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The crazy bastard walked to the pool table and began racking the balls, nodding to the pool cues hanging on an adjacent wall. “Pick it. You break.”
And, then they played. And that’s all they’d done. A little small talk here and there, but that was it. They just played. When the fifty-minute hour—what the hell is that about?—was over, Ernie nodded at Logan and said, “I’ll see you in two days. Same time.”
And that was it.
The following session, Logan walked in, caught the bottle of water Ernie tossed his way, and they began to play again. No pressure, no nothing.
And, within twenty minutes, Logan was talking.
“His name was Dopey.”
Ernie grunted. “Back in my day, we had names like Cowboy and Ice Man. Dopey? You guys went withDopey?”
Logan was surprised to hear himself chuckle and a little of the tension seeped out of him. “Yeah. Nick James. We all called him Dopey because he was so damned much like the dwarf, Dopey. Smiling and happy all the freaking time. Everyone’s friend no matter what. In the beginning, I think people thought he was a bit slow, because he had this way of talking really slow and he didn’t say a whole lot sometimes. He turned out to be the smartest of all of us.”
“How so?” Ernie asked, leaning over the table to line up a bank shot.
Logan shook his head and a bitter half laugh came out of him. “He was actually pretty damned philosophical. One day, we’re all sitting around. They told us to get ready for a call out, then nothing. You know—“
“Hurry up and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. So, we’re waiting and someone pulls up some article about an asshole somewhere burning the America flag in protest. We’re all feeling pretty pissed off about it because, you know, we’re deployed left and right, hardly a break between them. We’re dealing with sand in our damned underwear and heat like you’ve never felt in the summer or snow up to our freaking ears in the winter, getting shot at and blown to shit, and—”
Logan stopped then, swallowing as the memory hit him hard. “Well, you know,” he said, not wanting to mention the shit they had to see, the shit they had to do.
Not wanting to talk about what it was to take a life, even when you knew it was their life or yours. Even when that person would put a bullet through your skull with no qualms about it because of what you stood for.Whoyou stood for.
Ernie simply nodded. They’d stopped playing pool for a minute, but Logan bent back over the table, taking a shot to the corner pocket and sinking it with a satisfyingshunkin the pocket.
He was quiet for a minute, eyeing the table and then lining up another shot before continuing.
“And, we’d all do it all over again in a heartbeat for our country. So, to see some guy burning the flag—” He shook his head. “Dopey. He just stops all of us. He tells us all we’re wrong. Of course, we look at him like he’s nuts, but he doesn’t care. He says, we’re all wrong. That burning the flag is a right and it’s a right we have to continue to protect no matter what.
“He says it’s a right that should never, ever be exercised, but if some asshat back in the states is dumb enough to exercise it, we need to protect his right to do it. Because that’s what makes us different, you know? That’s what makes the United States so great. It’s the fact that you can say and do those things, that you can say and do what you believe in and you can stand up for what you believe in. And, that’s what we’re over here fighting for, he says. We’re fighting so that asshat can burn the flag.”
“Do you think he was right?” Ernie’s tone had held no judgment. He had only been asking the question.
“I don’t know.” Logan stared out the window for a minute before continuing. “It still pissed me off to hear about some guy doing that, but I do think Dopey had it right that we have to stick up for all the rights we have here, you know? Even the ones that make me want to bash someone’s head in from time to time. It’s what makes America better than any other country on the planet.”
Ernie was quiet.
Logan took another shot, but missed miserably and he fell back onto a stool to watch Ernie clear the rest of the table. The guy sure didn’t pull his punches at the table just because you were paying him for his services.
“Dopey didn’t make it home with you?” Ernie’s question gutted Logan. Logan could still hear the sound of what seemed like a hundred tridents being pounded into Dopey’s casket as his fellow SEALs said goodbye to one of their own.
Logan shook his head. “Nah. Never made it. Carried his body out, carried him all the way back to the evac point, but—” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. Ernie got it. The pain of that moment when you realized there was no more you could do. No way to turn back the clock. A life was gone.
Ernie didn’t have some magic answer for that. They’d just kept playing pool and talked about little things after that. What his job was like at Sutton, who he thought would win in that weekend’s game, stuff like that.
But walking into work on Friday, Logan felt lighter somehow. Rather than head back to his office, he walked into Samantha’s office and shut the door. She had four windows open on her screen, fingers flying as she copied and pasted, and flipped from window to window.
She looked up, a startled expression on her face, like she hadn’t realized he was there until he shut the door. He felt his lips pull at the sides. If it wasn’t so dangerous for her, he’d laugh at the way she was so completely unaware of her surroundings. The computer sucked her in and she didn’t come up for air or food until someone came to pull her up.
Logan did just that now. He rounded her desk and hauled her up out of her chair, pulling her against him with one arm. His other hand found her hair and tangled in the mass of it, pulling her toward him as his mouth found hers. Hungry and greedy and not stopping to think about what he was doing any more.
“I’m doing something about it now,” he said when he’d dug up some sanity and pulled back from her.
She blinked at him. Once. Twice. Several more times, before she spoke. “Doing something about what?”
