They called him Cosmo–the a mass of frizzy, curly hair that stuck up and out from his head identical to Cosmo Kramer on the popular American sitcom, Seinfeld. He'd been working with the Americans, feeding them tips here and there, giving them information on the comings and goings of certain people of interest. He was quick to smile and hard to scare, and his daughter, Nagar, was the same age as Paulie's sister, Kylie. Kylie had even written Nagar a couple of letters and Nagar had responded with pictures and a few basic words in English that her father had taught her.
They had found his bike first. It had been tossed outside the base too, its wheels spinning, handle bars buried in the sand. They checked for a flat and looked around for Cosmo, surprised that he had just abandoned it in the middle of the road that circled the perimeter beyond the Concertina wire. And then they found Cosmo. His dead fingers had been wrapped around an American flag. It was one of those little cheap ones on a wooden stick, the kind you wave at parades on the fourth of July. The message was clear. Someone had discovered Cosmo's willingness to assist the Americans. And they’d killed him.
Paulie was the most shaken of all of them. He didn't understand the hate. The Sunnis hated the Shiites. The Shiites hated the Sunnis. They both hated the Kurds. And they all hated Americans, though the Kurds were slightly more tolerant and recognized that America might be their only hope.
“Remember when that church burned down in Hannah Lake? Remember how Pastor Taylor helped organize a fundraiser and everybody kind of pitched in and the church got rebuilt? It wasn't even Pastor Taylor's church. It was a Methodist church. Half of the people who gave money or helped rebuild weren't Methodist. Heck, more than half had never set foot in any church,” Paulie had said, incredulous. “But everybody helped anyway.”
“There are scumbags in America, too,” Beans reminded gently. “We may not have seen it in Hannah Lake. But don't for one second believe there isn't evil everywhere.”
“Not like this,” Paulie whispered, his innocence making him resistant to the truth.
Ambrose never saw his friends after the blast that killed them. He never saw them laid out peacefully in death like Bailey was. They wouldn't have been laid out. No open caskets for soldiers returning from war, for soldiers who had died from an improvised explosive device that blew a two-ton Humvee into the air and sent another one careening. They wouldn't have looked like Bailey either, as if they were sleeping. Judging from the damage to his own face, they would have been ravaged, unrecognizable.
At Walter Reed, Ambrose saw soldiers who were missing limbs. He saw burn patients and soldiers with facial injuries much worse than his own. And his dreams were filled with limbs and gore and soldiers who had no faces and no arms, stumbling around in a storm of black smoke and carnage on the streets of Baghdad. He'd been haunted by the faces of his friends, wondering what had happened to them after the blast. Had they died immediately? Or had they known what was happening? Had Paulie, with his sensitivity to things of the spirit, felt death take him? Had Bailey?
Such needless death, so unnecessary, so tragic. Grief clogged Ambrose's throat as he stared at Bailey Sheen, at the dirt that matted his hair and the dried mud that Angie Sheen gently wiped from his round face. The toddler Rachel Taylor had taken from Rita's mother was smeared in the same black mud. Bailey was dead, Rita was unconscious, and the bottoms of Becker Garth's pant legs were still damp and caked in dirt. He had done something to his wife. And he had done something to Bailey, Ambrose realized in dawning horror. There was evil everywhere, Ambrose thought to himself. And he was seeing it right here in Hannah Lake.
He strode from the room, fury pounding in his temples, surging through his veins. He crossed the emergency lobby, pushing the swinging doors wide that separated the waiting room from the trauma center, causing the few people who huddled miserably on the metal chairs, waiting for admittance or word on the condition of loved ones, to look up in alarm at the angry, scarred giant who flew through the doors.
But Becker wasn't there. Rachel Taylor still waited by Sarah Marsden's side, but Ty had surrendered to exhaustion across her chest. Rachel still hadn't seen Bailey, still didn't know her nephew had been killed. She looked at him in question, her eyes wide in a face that reminded him of her daughter, reminded him that Fern sat devastated in the room where Bailey lay and he needed to go to her. Ambrose turned around and went back through the trauma doors. Landon Knudsen and another police officer Ambrose didn't know stood just outside the emergency room entrance.
“Knudsen!” Ambrose called out as he pushed through the entrance doors.
Landon Knudsen took a step back and his partner stepped forward and put a hand on his holster.
“Where's Becker Garth?” Ambrose demanded.
Knudsen's shoulders slumped as his partner's back stiffened, their opposing reactions almost comical. Landon Knudsen couldn't take his eyes off of Ambrose's face. It was the first time in three years he had laid eyes on the wrestler he had idolized in high school.