Then the sound of the engine. The joking vanishing instantly, replaced by operational paranoia. They'd moved as a team, weapons fixed, positions good, covering the entrance to the courtyard. He'd led from the front, the first to step onto the winding alley that fronted the place.

"It was an ambulance, an old diesel job with black smoke coming out the back," he said. "I heard a loud pop, sounded like a blown tire."

More real than the street outside the diner was his memory of that moment. The comforting weight of his weapon against gloved palms. The taut pull of the chin strap of his helmet. Dinner smells, cumin and black pepper and smoke.

The ambulance had stopped a hundred yards north, in the center of the alley. Jason could see the doors wing open. Two dark-skinned men looked around edgily. One vanished around the back, then returned with a tire iron, squatted beside the front right of the truck while the other kept a nervous watch. Knowing, as Jason did, that in the center of a back street in insurgent territory, with no protection, with medical supplies and possibly drugs on board, they were only one thing.

A target.

Jason's orders were clear: Guard the house. Stay put until relieved. But there could be wounded in back. Maybe women, or children.

"You never know, is the thing. Over there. One minute somebody is smiling and waving, the next they're aiming an AK-74." He shrugged. "But it was an ambulance."

He'd ordered the squad to stay put, taken Paoletti and Martinez. Moving carefully, not hugging the sides. In a firefight, bullets rode the walls. Dark eyes watching from windows, always gone when he turned to look. The ambulance drew nearer a step at a time. A long hundred yards. He watched the men working on the truck, saw one of them stop, shade his eyes with his hands, wave them forward. Yelling something in Arabic, fast and guttural. Jason ignored him. The previous week a truck disguised as an ambulance had been loaded with bathtub-brewed dynamite and detonated amid a crowd of men applying for positions in the Iraqi National Guard.

"Funny, but you remember the littlest things. The sun was setting, and I remember thinking how someday I would miss those sunsets. It's all the dust. Makes it look like heaven is on fire."

The man squatting beside the tire had a thin dark mustache. A perfect bead of sweat hung at one end. He'd looked up and smiled, pointed to the spare beside him, said something unintelligible.

Jason signaled Paoletti to watch while he and Martinez moved to the rear of the ambulance. His heart pounding. Not something you ever got used to, the realization that if things went wrong, you could suddenly not be there any more. Not be, period.

At the rear, he'd leveled his weapon as Martinez put one hand on the handle. Nodded to him, ready to fire, thinking short, controlled bursts, thinking don't let this be the moment, and then Martinez had yanked open the rear door and raised his own rifle, both of them yelling Arabic phrases they'd learned phonetically.

A wide-eyed boy about five years old stared at them from the floor of the ambulance. A man knelt over him, crimson fingers moving in his chest. The doctor glanced at them, turned back to the boy without a word. Didn't ask what they wanted, who they were, just worked to save the life of a child.

"It'd been a shell, a mortar shell. Insurgents lob them all the time, and their aim sucks. No training and old Soviet hardware smuggled in from Afghanistan. This kid had been playing with his brother a mile from our FOB. The shrapnel tore him to ribbons."

"Jesus," Cruz said. Her voice quiet. "What did you do?"

"We set down our weapons and cranked up that ambulance like we were swapping a tire at the Indy 500."

When they were finished, the little man with the driver had shaken Jason's hand, then put his right hand over his heart. Jason had repeated the gesture, feeling good. Watched them start the ambulance, black smoke farting out the exhaust, and stood aside to let them drive away. He and Martinez and Paoletti had smiled at one another. Started walking back beneath the burning sky. He remembered the warmth in his chest, the sense that he loved these men and would do anything for them.

And when they'd gone about thirty feet, Jason heard a distant crack. His mind classified it, medium-caliber rifle fire, single shot, and then Martinez said, "Oh."

Just that, "Oh," no scream or cry or curse, and then blood began to pulse from his neck, a thick, ropey flow, not spraying like an arterial hit but pouring fast, the top of his desert camos staining dark, no, no, Martinez, the nicest guy you'd ever meet, blood everywhere, Martinez with his hands at his throat like he could hold it back, his whole life pulsing through clenched fingers.

Christ save him, Jason's first thought was relief that it wasn't him. And the Worm had been born in his chest, filthy greasy contemptible cowardly pansy useless outsider waste that he was.

"A sniper shot one of my men," Jason said, and stared at the pattern of divots in the Formica table. Traced shapes with a rough fingertip. "I haven't talked about it with anyone since I came home, not even Michael." He scratched at his forehead, closed his eyes, able to see Martinez passing around pictures of Scarlett Johansson and claiming she was his fiancée, Martinez crying with laughter as he pummeled Jones with a chair in their X-Box wrestling game, Martinez who died before they could even get him in the Humvee, who coughed and clutched at Jason's arm and left fingerprints black and ragged. Just a boy. "I don't know why I'm telling you."

Cruz reached across the table and took his hand. The move surprised him, brought him back to the moment, to the simple pleasure of human contact, a living woman touching him. He looked up, met her eyes, watched her bite her lip like she was picking her words carefully.

Then she said, "I slept with another cop. A married one."

"What?" Confused.

"That's why no one trusts me. He was a superior, a friend, and one time things got out of hand. Just one stupid time. But after it got out, everybody figured it was how I'd earned my place in the unit." Fire in her eyes on that, angry pressure on his hand. "So now no one trusts me, no one believes I have what it takes. And no matter how hard I work or how many cases I close, I can't go back and undo it."

He didn't know what to say, just looked at her, felt her fingers warm and soft in his.

"I know it's nothing like what happened to you," Cruz said. "I'm not comparing it, my problems at work to your war. I just… I don't know, wanted to tell you something. Tell you the thing that I didn't tell other people, the way you hadn't talked about what happened in Iraq." She stopped, started again, stopped. Looked at him. "Does that make any sense?"

"Yes," Jason said. For a moment he let himself just meet her eyes and pretend that they were two normal people sharing secrets amidst the clatter of silverware and the burnt smell of coffee, like this was the morning after a date that left the world ripe with possibility. Then he sighed and took his hand from hers.

"It's time."

The street was wide and lined with trees in summer bloom. A gentle breeze set branches rustling, their shadows shifting liquid. Cars were parked along both sides, and well-dressed women with expensive hair drifted among the small shops. The fresh smell of bread rose from a bakery.

"Looks clear," Cruz said.

He nodded. "Hurry."

They moved north on the sidewalk with the fastest walk that wouldn't draw attention. A car rounded the corner from Lincoln, and Jason tensed. "I wish we had a gun."

Cruz didn't reply. Her apartment tower was born of the seventies, a plain, blocky structure with broad windows bouncing sunlight. From the lobby an elderly doorman smiled at her and touched a button on his desk, and the entry unlocked with a buzz.