The Detachment

think I can tell by where you’re living these days how that worked out.”
    I drummed my fingers on the table. “Probably for the best.”
    “I don’t know. Thought you two had something special, tell you the truth.”
    I nodded. The three of us had been through a lot together: first, as opposing players on hair triggers; then, when the Mossad had brought me in to take out a rogue Israeli bomb maker named Manheim Lavi, on the same team; and then, most improbably, watching each other’s backs for reasons that had nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with personal allegiances. What had bloomed between Delilah and me, I knew, was as improbable as it was precious.
    “You think about her?” he asked.
    I looked away. “What do you think?”
    “Well, what was it about her being in the life you didn’t like, exactly? I’m in the life, and you seem to tolerate me.”
    “I don’t live with you.”
    “Is that really the critical difference?”
    “Yeah, it is. I was trying to learn…how to relax over there. You know? New city, nobody knows me, nobody’s looking for me. I just want to take it down a notch, not always feel like I need to be looking over my shoulder. Well, how am I ever going to manage that when I’m around someone whose job could bring a shitstorm onto us at any minute, and once actually did?”
    He frowned. “Someone made a run at y’all in Paris?”
    I nodded, remembering. “Paris is a bitch.”
    He dipped his head gravely and looked at me. “You’ll have to tell me about that sometime. But partner, you, relaxing? That I’d like to see. Go ahead, do it for me, just for a minute. But let’s bet on it first. I could use the money.”
    I didn’t answer. I hated when he pulled the psychoanalysis shit with me. I hated it more when there was substance to his observations.
    “Anyway,” he went on, “here you are, back in the life but without Delilah. Even with me as a dinner companion, it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, if you want my opinion. Which I know you don’t, but there it is.”
    “I’m not ‘back in the life.’ Someone tracked me down. I’m trying to straighten it out. It’s not like I have much choice.”
    I expected him to laugh at my protestations, which would have been classic Dox. That he didn’t irritated me even more.
    “What?” I said.
    He raised his eyebrows in mock innocence. “I didn’t say anything.”
    “I know. It’s not like you. What are you thinking?”
    He leaned back and scratched his belly. “Just that…maybe you were more bothered by what Delilah does in the life than you were by the life itself.”
    I didn’t answer. Delilah did a lot of things for the Mossad. But chief among them were long-term honey trap operations with high-value targets. She was a gorgeous natural blonde, intelligent, confident, and sophisticated, and she knew how to work all of it. I doubted they’d ever had anyone on the payroll as effective as she was, not that they ever appreciated her for it. In fact, she’d told me the missions they sent her on—to literally sleep with the enemy—made her continually suspect, even stained in the eyes of management. Which was part of the reason I found it maddening she wouldn’t quit. What did she owe them? Why was she loyal? They didn’t deserve her.
    “You going to tell me it never bothered you, her going off for a month at a time without being able to tell you where or who with? You going to tell me you never woke up alone in your big bed in the middle of the night, wondering if right then, at that very moment, she might be straining the gravy with—”
    “‘Straining the gravy’?”
    “Yeah, it means—”
    “Forget it, I can imagine.”
    “It’s all right, it means—”
    “You made your point.”
    He grinned. “I wasn’t being too oblique?”
    “No, you weren’t being too oblique.”
    The grin widened, for the most part his usual shit-eater but with some sympathy in it, too. I might have argued further, but what would have been the point? Like Kanezaki, he could think what he wanted. What mattered at the moment was, he was armed—a Wilson Combat Supergrade Compact. I’d asked him how he’d managed to procure it so soon after arriving from Bali, and he’d smiled and told me only, “The old underground redneck railroad.” It was comforting to know he had my back in the Beverly Wilshire now, amid the ambient music piped in from the high ceiling, the oblivious background