Free Hard Rain by David Rollins Page A

call it quits before she’d reconnected with her JAG jerk, I reminded myself that I was also no angel. I’d only recently returned from Florida, where I’d been on a case and met a colonel of my own. She’d helped me nail a guy who’d cut a buddy of mine out of his parachute and let gravity do the rest. And things had just happened pretty damn fast with the colonel and me, too.
    ‘All right . . . you win,’ said Masters finally. ‘His name’s Richard Wadding, okay? Lieutenant Colonel Richard Wadding.’
    The name of her fiancé, delivered to me like that – like some kind of confession – caught me by surprise. ‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I heard you right. Did you say, “Richard Wadding”?’
    Masters nodded, relieved, perhaps because the secret was out in the open.
    I wasn’t so sure. That’s because I knew the guy. Only I knew him by a different name – the one he’d been given by the Gulf War I and II vets flocking to join the growing class action against the military for exposure to depleted uranium ammunition. A buddy of mine by the name of Tyler Dean was one of them. Tyler used to drive an M1 Abrams tank and lived around the stuff in the Iraqi desert for eighteen months. A year ago he went to the doctor to complain about a sore throat and ended up in hospital having most of his oesophagus removed. While they were mucking around in his insides, they also found that one of his kidneys had died inside him. They stitched his stomach to his tonsils, removed the kidney and introduced him to a dialysis machine. Tyler was only twenty-nine. Masters’ fiancé was point man for the defendant, the Armed Forces of the United States of America, doing his best to see that the vets got nothing more or less than a kick in the keester. So, like I said, I knew this Richard Wadding by a different name. I knew him as Colonel Dick Wad.
    ‘So you do know him?’ she asked, exercising that annoying ability of hers to read my thoughts.
    Before I could answer, the front door opened and more folks surged in. Music blared and the party reached critical mass in an instant. A young boy crowd-surfed from the front of the café to the back on a roar of approval. An old guy with five-day growth on his face and wearing a coat tailored from what looked to me like compressed lint materialised in front of Masters and pulled her up and out of her seat. He wanted to dance with her. She protested but gave up when it seemed he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
    A large old woman came over to me, her hair clamped down by a colourful scarf tucked into a beige ankle-length coat buttoned to the neck. She was holding a plate of pastries doing breaststroke in what I assumed was honey. ‘Here, here,’ she said, waggling the plate under my nose. I smelt nuts and cinnamon. ‘We cele . . . celebrate – you eat.’
    I gave her the only look I could manage, which was blank.
    ‘Please, please . . .’ she insisted, waggling the plate more urgently thistime. I accepted one of the pastries being offered because, like the dancing for Masters, following orders appeared to be the only option here. I took a bite.
    ‘Very good,’ I said, because it was. The music and the laughter were loud enough to feedback through my ears like they were old speakers about to blow. ‘What are you celebrating?’ I shouted.
    She shrugged, unable to penetrate the language barrier.
    ‘Married?’ I yelled, holding my arms out to indicate the party. ‘Someone getting married?’
    The woman frowned. And then what I was saying seemed to dawn on her. ‘No, no. No marry,’ she said, cackling, revealing the remaining three teeth still planted in her gums. ‘ Bir ca? Um . . . circum . . . Ünnet! Ünnet! ’ And in case I still didn’t get it – because I obviously still didn’t – the woman used a couple of fingers to snip at the air.
    And then I got it. ‘You’re celebrating . . . a circumcision?’ The kid did another turn of the café