Chapter 4
Story: He Laughs At Her Taped Hands In Front Of The Whole Gym, Until The Senior NCO Does Not Join In
The gym emptied slowly. Soldiers drifted off the benches and toward the doors in pairs and small groups, talking low, shooting glances back at the mat where Reyes still stood alone. No one stopped to talk to her. No one met her eye. They filed out like men leaving a courtroom.
Briggs's office was a glass-walled cubicle at the back of the gym, beside the equipment cage. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a fan. Hale stood inside, arms crossed, shoulders set. Briggs sat behind the desk with his black wristwatch on the blotter, not looking at him yet.
Reyes waited outside the open door. She could hear them through the glass.
"—know her," Hale was saying. "You do. I can see it on you."
"I don't know her," Briggs said.
"Then what's your problem? A new NCO steps on my mat, runs a mouth, you stand there watching me look like a fool—"
"Did she run a mouth?"
Hale stopped.
"Did she," Briggs repeated, "run a mouth. Or did she answer you when you started on her?"
"She walked onto the mat like she owned it."
"Mat's open. Post policy. You know the rules."
"The rules," Hale said, and his voice had an edge now, a hard edge. "You want to talk about rules, let's talk about you standing there with your arms crossed watching your own man get showboated by an S-3 paper-pusher."
Briggs picked up his wristwatch and buckled it on. Slow. Deliberate.
"You weren't getting showboated," he said. "You were getting read."
"Read?"
"You talk when you should be working. She let you. And you kept talking and she kept watching, and at some point you looked around and realized you had no idea what she was going to do next. That's not showboating. That's a skilled fighter letting you walk into the thing you did anyway."
Hale's mouth worked. "You saying she's a skilled fighter?"
"I'm saying you lost your head and got put on the mat twice because of it."
"That was—"
"Twice," Briggs said. "Once on your knee, once on your hands. And you want to tell me what she would have done if she'd wanted to hurt you?"
Hale didn't answer.
"Because I've got a file on my desk," Briggs said, "and it says she knows exactly what to do with a man who gives her his head and neck like that."
He tapped the desk. There was nothing on it.
Hale looked at the empty desk. Then at Briggs.
"File?"
"Paper file. Digital file. Doesn't matter what kind of file." Briggs leaned back in his chair. "Point is, you came onto that mat assuming things about her, and you were wrong, and you got put down for it. The question is what you do with that."
"Sounds like you know her."
"I know her record."
"Whose record?"
"Her own."
Hale stared at him. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're going to get," Briggs said. "Now sit down."
Hale didn't sit. He stood, arms crossed, and the two men stared at each other across the desk.
Outside, in the gym, Reyes had moved to the wall where her water bottle sat. She picked it up, drank, and looked out through the tall windows at the parade field beyond, empty and green in the hard afternoon light.
She didn't turn when she heard footsteps.
"You want to tell me what that was?" asked a low voice from behind her.
Reyes capped her water and turned around. Sergeant First Class Nolan Briggs stood a few feet away, arms crossed, whistle flat at his chest.
"I want to tell you to read my file," she said.
"I read it."
"Then you know."
"I know what's on it," he said. "I don't know what wasn't written down."
Reyes looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the mat, and at the spot where Hale had gone down.
"It wasn't written down," she said. "Because I didn't want it to be."
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