Lynne Heitman's Alex Shanahan Series by Lynne Heitman

Author:Lynne Heitman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62681-547-6
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

We had pulled the pillows off the floor and the sheets over us as we lay on the bed together. Jack had gotten up to open the window, so the sounds of the wakening neighborhood were coming through along with a slight, cooling breeze. A gospel singer was on the stereo, someone I’d never heard of, but someone he liked. I liked her, too.

“Jack.”

“What?”

“You’re not like Jimmy.”

He shifted, so my head rolled a little to the side and I had to readjust to fit again into the crook of his right arm and against his chest. He didn’t answer.

“Jack.”

“I heard you.”

“That’s what scares you, isn’t it? You’re not scared of him. You’re afraid you’re like him. You’re not.”

“How do you know?”

I raised my head and crawled up to look into his eyes. I turned his face to make sure he was looking at me. “The only thing you have in common with Jimmy Zacharias is you were both from Florida, and you both served in Vietnam, which put the two of you in the same place at the same time with the same set of crappy options.” I curled into him and put my head down again. “It’s not in you to be like him.”

I listened to the music and tried not to think about the moment, coming soon, when we would have to get up and take showers—or maybe one together—and put our clothes back on and go back to the world. He was quiet, stroking my hair.

“Where did you grow up?” he asked.

“All over.”

“Where were you the longest? Where do you think of as home?”

“Seattle.”

“What neighborhood?”

“Ballard.”

“Try to picture a company of North Vietnamese soldiers coming out of the trees one night in Ballard. It’s foggy and it’s hard to see. They look like ghosts carrying machine guns and hand grenades and rocket launchers. But they’re not ghosts and they woke up in the morning pissed off and they walk in pissed off. They walk up and down the streets of the neighborhood rousting people out of bed, out of their homes. They bust into bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms and basements. They’re looking for the husbands and the sons because this is supposed to be an enemy stronghold. They think they’re there. They’ve been told they’re there, and they find weapons, but mostly what they find are mothers and sisters and grandmothers and daughters.” The slightest tremble crept into his voice. “They find babies.”

I felt him stiffening. When I tried to put my arm around him, he turned so that it was hard to be close to him at all. I moved away and wrapped myself in the sheets.

“Now they’re really pissed off, these soldiers. So they go up and down the streets of Ballard from house to house, killing the family pets—shooting the dogs and running the cats through with their bayonets, just for the hell of it. Just because they can. Now they’re not sure what to do because if they leave all these people

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