“So why aren’t you there? Why are you here, living out of your truck?”
“I’m working,” said Peter. “Helping out a friend. I don’t have a lot of money.”
The detective’s gray eyes looked right through him.
“You get panic attacks? Nightmares, maybe? Or it takes a pint of bourbon to get to sleep?”
“I sleep fine,” said Peter. Which was true, as long as he could see the sky before he closed his eyes. And hear the wind in the trees. Goddamn it. He kept breathing. Maybe it was getting easier.
The detective’s face softened a little. “The VA’s just a few miles from here. They have some pretty good people. Sometimes it just helps to talk.”
Peter opened his mouth and closed it again. How had this cop put him so off-balance?
“No offense,” he said, looking up at the detective, “but you don’t look like my mother. So what the fuck is it to you?”
The tall detective’s face was carefully calm. “Let’s just say I’ve had my share of nightmares.” He stuck out his hand. “Sam Lipsky. Rangers, Somalia ’89, Iraq ’91.”
The Rangers were the Army equivalent of the Marines’ Force Recon, Peter’s group. Somalia was an ugly little war. Mogadishu warlords shot down a Black Hawk helicopter, dropping Rangers in the middle of a hostile city. Then the rescue went bad.
Peter shook the detective’s hand. It was lean and hard, like the man.
“So tell me,” said Lipsky. His eyes like X-rays, looking under the skin. “Do I gotta worry about you? Like that poor schmuck shot up that recruiting office last week?”
Peter shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not me.”
“You’re not pissed off, frustrated, unemployed, maybe got something going that’s not quite legal?”
“All of that, yeah, except the last one.” Peter spread his hands. They were shaking slightly. “Listen, I’m really starving. Can I get something to eat?”
“Sorry. Not yet.” Detective Sam Lipsky pinned Peter with a glance. “Sit tight. I’ll leave the door open. You’re not going anywhere just yet. Better give me the keys to your camper, or we’ll just pry off the lock.”
14
While the cops combed through his truck, Peter talked to other detectives who asked the same questions in different ways, over and over. Peter gave them more or less the same answers. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He knew to vary his answers enough to be believable.
And all the while, his heart beat too fast, the white static buzzed and crackled in his brain, and his feet twitched for a lonely mountain. Breathe in, breathe out.
When they were finished with their questions, they left him alone to sit. He thought about the last time he had an official interview. He’d been back in the States for three days, and he sat in the small cluttered office of a Navy shrink.
It was part of the discharge process. The Pentagon wanted every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine to have at least one session with a mental health professional before returning to civilian life. The idea was to make sure that veterans weren’t emotionally or mentally disturbed, or if they were, to get them into treatment. But in reality, almost nobody admitted to problems. It was part of the culture. Man up and keep going. And you sure as hell didn’t want anything on your record.
The Navy shrink was a stout, friendly lieutenant commander with soft hands but a strong grip. He asked Peter why he didn’t eat in the officers’ mess, why he slept outside on the wild part of the base. Was there something wrong with his quarters? A thick folder open on the desk before him. Peter’s service record.
Peter said he liked the open air. It was a way to get some time to himself. He didn’t mention the way his lungs got tight and the walls closed in and his heartbeat would accelerate inside a building. Especially an institutional building, like the vast office complex where the shrink sat behind his steel desk under flickering fluorescent lights. Peter could barely keep himself in the chair.
The Navy shrink looked at him with a kind smile, and Peter knew the man could see it in him, the pressure in his head, the way the sparks crackled up his brainstem.
“It’s a nice day out,” said the shrink. He closed the folder and set it aside. “How about we go for a walk?” And he watched Peter’s breathing slow in the open air as the static subsided.
“How bad is it?” the man finally asked as they walked the manicured paths. “I’m not writing anything down. This is just you and me.”
Peter told him it was fine if he stayed outside.
“That’s gonna get in the way of civilian life,” said the shrink. “Was it worse during fighting, during downtime, or both?”
“It didn’t start until I got off the plane here,” said Peter. “End of the tour.”
The shrink nodded like he’d heard it a thousand times before.
Maybe he had.