Hey Tiana. Just got out of the IMMAF meeting. They’re covering their asses, just as we thought they would. No investigation. T let his mask slip at the end though. I think he scared the bejesus out of the stiffs. How r u doing? D

 

Hi Dax! Wow what a shocker there, huh. They’re so corrupt—I always knew there was an IA missing from the end of IMMAF. Lol. I’m doing better today. Cassie & her kids always cheer me up. Trying not to think about T. So is the case over? T

 

I think so. They won’t want the spotlight on their refs and dope test doctors, so they’ll sweep it under the rug. Man, I hate politics. Can’t wait to get back in the ring. Is it too soon to meet up? D

 

Doc said the swelling should go down in a few days. I will definitely meet u then. Right now I feel like a side of beef Rocky just trained on & I look even worse! When’s your next fight? T

 

Next weekend. I’m headlining at Staples Center. If I reserved 2 x VIP tickets would u come? Maybe bring Cassie? I’ll feel better knowing you’re there and safe. D

 

Aw you’re sweet. Cassie hates fighting, but I will do my best to be there. I’d love to be in your corner so to speak. Can’t make any promises though. What if T is there? T

 

I’ll make certain he isn’t. You have my word. In meantime, take it easy & I’ll see you soon. Can’t wait. D

 

Me either. Good luck with your training. Looking forward to distracting you on fight night! Hugs. T

 

***

 

No doubt she would, Dax reckoned. With a body like hers, and that sweet face he pictured whenever he thought of something good in his life, yes, Tiana Crowe would be a distraction all right. One he absolutely wanted. Fans cheering him was one thing—contrary to popular belief, he did sign autographs when they asked nicely—but to be honest, he didn’t pay them much mind during a fight. They were background noise. Knowing a woman like Tiana was watching though, and on his side, was a different kettle of fish. He didn’t just want to fight, he wanted to perform. Excellence in martial arts had nothing to do with drugs, and it was the one thing about this sport that all the corruption in the world couldn’t touch. It was thrilling to watch, and it was thrilling to perform, when all that training and technique and talent came together in the octagonal ring.

 

He wanted Tiana to see it. To see him at his best. No one could touch him when he was at his best, except maybe her. They hadn’t known each other long, but they’d definitely connected. He felt like she knew him, or at least knew a part of him, in a way that no woman he’d dated had ever gotten close to knowing.

 

Why was that?

 

Why her?

 

He thought about it all the way to Glassell Park, where he’d agreed to meet Monte for a one-on-one at an old basketball court, the indoor gymnasium owned by the local parish. The building itself, an annex of an even older church, was kind of rundown, with mossy, stone walls and a slate roof. No one would ever guess there was a pristine, full-sized basketball court inside, or that the only two players there that afternoon had fought in two wars since the last time they’d shot hoops on American soil.

 

Monte was in great shape. He’d never been as strong as Dax, but he was a lot nippier, and he had way more tricks up his sleeve. He’d also lost none of his competitiveness since leaving the Corps.

 

“You always said you had pretty good D,” Monte reminded Dax after wrong footing him for the third time in as many points. “More like DOA, brother.” He dunked the ball and performed a few pull-ups on the hoop.

 

“Home court advantage, that’s all,” replied Dax. “I haven’t gotten used to the smell yet.”

 

“I love the smell of bullshit in the morning. Smells like…victory.”

 

Typical Monte—a movie quote for every occasion, usually modified.

 

“Soon as we’re done here, we can put the gloves on and go a few rounds.” Dax dribbled the ball from side to side, faking his opponent out, but Monte wasn’t buying it. He had the speed and the skills to soak up anything Dax could throw at him.

 

“Gah!” Robbed again, Dax gritted his teeth and put some serious pressure on the showboat. It felt more like controlling the ring during a difficult professional bout than it did shooting hoops with an old war buddy. Monte didn’t give an inch. He shoved right back and returned Dax’s body checks with interest, until he created an opening around the back of Dax and peeled away like a matador on the run.

 

Another basket.

 

“How many?” asked Dax.

 

“Ten-three to me.”

 

“Time for a turnaround. It’s coming. I can sense it.”

