The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell Read Free Book Online Page A

by the searing, eye-watering reek of unwashed human flesh, all the more surprising. It was Faisal Amar, the smart-ass interpreter who worked for Delta Company, the young man with the mole and the dusty gray suit. The man she’d come to see. “Faisal has begun working with us in a more advisory capacity,” Masterson said. “Maybe you’d like to advise him to share his knowledge of what happened to Sergeant Beale yesterday.”
    *   *   *
    Faisal Amar’s condition, his dangling arm and tufts of missing hair, embarrassed her more than she’d expected—worse, somehow, than when Beale had hit him three weeks earlier, because the injuries seemed almost meditative. Deliberate rather than passionate. She also disliked the clothes that Masterson’s lieutenants had dressed him in, once they’d taken him into custody: scrawny, shifty arms sticking out of a Lakers jersey like a drag queen’s, a pair of oversize shower slippers on his crusty feet. But his hostility was clear enough. You saw guys like that at gas stations in Kansas City: pompous, sallow-eyed, acting like they had a secret answer to everything. Real sweeties to women, they were supposed to be. Wondered why their countries looked like shit when they kept trying to blow up everything. After Lieutenant Anderson left, he studied her face, then shrugged at her covered name tag. “I know you,” he said.
    â€œYes, you do,” Fowler said, peeling off the tape.
    â€œThree weeks ago you beat me up. Now you lose a soldier. Man, you are on some kind of streak.” She got a genuine leer out of his thin face, salt whitening the corners of his mouth: they had bad luck in common. A nice thought. Unless it wasn’t bad luck at all that Faisal appeared to be connected to both of these events.
    â€œYou remember a lieutenant named Pulowski?”
    Here was some bad acting in her opinion: squinting, ceiling examined, eye movements to suggest the ruffle of memory. “Which time is this?”
    â€œHe brought you to this man.” She showed him the note that Pulowski had given her and pointed to the drawing of the anonymous Iraqi’s face. “We think he has information about my missing soldier, Sergeant Beale. We also think you know him and you pretended not to. Why would you do that, Faisal? Why would you lie to us in such an important case?”
    â€œWe do hundreds of these, lady,” Faisal said, “a million, whatever. Come on. I do not know this person.” He craned his neck so he could shout around her, toward the door. “Hey, boss. You got somebody more interesting for me?”
    She felt a trigger flipping in her head, lower than her brain—down in the spinal cord, the center of the neck—and she jerked his slim, champagne-flute wrist down and leaned in, her elbows on his knees. “Just read the goddamn paper!” she said. “Read it and tell me the truth about what it says.”
    Her actions and her words felt thick and meat-headed—as bad as Masterson’s riff on Watts—and yet Faisal overopened his eyes and licked his lips to simulate eagerness to please. Then, as he focused on the text, his features shut down, as if a plastic sheet had covered them. No need to translate that. “It is nobody,” he said. “This man.”
    â€œWhat I’m curious about,” she said, “is when you’re going to realize that you might want to start telling the truth. If you think I’m here to save you”—when Faisal made a move to protest, she grabbed his face where Anderson had bruised it—“I’d ask myself, why aren’t I being processed? I offered to take you back to Camp Tolerance, but these guys, the one who hit you—”
    â€œAnderson.”
    â€œAnderson told me that there wasn’t any paperwork on you.”
    She backed off, waited. Faisal limped to the threshold of his cell and nodded at