Free The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell Page A

excellent—better than you might imagine if you chose girls only from looking at a magazine. But it was the part about lying in bed with her watching Leno, naked, and listening to her worry that had truly excited him, because those worries bore her own private weight. And secondly because Beale’s antics, Hartz’s opinion, the concern about whether she’d measure up as an officer, were exactly the kinds of things that he’d given up worrying about a long time ago. Which meant that whatever was happening now would be worse for her than it would ever be for him.
    â€œHey,” Pulowski said, as Masterson’s interpreter stuck his head out of the schoolroom door. “I need you to talk to somebody.” He hustled the ’terp down the hallway to the room where the deaf man had been. What was he expecting? Nothing, he hoped. And what use would that information be to anybody? But when he and Faisal Amar entered the room, the deaf man cowered, went wide-eyed and spooked, jumping up so quickly that his chair tipped over backward, and that sound, the sudden scatter of metal against linoleum, acted as the ground for a high-voltage charge that had been running secretly through the room all along, buzzing, humming, burning just beneath their skin. Pulowski grabbed his arm, shouted uselessly, “Stop!” and then the two soldiers on guard outside swept in and tackled him. The man went down as if he’d been dropped from the ceiling. Pulowski heard his head slap linoleum and in a moment he was trussed, one soldier pinioning his arms behind his back, the other shouting, “Down! Get down!” with the muzzle of his M4 pressed into the man’s ear. This occurred in view of the other Iraqis lined up in the hallway, who craned their necks to see, until Pulowski kicked the door closed, rounded, and found Faisal squatting before the man’s bleeding face.
    â€œIt’s all right, okay, guys, no problem here,” Faisal was saying. “He just freak out a little bit, this guy. Is he crazy? Did he say something?”
    â€œHe’s deaf ,” Pulowski said.
    â€œNo weapons,” said the soldier kneeling on the man’s back. “He make a move on you?”
    â€œNo,” Pulowski said. “He just bolted when I came back in.”
    â€œHe tell you what he want?” Faisal asked. He’d picked up a greasy, stained notebook that had fallen out of the man’s pocket.
    â€œHe wanted me to read something,” Pulowski said.
    The man had ceased arching his back in an effort to get free. Instead, his brown irises seemed curiously calm, completely resigned as he gazed up at Pulowski. There was something off there, maybe. But Beale was dead by now. He’d lumbered out from behind that dumpster and run to the open door he’d identified. Once there, he’d glanced back at Pulowski and pointed up, as if to indicate where he was going. There had been nothing hidden in his face. He’d been terrified. He’d known that Pulowski would not help him. And he’d barged into the darkness anyway. The last thing Fowler needed, after all the favors Pulowski had done for her already, was to know how good Beale had been. Or to believe there was any hope of getting him back. In the schoolroom, Faisal whispered quietly and patiently in Arabic, which the deaf man gave no sign of understanding, and then, chuckling to himself, turned to a clean page in the notebook and, his face aping broad emotions of forgiveness, of generous importuning—his thin eyebrows raised, his lips folded into a clownlike moue—wrote something in Arabic and held it down beside the prisoner’s eyes, turning it sideways so that he could read.
    â€œWell, he can go now, I think,” Faisal said, when the deaf man had finished reading. And when the soldiers holding the man hesitated, looking at Pulowski, who was the ranking officer in the room, he added, “I mean, if you want