Chapter Two

Stars. Blinding white stars zapped from temple to temple, bouncing inside Jake Weylin’s skull. Like a psychedelic pinball machine, they pinged, and everywhere they landed, pain followed. He dropped to his knees and sucked in a lung full of air, shaking the blinding hit off.

Sure enough, Rocky Rabbit followed through with a kick to Jake’s side, knocking his hands out from under him. “You need to butt out,” the guy bellowed.

Well, yeah… Jake caught himself on one elbow before his chin hit the asphalt. He had never liked Poindexter’s right-hand man, even less today. A helluva lot less.

Rafael Poindexter, the slick snake-oil real estate chump from the West Coast, hired local muscle to do his dirty work for him. Jake had had run-ins with Rocky Rabbit and Ferret Face before. The two toughs swaggered everywhere they went and thought they could bully anyone who got in their way. Jake thought otherwise.

The last time ended in a shoving match that Jamaal got caught in the middle of. One look at Jake’s buddy and Poindexter’s men turned tail. At six-foot-four and nearly three-hundred pounds, Jamaal did have a way of blocking the sun and making an opponent think twice.

But Rocky Rabbit? The guy was nothing but a hitman from the flat soles of his high-priced leather loafers to the top of his greased back, blond hair. He needed dental work. If Jake hadn’t been outnumbered two-to-one and face down on the pavement, he could fix those buckteeth for him. Once and for all.

Only right now he was ground level and about to eat those sissy leather loafers.

“Your buddy better back off, Weylin. Make sure he gits the message. You guys mighta been in the Army, but you need to mind yer damned business.” Ferret Face followed through with a kick to Jake’s kidneys. “Now you been told. ’Bout time you listened.”

Jake groaned, rolled to his side, and spit. What are these assholes talking about? Butt out of what? He’d never been Army. Oh hell, no.

“The boss catches you sticking your face in his business again, he ain’t gonna be so polite,” Rocky Rabbit declared, his index finger pointed sternly in Jake’s face like he expected to be obeyed.

“Yeah,” Ferret Face agreed like the dumb ass he was. He clenched his meaty fist and shook it at Jake. “Next time, you get the hammer.” The two thugs stomped away, grunting to each other like the lowland gorillas they were.

Jake rolled to his back, lifted one hand to his sweaty forehead, and blew out a big huff into the frosty air. Damn, it was cold, a bitter East Coast kind of December cold. Staring at the bright sky overhead, he should’ve been thankful he was still alive. He should’ve been thankful he wasn’t hurt worse. He should’ve been thankful for a lot of things. But he wasn’t.

He’d just gotten his ass handed to him. Shrugging off the pain and embarrassment of the encounter, he pushed up from the grimy ground. His swollen bottom lip tingled. Maybe tingled wasn’t the best word. More like buzzed. His jaw and ears, too. That didn’t happen often.

At least the beat-down happened behind what used to be a busy grocery store. Now it was just another vacant building in the neighborhood, where vagrants camped and troublemakers jacked up with their drugs, needles, and shit. The important thing was that no one had seen him, not that it would’ve mattered if they had. Folks didn’t often come to a stupid white guy’s aid any quicker than a stupid black man’s, not in this part of town.

But still. He had his pride. It was a rare event when two jack-holes got the best of an ex-Marine. Jake shook that stupid notion out of his head. God knew there was no such thing as an ex-Marine. Only civilians used the term. Jake wasn’t ex-anything. Not yet.

Right on cue, a mighty ‘Oo-rah’ from the good old days roared to life within. He rolled his shoulder and stretched both arms over his head to ease the kink of that last kick out of his lower back. And his neck. And his butt. Damn. He should’ve seen Rocky Rabbit and his sidekick coming. Wished he had. Also wished he knew what he’d done to merit a warning from a creep the likes of Poindexter.

