Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(20)
An aging Hasid, his beaver hat sparkling with raindrops, casts a disapproving look at them, and only then does Rainy realize that Halev has taken her hand. Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not like men and women walking together, let alone holding hands, let alone a man holding hands with a woman wearing a uniform.
Rainy feels Halev’s hand shrinking in hers, and she tightens her grip in defiance. Let the alter cocker sneer, she will not be shamed by those people. She will not be shamed by anyone.
And if he wants to kiss me?
Halev insists on walking her home, despite acknowledging that she was the one who at their first meeting rescued him from a street fight and not the other way around. Still, a gentleman does not let his date roam the streets of the city alone at night.
They are a block from Rainy’s home when she notices that a long, black Plymouth sedan is creeping along the wet street behind them. Halev notices it too. “Let’s walk a little faster, shall we?”
“Actually, Halev, I have a feeling that may be my ride.”
“What?”
She stops and turns back to face the car, which now accelerates gently to come even with her. A burly man in a heavy overcoat and wearing a homburg hat rolls down the window and says, “You the Jew’s girl . . . uh, what’s her name?”
A second man, smaller but with the dead eyes of a porcelain doll, says, “Schulterman.”
“That’s me,” Rainy says.
The car brakes and both men get out. Both wear loose-fitting overcoats to conceal the bulge of shoulder holsters. That they are gangsters is not in question, they practically have the word gangster hung on a sandwich board around their necks.
“Come on, Rainy,” Halev says nervously.
“I’m so sorry, Halev, but I have to say good night.”
“But—”
“It’s something . . .” She searches for the word and only comes up with, “Official.”
“I see.”
“I had a great time.”
“So did I. But these gentlemen are definitely putting an end to my schemes for a good night kiss.”
Rainy smiles. “Next time?”
“Promise?” he asks with a crooked smile that reveals a sweet mix of desire and bashfulness.
Feeling an overwhelming swirl of mismatched feelings, including the giddiness of attraction to Halev, nervousness, and fear—but mostly fear of screwing something up—she shakes Halev’s hand chastely and self-consciously, and slides into the backseat of the Plymouth.
6
RIO RICHLIN—CAMP ZIGZAG, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA
“You Cole?”
It is four o’clock in the morning, and the man speaking is an MP corporal. He is behind the wheel of a jeep pulling a wooden cart on bald automobile tires. It’s a makeshift arrangement that has never appeared in an army field manual. But then the army manual does not contemplate this particular sort of cargo.
Sergeant Cole rubs sleep from his eyes and looks at the MP, then at the bodies piled and intertwined in the cart. Eight of his soldiers—the new guy Beebee, plus Suarez, Stick, Stafford, Castain, Preeling, Magraff, and Richlin—are in various states of consciousness. They are bleeding, bruised, groaning, and trying unsuccessfully, in the case of the marginally conscious ones, to climb out.
“I’m Cole,” he admits, with disgust in both syllables.
“I think these belong to you.” The driver jerks a thumb over his shoulder.
“You can drive ’em right on back to the stockade,” Cole snaps.
The corporal laughs. “No can do, Sarge, stockade is full. So’s the city jail. And anyway, the dark-haired one there slipped me a fiver to get them here. There’s been some roughhousing. Your bunch were in a fight with some Frog colonials. Then, best as we can tell, they went on to get into a second round with a Texas outfit.”
“Dammit,” Cole says, which is about as extreme as his language gets unless there’s shooting going on.
Rio rolls off of Cat, tumbles, and slams hard into the dirt. She lies there, facedown, for quite a while, arms and hands flattened on the ground. She might just as well have fallen out of a passing plane.
How did I get here?
The ground does not feel quite solid to Rio, in fact it is spinning, spinning, and sort of falling away, like one of those boards they use to ride the waves at Stinson Beach. Oh, she wishes she were there right now, wishes she were far away, lying on some beach. And also really wishing hard that she had not started drinking that ouzo they got . . . somewhere.
Her tongue is a dead rat coated in tar; her muscles are both limp and sore; her stomach . . . oh, she doesn’t even want to think about that because she’s got nothing left to puke up unless she’s going to start puking up her liver.
Also, her face hurts. She almost remembers the punch that connected with her right cheek. And she can vaguely trace the soreness in her throat muscles to an armlock, possibly from an MP, that part is not at all clear. The one thing she does remember with a certain satisfaction is that the sprain in her right ankle is from the impact of her boot tip on a sensitive area of a male Texan’s person.
“All right, you useless bunch of clowns, crawl off and shower. Who knows what bugs you picked up, and I won’t have them in my tents. And, Suarez, for God’s sake pull up your pants!”
Cat says, “Hey, I lost a tooth.”