“Yeah?” Joey prompted.
Jenny looked at him. The stoplight threw red light over her face, revealing her right profile in red highlights and leaving the left side of her face buried in shadow. It was like she was trapped between two worlds.
Joey didn’t know where the impression had come from, but once the thought had come to his mind he couldn’t get rid of it.
“You and your mom are close,” Jenny said.
“Yeah. Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Joey looked away, aware that the young woman’s eyes were boring into his, seeming to see past so much of the image that he had built up to impress her. “I kind of blew curfew tonight. Not exactly a step designed to build closeness.”
Surprisingly, Jenny laughed. “No,” she agreed. “Definitely not.”
“What about you?” Joey said, thinking that if an opportunity presented itself he should capitalize on it.
“What about me?”
“Are you close to your mom?”
Jenny looked away. “She’s dead.”
Joey felt horrible. The night just wasn’t going well at all. He felt like he couldn’t do anything wrong without making a mess of things. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“No,” Jenny agreed. “You didn’t.” Her face turned green. She waited a beat, then pointed at the traffic light. “Green. We can go.”
Feeling even more inadequate, Joey took his foot from the brake and placed it on the accelerator. He sped up, following the familiar streets back to Fort Benning.
“You didn’t do anything wrong by asking, Joey,” Jenny said. “You couldn’t know. It’s just me and my father.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head, then a smile twisted her lips. “But you have a little brother.”
“Chris.” Joey nodded. “Yeah.”
“So how old is he?”
“Five,” Joey said. “And don’t try to tell him any different because he can count.”
“Five’s a cute age.”
And seventeen’s not? Joey wanted to ask. But he didn’t. He was afraid of the answer. Especially since he’d told Jenny he was twentyone. “How do you know about cute ages for kids?” he countered. “If you don’t have a younger brother or sister?”
“Before I became a server, I worked in a child-care center. I liked working with the creepers.”
“Creepers?”
“Kids ten to fourteen months old. The daycare center staff called them creepers because they just started to pull themselves up on things and walk.”
“Oh.”
Jenny looked at Joey and smiled again. “And you were thinking?”
“Horror movie stuff. Aliens. Predators. Creepers.” Joey shrugged. “Just seemed to fit.”
“So what’s your little brother like?”
Joey slowed and took a left through the intersection, making certain he had plenty of room before the oncoming traffic reached them. A pang of jealousy ripped through him. Jenny didn’t even know Chris and already her attention was zeroing in on him, leaving Joey way behind.
Struggling to mask his hurt and disappointment, Joey said, “Chris is great. Everybody likes him.” Can’t you tell?
“Must be nice.”
“What?”
Jenny looked away from him, turning to play with her hair in her reflection on the side window. “Having a little brother.”
“Some days,” Joey admitted. “Other days, I wish I was an only child.”
“Why?”
Joey shrugged. “Kinda miss all the attention.” Miss it a lot, actually.
“You do, huh?” Jenny turned her attention to him.
Really regretting all the scrutiny he was getting, and feeling more than a little defensive, Joey said, “Yeah. I mean, you have to work your tail off at home to get your parents to notice you because all your cuteness points faded back in a past you can barely remember, and your little brother just has to step into the room and—pow! He’s the center of attention.”
“That happens a lot?”
“Yeah,” Joey said. “All the time.” A kaleidoscope of images swirled through his mind, stinging with each memory of how Chris had so nonchalantly taken the full attention of both parents and any other adult who happened to be around. “I mean, it’s like Chris is a magnet for attention.”
A brief, tense silence stretched between them. Joey had the feeling he had done something incredibly stupid, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was.
“I thought you lived in an apartment with a roommate,” Jenny said. Her voice turned cold and hard. She slid away from him, pressing herself up against the door. “That’s what you told me at Kettle O’ Fish.”
Too late, Joey realized that one of his lies had been found out. And they were all tied together. Sick apprehension filled him.
“What else have you lied about?” Jenny demanded.
Turkey
37 Klicks South of Sanliurfa
Local Time 0810 Hours
Artillery fire peppered the ridge of desert rock Captain Remington had chosen as Goose’s observation point. Goose braced himself as Tanaka hit the brakes. The RSOV skidded through the loose sand and broken rock that covered the area from the explosions that had turned the border region into a moonlike landscape.
Keeping his head low and his helmet cinched up tight enough to keep it on, Goose stepped from the RSOV and sprinted over to the com team Remington had waiting for him. The two men pressed themselves into the lee side of a rocky outcrop that thrust up to a broken point twenty feet overhead.
Despite the preparation he’d had for the scene and the occasional glances of the border he’d gotten while racing for the observation point, the carnage strung along the border nearly froze Goose’s heart. In all his years as a soldier, Goose had never seen anything that could have left him ready for the horrible consequences of the clash that lay before him.
The Syrian infantry remained too far away to see with the naked eye. According to Remington’s reports while Goose had been en route, after the initial flurry of SCUDs and FROGs had landed within Syrian occupied territory, the enemy army—at this point that was the only way Goose could think of them—the Syrians had abandoned their posts and pulled back.
If the Turkish government and the United Nations could have agreed with President Fitzhugh’s desire to send the troops into
