She scrambles up the slope, grabbing brush to pull herself along, thinking that if she hurries, she can get to a RebootYu and buy some used Hideware before she has to meet her friends in the Carnival District. She collected seven hundred tokens in all, which might even be enough for a used Ophelia. And if that jealous bitch Joyce Brilliant thinks Iris is going to let her borrow it, she’s got another think coming.
In another minute the mermaid is alone. It swims disconsolately out of the murk to gaze through the side of the aquaball at Chip’s easy smile and empty eyes.
In a small, warbling voice, the pitiful creature inside the glass sphere begins to trill. Her song—a low-pitched, unearthly dirge, like the forlorn cries of the whales that have long been extinct—has no words. Perhaps there never are for grief.
Thumbprint
THE FIRST THUMBPRINT CAME IN the mail.
Mal was eight months back from Abu Ghraib, where she had done things she regretted. She had returned to Hammett, New York, just in time to bury her father. He died ten hours before her plane touched down in the States, which was maybe all for the best. After the things she had done, she wasn’t sure she could’ve looked him in the eye. Although a part of her had wanted to talk to him about it and to see in his face how he judged her. Without him there was no one to hear her story, no one whose judgment mattered.
The old man had served, too, in Vietnam, as a medic. Her father had saved lives, jumped from a helicopter and dragged kids out of the paddy grass, under heavy fire. He called them kids, although he had been only twenty-five himself at the time. He’d been awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
They hadn’t been offering Mal any medals when they sent her on her way. At least she hadn’t been identifiable in any of the photographs of Abu Ghraib—just her boots in that one shot Graner took, with the men piled naked on top of each other, a pyramid of stacked ass and hanging sac. If Graner had just tilted the camera up a little, Mal would have been headed home a lot sooner, only it would have been in handcuffs.
She got back her old job at the Milky Way, keeping bar, and moved into her father’s house. It was all he had to leave her, that and the car. The old man’s ranch was set three hundred yards from Hatchet Hill Road, backed against the town woods. In the fall Mal ran in the forest, wearing a full ruck, three miles through the evergreens.
She kept the M4A1 in the downstairs bedroom, broke it down and put it together every morning, a job she could complete by the count of twelve. When she was done, she put the components back in their case with the bayonet, cradling them neatly in their foam cutouts—you didn’t attach the bayonet unless you were about to be overrun. Her M4 had come back to the U.S. with a civilian contractor, who brought it with him on his company’s private jet. He had been an interrogator for hire—there’d been a lot of them at Abu Ghraib in the final months before the arrests—and he said it was the least he could do, that she had earned it for services rendered, a statement that left her cold.
Come one night in November, Mal walked out of the Milky Way with John Petty, the other bartender, and they found Glen Kardon passed out in the front seat of his Saturn. The driver’s-side door was open, and Glen’s butt was in the air, his legs hanging from the car, feet twisted in the gravel, as if he had just been clubbed to death from behind.
Not even thinking, she told Petty to keep an eye out, and then Mal straddled Glen’s hips and dug out his wallet. She helped herself to a hundred and twenty dollars cash, dropped the wallet back on the passenger-side seat. Petty hissed at her to hurry the fuck up, while Mal wiggled the wedding ring off Glen’s finger.
“His wedding ring?” Petty asked when they were in her car together. Mal gave him half the money for being her lookout but kept the ring for herself. “Jesus, you’re a demented bitch.”
Petty put his hand between her legs and ground his thumb hard into the crotch of her black jeans while she drove.