Do They Know I'm Running? (28 page)

PEOPLE’S FRIED CHICKEN WAS THE LATEST BODY SNATCHER TO
inhabit the corpse of a seventies-era burger stand in an area of Richmond called the Iron Triangle, saddest neighborhood in the area’s most homicidal city. The canted beams out front bristled with graffiti, a half-dozen bullet holes pocked the window glass. The parking lot’s asphalt buckled so badly Godo imagined some ancient tribal curse gathering force from below, trying to break through. Where better to hawk a black market AK, he thought.

Through the smeary glass he noticed that two of the black girls working the counter wore head scarves and
abayas:
Muslims. It was a growing subculture here, a way to detox the ghetto. He felt blindsided and not a little pissed off as he grabbed the door, following the others inside, then the smell of the place hit him. What was it Chato said?
They do something weird with the chicken
. Grilled meat, lemon, tamarind paste, mint, like some of the houses he’d searched in Iraq. A jolt of terror, feeling for the trip wire, waiting for the explosion, even as he knew it wouldn’t come. He checked to see no one had noticed. Wiping his palms on his shirt, he edged another step inside, let the door close behind him.

While Chato and Puchi pimp-strolled across the room to claim the corner table, Efraim went to the counter to order drinks. Godo lingered, neither here nor there, glancing up at the overhead menu and noticing the place sold only Pepsi, just like over there, Coke being linked to Zionists and the devil.

Lowering his eyes, he studied the chunky black girl in the scarf taking Efraim’s order. She had Cherokee cheeks in an otherwise perfectly round face, a laugh-line squint and a blazing smile so selfless Godo could imagine joy coming to her easily. Enviable, that. Inadvertently, he searched her face for tattoos, like the Shia women wore, and shortly not just his palms but his neck and brow were cloying with sweat.

Efraim carried the drinks on a tray to the corner table and Godo followed like a pup, sat down quickly, grabbed his Pepsi. It was oversweet but the cold was what he wanted. He finished the thing in two fierce swallows.

“The fuck, homes.” Puchi, chugging his ice with a straw. “Sucked that down like a junkie.”

Godo wiped his lips, already craving another. Out in the parking lot, two bikers wearing Nomad patches straddled hogs, gazing down into the open trunk of a BMW owned by a catlike Asian dripping gold, hair slicked back, shades despite the darkness. The conversation was quick, close, almost intimate. Maybe thirty feet away, a trio of black hood rats—more gold, worn over a dashiki, a turtleneck, a Raiders jersey—lurked behind a Mercedes SEL, apprising another set of merchandise, staring into the open trunk, listening carefully to the owner’s patter, in this case a bottle blonde in candy-red slacks and slave-maker pumps: body of a porn star, face like a dropped pie.

Fucking place is an open-air gun mart, Godo thought, wondering if any of the players out there were ATF. “How long till your guy shows up?”

Puchi leaned down to his straw like he was snorting a rail. “Ask me when he gets here.”

Godo belched into his fist, looking off. The moon-faced girl was counting change into the palm of a washed-out, splay-footed woman whose body cascaded fat. Her stretch pants matched her hair curlers. Beside her, a bone-thin towheaded girl sucked on her fingers while bumping mindlessly against her mother’s slab of a
thigh. It looked like some sort of gag, the two of them together, especially with the moon-faced girl in the head scarf standing just beyond them, that breathtaking smile, the cash register a kind of shield, protect her from the white trash. She reminded Godo of someone, the counter girl, the memory just out of reach at first. Finally, it crystallized: Mobley, Jam Slammer Mo, his squaddie with the hip-hop battle anthems, Outkast’s “Call the Law” the hands-down favorite, bellowing the words into the teeth of the shamal sandstorms from his perch at the Humvee’s turret:

Godo spotted the two grenades rolling toward them across the concrete floor and had time to shout out, everybody charging back at flash speed, diving for cover, but Mobley was dragging the SAW, those two-hundred-round ammo drums. The explosions tag-teamed, a sheering white one-two thunderclap followed by AK fire from somewhere near the back of the house, muzzle flashes crackling through the smoke and dust. Godo and Chavous answered with suppression fire, Gunny Benedict crawled forward toward Mobley’s screams. The blast had ripped his leg in two, just above the knee, the arteries torn like thread. He bled out so fast he was convulsing from shock by the time Gunny reached him. Calling for a corpsman was pointless. Mobley was dead before they could drag him into the courtyard, the severed half leg still inside the house.

