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  Although he was not completely stunned, he pretended that he was. The leader was very thorough in his search of Daud’s clothing. The man found the thicker sheaf of American currency hidden in Daud’s belt. As a last insult, he took Daud’s boots and socks, leaving him barefoot in the alley. Then he kicked Daud in the head.

  As the new explosion of blood filled his mouth and his senses faded, Daud mocked himself. Welcome back home, Rageh. His vision blanked, but he heard the leader walking back to the jeep. Enjoy your newfound wealth, Gold Tooth. I will come for you.

  When Daud regained consciousness, his face had swollen considerably and a small child was laboring to rob him. The boy had his hand deep inside Daud’s pants pocket and was rummaging for change. Feeling the shift of Daud’s body, the boy looked at his victim and squeaked in alarm. He knotted his fingers into a fist, seized all the coins he could, and withdrew his hand; then he took off running.

  Head spinning, thinking he was going to be sick, Daud glanced up and stared into the bright sky that temporarily blinded him. Sharp lances of agony fired through his brain. The slap of the boy’s bare feet against the alley ground echoed inside his skull. At the other end of the alley, glimpsed through spots that swam through his vision, the boy joined a few other children in a pack and they all ran as if for their lives.

  Daud touched his nose and felt the caked blood on his upper lip. He’d been unconscious for a while. He took another breath, then forced himself to his feet. When he glanced at his wrist, he discovered the al-Shabaab men had taken his cheap watch as well. He’d bought it for an American dollar from a sailor at the harbor.

  He started walking, and the sharp rocks along the alley bit into his feet. Thankfully, the thick pads that had formed on his feet as a young boy hadn’t completely gone away. The feet were not nearly so much of a problem as his head.

  A half hour later, Daud arrived at Afrah’s house. The home was a small building covered in corrugated metal in the middle of a small sea of such structures. Half of those had been destroyed not so long ago, and their charred remains stood out like meteor craters among the other makeshift houses.

  His son had never had to live so hard, and Daud took pride in that. But Ibrahim had died hard, suffering from infections that had taken three days to steal his life from him. Daud had been forced to open his wife’s grave to lay their son with her.

  After that, Daud had given up. His heart had turned to stone, and he had walked away from everything he’d believed in. Now he was back in the old neighborhood where his father had raised him, a place that was just across the city but a world away. His wife had never seen this part of him. She had known only the college graduate and the businessman he had become, not the son of a brigand who had grown up hard and hungry until his loving father had set him on another path.

  Daud stood to one side of the door and knocked, out of the way in case Afrah was drunk and paranoid. Afrah had taken to alcohol when he’d renounced the thin veneer of Muslim faith he’d learned from his mother. The metal covering the door felt hot beneath Daud’s hand.

  “Who is it?” The voice was deep and husky, not quite alert.

  “Rageh Daud.”

  A moment passed. Then the door edged open. A huge, bearded face peered out through the opening. Afrah’s face looked like a threatening storm cloud as he peered at Daud over the muzzle of a Tokarev 9mm pistol. After he had renounced Islam, Afrah became a Communist for a time and learned to drink from the Russians while they were in-country.

  “I do not have business with you.” Afrah’s eyes narrowed and his finger rested on the pistol’s trigger. “Go someplace else or you will regret it.”

  “Afrah, friend to my father, do you not know me?” Daud knew that he was more gaunt than he had ever been. His face had suffered from the injuries received from the bomb as well as the sudden weight loss, and the sadness that had turned him numb inside had stamped his features.

  “Your father?” Afrah looked at him a moment longer. The man was in his fifties, though he still looked to be in his physical prime, but Daud feared that his mind was no longer as true as it had once been. “Rageh? Can that be you?”

  “Yes.”

  Whooping with unrestrained joy, Afrah shoved open the door and stepped outside. He was a bull of a man, wide through the shoulders and shaggy now because his hair had grown long. Wisps of gray showed at his temples and in his beard. An old scar—but new to Daud—ran down the man’s left cheek and caught his upper lip, puckering it up into a madman’s leer.

  He wrapped his arms around Daud and lifted him from his feet. The huge embrace and the sudden movement drew a groan of pain from Daud.

  Gently, like he was handling a babe, Afrah placed Daud once more on his feet. “You have been ill-treated, Rageh.”

  “I have.”

  Afrah trailed fingers over the fresh scarring on Daud’s face. “And you have been mightily wounded.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father would have killed the man who has done such a thing to you.”

  “I know. May I come in?”

  “Of course.” Afrah opened the door and gestured inside.

  “We have many things to speak of, and I would learn what you know of an al-Shabaab man who has a gold tooth.” Daud touched his front tooth, though pulling his lip back to show Afrah hurt. “Here.”

  “I know of such a man.”

  “Good. Because I am going to kill him.”

  5

  AT THE JAIL, Sheriff’s Deputy Alvin Trimble guided Bekah in through the back way. She went without speaking, wishing everything she was experiencing was just a bad dream, wishing again that she had stayed home with her granny and Travis. That was where she should have been. She had no business going into town. She hadn’t even enjoyed hanging out with Connie and the others.

