“Where the hell are we?” he asked as he was being helped into a black SUV.
“You’re in an office park, sir, in El Paso, Texas.”
Chapter Eighteen
The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars.
—Johnny Cash
He sat next to Holly with a bucket of popcorn in his lap. On the screen in front of them the villain in the metal mask sneered at the hero, causing spit to fly out of his mouth. The visceral hatred behind his words made Crocker clench his fists.
Then bullets started to fly, the chase started, and the volume in the theater grew until it hurt his head so much he felt like screaming. The sound of tires screeching, the grinding of metal against metal, bullets firing, ricocheting—it was too real.
He became the man in the black cape running, sweating, dodging bullets. His blood pressure and heartbeat shot up.
Crocker, feeling pain emanating from his hands and realizing what was happening, craned to look back at the exit and, turning to Holly, whispered, “I’ll be right back.”
He hurried up the aisle, through the double doors, and found the men’s room, which was cold and smelled of ammonia. He scanned beneath the stalls, the urinals, and sinks to check whether anyone was there. When the door swung open, he turned and instinctively scanned the heavy man’s face and body. He wore a plaid shirt and looked soft and unarmed. Crocker knew that if he had to, he could take him easily.
Their eyes met. He balled his fist and waited for the man to reach for a weapon. Instead, the man turned abruptly and left.
Crocker zipped down his fly, did his business, and exited. In the lobby he paused for a moment, trying to decide whether to buy a bottle of water from the concession stand and rejoin Holly or wait. He decided to step into the mall, where there was more space.
He sat on a bench listening to Elton John’s “Circle of Life” play over the mall’s PA system, considering the actual warfare and havoc he’d witnessed in places like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq, and thinking about how experiences burn into your brain and are hard to expunge.
Images of fallen and maimed teammates flashed in his head. As he tried to remember their names, he looked up and saw Holly walking toward him with a confused expression on her face. She’d gained weight while he was out of the country, which made her look softer. She was as beautiful as ever, but older.
“You okay?” Holly asked, her dark hair glistening in the light.
“I’m fine. The noise started to bother my ears.”
“But you missed the ending.”
He took her arm in his. “Let’s get something to drink.”
She cuddled next to him as if they were teenagers, and they walked past Banana Republic, American Eagle, Victoria’s Secret, and all the other so-called high-end stores—each in its own way offering some kind of escape from the ordinary. It seemed to Crocker that they only underlined the banality of their customers’ lives.
“Why can’t they just sell shit and leave it at that?” Crocker mused as they sat down across from each other in the food court, sipping their cold drinks—a Dos Equis in his case, a Diet Coke for her.
There was a vagueness in her eyes that he attributed to the Prozac she was taking.
“What’s really bothering you, Tom?” Holly asked.
“Nothing.”
He wanted to tell her about what had happened on the tarmac in Foz do Iguaçu, the underground prison in Barinas, and the tunnel under Ciudad Juárez, but knowing that she was struggling with her own PTSD issues, he stopped.
Recently his mood had been vacillating between defensiveness, anger, and aggression. After a harrowing mission like the one he’d just been on, his return to civilian life often followed the same pattern: Initially there was excitement about being home and deep appreciation of the simple pleasures of being alive. But after a week or two that hyperawareness would start to morph into a critical view of the world around him and a sense of unease. The pretty female reporter on the sidelines of a football game who he’d considered fun and sexy turned into someone vain, self-important, and predatory. The commentators became vile and greedy manipulators.
He saw the worst in people, and even put thoughts in their heads. He was sure they didn’t appreciate the freedoms they enjoyed. They even made fun of people like him who were fighting to protect them, and this put him on edge. It made him long to escape the artificial world and return to the reality of battle, carnage, and aggression, which is how he felt now.
Trouble was, his CO had given the men of Black Cell six weeks of R&R, and only three had elapsed. So Crocker did what he usually did when he was filled with excess energy—he trained. Even though his legs and back hadn’t fully healed, he started every morning with a ten-mile run through the woods with Brando, then drove to ST-6 headquarters, ran the obstacle course a couple of times, and took target practice for an hour. After dinner he went to the gym and lifted weights.