“Hey dude, she asked you a question.”

It was Puchi. Godo glanced up, saw everyone grinning, not kindly. At the table’s edge, the moon-faced girl stood there waiting.

“I just axed if you’d like a refill on your soda,” she said.

Her voice was soft and more feminine than her size suggested. Gazing up into her face, framed by its veil, he searched for what it was that reminded him of Mobley, feeling vaguely ashamed, as though at some level his mind still believed they really did all look alike.

“Yes,” Godo said, a whisper. “Please. A refill would be nice.”

“It’s a dollar,” she said.

He dug into his pocket for the bill, thinking: ax. Who was it in the squad that used to tease Mobley about that? I axed you nicely. Don’t make me ax you again.

He handed her the money and watched her bobbing hips as she ambled away. Girl can work it till you jerk it, he thought, veil or no veil. He wondered if she felt disgusted by his face.

The night Mobley died, army psyops crews roamed the city in their Humvees, cranking out the deafening sounds of men and women screaming, cats fighting, Guns N’ Roses: “Welcome to the Jungle.” The favorite, though, was a gut-knotting laugh, the creature from
Predator
, played with amped-up bass at a hundred decibels, echoing off the pavement and the concrete walls of the pillbox houses and apartment buildings, like the voice of some cut-rate god.

“Hey hey hey.” Puchi nodded toward the parking lot, sucking loud on his straw, the dregs of his Pepsi. A gray windowless van had just pulled in. “Here comes business.”

Watching as the driver got out and crossed the parking lot, Godo took notice of how underwhelming the man was. Among the contractors he’d met in Iraq, a fair number had come from special forces backgrounds; they’d kept up with the PT, rock-hard bodies, switchblade minds. Cocky, sure, but sometimes you just had to grant that. There were plenty of others, though, who’d simply grabbed the back of the gravy train and refused to let go, slack habits, washed-out eyes, the mouthy swagger of small men: users, gasbags, phonies. They didn’t just lack fire discipline;
they used their weapons like bug spray. Everything about them stank of self-delusion and the fear of weakness.

The man pulled a chair from another table and sat near Puchi, neither close enough to be part of the circle nor far enough away to seem too much a prick. He wore work boots and cargo pants, with a khaki T-shirt underneath a frayed cammie combat blouse, the name tape removed. That alone was enough to make Godo hate him. His eyes were smallish and filmy green while his skin had a raw red quality just short of a rash. He had a wisp of a mustache blurring his lip and a fistful of sag hiding his belt. His left eye drooped, suggesting some sort of nerve damage, and his left hand trembled till he jammed it in his pocket, which he did the instant he caught Godo’s stare.

Puchi did introductions. The man went by Chuck. He tugged a cigarette from a pack lodged in his shirt pocket and lit up right there, using a yellow Bic. No one behind the counter so much as frowned, let alone told him to put it out; they seemed to be ignoring him, actually. Christ, Godo thought, maybe he owns the place.

“We had a chance to float the boat a little,” Puchi said, slipping into some prearranged code. “I’d say everybody was happy.”

“Not quite,” Godo said, squaring himself in his seat. He’d been wondering how the guy got the weapons in. He’d heard tales of GIs sawing off the bottoms of oxygen tanks, slipping the AKs in, welding the bottoms back on, then loading them into shipping crates for transport back to their unit’s home base, all but impossible to track to a specific soldier. Maybe Chuck here had a guy in uniform working for him, easier that way, no customs. Godo felt certain that, if he asked, he’d only get a lie for his trouble.

Improvising, just to see where it went, he said, “You get the guns in Iraq, that’s one thing. If that’s where you get the ammo too, there’s a problem. Saddam’s factories got sloppy packing cartridges, it’s why they had so many misfires. So the weapons, fine.