  “Did you try to kill Buck?” Alvin’s tone was flatly accusing. He halted beside a security door and buzzed for admittance.

  “No.” Bekah refused to look at him, but she knew that not answering would make things worse. Alvin Trimble wasn’t much different from Buck Miller as she recalled, but he was on the side of the law.

  “Buck says you did.”

  “Buck pulled a knife on me. That’s why I got the jack handle.”

  “That’s not how he says it.”

  “You need to look for that knife.” Bekah said that, but in her heart she was sure that someone had scooped the weapon up. Maybe it was to protect Buck, or maybe it was just theft, pure and simple. It could have been someone looking for a souvenir.

  “I need to get you booked and in a cell, that’s what I need to do. And you need to be praying Buck survives.”

  “He has a broken wrist and a fractured knee. He’s not going to die.”

  “And what makes you the expert of that?”

  Bekah looked at Alvin then and spoke calmly. “I’ve seen men die. I’ve held a couple of them in my arms while they talked to their mommas, then crossed over to someplace else. I know what a dying man looks like. Do you?”

  Alvin shrank back from her for just an instant, then came back filled with anger and embarrassment. She’d forgotten how prideful small-town men were. Or maybe she hadn’t cared. She wasn’t sure which. “I’ve seen my share of dead people. We get traffic accidents out here, and I worked the Hickerson killing.”

  Bekah vaguely remembered the Hickerson killing. The murder had been a domestic dispute that had turned deadly a couple years ago. Bekah resisted the impulse to tell him that a shooting was nothing like having to go out and help gather pieces of a fellow Marine who had gotten blown up by an IED only a few feet away. She turned her attention back to the security door as it buzzed.

  “You said I was drunk and disorderly.”

  “You are.”

  “Then hook me up to a Breathalyzer. Give me a blood test.”

  “Why don’t you just be quiet.” Alvin grabbed the door and opened it, then shoved Bekah ahead of him. She kept pace, following the narrow hallway p
ast the jail cells. Low-wattage bulbs filled the area with pale light that barely penetrated the darkness.

  Bekah barely kept herself calm. She wanted the cuffs off, and she wanted to know how badly getting arrested—even under these bogus pretenses—would harm her career as a Marine reservist. She needed that job. She needed the income and the insurance. She needed a way to take care of her son and herself.

  And she liked what she did as a Marine. Billy Roy couldn’t be allowed to take that away from her.

  For just a moment she considered prayer. That was an automatic response left over from her childhood days. Her grandparents had always taken her to church. Her daddy had been on the road a lot, and her momma had worked all the time. Or been gone. Bekah wasn’t quite sure which was the truth there. Rumors still persisted about her momma even though that was nearly twenty years ago. Callum’s Creek was a town that relished hanging on to dirty laundry. Kids inherited all those troubles the day they were born and carried them around forever.

  As long as they remained in Callum’s Creek.

  Sometimes Bekah had thought about getting out of town, but her granny lived here, and she knew the woman would never leave. Not with Grandpa buried in the small family cemetery on the property her granny kept.

  Bekah didn’t pray, though. God had stopped answering her prayers a long time ago. She didn’t think God even knew she was alive these days.

  The female jailer expertly rolled Bekah’s fingers on an ink pad, then rolled them again across the ten-card, the document that held her fingerprints. The woman was gray-haired and in her late forties. Bekah could almost recall her name, but it eluded her. She was heavyset and looked more like a momma than a peace officer.

  “You need to get some ice on that hand.” The jailer held up Bekah’s right hand. Bruising was already swelling the knuckles and turning the flesh purplish. “I’ll see that you get some.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Surprised that all you got is a little damage to one hand.” The jailer kept rolling Bekah’s fingers, taking it easy with the wounded hand. “You take on a bruiser like Buck Miller, I’d expect them to have to cart you out of there. The way I heard it from dispatch, you pretty much cleaned his clock.” The woman smiled at her admiringly.

  Despite the circumstances, Bekah grinned a little. “I suppose I did.”

  “Some of the gals around here should send you a thank-you note. Buck’s rode roughshod over a few of them.”

  “I know.”

  “If the world was fair, I’d be booking him into a cell tonight. Not you.” The jailer finished the last finger and handed Bekah a towelette to clean up with. “But we both know the world ain’t fair, don’t we?”

  Bekah wiped the ink from her fingers and didn’t say anything.

  “Still, coulda been worse.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “They coulda been carting you off to the hospital tonight. You got to be thankful for that.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The jailer looked at Bekah. “They said you’re a Marine.”

  “Reservist.”

  The woman nodded. “Marines are a tough bunch. My daddy was a Marine. Fought back in World War II, then again in Korea. He was a good man. One thing he always remembered and took pride in throughout his life—and there were precious few things to take pride in where I grew up—was that he was a Marine.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “You just keep your head up, Marine. You’ll get through this.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now let’s get you back to one of those cells. You look like you could use some sleep.”

  Bekah didn’t think she could sleep, but the adrenaline drain had left her empty.

  The eight-by-eight jail cell felt as closed-in as a broom closet and smelled of disinfectant and old urine. The county was poor and struggling; it didn’t put a lot of money into its criminal-holding facilities.

