by E. M. Smith
“Where the hell are my pants?” I dropped to my hands and knees. There—my pants were inside out under the corner of Romeo’s bed. The pocket was lit up.
I dug my phone out and hit the alarm icon. Eleven-sixteen. I’d had it set for oh-five-hundred.
“Dammit,” I said, yanking on my jeans. “How many fucking times did it go off before you figured it might be a good idea to wake me up?”
Romeo sat up so fast that the pillow went flying.
“Somehow this is my fault? Typical—” Romeo took my shirt off and threw it at me. “—asshole guy. Thanks for last night. Feel free to fuck off.”
She flopped back down and pulled the covers up over her head.
I knew I should apologize, but I didn’t have time. I gathered up my shit and got out.
Bravo was coming out of the bathroom in a towel.
“Gross,” he said when he saw me. He banged on Romeo’s door as he passed and yelled, “Don’t bring your ratchets back to barracks, soldier. It’s unprofessional.”
From her room, Romeo yelled something, but it was hard to tell if she was saying words or just making a sound.
“Fuck you, Jersey Shore,” I said.
Bravo shot me the finger over his shoulder and kept walking.
I went into the bathroom, kicked the door shut, and unlocked my phone. Two missed calls from Whiskey—one at six-twelve, one at seven hundred hours exactly. None from Ms. Baker, that bitch. She’d probably already told the girls I had abandoned them or something. I called Ms. Baker.
“Hello?” She sounded out of breath.
“Ms. Baker, it’s Jamie Kendrick—”
“You’ve got some nerve calling just as we’re about to walk out the door,” she snapped. “The girls waited all morning and you can’t even pick up a phone long enough to tell them you’re not coming?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can be there in less than an hour, just—”
“Absolutely not. We’ve had this afternoon at the Museum of Natural History planned for more than a month. You knew about it well in advance.”
“Go a different day. Please. I’ll pay for it.”
“The guest speaker was a colleague of mine at Sarah Lawrence and today is his final lecture. Last weekend, we discussed shortening the visit so that the girls and I could leave on time. You said that you would help get them out the door so you could stay until noon.”
I scrubbed my hand across my face, trying to wake myself up enough to think of something to say.
“I know,” was all I came up with.
“I was under the impression we had reached an accord,” she said. “Was I somehow mistaken?”
“No, ma’am, but—”
“You’ll be able to see them next week.”
Probably not once Whiskey fired me.
“And—” Ms. Baker gasped. “Eva, wait. Stop that, honey. Not out here.”
In the background, I could hear Della saying, “We only pee in the toilet, Eva.”
“Now I’ve got a mess to clean up and a little girl to change,” Ms. Baker said. “I really don’t have time to—”
“Put Della on the phone,” I said. “Please. While you clean Eva up, let me talk to Della. I’ll keep her out of your hair.”
Ms. Baker sighed like I was asking her to carry the cross for Jesus on her lunch break. The phone changed hands.
“Eva peed on the stairs,” Della said.
“How come?” I asked.
“She just does that.”
“No, she don’t,” I said. Eva hadn’t had an accident since she was two and a half years old. I knew because I had helped potty train her. “She’s a big girl like you.”
“Eva’s three,” Della said. “I’m four. Eva’s not as big as me.”
“She ain’t as big as you, but—”
“You’re supposed to say ‘not,’” Della said. “Ain’t ain’t a word.”
“I can say it and spell it and people know what it means. It’s a word.”
“No, it’s not. I know. I go to preschool now and I’m very intelligent.”
“A little too intelligent for your britches,” I said.
“I wear skirts,” she said.
Smartass. “Do you like preschool, D?”
“I can say my ABCDs,” Della said.
“You already knew them. Daddy taught you. Tell me something new and cool.”
“I don’t have any scratches on my arm.”
“Why would you have scratches on you?” I asked. “You been fighting?”
“I can do that, too. Judo! Chop!”
That was Owen’s fault. He’d loved those old kung-fu movies.
“Listen to me, girl. Don’t be hitting people. You’ll get yourself into trouble.”
“You hit people.”
“I hit bad people.”
“But I hit bad people, too!”
I rubbed my eyes. I was too hung over to think of another way to deal with this. “Just don’t hit anybody, Della. It ain’t good.”
“Will you come play with me, Uncle Jamie?”
The backs of my eyes prickled. I cleared my throat. “I’m real sorry, sweetheart, but I can’t today. Y’all are fixing to go the museum.”
“But I want you to,” she whined. “Eva won’t play with me no more. She’s just mean.”
“Tell her Uncle Jamie said to be nice and play right or he’ll spank her.”
“Gramma said you can’t spank us.”
“I will spank you if I find out you been fighting at school.”
“But—”
In the background I heard Ms. Baker tell Della it was time to go.
“Bye, Uncle Jamie, love you. It’s time to go.”