 

“That’s just your bowel movement, brother. The fear talking. What do you say? To the hole one last time?”

 

Dax grinned as he shook his head. “You always did have shit for brains, Slats.”

 

“Sticks and stones, Ee-stir-lang.”

 

That bizarre mispronunciation of his surname flooded Dax with memories of their time together in the Corps. Their first drill instructor had read the name wrong from his call sheet; he’d also had a unique Louisiana accent that had emphasized the second syllable of Easterling. The name had stuck. And now that he thought about it, the shortening of Monte’s surname—Slattery to Slats—had also come from the same drill instructor, who’d freely admitted he couldn’t be bothered saying that mouthful every time.

 

“Hey, guess who flew in the other week,” Dax said.

 

“Was it Michael Jordan?”

 

“Not exactly. Think shorter and altogether more spic.”

 

Monte laughed out loud. “How is Carlo?”

 

“Same old. He suggested looking in on you, but I think he ran out of time, had to fly back East.”

 

“Ah. No worries. Maybe next…time.”

 

Seeing Monte’s smile suddenly drop, watching him retreat for a few moments into his shell, to recalibrate himself and this new…reality…was like looking in a mirror. When the past hit, it tended to hit hard. And though Dax hadn’t had to book himself into a clinic to cope with those hits, he knew what they were about. He knew them well.

 

Fuck it.

 

In a moment of sheer genius—okay, so the Slatster was distracted—Dax danced around him and created his first real shooting opportunity in at least a quarter of an hour. Unfortunately, he rimmed it. The ball rebounded off hoop and backboard straight to Monte, who punted it up for a neat winning basket.

 

“Game.” His second win in a row.

 

“Crap.”

 

“I guess the drinks are on you, brother.”

 

Dax bolted for the exit, pretending he was going to welch on their deal. Monte called him back, threatened to hunt him down and hound him for the rest of his life if said drinks weren’t provided in a timely and relentless manner at a local bar of his choosing. Accepting defeat, Dax shook his friend’s hand, slapped him on the back and said, “You’d best fear the sequel, hotshot. Next time I call the shots, make the shots, and drink the shots you buy.”

 

“The day I let that happen, you have my permission to shoot me.”

 

Dax grinned. “Don’t put ideas in my head.”

 

“I’d need a crowbar for that.”

 

While it felt good to have their old rapport back, Dax felt as though the banter had a time limit. So much had gone unsaid between them since they’d left the Corps. Keeping things light and fun was important, but the longer it went on, the more he realized they were both doing it to avoid discussing the elephant in the room.

 

Monte’s treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was ongoing. He hadn’t managed to hold down a regular job since returning home, and he’d pretty much confined himself to his old neighborhood. There was comfort in that, a sense of safety. Those things were important when someone felt vulnerable or lacked confidence.

 

Of course, Monte “Slats” Slattery hadn’t lacked confidence when he’d first joined the Marine Corps. No one had. He’d been a smartass, an all-round sportsman, and a total movie geek. His girlfriend, Cherish, had been one of those daytime soap actresses who never starred in anything but played lots of bit parts in lots of different shows. A real looker. They’d met on set when Monte had earned his keep playing an extra for a few months. After a few hot dates, they’d moved in together. And they’d stayed close all the while he’d served overseas. They’d even talked about having kids.

 

But unlike daytime TV, combat was an unpredictable bitch. The moment you thought you had a handle on it, it would throw an explosive curve ball right in your face. So you had to be ready for anything. Week after week, month after month of being on edge, of knowing your life was not necessarily in your own hands, of seeing people you knew well die for no other reason than they were a few steps ahead of you or behind at the wrong time, and that it could so easily have been you…that shit had to reshape you on a deep level.

 

And as Sergeant Willy had demonstrated that day in Helmand, the mind of an ordinary guy could only stand so much reshaping.

