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chapter 11
quinn
It takes Quinn a few moments to realise she hasn’t been buried alive. Her nose is pressed up against a splintery wooden board, but so too is her left cheek, and, as far as she’s aware, convention dictates some kind of pillow when you’re laid to your eternal rest.
She rolls onto her back and stares up at the underside of a porch roof. Losing her right eye last year has thrown off her spatial awareness, but even she can see the roof is canted away from the building at a precarious angle. She meant to tell Marnie to get it fixed the last time she woke up on her ex-girlfriend’s front stoop.
It’s not yet dawn; early morning October mist drifts across the grey fields of stubble surrounding the farmhouse. Quinn runs a tongue around her remaining teeth. Her mouth feels like the bottom of a bat cave. She hates falling asleep without flossing, even though at this point it’s akin to repainting the railings on theTitanic.
Her phone vibrates in her back pocket, but she ignores it. It’ll be the News Desk, and she has no intention of interrupting her hangover to schlep back to Washington. They can get one of the junior correspondents to follow whatever chum the president has just thrown in the water.
The screen door opens. ‘Jeez,’ Marnie says. ‘Again?’
Quinn struggles to sit up, pushing against her functioning arm. ‘You need to get your porch roof fixed.’
‘What the fuck you doing here, Quinn?’
‘Selling Girl Scout cookies?’
Marnie pulls Quinn to her feet. ‘I’m not kidding around. This has got to stop.’ She doesn’t invite Quinn in, but she doesn’t shut the door in her face, either. Quinn follows her into the warm kitchen, feeling like a stray cat let into the house after a night on the tiles.
‘You can’t keep getting wasted and driving out here,’ Marnie says, pushing a cup of coffee across the counter towards her. ‘You’re gonna end up in a ditch. And I gotta tell you, you look like crap.’
Quinn would smile if she could, but she’s lost most of the muscles on the right side of her face. ‘That ship has sailed,’ she says, without a trace of self-pity.
She demanded one of the nurses bring her a mirror just three days after the IED exploded beneath her Jeep in Syria. She couldn’t actually tell the woman what she wanted, of course: her jaw was still wired shut. She’d had to write it with her left hand on the pad they’d given her. One silver lining to all this: it’s her right arm that’s paralysed, and she’s a leftie.
Her desire to see what she looked like wasn’t provoked by vanity: she’s atelevisionreporter. Viewers may not expect their war correspondents to be pretty blonde auto-cuties, but they don’t want to be put off their dinner, either.
Senior management at INN said all the right things when they medevacked her home, promising to keep her job open and to pay for private medical care and one-on-one rehabilitation, but Quinn knew as soon as she looked in the mirror her career was fucked.
And she was the lucky one: her cameraman, fixer andtranslator had all been killed in the roadside bomb, along with the two US troops accompanying them. Quinn ‘just’ lost an eye, her right lower jaw, and ninety percent of the use of her right arm. The plastic surgeons patched her up pretty well, but there was no way INN would ever let her on prime time TV again.
Instead, they had the company shrink sign her off the reporters’ roster with PTSD, and offered her a job they didn’t expect her to take, as Washington Bureau Chief. In theory, it was a promotion.
She’s aware she’s become a cliché: the embittered journalist looking for redemption and a way back into the premier league, but she’s not going to be the one to blink first. Their standoff has lasted fifteen months so far. INN sends her on bottom-feeding stories that never make it out of the graveyard bulletins. Quinn returns just enough of their calls to stop them being able to fire her.
Marnie folds her arms and watches Quinn sip her coffee. ‘You coulda caught your death. It was down in the thirties last night.’
‘Alcohol doesn’t freeze. Slit my wrists and I’ll bleed pure bourbon.’
‘Not funny, Quinn.’
Even with sleep in her eyes and pillow-creased cheeks, Marnie is still the most beautiful woman Quinn has ever seen, with a torch of red hair and delicate Celtic bone structure. They met nine months ago at a petrol station in rural Maryland; Quinn had been struggling one-armed to change a flat tyre when Marnie had stopped to help.
Conversation had led to dinner; dinner to bed.
The other woman hadn’t been put off by Quinn’s disfiguring injuries. What put an end to their relationship, after just over six months together, was Quinn’s inability to stay sober for longer than eight hours at a stretch.
Quinn reaches for the pitcher of coffee on the hotplate, wrapping her bad hand around her mug as she refills it. She’s learned the hard way that adding the non-visual signal, from the sense of touch, helps her brain judge distance and location more accurately.
‘How long this time?’ Marnie asks.
‘What day is it now?’
‘Sunday.’
Quinn has many faults, but telling the truth and shaming the devil is hardwired into her DNA. ‘Three days,’ she says.
‘Goddamn it, Quinn. You wanna screw up your life, be my guest. But I don’t want a ringside seat.’
Quinn was a screw-up long before the IED. She suffered a one-two knockout punch when she was seven and her parents divorced, and then foughtnotto have custody. Forced to spend her childhood shuttling between homes in London and Scotland, in neither of which she was welcome, she didn’t grieve much when they died from cancer while she was at college, within six months of each other. She specialises in rooting out all that’s dark and ugly in human nature, because it’s what she knows.
Her phone buzzes again.
‘Take it,’ Marnie says.
Quinn suppresses her craving for a slug of Eagle Rare from the hip flask inside her jacket and swipes right on the call from the News Desk.