It was still early. Jake hadn’t made his early morning rounds of Sector 18 yet. Jamaal was over at the Flying Angel Tavern turning in a week’s worth of recycle. Rowdy Stokes owned the place. Ex-military and understanding of other vets down on their luck, he paid a half dollar a pound for recyclable aluminum trash. It wasn’t much, but it put some GWs in their pockets and bought a decent sandwich and a Coke once in a while. Maybe a cold beer. Conversation.

Jake had planned to meet Jamaal over at Lamont’s Pool Hall. He’d wanted to chat the owner, Lamont Adams, up for a job, but he didn’t get the chance. The old fart wasn’t there. The door was still locked and Jake chalked it up to his wife. She had an awful wasting kind of cancer, so Jake always cut the grouchy guy a little slack. God knew he had his hands full. There wasn’t anything worse than standing by and watching the woman you loved die a slow death. Yeah. He cut Adams a lot of slack. Looked out for him, too, because that was what Sector 18 was all about.

Jake arched his back and stretched. Litter patrol wasn’t much of a life, and picking up other people’s garbage might look like a waste of time, but it kept him and Jamaal close to the folks they cared about, the folks who might not know someone was sneaking around their business with a crowbar. Or breaking into their car. Or bullying their kid on the way home from school and forcing them to run drugs across the bridge to high-end folks in fancy cars who wouldn’t be caught dead in poor, rundown Anacostia.

Dusting his scraped palms down his dirty jeans, he called it one helluva hard lesson learned. Poindexter’s message was clear. He was on his way to fame and fortune. The have-nots were in his way. But if Poindexter thought he could send his henchmen into Sector 18 and expect Jake to turn tail and run, he had another thing coming. Jake Weylin didn’t desert his post, not ever, and this piece of Washington D.C. wasn’t just Ward 8 anymore. No sir. It was his and Jamaal’s prime real estate. It was Sector 18, and they were the self-proclaimed guardians of it, not Poindexter.

Acid pooled in the pit of Jake’s gut. If Rocky Rabbit and Ferret Face were on the prowl, where the hell was Jamaal? And what’d Ferret Face mean by ‘your buddy better back off’?

It took Jake less than ten minutes to hightail it over to the Flying Angel, but Rowdy hadn’t seen Jamaal yet. Only one place remained to check for his buddy. Well, make that two. He could very well be floating in the Anacostia River or he could be down at the free clinic. Jake opted for the clinic. He jogged, scared of what he might find. Jamaal was the only family he had. He couldn’t afford to lose him, too.

Approaching the clinic, he caught sight of Miss Wright pulling out of the rear alley, and who should be in the passenger seat next to her with his head lolled back like he was taking a nap? Jamaal. The slacker! But damn, it looked like he’d been in a fight.

Jake kept his distance, not like that was hard to do. Lacy was, after all, on wheels. Once he’d seen her look both ways before she pulled into traffic, he knew where she was going. He’d followed her plenty before, mostly just to make sure she’d gotten home in one piece.

Ever since that first day in the alley behind the clinic, Lacy was on his safe list, one of the many innocent and kind people he kept track of. It was damned unusual, though, for a pretty white gal like her to live in shabby, low income Anacostia. She was no cast off like he was, not even down on her luck, either. She had a good job. So why was she here? He hadn’t figured that one out yet, but, oh well. There were lots of things he couldn’t figure out these days, like why she’d put on such a tough act that first day.

It was a good thing he liked to walk, so he followed her. How else would he get to his buddy Zack’s place over in Maryland? Or the hospital in D.C. the few times Jamaal had been incarcerated under the guise of needing medical care? Besides, physical exercise worked wonders. It cleared a man’s head, a damned good thing in Jake’s book. Working up a good sweat also worked the kinks out of a man’s back and exorcised the mental demons out of his head a helluva lot better than the shit Jamaal chose to put in his mouth. No way was that crap going into Jake. It all ended up in a guy’s head, and he had enough crap in there to last a lifetime as it was. Maybe two lifetimes. He didn’t need more.

