Chuck Logan - After the Rain

The young brown guy, the slightly older black guy, and the old white guy had been in the room for thirty minutes and now the sweat was running down their arms. They didn’t need to be reminded, but the black guy went and said it anyway.

“ Damn, it’s hot.”

“It ain’t so hot,” the old white guy said. “Panama was hot. Somalia was hotter. Kuwait was really hot, but that was a dry heat. Now, you take your triple-canopy jungle in Laos…”

“Don’t start,” the black guy said.

The temperature in the windowless room had topped ninety degrees at ten A.M., and that was half an hour ago. The room was in a suite of unused offices in an almost vacant strip mall off Highway 12 on the western edge of the Detroit metro area. The building was deserted except for a one-room telemarketing sweatshop at the other end.

The white guy was closer to sixty than to fifty, and his shaggy white-blond hair was shot with gray, and he’d given up trying to hide the bald spot on top. Once he’d been cinched down tight all over. Now his skin and muscles were starting to look like they were a size too large. He shook his head, toed the dirty carpeting, and laughed.

“Figures. No A/C. No nothing. Lookit this place. Some op. Shows how much we rate. Where are we? Inkster? What kind of name is that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the black guy, who was in his late twenties. Unlike his older partner, he enjoyed looking in the mirror every morning. His skin fit him nice and tight.

They wore Nikes and faded jeans and oversized polo shirts that did not entirely conceal the holstered Berettas, the pagers, the plastic hand ties and cell phones hanging from their belts. They were obviously exhausted. They had not shaved in the last twenty-four hours.

They were not cops.

Nobody would admit who or what they were now. Only what they’d been. The old one was former Delta, former SF. The young one had also been with Special Forces. They’d been through the looking glass and now they carried nothing in their wallets or on their gear that could be traced back to the military. They were simply known by their mission name: Northern Route.

They were volunteers, totally on their own.

An hour ago they snatched a Saudi Arabian businessman off a busy street, stuffed him in a Chevy van, and brought him to this crummy little room from which the air conditioning, the desks, and the chairs had been removed. There was a touch of method in the selection of this room: the sensation of slow suffocation as an interrogation tool. For now the prisoner remained blindfolded. A little later they would take the blindfold off.

So it was just the three of them, and a lot of sweat, and the worn gray carpet, the bare walls, and the gray ceiling tiles crowded overhead with their grids of monotonous dots. And now the walls, carpet, and ceiling started closing in to form a solid block of heat.

The old guy wiped sweat from his forehead and said, “The right way to do this is we should be sitting on a runway. Three hundred thousand Arab types down the road in Dearborn for these wrongos to hide out with. And there’s not a single military base in this whole town. That’s real smart.”

“Hollywood, man-just cool it. It’s only half an hour. They’re on the way in from Willow Run to pick him up.” On him, the black guy nodded at the third man in the room.

“What would be nice, Bugs, is for Omar here to tell us something.”

Bugs shook his head. “Never happen. We can’t make deals, that’s for the suits. But my guess is this guy’s hardcore Qaeda. No way he’s gonna talk to anybody. Nah, I think he’s gonna sit out the war on the beach in Cuba.”

Hollywood nodded. “You hear that, Omar? Camp Delta. Nice eight-by-eight chain-link dog kennel. Got your little rug and your prayer arrow scribed on the concrete floor.”

The third man in the room showed lots of brown skin, as he’d been stripped down to his jockey shorts. He sat stiffly on a metal folding chair, his hands bound tightly behind his back in plastic cuffs. In contrast to his scruffy captors he was clean-shaven, his thick dark hair was styled, his fingernails and toenails looked recently manicured. He smelled of cologne rather than sweat and fatigue. In further contrast, a comfortable two inches of belly flab drooped over his waistband. According to the word, he was the renegade nephew of a Saudi prince, one of the world’s ultimate rich kids.

But right now he was seriously separated from his Rolex and his Mercedes, and he had a band of duct tape wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. The intell on him suggested he was a dilettante slumming in jihad, that he was soft, that he would crack. So far, the intell was wrong.

Hollywood scrubbed at the stubble on his chin with his knuckles, then he grimaced at the prisoner. He crossed the room in three swift strides, grabbed a handful of the prisoner’s sleek black hair, yanked him to his feet, and shouted, “We know you’re getting set to move something. So what is it, where is it, and who’s doing it?”

The prisoner hunched his shoulders and drew his chin into his chest.

Hollywood’s frustration blew on through to outright anger. He seized the prisoner with both hands and roughly spun him in a circle. “So which way’s Mecca, Omar? Take a fuckin’ guess!”

“Hey, hey, knock it off,” Bugs said, moving in quick. Their good cop/bad cop choreography was getting out of hand. It was the heat.

“Yeah, right.” Hollywood rammed the staggering prisoner’s head against the wall.

“You goddamn redneck-you’re way out of line. Back off!” Now Bugs was shouting as he stepped in between Hollywood and the prisoner, who had collapsed to his knees. They glared at each other, standing so close the sweat on their noses almost merged.

Hollywood squinted his pale blue eyes. “You young guys-you think this is some kind of extreme sporting event. Let me clue you. This is a war. This scumbag is the enemy. You better get some hate in your chest, son; ’cause if you don’t, when the time comes, you’re gonna hesitate…”

Bugs stood his ground and stared directly into Hollywood’s eyes. “You got no cause to bad-mouth his religion.”

“Wise up,” Hollywood said evenly. “This raghead wants to kill your family because he’s an intolerant Wahhabi creep, get it?”

“Fine, but I’m telling you, he ain’t going to talk, not to us.”

“Oh yeah? There’s ways.”

“Spare me.”

“When I was in Nam…”

“It’s too early in the day for the geezer hour,” Bugs said. “And it’s way too hot, besides.” Rolling his eyes, he reached down, hoisted the prisoner by the arms, and guided him back to the chair.

Hollywood walked to the corner, stooped and plucked a half-liter plastic bottle of springwater from a twelve-pack. He got up, opened the bottle, and returned to the seated prisoner. Slowly he poured several ounces of the water on the prisoner’s bare chest. The prisoner reacted to the touch of liquid, instinctively licked his lips. Thirsty.

“All you need is a gallon of water and a washcloth. Put the rag over his mouth and nose and just dribble the water. Slow suffocation. Works like a charm. Don’t leave mark one,” Hollywood said.

“They catch you doing that today you go to Leavenworth. Besides, evidence acquired through torture is not admissible in court.”

“Court? Court! ” Hollywood actually shuffled his feet in a brief dance of rage. “Oh great, why don’t we read him his rights and have a seance and see if we can contact William Kunstler.”

“Maybe you could pull that shit in Afghanistan, but not here,” Bugs said.