Castle Danger--Woman on Ice Read online

  Fuckin’ Iraqis.

  The scope shook because he was breathing hard. Fuck. He was out in the woods, alone, to let the steam escape.

  Fueling the fire, no, they had told him that would kill him. Fueling the fire, not in this snow. Not in the sub-zero. The rabbit saw the scope shake. Staring right at him now. But the crosshairs were all over the place with his heightened heartbeat. Ease it down, Marine. Ease it down.

  Joel came to hate the sound of Arabic, the way these guys argued, loudly, all talking at once. You’d think they were about to punch each other, but it never came to that. They were just loud. Even the people who spoke to him in English, who were friendly to him, it never felt genuine. He hated their teenage boys most of all. He hated being hit on the helmet with sandals. Sometimes, when no one was paying attention, he would scope innocents, to keep up practice for the next hunting season, whenever he would see another one. If he would.

  That rabbit knew. It saw the glint. Joel tightened his finger on the trigger. His heart rate was still high, but he had compensated. He knew the rhythm, the exact moment to—

  Fucking rabbit was gone. Shit! Joel fired anyway, a shockwave through his body, and the mound of snow where the rabbit had been perched exploded. Joel let out a heavy breath that rasped and rattled up his windpipe. A dry cough. He buried his head in his arm, but it was too late. He’d probably scared off every living thing within a five-mile radius.

  When the attack finally happened — a car bomb at a wedding in Baghdad — Joel and his unit weren’t given any prior warning. There had been no hints from the ever-present and increasingly sullen Iraqi teenagers. No portent of doom. It was several blocks away, so Joel was never in any danger, but he’d joined the general rush to the bomb site. Two American soldiers died. Three American contractors. One British soldier. Seventy-nine Iraqis, including the groom, the mother of the bride, and the sister of the bride.

  Jesus, the way that bride rallied, taking care of the children, pulling them from rubble and glass and body parts, sending them to get help if they could walk, carrying them if they couldn’t, while her not-quite-husband stared up from lifeless eyes only a few feet away … Joel wanted to go home. He wanted to go home badly.

  He had frozen up.

  In that shitty desert heat, despite all his training, all his frustration, when the boom came and he felt it in his bones, he had frozen up. When a sergeant finally slapped him on the helmet and told him to do something, Joel helped some of the wedding party get treatment, but he had to navigate the helter-skelter scene, everyone shouting and stepping all over each other, making it harder for help to get where it was needed.

  He shouted, but his Arabic sucked. He had a teenage boy, all dressed up for the wedding, with a possible skull fracture. He couldn’t stop the bleeding. This kid was going to die. The last person he would ever see was Joel Skovgaard, who didn’t even know how to talk to him. Just telling him in English, “Gonna be okay, gonna be okay, gonna be okay,” then “Allah akbar, right? Allah akbar?”

  The kid said something. A question? Was it a question? Do questions sound like questions in Arabic? Joel was too young. He never paid attention. He blocked that shit out. It all sounded exactly the same to him. Fucking fuck!

  It wasn’t until later, sweating buckets, his voice gone from shouting, his hand on the kid’s head, long dead, that he realized his rifle was gone. Jesus, what had happened to it? One of those fucking teenagers must have taken it. Here he was saving their goddamn lives, some pure Jesus shit right there, and what do they care? They just took his gun and …

  There it was. Across the street, leaning against the wall right where he had left it, when the sergeant got him up and moving, where he watched the horror unfold in waves, until he jumped in to help.

  Right where he’d left it.

  He lifted his head from his arm. Sniffed snow up his nose. All he’d done today was waste his time. And the rabbit’s time, too, he supposed.

  (Getting most of that story out of Joel took me months, and I still had to make up big chunks of it.)

  Anyway, on his way back to his pick-up truck — what else? — his phone picked up a tower again and beeped at him. A few missed messages. One from Dad. “Call me as soon as you get this. Did you forget we’re meeting Chief Neudecker today? I think he can get you on the force.”

  He didn’t feel bad about it. He didn’t feel good about it. All he felt was that he’d been given the consolation prize for not killing that goddamn rabbit.

