few moments for what he had said to register. When it did — when she understood he had no idea she was guilty of anything — she was surprised to feel an odd twinge of something like disappointment.
"Electra," she said.
"Huh?"
"A love thing between father and daughter," Mal said. "Is an Electra complex. What's in the envelope?"
He blinked. Now he was the one who needed some processing time. Hardly anyone knew or remembered that Mal had been to college, on Uncle Sam's dime. She had learned Arabic there, and psychology too, although in the end she had wound up back here behind the bar of the Milky Way without a degree. The plan had been to collect her last few credits after she got back from Iraq, but sometime during her tour she had ceased to give a fuck about the plan.
At last Glen came mentally unstuck and replied: "Money. Five hundred dollars. I want you to hold onto it for me."
"Explain."
"I was thinking what to say in my note. I figure I should offer a cash reward for the ring. But whoever stole the ring isn't ever going to come up to me and admit it. Even if I promise not to prosecute, they wouldn't believe me. So I figured out what I need is a middleman. This is where you come in. So the note would say, bring Mallory Grennan the ring, and she'll give you the reward money, no questions asked. It'll say they can trust you not to tell me or the police who they are. People know you, I think most folks around here will believe that." He pushed the envelope at her.
"Forget it, Glen. No one is bringing that ring back."
"Let's see. Maybe they were drunk, too, when they took it. Maybe they feel remorse."
She laughed.
He grinned, awkwardly. His ears were pink. "It's possible."
She looked at him a moment longer, then put the envelope under the counter. "Okay. Let's write your note. I can copy it on the fax machine. We'll stick it up around the bar, and after a week, when no one brings you your ring, I'll give you your money back and a beer on the house."
"Maybe just a ginger ale," Glen said.
Glen had to go, but Mal promised she'd hang a few flyers in the parking lot. She had just finished taping them up to the street lamps when she spotted a sheet of paper, folded into thirds and stuck under the windshield wiper of her father's car.
The thumbprint on this one was delicate and slender, an almost perfect oval, feminine in some way, while the first two had been squarish and blunt. Three thumbs, each of them different from the others.
She pitched it at a wire garbage can attached to a telephone pole, hit the three-pointer, got out of there.
The 82nd had finally arrived at Abu Ghraib, to provide force protection, and to try and nail the fuckers who were mortaring the prison every night. Early in the fall, they began conducting raids in the town around the prison. The first week of operations, they had so many patrols out, and so many raids going, they needed back-up, so General Karpinski assigned squads of MPs to accompany them. Corporal Plough put in for the job, and when he was accepted, told Mal and Carmody they were coming with him.
Mal was glad. She wanted away from the prison, the dark corridors of 1A and 1B, with their smell of old wet rock, urine, flopsweat. She wanted away from the tent cities that held the general prison population, the crowds pressed against the chain-links, who pleaded with her as she walked along the perimeter, black flies crawling on their faces. She wanted to be in a Hummer with open sides, night air rushing in over her. Destination: any-fucking-where else on the planet.