The warm rumble in Lett’s gut burned white hot. He remembered all too clearly that Selfer was the whole goddamn reason he was here in the first place. In Captain Charlie Selfer’s first mission for him, he and two other GIs were to cross the German border disguised as German soldiers and reconnoiter enemy strength along the Ardennes line. They ended up in bombed-out Cologne. There a German girl recognized Lett and his team as American spies. But she was alone on the rubble street. She screamed and tried to run, and she would’ve given them away. It was war. Lett strangled her. He didn’t think, just did it, mechanical. He and his sorry crew somehow found their way back over the lines. Yet Selfer didn’t want to hear the truth Lett had to report—that the Germans were amassing an invading counterattack force. This horror didn’t fit the popular intelligence reports already making the rounds that Selfer had crafted. So it was all for nothing. A poor girl suffocated for a damn report that did not fit. And Lett had nightmares about that girl ever since.

Lett glared at his GI shoes. They should just get to the point. He was a deserter once, and Selfer, once again, had him right where he wanted him.

But Selfer owed him. Selfer owed him the cure.

Lett’s heat made the sweat return, trickling down his spine. He grabbed at the chair arms, focusing on a knot in the floorboards, the spot evenly spaced between his planted feet. He did this when he expected a blood rush to the head and a firefight inside his skull.

“Hey, relax. That chair’s not made of needles,” Selfer said.

“It’s no featherbed,” Lett said.

Selfer held onto his smile. He held out his hands. “What can I tell you? Ask away.”

“What about Washington, DC? Wasn’t that always your goal? I’d have figured you for a natural.”

“Oh, I gave DC a go. All of three months. Then I got the call. You see, I want to be my own man.” Selfer’s curling mouth had taken a straight line.

Lett wasn’t buying it. “You just like things hotter. Wilder. That Washington pond is too big and all the fish, as well. The Pacific’s just about right for a big swimmer like you.” Something made Lett refrain from calling him a shark.

“Let’s just say that I don’t suffer mediocrity. And I don’t think you do, either. In any case, you’re in no position to be casting stones. You could still have bars blocking your way.”

“So why am I not in a stockade? Or made an example, Eddie Slovik-style? So I turned myself in. Big deal. You could’ve claimed you found me—gained you a whole basket of brownie points.”