Free The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell Page B

to let him, of course. These are not my decisions. Unless you want to let him talk to your female lieutenant. Do they allow these things? I admit he’s not all that good-looking, quiet type, I don’t know—but who am I to say what a woman like that would find attractive—”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Pulowski asked.
    â€œThis guy, he loves your lady officer,” Faisal said. His accent corrupted this phrase into something that sounded slurred and drunken. Pulowski noticed that Masterson’s soldiers—now gently tugging the prisoner into a sitting position, checking his wound, finding a rag to mop the floor where he had bled—grinned in spite of themselves.
    It was possible that even the prisoner, fresh gauze taped to his temple, looking dazed, added a bittersweet and hopeless smirk.
    â€œNo, seriously.” Faisal was on a roll by now, getting laughs, and he continued with all the subtlety of a lounge singer. “He says, ‘Azeezati’ —that’s dear woman, okay? ‘I know that you don’t see me but I think that we are a couple made in heaven and I am offering to you the opportunity to be my wife, zawja .’ Yes, well, it’s flattering, I think? No? He says here he has fifteen goats and a 1984 Toyota Camry—”
    â€œAll right, okay, I get the idea,” Pulowski said, flushing. He was still holding the piece of stationery, with the man’s sketched pictures. The unsettling male angel. If he’d had any balls he would’ve thrown it away. Instead, he stuck it in his pocket, which felt like the only truly cowardly thing he’d done all day. “Get him out of here. We’ve had a nice ha-ha, so let’s give Romeo his walking papers and move on.”
    â€œWe could always ask the captain if he has a policy on this,” Faisal said.
    But Pulowski already had the door open, waving the deaf man—now transformed back into a civilian from a prisoner—out the door and into the crowded hallway beyond. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, very funny. Okay, who’s the next case?”
    *   *   *
    Fowler collapsed against the wall of her trailer at Camp Tolerance, head tilted back, still sweating, having just returned from the schoolhouse and her last, fruitless attempt to find Beale. “It was my fault,” she said.
    Pulowski lay on the floor with his arms winged behind his head, like he did when he was thinking up a line. By now she was ready for one.
    â€œIf you’re going to make me lie here and listen to you say stupid things like that,” he said, “you could at least have the decency to clean the place up.”
    Not bad. Maybe she could work with that.
    â€œYou’re a fucking classic, Pulowski.” She grabbed an old T-shirt from the floor and smacked him in the center of his skinny chest, shaking her head. “The one person in the Army who’d try to fix a disaster like this by cleaning .”
    It was an experiment, she understood that. Some attempt to touch the world as it had been before they’d lost Beale. As it had been when they’d made love here.
    â€œControlling your environment,” Pulowski said, doing a passable impersonation of Captain Hartz’s crusty bark, “is the first step on the road to clarity of mind.”
    â€œI hope not,” she said, gazing around her trailer. The place was a disaster of crap. The tops of her two lockers were cluttered with backup supplies, razors (unused now for a week), her extra soap, her iPod dock, her camera charger, her stacks of toilet paper, baby wipes, bug spray. The top of the fridge where she’d put together a tiny kitchenette, hot plate, coffeemaker, powdered Gatorade. The corner where she’d tossed USPS Priority Mail boxes that contained the rare postings from her dad—never anything from her mother—the plastic bags of trail mix, almonds, the copies of The Kansas City Star ,