For the first time in nearly a year, I’m finally out of the South. I’d expected my first trip from Camp Lejeune might be a trip to New York. After the way I left things with Francie, I owe her that, even if she’s forgiven me. Instead, I’ve found myself on my way to the final phase of training before I’m giving a permanent assignment. I’d been told to prepare to leave the country when I enlisted, but I hadn’t expected that to happen for a lot longer. I also hadn’t expected to find myself in London.
“Wait, is this the first time you’ve been out of the country?” Luca asks, and I bristle. He shoots Jack an incredulous look, but he shrugs.
“Don’t look at me, man. I haven’t either.” Jack’s cool response stops me from overreacting.
“Really?” Luca repeats. “Never?”
“I grew up in foster care,” I remind him.
“Single mom,” Jack says. “We didn’t exactly go on vacation.”
In the last few months, we’ve gotten to know each other better, each of us skirting around whatever sad stories sent us signing up for the Marines. During the first three phases of special ops training, we’d stuck together. Unlike some of the other recruits neither Jack nor Luca joined to prove anything. We just didn’t have a lot of options. It made it harder to relate to some of the more ride or die types training alongside us, many of whom had washed out and headed back to their Marine units. Luca liked to say that we were a sort of suicide squad and that made us stronger than some of the others. It’s pretty damn easy to say you’ll fight for someone else and then fail to live up to that promise, it turns out. But when all you’ve got is the fight, there’s a certain glee to going balls to the wall. Plus, we’d discovered that we all had our own particular set of skills.
I’d always been good at numbers with an interest in literature, which meant I’d taken to code cracking and a few of the foreign languages we’d been introduced to. Jack’s talent lay in his steady hands, trained from years of teaching himself instruments. He ranked at the top of every marksmanship test. He could even slow down his heart enough to get a shot off at a record-breaking distance, a feat which meant he’d been flagged for extra training as a sniper. It was something we were all expected to do to some extent, but Jack? He’s the one they’ll call in when they want to take out a high-level target from a helicopter. Luca’s particular skills don’t fall into a training category. He’s just fucking insane. If an ounce of him fears death, he’s never shown it. He walks into every training scenario with a sort of jubilant nihilism. I can never decide if he’s going to be the one that saves the entire unit or gets us all killed.
“Look, we need to celebrate,” Luca says. “We’ve got one night in London before they send us to the ninth circle of hell. We should make it count.”
“You’re going to get us discharged before we even get assigned to active duty,” Jack says.
“What? No! I know London. I have family here,” he says as we brush past a few other trainees in the hall on our way to the stairs.
Jack lifts his eyebrow behind Luca’s back. We’ve pieced together enough about Luca’s family from things he’s said to know he’s not talking about a typical family. I’d guessed but Jack was the one to look it up and discover that the DeAngelos were a well-established, far-reaching criminal organization. Of the three of us, Luca’s been the most tight-lipped about why he joined up. I can’t help thinking his chaos in a bottle routine is hiding something darker. I just can’t figure out if he’s running from his past, his family, or himself.
“Are we going to their house for family dinner?” Jack says dryly.
“Believe me, you don’t want to hang out with my family. Not when you have a city like this at your disposal.” He snaps his fingers and whips around, continuing to walk backwards. Somehow he manages to not knock into anyone, but, probably, because everyone moves out of his way. “I’ve got it. I know what we’re doing tonight.”
I brace myself. I can only imagine the trouble he could get us in a city