  Bekah sat on one of the two cots bolted to the cinder blocks and looked at the blank wall. There was nothing else she could do. Besides the two cots, there was only a toilet and a sink—bare essentials. In another cell, a drunken man sang church hymns and another man growled curses at him and told him to shut up.

  She had no idea of how much time had passed before Alvin came back to the holding area. He held a fresh cup of coffee, and the smell cut through the stink of disinfectant and urine. “Just wanted to see how you were holding up.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Did the Marines teach you how to handle jail time?”

  Bekah ignored that. “Don’t I get a phone call?”

  “Who would you call? Judge has gotta set bail before you can bond out. That won’t come till the hearing in the morning. If you can get before him in the morning.”

  Bekah didn’t even know a bail bondsman, nor how that process worked. The only person she could call would be her granny, and she didn’t like the idea of waking the old woman in the middle of the night.

  “How is Connie?”

  Alvin shrugged. “Just had a nosebleed. Nothing much.” He sipped the coffee. “Buck is gonna live.”

  Bekah ignored that. “Did Connie swear out a complaint against him?”

  “No.”

  Confused, Bekah looked at Alvin again. “Why not?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “Buck hit her. More than once.”

  “That ain’t how she’s telling it. She says she slipped and fell, and you went off half-cocked, screaming and yelling at Buck. Attacked him.”

  The floor seemed to drop away under Bekah.

  “Yeah, you’re in a world of hurt.” Alvin shook his head. “I’m betting Judge Harrelson throws the book at you in the morning. You get a good night’s sleep. We start early tomorrow.” He turned and walked away.

  Bekah sat in the darkness, alone and uncertain about what her immediate future held. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Suck it up, Marine. Take things one step at a time.

  Because she’d stood post in enemy-occupied areas, she knew how to turn off her mind when she needed to sleep. She lay back on the cot and tried not to think about what might live there. None of it could be any worse than the bugs and lizards and snakes she’d had to put up with in Helmand province. At least there was no sand.

  After a while, she slept.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, Bekah filed into the judge’s courtroom behind four other prisoners and ahead of two. Two of them had on orange jumpsuits. All of them were in handcuffs. The guys in the orange jumpsuits had leg irons as well. The bailiff directed them to sit in the front rows, which were marked for detainees. A scattered double handful of people occupied the rows farther back.

  Bekah was mortified to see that her granny sat in one of those rows beside Travis.

  “Momma!” Travis tried to get up and run to her, but Granny caught him and held him back, talking quietly into his ear. Travis wasn’t happy but finally went back to his seat.

  Bekah smiled at her son and mouthed I’m sorry to her granny.

  The old woman smiled back and shook her head. Granny was in her late sixties—past retirement age—and was thin. Grandpa had always said Granny was made out of rawhide and bone and filled with sheer cussedness, because she never backed down from anyone or anything. He’d also told Bekah that she had a lot of her granny in her and that she should take pride in the fact.

  Bekah did. When her granny had been younger, she had broken horses, roped cattle, and done every nasty job required around the ranch. She’d mucked out stalls, then cleaned up and had supper on the table when everyone came in tired and hungry.

  Age had turned Granny’s hair white, and she’d cut it short years ago so it wouldn’t be a bother. She was in one of her Sunday dresses today, not the everyday jeans and blouse and boots she normally wore. Time had slowed the woman down, but she still put in full days. Helping raise Travis had guaranteed that. That chore made Bekah feel guilty, because her granny shouldn�
��t have had to raise her granddaughter, much less her great-grandson. She should have been able to enjoy her twilight years.

  Whenever Bekah brought that up, though, her granny just waved it away. “Both of us are here just doing the Lord’s work, girl. He don’t ever give you more than you can handle. We’ll get through this just fine. And with your grandpa gone, the Lord knows I needed something to do so that I didn’t just wither away. The boy makes life new again, and I give thanks for that.”

  Even when Bekah couldn’t manage her own belief, she clung to her granny’s faith. That was what she had always done. She took her seat on the bench and waited a few minutes till the bailiff told them all to rise. Then she stood as the judge entered the courtroom.

  Warren Harrelson had a reputation as a hard-nosed judge. Repeat offenders were not welcome in his courtroom. Habitual drunk drivers and meth dealers found permanent homes in prison on his watch.

  Now in his sixties, Harrelson had been doling out justice in the county for over twenty years. Standing over six feet tall, brown hair finally giving way to gray, freckled, broad across the chest, and only ten pounds over his best weight, the judge was an imposing figure. He didn’t wear robes this morning, since these were hearings and not actual court trials. He wore slacks and a golf shirt. He took his place at the bench and told everyone to be seated.

  Most of the cases appeared to be everyday business. The two men in orange jumpsuits pled guilty and got prison time, which ratcheted up Bekah’s feelings of unease. She’d never been to court before and had only seen trials on television. This didn’t seem much like television.

  One of the women pled out to a charge of prostitution, and that shocked Bekah because the woman had been picked up in Callum’s Creek. Bekah hadn’t known that particular vice existed in her hometown. She received an additional thirty days to the probation sentence she’d already been under.