  Joel met his dad in the parking lot of the police station, parked right next to the man’s leased GMC Yukon Denali, still running. Awfully big vehicle for someone who was alone in it most of the time. Abe Skovgaard got a new one every five years. No, that was what he told people. Truth was he got one every other year. At the first sign that the floor needed a bit of cleaning, time for a new vehicle. Same at home. Always needed something new. New furniture, new television, new appliances. Maybe that’s why Joel liked old things. Old truck, old hunting rifle, old music. Dad was always about keeping up.

  Abe buzzed his window down a couple of inches. Joel hand-cranked his. Snow came swirling in, but he didn’t mind.

  Abe asked, “You want to go home and change first?”

  Joel shook his head. “I’m good.”

  “Son …” The lecture was there, right on the tip of his tongue. It always was. Joel had heard enough of them. Lately, he’d watched his younger brother Obie get them more often, watched the same dead-eyed look creep into his face that Joel had gotten halfway through his teens, too. Their sister Amber, the middle child, didn’t get them in the same way. I mean, girl, right? It all came down to Joel needing the push, Amber needing the love, and Obie needing to measure up, instead of settling into the spoiled baby role, regardless of what Mom wanted. Jesus, the old man was hard on Obie. Joel flinched at the condescending way Abe talked to the kid, same as he’d flinched at surprise gunfire in the desert.

  But this time Abe shook his head and said, “Okay, okay, that’s … that’s how it will have to be then.” More like he was telling himself than Joel. Serenity now, you know.

  They got out of their trucks, met in front of the Yukon. Abe stuck out his hand. A fucking handshake. Dad always wanted a fucking handshake these days. Joel shook it. Barely. Abe wore his heavy coat, of course, but beneath were slacks and expensive dress shoes that would get tossed in a couple of months, after the snow had had its way with them.

  “The Chief thinks it’ll be a shoe-in. The combat experience helps, obviously. You can get through the patrol stuff in no time at all. Just do what they ask for, volunteer for overtime, and we’ll get you ranked before you know it.”

  That was Dad, alright. When Joel told him he was thinking about being a cop, Abe got to work, made some calls. His buddies the Chief, the mayor, a couple of judges. It was like Abe didn’t hear right, or he chose not to, still thinking a cop’s job was a way into politics. Abe had never been a politician himself. One of his regrets. Mom kept him from that, so he worked on selling the dream to Joel, almost from day one.

  Joel stopped worshipping his Dad around middle school. Anything for the attention back then. Joel didn’t need or want it anymore once he figured out girls, country guitar, and guns. Now Joel wanted to be a cop because he couldn’t think of a better way to drain the anger every day. He wanted to come home exhausted, drink some beer, smile, and drift off to better dreams than the ones he’d been having.

  A gun, a car, a shift, and bad guys to rough up. He’d be doing more good that way than he’d ever done in Iraq.

  “You get anything today?” Abe asked.

  Joel shook his head.

  “Too bad. Too bad. Did you take a shot, at least?”

  “Rabbit. Should’ve had him. Just one of those things.”

  “Too bad. Maybe we can go down to the range after this, check your scope.”

  It wasn’t the scope. That was Dad’s way of saying it was Joel, the shaking, but he’d let his son discover
that “on his own” at the range. Fuck it. “Sure, Dad. We’ll see.”

  “Don’t worry about your clothes today. I’ll tell him I forgot to tell you about it. My mistake, not yours. I’m pretty sure if we play it right, he can sneak you in before he leaves the office. But don’t say anything about that woman, alright?”

  “I know.”

  “He’s not crazy about her.”

  That woman — and it had to be said with emphasis, always — was the mayor’s replacement for the retiring Chief. Ms. Donna-Ellen Bosack had moved to Duluth to be closer to her fiancé, who worked for 3M, a big Minnesota company. She was already a cop in Chicago at the time, so she was able to get on in Duluth. But then her fiancé died a year later, and she grew an even harder shell overnight. Straight-talking, ball-buster mouth on that broad. She stomped her way up the ladder until it was inevitable that she would take over the force. First woman to do so.