 

***

 

While he waited at the bar in McGinley’s Irish pub, Dax thought back to that day in Afghanistan. His memory picked up where it had left off during the tribunal, with an enemy insurgent approaching, carrying something heavy…

 

The sound of the explosion in the distance made Dax spin round. He glimpsed a room in the back. A few guys were shooting pool. One of them had just made a strong break. The noise of clashing balls had been nothing at all like the one he’d heard out in the desert—that roaring crack—but it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. Reality blurred. Whenever it happened, the past blundered into the present and shouted loudest.

 

By the time Dax, Monte and Segura had reached the top of the dune, Captain Darnell was writhing on the ground, his hands clasped over his eyes. A second insurgent, hiding nearby, was lobbing grenades at him and Willy. Another one exploded six feet away from Darnell.

 

Dax and the others immediately opened fire. Their rounds kicked up the sand where the hidden bomber was hiding. Meanwhile, the other insurgent, who’d toted something big and heavy for what had to have been a couple of hundred yards, was now close enough to throw it at Darnell. He was also screaming something in Arabic.

 

“Willy, get the fuck down!” yelled Segura. The near-naked sergeant was standing in front of the insurgent, ready to tackle him with his bare hands. He was also blocking his colleagues’ line of fire. They all shouted, “Get out of there, Willy!”

 

But the big guy had no intention of listening to logic. He took one look at his fallen C.O., then rushed the enemy soldier. He threw the Afghan off his feet. The package spilled onto the sand. For one horrible moment, the entire unit held its breath, expecting a huge bomb to go off.

 

It was just an old field radio. Looked Russian. It didn’t make sense why anyone would carry it toward an armed enemy patrol.

 

Someone nailed the second insurgent when he showed his face to see what had happened to his colleague. Meanwhile, Willy was busy beating the living hell out of the Afghan who’d dropped the radio; and with Captain Darnell down, injured, no one wanted to stop it. A little retribution went a long way in a war that never seemed to end.

 

Two pairs of Marines had gone to flank the bomber’s position, to make sure he was alone. When they gave the thumbs-up, the others, including Dax and Monte, went to fetch Captain Darnell. Someone else called for a medevac.

 

They quickly saw that Darnell had taken shrapnel to the face. Two small pieces, but one had hit his left eye; the other had stuck in his cheek. While it didn’t look life threatening, it was a serious injury to his eye. The war was definitely over for him.

 

“Son of a bitch came out of nowhere,” Carlo Segura observed, pointing to the bomber’s hole, no more than a hollow in the rock. “He must have been waiting for us.”

 

“But what the hell was this other raghead gonna do? Radio us to death?” Monte timed his comment well; Willy had just finished his assault, having beaten his opponent unconscious. He got up, panting, and looked across the faces of his comrades.

 

“You okay, Willy?” Dax asked him.

 

No response. The big guy stood the radio unit right side up, brushed all the sand off it like it was a new toy he’d found buried in his sandbox, and switched the power on.

 

The explosion blew him apart.

 

The force of the blast hurled everyone off their feet. The ringing in Dax’s ears and the acrid taste of flash-boiled blood in the air and the chunks of Willy still peppering the sand around them were too much for him to process. He stopped feeling. He looked on from a place of safe remove, where there was an invisible wall between him and what was happening…

 

A wall that had been there ever since. The only difference was that, now and again, holes appeared in that wall. Holes through which reality flooded, unfiltered, and he had no choice but to relive the experience from which his brain had tried to spare him.

 

And it wasn’t just that incident out on patrol. There were others. Many others. Fighting in the ring was a finite thing: the threats were quantifiable, mostly predictable. If you kept your head, you could control the outcome. But war was in so many ways beyond a man’s control.

 

Even after, when the danger was over, the echoes of those moments of powerlessness were so potent, so haunting. They had the ability to cut right through time and space and wedge themselves in the face of everything a man was, everything he thought he’d become since.

 

A part of Dax was still there in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he’d at least managed to move on and not let it take him over. He could only imagine what Monte was going through.

 

“The tribunal went okay?” asked Monte. “You’re not suspended or anything?”

 

Dax was pretty sure he’d explained it to his friend already, but he couldn’t be certain. It had been a strange day, with nothing really resolved. So many things were still up in the air. His memory might be the defective one. “No. It sounds like they don’t want to put me and Hollis under the microscope,” he replied. “There are too many implications. They’re worried what I’ll dig up if they push me.”