“Love you, too, girl. Tell Eva I love her, too. And y’all be good, you hear?”
“Yep, yep, yep.”
I couldn’t make myself hang up. Della did it for me.
*****
The NOC-Unit barracks was a five-floor apartment building. Each team had a floor to itself—even though mostly just the junior members lived there—and the ground floor was a gym.
Instead of calling Whiskey back, I got changed and went downstairs. There was only one other guy working out. He was from a different team, so we gave each other some space. While he was using the weights, I started out on the treadmill.
I ran until I threw up, then I ran some more. My head cleared. The other guy left and I switched to lifting. I benched more than I could handle and hoped my arms would give out and the bar would crush my throat while no one was there to spot me.
I used to work out with my sister-in-law, Talia, back when I still thought she was just a model-turned-personal-trainer. I think Talia started me on it to keep me from going crazy while I was on house arrest, but it turned out I loved training. It was a lot like drinking—the more I hated myself, the harder I worked. Except with training, I eventually hit a point where I kind of started to think maybe I wasn’t so bad.
That was my mistake. I’d gotten cocky. I’d figured that because I wasn’t drinking or smoking anymore, because I had a job, because I wasn’t a perfect example of what not to do with your life, I could maybe be a little bit proud of myself.
“Fixed that,” I said under my breath.
My arms didn’t give out on their own and my brain wouldn’t let me “slip” and let go of the bar, so I gave up on the weights. Beating the hell out of the heavy bag might not make me feel better, but it was worth a shot.
I got my gloves and some tape out of the locker room. My hands shook while I wrapped them.
“Shit.” I killed the roll, then launched the cardboard at the trash. “Eight fucking months. Got to be fucking kidding me.” But there I was in the mirror, hung over as shit, stinking like vodka and barf and stupid fucking failure. “Dammit!”
I didn’t bother with the gloves, just went straight into burnouts. My speed was down. My power was down. My rhythm was off. Everything was wrong. I was on my tenth drill when I heard someone walk in.
<
br /> “You’re going to break a finger like that,” Whiskey said.
I didn’t turn around. The last thing I wanted was to talk to her.
“Get your gloves on or get out, Juliet.”
“Fuck!” I grabbed the punching bag with both fists and kneed it. A muay thai clinch. I knew the name of the move and the discipline it came from—and the names of a thousand others that I was never going to need now. I might as well have learned all the crocheting patterns in the world.
“You have five minutes,” Whiskey said. “Hit the showers, get dressed, and meet me out front.”
*****
Whiskey didn’t say anything when I got outside, just started walking. I followed her. The rain had quit earlier, but there was still some lag time before everything smelled like rotting garbage again.
After a couple of blocks, Whiskey led me into a diner and sat down in a booth by the window.
The waitress came over and gave us a big smile.
“What can I get for you?” Her accent was so heavy I could just barely understand what she was saying.
“Two coffees,” Whiskey said.
“And a water,” I said.
“You said ‘water,’ correct?” the waitress asked. Apparently, the accent-barrier went both ways. “Nothing else? Pie, perhaps?”
“No, thanks.”
“I will bring your coffees and water right out.”
I leaned back and shoved my fists into my jacket pockets. The left one was stiff and throbbing a little.
“What’s a pink slip from NOC-Unit look like, anyway?” I asked. “Two in the back of the head?”
“I wouldn’t waste the bullets,” Whiskey said.
“I don’t blame you,” I said.
The waitress dropped off our order and left.
Whiskey stirred some sugar into her coffee and my stomach turned. I used to drink it that way back in junior high, but then I’d gone on this bender that ended with me throwing up Kaluah. Since then I hadn’t been able to handle sweet coffee.
I twisted my cup back and forth on the table, but didn’t pick it up.
“You’re not fired,” Whiskey said. “You’re on probation. It’ll end when I say it ends and if you fuck up again you’ll spend the rest of your life rotting in prison in some third-world country no one’s ever heard of. I haven’t decided yet whether going to AA meetings should be included in your probation. Do you think something like that would help?”
“Is this the part where you spill the story about how you overcame addiction and I can, too?”
Whiskey’s glare made my blood run cold.
“I’ve never been addicted to anything,” she said. “And if I had, I wouldn’t tell you about it. I’m not the hard-ass team leader with the heart of gold who’s going to kiss your booboos and make them better.” She pointed at her chest. “I don’t have anything in here but more colossally pissed-off fury than an angry little boy like you could handle.”
“What about?” I asked.
“What?”
“Why’re you so pissed?”
“Why are you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Daddy didn’t hug me enough. Mama beat me. Brother runned off to New York City to git hisself a education and left me in the trailer park.”
“You think joking is going to help this situation?”
“Couldn’t make it much worse.” I took a deep breath and blew it up toward the ceiling. “So, why are we here?”
She pulled a square black box out of her pocket and sat it on the table.
“I needed to talk to you in private,” she said.