  The Chief had had no choice but to make her his No. 2, despite the fact that she hated him, hated the way he ran the old boy’s club, and had no problem telling him so. Daily. And then there was the fact that if you dialed back ten years of angry wrinkles, she was a sexy bitch with a dirty mouth. Lie to her and she would roll her eyes and say, “Fuck my ass.”

  Maybe the Chief misunderstood, thought he had a shot, because things tanked between them after … something had happened at a conference in a Winnipeg hotel bar. Whatever he’d done, she seemed to have a smirk on her face in every meeting, and the Chief’s balls had seemed to wither away until all he talked about was moving to South Carolina.

  Which is what he did with Abe for the first ten minutes of their meeting. Inside for the first time since three-thirty in the morning, Joel was able to smell himself. Not a pleasant way to wake up from the coma the cold had induced in him. But, shit, a smell was just a smell. His mind was fucked up from smells. Burning flesh reminding him of barbecue. The farts of sick Marines smelling like Indian food. Worse, the food itself at the FOB smelled too close to the dead men they would pass on the road to somewhere else, rotting in the sun because there was no one to claim them. They were all from far away — Syria, Saudi, Afghanistan.

  But the stink that eventually brought him back to this office was even worse than his own, some godawful fuming expensive cologne that made Joel think of tear gas.

  The Chief said, “You need to come down to Hilton Head, Abe. You wouldn’t believe the catfish. You can’t keep them off the line. And their February is like our October, I’m telling you.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Golf, I might even take that up. Never did up here, but you should see this course. I’m right over the sixteenth fairway. Wow.” He held out his hands like framing a painting. Then dropped them, let out a sigh. “Counting the days.”

  Abe started talking about his cottage on the lake, about summers in Minnesota, catching walleye, but Joel could tell his dad had lost the Chief already, staring over Abe’s shoulder, lost down South. Uh-huh. Sure, sure. And then he interrupted Abe, “So, let’s see. What have we got here?” He picked up a file, supposedly Joel’s “record” or something. Sure as fuck not a resume. He’d never written one. Maybe Dad had done it for him. Or he’d got Amber to do it.

  “Corporal?” The Chief asked Joel.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Marine Corps.” The Chief glanced over his stylish reading glasses. “Four tours? I don’t know how you did it. My boy had two in Afghanistan and that was enough.”

  Joel wondered how the guy got out of going back, then. He nodded. “Kept my head down, followed my orders.”

  “What I see here is …” Flipped the page. “A leader. Reluctant, maybe, but a leader still.”

  Jesus, how had Abe embellished this? “If I led, it was out of harm’s way. Never lost a man when I was out front.” He was only out front when nothing exciting was going on.

  Except for the bombing, his life in Iraq was the old cliché — long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. But much of that terror was down to the threat, rather than the reality. Humiliation was how they really got him.

  “Hear me, son?” Abe, having to pull him back down to American soil. “About your experience?”

  He cleared his throat. Lifted his eyes to meet Chief Neudecker’s. The man looked bored. Nowhere near old enough to retire. That seemed more and more like a political move. Mid-fifties? Abe was forty-seven now, pretty young when Joel came along. Both of these guys acted older than they really were. They had missed Vietnam. They had missed the Gulf shit. All their flag-waving was based on movies and political bios.

  “Sir, yeah, sir, I had a lot of crowd-control duties, did patrols, pretty much what you guys do here. Carried an AR-15, carried an S-and-W MP, .40, and spent my whole life shooting a Remington 700. And if all those fail, I can take down a bastard right quick with these.” Joel held up his hands, but shit, that was silly. He dropped them back into his lap, looked away at cleared bookshelves, empty walls, the man packing early.

  Abe jumped in. “And there were a couple classes, online, these days. Criminal justice and what was the other one?”

  “Oh, like, Current Issues in Policing, I think.”

  “Yeah, you did that over there, didn’t you? Passed both.”

  Had he even finished the classes? If he had gotten a grade, must’ve been due to Dad’s interference again. Abe was like that. Some people might’ve seen it as affectionate, a picture-perfect encourager. But at home he treated the whole family like employees. A list of chores on the fridge done on an Excel spreadsheet every month. Only way out was doing extracurriculars.