Their continual trips to the clinic were all Jamaal’s fault. Like the first one. If Jamaal hadn’t been playing drink-and-cry, ‘let-me-tell-ya-another-sad-story’ that day, he wouldn’t have fallen on his butt and broken the bottle of cheap liquor that cut him. Of course, he didn’t need many stitches, not like that ornery Dr. Anderson would’ve wasted more time or catgut on him than he had to.

Aggravation skittered across Jake’s shoulders just thinking of the prick. Anderson couldn’t sew a straight line. Didn’t look like he’d even tried to make his stitches even, not like the kind Dr. Marlee did. Of the two, she was the real doctor. He’d left Jamaal with an oozing wound that healed into an ugly scar on the left cheek of his ass, not like anyone else would see it, but still. Jamaal might get lucky. Some woman might want to see his big backside. It could happen.

Jake spread his fingers on his right hand wide, flexed them a few times, and let the aggravation roll away. He wasn’t about to hit a doctor over a few lousy stitches. Besides, it was Jamaal’s fault he’d gotten cut. It was also Jamaal’s fault that Jake came face-to-face with Lacy. Now there was another story.

She’d literally taken his breath when she’d looked up from her car like a trapped animal, and Jake had all but suffocated on the spot. No shit. His heart kind of stopped pumping. His lungs quit processing oxygen, and he, a big tough Marine with one too many forward deployments under his belt, wanted to tuck tail and run away. From a woman. How crazy was that?

When Anderson had asked Jake that day what happened to Jamaal in his sarcastic way, Jake had stuttered like a dimwit, not able to take his eyes off Lacy. She’d looked down at the instrument tray like she didn’t want him to know she’d seen his moment of total stupidity, her dark lashes fanned over a sprinkle of freckles on blushing pink cheeks.

Lacy had that redhead complexion thing going for her, the creamiest skin beneath a clipped up tangle of burnished red hair, all of it intent on escaping said clip. The knowledge that he’d put that glow on her face had excited Jake at some primal level. That’s what made the blush all the more noticeable. It declared he was still a man; that this particular woman noticed him and couldn’t control her body’s response to him.

He hadn’t missed that just the tip of her tongue peeked out briefly between moist lips already glistening with a hint of pink gloss, either. Like a fifteen-year old boy with raging hormones, his eyes had drifted to the front of her scrubs, hoping for a hint of hardened nipples beneath the fabric. Instead, pockets covered the swell of her breasts, nice plump pockets that created a rigid hard-on in his pants. He’d been glad he was sitting that day. He’d dropped his hands in front of his lap to camouflage his reaction.

But Lacy had secrets, too. He could tell. She might not trust him enough to share, but that was okay. He wasn’t much for sharing, either.

For some crazy reason, that single meeting sparked emotions he hadn’t admitted to in years. Out of the blue, his feelings for her ran as deep as hot-blooded Rodolfo’s did for the fair Mimi in Puccini’s tragic opera, La Bohème. It didn’t help when Jake’s dysfunctional brain immediately set his vocal cords to humming, ‘O soave fanciulla,’ the duet between the love-struck couple that translated meant, ‘Oh lovely girl.’

Didn’t it figure? His gray matter could instantly pull up the musical score from any opera in the world, but he couldn’t form a coherent answer to Dr. Anderson with Lacy watching. Yeah. Puccini’s Rodolfo turned into a blithering idiot the moment he’d met Mimi, too.

The opera played in the back of Jake’s mind while his feet followed her car, not like he worried he’d lose her. He knew where she was going. But with every step, Jake’s mood plunged headlong to regret. There would be no tenderness between him and the lovely Lacy, especially not enough to make a happy ending. He had a job to do. She was an unsuspecting client, but his responsibility nonetheless and nothing more. Besides Rodolfo’s and Mimi’s story hadn’t ended happy. Why would Jake and Lacy’s?