 

“Really? Do you have anything on them?”

 

“Nothing concrete. But it’s all there just beneath the surface. It wouldn’t take much to light up the whole freaking snake pit.” He wondered if Monte would get that rather oblique movie reference.

 

“Yeah. ‘Asps—very dangerous. You go first.’” Spoken in a spot-on Middle Eastern accent, just like the character from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

Dax chuckled. “Maybe we should have dug out there in the desert, found ourselves some ancient Persian treasure or something.”

 

“Digging? In that heat?”

 

“Beats hauling ass over hot sand in fucking circles for months.”

 

“True.” A half-bottle swig of Coors later, Monte added, while staring down at the table, “Does any of that stuff ever get to you?”

 

“What we did out there?”

 

“And saw.” He fidgeted in his seat. “Feels like nobody ever wants to talk about it. I get occasional emails from some of the guys, and it’s all small talk and banter, which is fine. They only know me as “Slats”, I guess, what I was like out there. I just wish we could have all sat and talked that shit through sometime, you know, instead of pretending as if it never happened, as if it’s just part of the job. I know it’s not the “done” thing and all that, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who can’t get over that shit. Like I’ve failed somehow, just because I can’t shrug it off and move on like a good Marine. You know what I’m saying?”

 

“I hear you, brother. It’s the one thing they can’t teach you, I guess. How to switch it off.”

 

“Yeah. Like a part of you is always plugged into what it was like over there. I mean, I can’t even think about half that shit without reliving it. The docs say it helps to talk through it, you know, describe it in detail, so I can accept that shit just happens, that none of it was my fault. But I think I saw too much. I mean, how can you ever accept that a guy you spent all that time with, a guy whose family you heard so much about, could have just exploded like that?” Monte’s hand began to shake; he had to set his bottle down. “One second he was there, then there was nothing left. Everything that made him Willy was gone. I-I just can’t get my head around that. And I see it all the fucking time: switching on that old knackered radio, and…everything that happened next.”

 

Neither of them spoke for a while. The occasional loud clash of pool balls made Dax flinch, because his back was to the rec room. Monte, though, didn’t appear present at all as he sat there, sipping at his beer. For Dax, the memories cut sharply and deeply, but they were short-lived; his friend seemed to dwell in them, somehow captive to his experiences as they unfolded in real time.

 

“That’s the big one for me, too—what happened to Willy,” Dax explained. “It was just so unexpected, and it happened right in front of us; I guess it’s as much of a battle scar as all our other cuts and scrapes. Only we can’t see it. We can’t wrap it with a field dressing. It’s still a war wound, brother. And we’ve both got it. We’ve both got plenty. It’s important that you know that. You’re not the only one who’s hurting from that shit. And there’ll be others in the unit. It might not hit them till they get stateside, but it will. Sooner or later, we’ll all switch on that old knackered radio, whether we want to or not.”

 

Monte seemed to look right through him for a few moments, then said, “Man, this got really freaking heavy, didn’t it?”

 

“Tell me about it.”

 

“Fuck it. Let’s keep it going.” With a manly burp, the man known in the Corps as “Slats” seemed to want to be that man again, if only until the drinks ran out. He slammed his empty beer down, then gestured for Dax to fulfill his obligation: more rounds, pronto. Unfortunately, Dax had to drive home after, so Diet Coke was as dangerous as he could get. This time. Next time, he’d get a cab.

 

He returned and set three beers down for Monte, plus a pack of potato chips apiece. “So how are you doing with your studies?”

 

“Getting there. It’s a chore, like all studying. A means to an end. I’ll get there. How’s the training?”

 

“Ditto. Plus, I’ve had a few…distractions.”

 

“So I hear.” Monte’s sly grin said he wanted to pry. “But first, tell me what Carlo had to say. What’s the news from over there? Then you can answer that question you’ve been dying for me to ask.”

 

“What question’s that?”

 

“Who’s this mysterious hottie that’s got you chasing your tail?”

 

“Oh. Yeah. It’s kind of a long story.”

 

“It always is, brother. It always is.”