Free Dirty Angels 02 Dirty Deeds by Karina Halle

never meant for our benefit, just to pad the pockets of those in the country that mattered most. I’d seen villages burned, young children dead and torn up on the streets, parents wailing, grandparents dying. All for nothing, not really.
    The day the Humvee blew up was the day that everything changed. I guess that’s the sort of day that should change a person. I was one of the lucky ones – one of my buddies lost both his legs, another had half his body burned to a gruesome crisp. But I would never consider myself lucky because then I was burdened with survivor guilt. More than that, I was burdened with guilt, pure and simple.
    When I returned home to Minnesota and finally healed up, I said goodbye to an ice hockey career – or at least the promise of one – I said good bye to friends and family. Both of those were easy. My father, a cruel, terrible man, had died while I was overseas. My mother, weak and helpless, couldn’t seem to exist without his cruelty. She barely noticed I was gone.
    As for my friends, they’d all pulled away once they got to know the new me. I barely spoke. I stopped drinking with them, going out, finding chicks, playing hockey. It was all over. I just worked out and hated every single minute I had to be a veteran, a survivor, a pawn.
    One day something in me snapped. I’m not sure what it was, maybe someone cut me off driving or perhaps I saw an advertisement for Mexico somewhere. But the next morning my bags were packed. I got in my car and drove for the border.
    It took days to get there and once I crossed over through Texas, time seemed to stop. Though I would never completely fade into the background, there was anonymity here that seemed to shake loose what little soul I had left. I felt free from everything – who I was, where I came from, the baggage I carried.
    For a year I bounced around from place to place. I started with the resort towns on the Caribbean side before heading to the ones on the Pacific side. Veracruz, Cancun, Tulum, Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco. When I got tired of the tourists, I moved inland and stayed in different cities, then towns, then villages. Each place had something special about it and in each place I met people who seemed to think I was some use to them.
    It wasn’t until I started running out of money that I found myself reaching for these people. It was also then when I met Carmen.
    I was in a town just south of Manzanillo. It was a small resort-town, a bit down at its heels but popular with Mexican tourists, which suited me just fine. I’d met a man once called Carlos and, of all the people I’d met, he not only was the most genuine but also the most ambitious. Though cordial and generous, he was also a realist and made things happen. He had connections – none of which he held lightly – and success in his sights.
    When I first met him I was sitting a bar in a rustic but authentic establishment, sipping tequila, which the bartender gave me on the house for no real reason, and reading a book. Some John Grisham thriller, something to pass the time. I read a lot that first year in Mexico.
    Carlos was there with two buddies of his, conducting business in the corner. At least I assumed it was business because when I would look over there, their faces weren’t laughing and no one except Carlos was touching their drinks.
    Suddenly there was a yelp and a fight broke out. Before I knew what I was doing, I was in the middle of it, holding one man back, the man who sneered like a dog and seemed hell-bent on ripping Carlos’s face off with his own veneers.
    I don’t know why I got involved – instinct I guess. But after the two gentlemen were escorted out of the bar, Carlos bought me a drink. He wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing there. He wanted to know where I learned to move like that, if I knew how to handle a gun, if I knew how to fight.
    I didn’t tell him much beyond the fact that I had been in the American military. He