He’d put the frivolity of unnecessary things like romance aside the day his men died at that other Sector 18, the front gate of Camp Eggers in Kabul, Afghanistan. He honestly couldn’t remember how the nickname came to be for that gate. It might’ve started as a joke. For all he knew, it was some make-believe battlefield in a video game that one of his USMC brothers or sisters had played.

He might not be able to remember that, but he knew he was damned proud of his men and women that day. On an assist to the Army, his USMC squad had fallen in like the topnotch troops they were. Not once did they complain, and there was plenty to piss and moan about in Afghanistan. They should have, but helping their Army brethren was part of the deal. It was what jarheads did. They manned up, marched on, kept on keeping on, and all that bullshit.

Two of his best corporals brought up the rear that day, Aiden Scott and Emile Blum. Trained and ready, they’d recognized the danger at Egger’s main gate before anyone else knew what was coming at them. Jake had jerked around when he’d heard Emile bark at the driver of that ratty mini-truck to, ‘Halt!’

The tough little blonde didn’t ask twice. There wasn’t time. With calm integrity, she’d lifted her M16A4, took careful aim, and sealed the deal, taking her shot and killing the driver. Aiden backed her up with a steady hack-hack-hack of his rifle. The two stepped forward instead of running away like they probably should have, and Jake was even prouder of them for that. Prouder and sadder.

They took the war to the jihad-screaming driver all right. They did their job and stopped him cold at the gate rather than let him in to spread his son-of-a-bitchin’ holy war inside Eggers. Only the truck was full of explosives, and the Army got a hell of an assist from the Corps that day. Jake’s squad took the brunt of the hit, lost two damned good Marines, and there wasn’t a thing he could’ve done about it but scream for the rest of his guys to get down while a shitload of fire and brimstone took out everything in its path. The explosion knocked everyone not in the immediate kill zone off their feet. Everyone but Aiden and Emile.

When Jake got to where they’d been standing, the guard shack was obliterated. What was left of the truck steamed in the middle of a blackened crater like a smoking carcass. Aiden and Emile’s charred bodies, or what was left of them, had still smoldered where they’d landed. In pieces. Bit and pieces…

Jake cocked his head and looked up, hoping to see stars instead of the dismal wintry sky overhead. For some reason he couldn’t understand, stars helped him forget. They were so far away, they couldn’t get hurt by assholes with guns and bombs and—death.

The day Aiden and Emile went to their eternal rest as true heroes still haunted Jake. Their remains were shipped home via Dover AFB in Delaware. Their mothers cried; one in Winnemucca, Nevada; the other in Detroit, Michigan. Like the true heroes they were, both Aiden and Emile were interred at Arlington National Cemetery amongst the other men and women who had given all.

But sometimes, Jake could swear he was still there at Egger’s front gate. To this day, he detested the smell of summer barbeques on the wind. Chargrilled hamburgers. Bonfires. Just the hint of burning autumn leaves could time warp him overseas and back to hell. Back to that day.

Fireworks were the worst. The Fourth of July might be a day of celebration for most, but it was a day of hiding out in Zack’s basement and watching noisy movies in his home theater to block the noise. Yeah. Independence came at too high a cost, and coming home sucked.

Jake growled off the mantel of despair settling over his shoulders. He had work to do. This wedge-shaped neighborhood between Eighteenth Street, Good Hope Road, and the Anacostia River had become his alternate universe, a second chance where he could make everything right again. He’d even named it the same corny name as what all the guys called the gate at Egger’s: Sector 18. It felt the same.

Jake kept walking, his mind edging closer to that numb zone between then and now. Jamaal was there that day, too. He knew the fallen. The dirty streets of Kabul didn’t seem so far away some days. Jake knew he couldn’t bring Aiden or Emile back, but if he could keep Jamaal alive, maybe Aiden and Emile would forgive him for ordering them to bring up the rear. He could still hear Emile’s cocky, “Yes, Sarge.”

He just wished he couldn’t.