Ammunition? Unless it’s Czech or Cuban, Yugoslav, anything but Iraqi, we’re not in the market.”

The guy named Chuck tapped ash onto the floor. His gaze was watery and a little off-center with the sagging left eye. He turned to Puchi. “What’s this guy talking about? You can buy a 7.62 round anywhere.”

“Not the quantity we want,” Godo said. “Not without red flags everywhere.”

Chuck turned to him, squinting against his cigarette smoke. “I don’t know you,” he said, half matter-of-fact, half insulting.

Godo mocked up a smile. “Sure you do. All the guys at Harmon Stern knew me.”

Chuck blinked, turning his cigarette in his fingers. His left hand still sat tucked away, safe in his pocket. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You guys came through my checkpoint four times a day.”

Chuck shot Puchi a glance. “What’s he going on about now?”

Puchi shrugged. “He worked over there. Like you.”

“So what?”

“Harmon Stern Associates.” Godo rocked back in his chair a little. “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Chuck took a short tense drag on his smoke. “I didn’t work with that outfit.”

No doubt the guy’s lying, Godo thought. Too vague, too interior. “You sure about that?”

Chuck stood up, said to Puchi, “This is fucked up.”

“Don’t let him bug you, man.” Puchi waved toward Godo like that might make him go away. “He came back with kind of an attitude. Not like he’s the only one, am I right?”

“I’m not fucking around. I don’t care where he’s been. Or what happened.” Chuck’s eyes flicked over to Godo’s face, jittered back. “He gets his shit in check or this is over.”

Godo basked in the power, the situation his to dictate. What
did he care if Puchi and Chato scored another AK or two? Chuck looked like he might bolt for the door, Puchi seething in silence, Efraim just sitting there, arms crossed tight. Chato, in a world of his own, fiddled with his straw, making soft trumpet sounds with his lips.

“You think I’m just messing with you?” Godo laced his fingers behind his head. “We had trouble with Harmon Stern, not just once or twice. All the time. They were like a cancer in Al Anbar when I was there. This one time in particular, they shot two unarmed
hajis
for sport, the two guys just working on their pickup along the road to Ramadi. We dealt with the blowback for days. Had a fucking riot on our hands.”

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Chuck said, a little stronger now.

“Convince me.”

“Convince
you?”

“Yeah. And don’t be so touchy.”

Chuck dropped his butt on the floor, crushed it with his boot. “You think I’m touchy?” He leaned forward, fists on the tabletop. The inwardness had fled. “I get sick of Molly Mopes shitting on what we did. You were there? Then you know as well as I do there was damn near no way to tell a good
haji
from a muj. You could talk to a guy one day, he’s friendly as a foot massage, that night you catch him carrying gasoline out to the highway to soften the asphalt, bury an IED. You want to fault somebody for shooting two guys by the side of the road? Listen up—unless you were there at that instant, unless you knew what the intel was, unless you know what those two
hajis
did, how suddenly they moved, how they acted right before the trigger got pulled, unless and until you know all that, you don’t know dick. And guess what, I don’t care how bad things turned after. That means nothing. Those people used any excuse they could to bitch about what we were trying to do. Ungrateful shitbags most of them. But we
had a job to do and we did it. We didn’t lose one package we were hired to protect. Not one. I owe nobody an apology, least of all you.”

Godo waited for a second, watching as, across the room, the towheaded girl and her walrus of a mother attacked their food. “My gunny got killed because of fuckups like you.”

“That’s it.” Chuck shoved the bad hand back in its pocket. “I don’t need this.” He turned toward the door and stormed out, Puchi watching his back as though waiting for that magic point when he’d stop, cool off, rethink it, come back in, if only to give Godo a ration of shit. But that didn’t happen. The guy who called himself Chuck, the man Godo felt almost certain he remembered now, if not him some guy just like him, climbed into his plain gray van and peeled out so fast his rear axle leapt almost a foot off the ground when it tagged a high-crested buckle in the blacktop. The other parking-lot shoppers stopped everything, staring after the van as it fishtailed away.