“And that’s some kind of fancy cone-of-silence spy gadget or something?” I asked.
“That’s a pager,” Whiskey said, looking at me like I was stupid. “If I had something that disrupted listening devices, I wouldn’t sit it on the table in plain view.”
“They still make pagers?”
“Juliet, Ms. Baker called NOC-Unit command today. She wants your visiting rights revoked on the grounds that you’re a bad influence on the girls.”
“What?!”
“Sit down. I’m appealing the decision—”
“Appealing? So, they already decided— I missed one visit! Far as she knows, I didn’t do nothing else wrong. Why the hell—”
“Listen to me, Juliet.” Whiskey leaned forward. “Ms. Baker knew who to call to go over my head. She has contacts in NOC-Unit.”
“You mean you’re just now starting to get that she’s fucking connected? Great, welcome to the club! Better late than never, right?”
Whiskey’s jaw worked.
“Keep your voice down,” she said. “I have a friend in R&D. I was asking him about the possibility of a Mark-17 on maneuvers when Ms. Baker’s call came in. That’s how I was able to start my appeal so quickly. I was there when Dr. White—she’s the head of R&D—had my friend file the stop-notice for your visitations.”
“I don’t give a shit about who filed what,” I said. “When I see that bitch—”
“Do you understand what a stop-notice is?” Whiskey asked. “It’s an order to shoot you on sight if you try to get near the girls. It will remain in effect until my appeal goes through.”
I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath and let it out.
“Why is this happening?”
“I don’t usually look on the bright side of things, Juliet,” Whiskey said. “But this time, there actually is a silver lining. Ms. Baker tipped her hand. Now we know that she’s connected.” Whiskey held up one hand to stop me from saying anything. “Without any doubts. And we know where—R&D, right at the top. And how—your nieces.”
My heart started beating faster.
“But you’re telling me all this because you’re the one person I can trust?” I sounded sarcastic, but honestly, I wanted it to be true. Paranoia gets exhausting fast. “You got me this job, put me on probation instead of firing me after I fucked up and started drinking again—”
“Fucked up once,” Whiskey growled. “There better not be any ‘again.’”
“—and now you’re keeping me from running up to the girls and getting shot. How come? Because you need me on your team? Because I’m some kind of asset? Or is it because this’ll make me trust you?”
Whiskey laughed. The sound made my balls want to run and hide up in my throat.
“I was ready to fire you this morning at oh-seven-hundred, soldier,” she said. “I don’t need you around. You’re a liability. Command ordered me to put you on probation.”
That knocked me back down to earth pretty damn quick.
“Command?”
“I can only assume it’s because they think you’re still useful. You’re young and eager to please, desperate enough to do whatever it takes to complete a mission, and having you around could force your nieces’ cooperation if it became necessary.”
“Cooperation?” I smacked my hand on the table. “What the fuck do you people want from them? They’re just babies.”
“No, they’re something worth risking an entire team on storming Delgado’s compound, keeping Ms. Baker happy, and an order to shoot you in the street—witnesses be damned—if you try to get close.” Whiskey raised her chin at me. “You, on the other hand? The second you become more trouble than you’re worth, you’re dead. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“No, do you really understand what that means?” Whiskey asked. “What you’re going to have to do?”
Part of my nightmare about Owen came back to me. Being a good little soldier until I could figure out how to get the girls away from these people.
“What do you think I been doing the last five months?” I said.
“Good.” Whiskey sat back in her seat. For a minute, she just stared down into her coffee cup. “While you were in the hospital you asked if I knew Delgado wasn’t planning on selling the girls.”
“I remember,” I said.
“Information and orders come down the chain of command,” she sa
id. “My superiors knew I wouldn’t ask questions on a human trafficking case, so human trafficking it was.”
“Is that why you’re telling me this stuff?” I asked. “’Cause you’re pissed at them for lying to you?”
She looked at me.
“I’m telling you because I don’t know what they want from your nieces,” she said. “But I sure as hell intend to find out.”
“So, what do we do now?”
“You stay away from the girls until the appeal goes through. Don’t go off half-cocked if command turns it down. And it might be smart for you to start making plans. Having an idea of where you’d go to ground if you needed to. Nobody would think it was strange for a man to take a couple hundred in cash out of his account every week for pocket money. Especially if it was in different amounts every time.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I’m—”
The pager started beeping. Whiskey picked it up and sighed.
“I’m going to chew command out about working two days in a row that we were supposed to have off,” she said. “But they probably won’t listen. In about an hour you’re going to get a call from dispatch. In another, we’ll very likely be on the way somewhere to take care of someone else’s shit. Be ready.”
Whiskey stood up and threw some cash on the table.
Before I could say anything about paying for it, she shook her head and said, “No, Juliet, be better than ready. Be incredible. Be the best goddamn soldier they have for as long as they need you, then be ready to run. That’s the only way you’re getting out of this alive.”
THE END
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