The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell Page B

been her one weakness, trying to take care of a man who couldn’t take care of himself. You told yourself you were going to change things, then you just kept making the same dumb mistake over and over again. It wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined when the ROTC recruiting officer, Captain Granger, had shown up at her high school wearing dress greens that had been cut so tight that everyone—including, Fowler had noticed, Miss Simmons, her homeroom teacher—could clearly see his biceps through the fabric. That was the kind of officer she’d expected to teach her about life in the Army—energetic, confident, and hard as fucking nails. Instead, she’d gone for the complicated option, the sensitive model, the one that had seemed more interesting, which was how you ended up in a tactical situation that was far more fucked-up than anyone had realized it would be.
    More than anything, she resented the way Pulowski had accused her of being responsible for this mission the night before. The whole lecture on how she had the free will to say no, as if the connection between them had never existed. Which was a lie. But then again, so were the arguments she’d used to keep her platoon together, functioning, and in the field. It didn’t help that she got a call from the TOC, informing her that the reinforcements she’d requested had been diverted to provide security for a tour that Colonel Seacourt was giving that day. Or that, hearing this news, her platoon sergeant, Carl Beale, became increasingly nervous, pacing back and forth, scanning the windows of the nearby buildings incessantly. “Why don’t you give me a couple guys, LT,” he said finally, “and let me walk this west perimeter, go in these storefronts? I don’t like them.”
    Beale had freckles so thick that in places they blended to solid patterns on his cheeks, and a body that resembled, in its doughiness and the flat-footed way his boots creased at the instep, an old-fashioned power hitter gone to seed. They were standing at the fender of Fowler’s Humvee, which she’d parked in the center of their work site. Pulowski had stopped for a water break a few meters away. “Stick with the plan, Beale,” she said. “We secure this area, we get the T-walls for the new checkpoint up, then we wait for the extra manpower to go in the buildings and get those cameras installed.”
    â€œYou knew you were bringing the cameras out. So why didn’t you bring the extra trucks in the first place?”
    She knew Beale knew the answer to that. The answer was that neither Pulowski nor McKutcheon had given them an accurate report on how congested and unruly the intersection was going to be. “It’s an unforeseen circumstance, Beale. Okay? But I’m not going to abandon protocol just because you’re nervous, okay?”
    â€œYeah, well, imagine how you’d feel if you lost somebody just because Pulowski was too much of a pussy to go do his job.”
    â€œIt’s not about Pulowski,” she said. “I don’t want to send you in either. Or Waldorf. Or Crawford. Or anybody.”
    â€œYou deserve better than that.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Beale was an awkward soldier; he’d never touched her except out in the bean field, when she’d saved him from a fight. But now he grabbed the collar of her body armor and pulled her down into a squat, holding tight. “You laid out for me with Seacourt, didn’t you? Huh? You lay out for me, I lay out for you. How would you feel if we got hit because you spent two hours waiting for backup, just because you wanted to protect Pulowski? He doesn’t have your back, ma’am. Not like we do, anyway.”
    She should have let it pass—ignored Beale, made the proper call. Instead what she saw, like the tiny picture she used to get when she turned her father’s binoculars around and looked through them the wrong way,