“We’re on,” Drabinsky had said. “Where are you?”

Jack’s heart had kicked up a notch. “At the marina, editing footage.”

“A little out of my way but I don’t want you to miss this. Be at the lot in twenty.”

After he hung up, Jack immediately contacted his photographer Maxine and told her to meet them at the accident scene.

As Drabinsky maneuvered impatiently through traffic, Jack’s mind went back to the first time he had been rushing somewhere, that morning in Baghdad when everything went wrong.

He was remembering Riley’s face.

He saw that face in his sleep sometimes. The slack jaw, the glazed eyes, the dust-caked laugh lines around them. A dust that could neither be tamed nor conquered and had permeated every facet of their lives back then-two hotshot network news monkeys riding shotgun with the Second Marine Division, Riley always complaining that the desert was wreaking havoc on his video equipment.

Not that it mattered much.

Richard Edward Riley had the tragic distinction of being the second journalist killed during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Jack had been right there when it happened. He could just as easily have been the third. One minute they were bumping along a deserted road and the next they were on the ground bleeding, their Humvee in pieces around them, Jack staring into the open, lifeless eyes of his best friend.

The details remained hazy, defensively isolated and contained by his mind, leaving the event with as much clarity as a half-remembered dream. Only the emotional and psychological pain were clear. Maybe that’s why his mind occasionally returned to it for no apparent reason, with no apparent trigger. It was his subconscious trying to remember, trying to hide the hurt among some cold facts. Like putting ice on a swollen eye.

Of course, the company he was keeping could have something to do with it. Drabinsky’s go-get-’em attitude reminded him of the marines who died that day. Tough, dedicated, counterintuitively marching into hell. Only the uniform was different. The SFPD bomb squad was full of that kind of men and women, the ones willing to risk their lives to keep Americans safe. And the people of San Francisco needed to know just how courageous they truly were. Instead, the rabid left wing harassed him endlessly.