Page 7 of What is Lost

“Yours. I mean...” He gave a pointed look right and then left at the empty barracks. “I’m still here, right?”

He’d waited for her.He’s not the enemy.“We just talked.” She paused then added, “It was private.”

“Oh.” The look of expectation slid from his face to be replaced by something close to embarrassment. “Okay.” His mouth wobbled into a sheepish grin. “Okay,” he repeated as he backed away. “Just wanted to be sure youwere all right.”

“I am. Thanks.” Then she thought,How often have you run into a nice guy who probably would never comment on how your ass wiggles when you use a Gigli saw?

So, despite all her resolutions and best intentions, she said, “Lieutenant Worthy, just what do you do for fun?”

“Fun? Me?Here?”

“They’re not oxymorons.”

The right corner of his mouth quirked. “I read and work out. I watch movies. I hang at the airfield a lot.”

“The airfield.”

“Yeah.” A little defensively. “I like to watch the planes come and go.”

“Come and go.”

“Yeah. The hand signals are interesting.”

“Interesting.”

“So weird.” He cocked his head. “Do you hear an echo?”

Okaaay.A guy with a sense of humor. She also didn’t think his hesitancy, the stumbling and fumbling, was an act.

“How about this?” she said. “We both change into civvies then blow this Crackerjack joint and go have somerealfun?”

“Oh?” he said. “Such as?”

ANNIE OAKLEY

JULY 2020

“Fun,”John said, as Roni nosed her rental up to a long building at the end of a rutted county road in Alabama, a half hour away from base across the Chattahoochee. Two yellow lozenges of light shone on either side of a darkened front door. He counted four roof-mounted cameras. He squinted at a stenciled sign over the doorway.

“A gun club,” he said then repeated, “Agunclub?”

“Yeah.” Roni threw the rental into and killed the engine. “I like target shooting. Makes me feel better.”

“Okay.”Seriously?On the other hand,he could sort of see it. All the gun ranges around his family’s place in Texas had been packed the day the Twin Towers came down and for a solid week afterward: hordes of angry, scared people banging away,hoping all those bullets somehow made up for their inability to go after an enemy whose face they didn’t even know. “So, you come to agunclub in Alabama? Why not shoot on the base range?”

“Because there aren’t many weapons to choose from, and it’s too…” She searched for the word. “Public. Everybody knows you. I don’t want to give guys like Horner any reason to make stupid jokes about shrinks going postal, especially after today.”

John almost said that Horner would never do that but then reconsidered. The guywasa jerk. The truth also was that he and Roni were, hands down, the best shots in their class. What with her dad being an instructor at Mountain Warfare, Roni came by guns honestly. As for John, deer hunting was practically a religion in Wisconsin.

Plus, he’d had some additional instruction from his uncle who’d been a Ranger and a sniper in Vietnam. He saw no reason, though, to talk about a detail that belonged to another boy’s past anyway.

“But I don’t have a weapon,” he said.

“I called ahead. We’re all set.” She killed the engine. “The owner’s a nice guy.”

“But it’sdark. Roni, you got to have some other way of working off steam.”

“I do.” Pulling the ignition key, she pushed out of the rental, pocketed the fob, and said, “But this is better than throwing knives or axes.”

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