Page 53 of Constantly Cotton
Everybody stared at him, but he was looking determinedly at his potato. As they watched he broke off a nibble with a fork, dipped it in salsa, and snuck it into his mouth. With a blissful smile, he closed his eyes. “Almost like a cookie,” he murmured.
“Colonel,” Briggs said, meeting Jason’s eyes, “get this kid a real fuckin’ cookie.”
“You do the shopping,” Jason reminded him. Then he put a liberal amount of butter and sour cream on his own potato and took a bite. “But you know, he’s right.”
There was a collective deep breath, and Jason spoke up again. “I know Burton’s monitoring coms, and Huntington is doing runs to other bases to pick up chatter. Is Owens still in charge of our supply lines while I’m gone?”
“Yessir,” Briggs said.
“Good. Have him look for big movement of guns where there should be no movement of guns and see who authorized it.” Oh, it felt so good to have a new lead on this! “Let me know as soon as you get something.”
Briggs gave him a slow and measured blink. “Unless there’s someone coming up the road to kill you, sir, I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
Jason gaped at him and turned to Daniels to reinforce the point. Daniels stared back at him.
“No,” Daniels said, as though his silence weren’t damning enough.
“Gentlemen, I know it’s tempting to think of this as a vacation—”
“Not tempting,” Briggs intervened. “Necessary. Sir, all due respect, but if we had to tear ass out of here overland at this point, we’d get about halfway around the lake before your boy here would be carrying you like a damsel in distress. And we get it. You’ve got someone after you, you need to recover, and once we take care of the credible threat, you’re going to go back to the base all happy fine, and the government is going to do what it always does—pretend it didn’t see what went wrong.” Briggs snorted and made a gesture referring to his dark skin and the hard road he’d probably had to travel because people—and institutions—sucked that way. “They’re good at that,” he said blandly. “But in the meantime, we tapped into your camera feed so you don’t need to sleep with the monitor in your room unless you get weird about flying blind. And my replacement is coming in two days, because, straight up, this has become the most sought-after vacation spot in Barstow.”
Jason pinched the bridge of his nose. “I thought we were keeping this in a tight group of people,” he said painedly. “So, you know, court-martial. In case that happens, it would be bad to take out our entire unit because you all knew.”
Daniels made a rude noise. “Yeah. Fuck that.” He reached over and snagged another piece of meat with his fork and another potato with his hand. “Chow’s good, we get to swim in the lake, and I’m just waiting for the entire US Olympic swim team to decide this would be anoutstandingplace to train.”
“You keep saying things like that,” Briggs muttered, “but I have yet to see you stick your dick in anything besides crazy.”
“Dude, the entire swim team, male, female, and trans? That would becrazy.”
Jason gave them both an even look. “There are so many things I never wanted to know about any of my unit. That image? That is going to have to be sandblasted from my brain.”
Daniels rolled his eyes. “We all have our fantasies,” he said. “And right now, your entire unit is fantasizing about you being fit, tan, and relaxed. You’re maybe twenty-five percent there.” He nodded at Cotton. “We have even kidnapped you a nurse who can cook. I mean, male, female, that right there hasgotto be someone’s fantasy.”
“He didn’t kidnap me,” Cotton said mildly. “I wasrecruited.”
Daniels hooted and then dug into the extra heaps of food on his plate. “And he’s highly entertaining. No, Briggs is right. We’re going to swap out your security detail with people we can trust. Burton is controlling the info there, and if he fucks that up, I’ll eat my own toes.”
“That guy is uncanny,” Briggs muttered. “Do you know how you ended up with the three of us as your security detail?”
“You lost a bet?” Jason hazarded, knowing soldiers, boredom, and the tendency of human beings to attempt to trade up into any given situation.
“No, even weirder. The three of us were set to go to Canada to take care of a subject. Burton texted us to ask if we’d be your detail, and we were, like, ‘Sorry, man, can’t make it.’ He told us to sit tight for a minute ’cause he was getting another text. Do you know what happened?”
“No,” Jason said, trying not to be frustrated, “because I’m not allowed to go back to work!”
Briggs ignored the last part. “Well, this particular subject was a super-urban animal. Like born and raised in the city, and he was killing people and bears—”
“Bears?” Cotton said, sounding stricken.
Briggs nodded. “I’m sayin’! Bears and wildlife. Leaving them to rot. Like some sickass shit. Anyway, Daniels, Medina, and I had been crewed up already. We were slated to move out in an hour, and Burton gets his text. The next thing, he calls me, straight up, and tells me to check the subject’s location. We’ve got him at a lake called Three Trees, in Canada. They’ve got hundreds of tiny lakes up there, and this subject has been haunting Three Trees forest, near the border of Ontario. So Daniels starts scanning our intel from Three Trees and he picks up on a call about ‘SUV meets tree and bounces into the lake.’ He follows up and… you tell it, Daniels.”
Daniels jumps in. “So the SUV didn’t justmeeta tree. The subjectdroveit into a tree, running from a grizzly bear, because the subject was going to take out a half-grown cub with an AK-47 semiauto. But the full-grown bear took a swipe at him, and he shit his pants—swear to God, it’s on the police report—and jumped into his SUV and proceeded to drive the SUV into a tree, where it bounced into the lake, and our subject drowned with a look on his face like this.” Daniels mimicked pure terror. “Which is probably the most solid proof that God exists that I have ever fucking heard of. So there we are, go-bags packed for summertime in the forest near lake country—like, hot and cold together—and Burton asks us if we want to guard our boss, whom we don’t particularly hate.” Daniels let out a low whistle. “Uncanny.”
Jason slow-blinked. “Burton has some valuable assets,” he said with a completely straight face, and he took a complacent bite of his steak. He absolutely,absolutelydidn’t look at Cotton, who was manfully hiding a covert smile, looking for all the world like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
DANIELS ANDBriggs took off, bringing the little takeout plate for Medina as they went, and Cotton looked around at the kitchen they’d cleaned before they left.
“Want to go outside and read before the sun’s gone?” he asked.