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

the door, which she opened. “Three letters,” he said. He held up three fingers, his zip-cuffed hands paired beneath his chin, then jumped over the threshold with an odd sideways hop, as if skipping rope. “Three letters, personal testimony from real Iraqis, yes? We take, we fax to Washington, get okay, the bad guys go in here. Hard to get, this testimony. This guy is bad, he did this to me. People know but don’t want to say. So I write them—”
    â€œYeah, I know, you translate Masterson’s arrest affidavits,” Fowler said, though Faisal’s tone caused her to shiver, to notice the sweat cooling beneath her undershirt.
    â€œNo, I make them up ,” Faisal said. There was a strangely mechanical element to his speech. “Whoever he wants to shoot, whoever he wants to detain, I make up a story of how they are bad. Like in a movie. So if the captain arrests me ”—he tapped the socket of his eye, then pointed out across the dusty expanse of the patrol base and made a whooshing sound, fanning out his fingers, as if a flood had covered everything in sight—“everybody, every people he send to jail the past six months, they go free. And these people will come to find him personally. He knows this, so he does not charge me.”
    â€œYou faked the affidavits,” Fowler said.
    â€œWhat the fuck?” Faisal said. “How else does he catch so many this way?”
    *   *   *
    Twenty minutes later, Fowler pushed into the last of eight long brown tents that occupied the southern end of the patrol base. Masterson’s staff had warned her not to disturb the captain at this time of day, and the farther she wandered down the stifling rows of empty bunks, draped with gear, Kevlars, and sweaty fatigues, the less certain she was that ignoring their warning was a sound tactic. The tent’s far end had been sectioned off by a wall of egg crates and she found him there, laid out like a pharaoh, an iPod glowing on his chest, his bare, callused feet atop a plain white sheet. A thick line of black crew cut scalloped low across his forehead, and his skin was acne-pitted, which, when he was awake, gave his features a roughened look but now resembled a putty covering for some other, younger face. “Sir, could I talk to you for a minute?” she asked.
    Masterson raised his eyebrows, rubbing the back of his head against his wrists. He’d been a club rugby player at Oklahoma State and, at Fort Riley, a serious lifter, but he’d dropped at least twenty pounds, and now sat up gingerly, as if his skeleton had been riddled with some incurable disease—not a good sign, especially if what Faisal had told her was true. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. He made an effort to lift his head, but this failed, and he belched and quickly aimed his gaze at the floor again. “This is not really my best time of day. We’re running these patrols all night. It’s a twenty-four-hour operation. I like to be there. So this is really my time to sleep.”
    There was, for the first time, a hint of apology in his voice—though it was factual, not self-pitying—and by way of answer, since she wasn’t leaving, Fowler reached under his makeshift desk, grabbed a wheeled stool, and rolled it between her knees.
    â€œWhy’d you have Faisal detained?” she said.
    Masterson chuckled as if she’d made a joke, then spat dryly into a wastebasket. “There’s a killing field out here along Route Trap. An old field where Faisal used to play soccer as a kid. Yesterday, Anderson finds a body out there with a communiqué pinned to its chest, saying Faisal organized the bombing at the Muthanna intersection.”
    A large floor fan thrummed in the center of the tent and music tinkled out of Masterson’s earbuds as he curled them up. No other accompaniment to tell her whether this story should be believed. “Why,