The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell Page A

tournaments, and once back in Tennessee sitting in his mother’s living room on leave—the grainy column of black smoke, the evacuated soldiers, half dressed, some down to their underwear. But it had mutated over time—after the details about the deaths of the two soldiers had come out—into something more organic. The bombing at Muthanna was the thing that skittered and scratched inside his brain when a warm gust of breeze touched his cheek, or he picked the paper up off his mom’s lawn, or he drove past his high school—anytime that he relaxed back into the ease that was normal life, there it would be, even if what had happened to those soldiers had nothing to do with him. Even if the only thing more ridiculous than getting killed at a traffic control point, at a completely unimportant intersection, was Fowler’s pigheaded insistence that this kind of ridiculousness needed to be stamped out or solved in some way. He’d said as much to Fowler—hell, he’d dumped her for that, basically—and, despite her compliments, he worried that she had brought him here to shame him, so he made an effort to keep a hard expression on his face and especially not to show fear. “I mean, okay, so the barracks don’t look too good,” he said, peering out the window at the crumpled slabs of concrete where the soldiers had stayed. “But it’s not … well, it’s not completely insane. I mean, look, what’s that?” He craned his head so that he could see through the windshield. “There’s people out, lots of traffic. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
    The worst part had been the feeling he’d had before he’d separated from Fowler, the premonition that he was going to do something cowardly and that he was powerless to stop it or make it change. And this was it. Forgetting his resolution, believing that maybe, in Fowler, there was something very, very serious he’d missed. “So tell me, where are the bad guys?” he asked. “What is it I don’t see?”
    â€œSame thing we don’t see,” Fowler said. He noticed that her tone had turned grave, respectful—though not frightened—and that she and Beale were upright in their seats, scanning both sides of the street that they’d now entered, while patting the … what was it? a broken shackle?… that Beale had welded to the roof, one, two, three, some ritualized version of a handshake between themselves and the Humvee.
    â€œTouch it,” Fowler said.
    â€œTouch what?”
    â€œTouch me, touch Beale, give us a little love, Pulowski.”
    He reached up, awkwardly, not wanting to undo his shoulder belt, and brushed the backs of their hands with his fingertips.
    â€œThat’s good,” Fowler said. “That’s for Fredrickson and Arthur, who fucking bit it right fucking here. And now, in their honor, we’re going to fix this place.”
    â€œHooah,” Beale said.
    *   *   *
    The traffic was a problem. Fowler could handle the bomb crater, the pile of slag left from the building that had collapsed, but what she hadn’t accounted for were the cabs, mini Nissan pickups loaded with melons, overladen buses, hatchbacks with angry-looking men that zoomed around her platoon’s vehicles as they pulled into the intersection outside Muthanna. So she pretended that she had. She called the battalion and requested four additional Humvees. She established a security perimeter, her Humvee’s .50-cal warning traffic away, then she ordered her platoon to fill the blast hole with gravel and tow away the chassis of the truck that had blown up Fredrickson and Arthur. And what did Pulowski do during these two hours of steady work? Nothing. He slouched around her truck. He unpacked his cameras, fiddled with some wires, and generally acted terrified—which, you know, fine, but so was everybody. It had always