When I got outside, the muggy early morning air smacked me in the face, and I retreated inside. I saw that the Tower had a concierge, and I turned to it. "Excuse me," I asked the woman at the front desk. "Can you call me a taxi?"
"Of course, Miss," the woman said. Taking my face and appearance into consideration, her eyes softened. "Is everything okay?"
"No," I said, trying not to sob. "I just made the worst mistake of my life. Everything is definitely not okay."
Chapter 6
Dane
I watched Abby go, fleeing into the empty elevator and the door closing behind her. I couldn't move, frozen in shock at what had happened in the last five minutes. Walking to the door, I stared at the elevator as the lights showed it going down all the way to the lobby. Part of me wanted to run after her, to charge down the fire escape stairs and plead for her to listen to me. If she just knew my story, if she only could understand, maybe there'd be a chance. But the other side of me, the side that had spent nearly five years in Fort Leavenworth as Prisoner Bell, stayed my feet. It was a good way to get myself arrested again, and from what Abby had told me about her father, a good way to fetch myself another felony, possibly even a sexual assault or rape charge. Two-time losers on a rape charge don't get much mercy from the State of Georgia, and the only way I'd see the free world again would be as a withered old man.
The cautious side of me won, which disgusted me even as I closed the door. Something rustled at my feet, and I looked down to see the photo that had set the whole thing off lying on the tile. Abby must have dropped it when she fled the apartment, perhaps when she was putting her shoes on. Reaching down with nearly numb fingers, I picked it up, absently locking the door behind me as I looked at the faces in the photo. Myself, Chris Lake, and Lloyd James. The killer, his friend, and the man who'd damned me.
* * *
Northwestern Iraq, Five Years Prior
"Man, do you even know what the fuck the name of this shit hole is?"
I glanced over at Lloyd, who was staring through slitted eyes at the wind scoured vista before us. We were inside a small hut that the locals had abandoned with the amount of insurgent activity in the area. It was just before sunset, and I was trying to get some rest and food before going out on guard duty starting at seven. Three hours of guard duty followed by six hours of sleep. It wasn't that bad of a setup, as long as we didn't get hit by the insurgents. Then nobody would get any sleep.
"What a shit hole," Lloyd repeated, and I had to agree that our hut didn't give us anything to send home on a postcard. It wasn't that Iraq didn't have its fair share of beautiful scenery. In the two months that we'd been there, I'd seen plenty of breathtaking sunrises and sunsets, and there was an arid majesty to a lot of the country. But still, we were uninvited guests surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of guns who didn't exactly like us. It got to you after a while. And this particular little nameless village had the unfortunate luck of being not only partially destroyed by insurgents, but it was hosting me and my squad mates just as a dust storm started to roll in, turning the whole world a sickly, ugly shade of brown.
"Lloyd, you know what the difference between you and the battalion commander is?" I asked, trying to get him to stop staring out the window and just calm down. Lloyd was my friend, but once he got going like this, he'd keep ranting through most of the damn rest time. No thanks. I checked the dust port on my machine gun, making sure to spray a little bit of lubricant into the action. I was on the SAW this patrol, and those things had a nasty reputation of getting jammed in the dust and grit of the desert unless you oiled the hell out of them.
“What’s that?” Lloyd replied. "He's taking two weeks’ leave to be back fucking some fraulein in Baden-Baden or something?"
"Nope. You're sleeping in the shit hole here. He's sleeping in the one ten kilometers down the road," I said with a smile. "Come on, man. This has been an easy patrol. We're scheduled to rotate back to the Green Zone for some R and R soon anyway. Just chill the fuck out and we'll be eating steaks, watching the NBA playoffs, and maybe getting some Air Force pussy before you know it."
"Forget that, man. I'm looking for a little local action," Lloyd said. "You know those girls want it. They dream about fucking a good ol’ American soldier. At least I can take some good memories back from this dreadful place."