  Take the time Abe found out Obie liked basketball. The old man was all over it. A new cement slab to widen the driveway, a world-class hoop set up on a pole, the right Nikes, official Spalding NBA regulation balls, time, money, and a talk with the coach at the middle school to get him on the team. Yeah, Obie was pretty good at it, but after a couple of seasons he was bored and wanted out. Abe wouldn’t let him quit. Whatever sort of guilt-laden psych-trip he could put a fifteen-year-old boy through, a boy who just wanted to meet girls and play video games, Abe pulled out all the stops.

  It was all foretold. Joel would run the country, or at least the state; Amber would make it in fashion or show-biz or whatever she was on about from month to month, and Obie would play in the NBA. Dad just knew it.

  So where was he going with this thing about the classes?

  “Dad.”

  But Abe pressed on. “It’s not unheard of, is it? Straight from one battlefield—”

  “To the other, right.” The Chief sighed. He rested his chin on his curled fingers. “No, you’re right. Yeah.”

  The Chief gave Joel the once over. Sloppy kid. Entitled kid. That pissed Joel off the most, even though he couldn’t deny it. He’d sure enough tried, though. He also hadn’t come here today thinking it was a fucking job interview. Seriously, only Dad. This was supposed to be about advice, maybe a good word in the ear of someone at the academy. Never occurred to Joel his dad would look for a way to skip all that.

  Chief Neudecker was still looking him over, as Dad rambled on, only now he was rubbing his middle finger across his lips. Creepy. It took another minute before the Chief turned his eyes back to Abe and said, “Maybe a couple more night classes, but we can wait until summer for those. I can rush the paperwork, get him up here in a couple of weeks. How’s that?”

  Abe stood and the Chief stood and they shook hands. Nothing out of the ordinary, just making a deal over a young man’s future, that was all. The Chief shook Joel’s hand, too. Moist. Lots of lotion to keep them smooth. But the handshake felt perfunctory. This deal was between the two older men. Joel should’ve brought his hunting rifle to this meeting. He should have taken a plug of Copenhagen and spit it on the rug. But he followed his dad out. Not another word.

  Let me add that I once met Abe Skovgaard, and he was one of the phoniest men I’ve ever shaken hands with. He either groveled if he thought yo
u were powerful, or dismissed you — politely, but devastatingly — if not. Someone once told him, I swear, that repeating a person’s name to them makes them feel nice, like it’s more personal. If anyone was able to suck the personality out of that, it was Abe Skovgaard. His religion, the part of it that wasn’t worshipping power, came from political talking points. His family was his display cabinet. If he couldn’t live through them vicariously, he would be translucent.

  Maybe that explained why Joel, for all his faults, was always as real as a brick to your face.

  The snow was heavier now, coming at them sideways. Soon as it hit them, Joel grabbed his dad’s arm and said, “The fuck was that about in there?”

  “Language.”

  “Kay. The motherfuck was that bullshit about?”

  Abe looked away. Nodded. “Nice, real nice.”

  “You didn’t tell me nothing about skipping the academy. Maybe I need the academy, you ever think about that?”

  “Well, in that case, I am terribly sorry, son. If you want, I’ll call the Chief and tell him you’d rather try your luck on your own. But who’s going to pay for it?”

  “Shit.”

  “No, not ‘shit’. That’s not an answer to any question. You haven’t worked since you’ve been home, and I’ve understood. I’ve stood by you. I let you come back to the house, to your old room. And I just set you on the path to a new career. So, yes, who’s going to pay for the academy on top of paying for your food, your clothes, your entertainment — how much for that PlayStation? Your bullets? Me? Was that the idea?”

  Joel shook his head and started for his truck.

  “I would appreciate a response. You wanted to know what the deal was. Are you opting out? Do I need to call the Chief? Or maybe you can show some gratitude?”

  Joel tossed his hands up. “Fine. Fine.”

  “Fine what?”

  So now Joel felt all of three inches tall. “I appreciate your help. I appreciate the Chief’s support. I appreciate all you’ve done for me.” Since I came home shell-shocked and humiliated.