PFC Blum pushed through the stairwell door to the parking lot behind Charlie Company. The asphalt wavered in the heat of the August sun. PFC Palmer was already in the back of the Audi with the two Canadians. Blum climbed into the driver’s seat, next to Sommer.
It was a beautiful Pacific Northwest afternoon. Thin clouds pushed into the satiny blue sky as if through slits from another world. The road from battalion took them past the Stryker brigade barracks, the PX, the commissary, to the line of departing cars at the main gate. After the wave-through by the MPs, they were off Fort Lewis grounds. The freeway ran along the barbed-wire perimeter fence before leaving the forest that obscured the base interior. Barns and small trading posts drifted by on either side. Traffic thickened and slowed. Every minute that passed Blum counted against his chances of making his flight.
Sommer too was growing impatient. “Exit here,” he said abruptly.
The Audi swung off the freeway into a maze of side streets.
It was hard to keep up with all the specialist’s sudden orders to turn at approaching stoplights. PFC Blum worked at the clutch with his sandaled foot as he hunted with the stick for the invisible slots between gears. He feared stalling. Palmer and the Canadians were doing things in the backseat that he was too busy to pay attention to, even as he caught glimpses while whipping his head around to check blind spots and palming the wheel to cut across lanes.
“Most of the time,” Alex said as the first raindrops rattled my mother’s balcony’s pine boards, “people are like, why didn’t you notice what was going on in the back? But A, I didn’t know my way around Tacoma. B, there was a ton of traffic. C, I’d only been driving a stick shift for five months and was still learning. D, we were going on back roads to a place where I was absolutely lost. I was with someone who I totally respected and didn’t want to get lost with, so that’s another factor.”
“When you say people are always asking, what kind of people do you mean?”
“FBI guys, prosecutors.”
“What was going on in the back?”
“See, I don’t really know.”
In South Tacoma they hit a patch of construction that backed them up half a block. This neighborhood looked a lot like Denver: box stores, grassy medians, strip malls with dirty stucco walls. Hot wind blew through the open windows. Long-armed balloon men bowed and waved outside a string of car dealerships festooned with plastic flags. Road crews in orange vests ushered cars through one by one. Finally they emerged onto a clear stretch of frontage road. Beside them on the freeway, tankers lurched and braked above a glimmering ribbon of cars. Specialist Sommer directed Blum to cut left under the big green highway signs giving miles to Seattle and Portland. A block of warehouses and loading docks went by before the neighborhood turned residential. Telephone lines splayed overhead in the blue. Sommer thought he recognized a church he had flagged earlier as a landmark, realized he was mistaken, then recognized the right one.
Was it really possible that PFC Blum never noticed what was going on behind him?
As Alex talked, I found myself grasping for the kinds of analogical scientific explanations that had always served for me as reflexive responses to mystery. Rather than young men inside that silver Audi A4, maybe it was better to imagine five entangled waveforms, three struggling to pull on bulletproof vests and hooded sweatshirts below the sight of people in adjacent vehicles, one yelling commands, one stomping frantically at the clutch in flip-flops and flower-print shorts. Maybe it was only when the humongous junk wads of quantum probability inside their heads were measured, again and again, by prosecutors and judges and psychologists and cruelly adamant cousins, that they collapsed into the simplistic points that endured. Measurement changes what it measures; questions commit us to the answers we give. But maybe this was just a complicated way of saying that all Alex remembered, or all he could admit to himself that he remembered, was that he never saw the guns.
“There’s the alley,” Sommer said, pointing to a strange blue shed with a gabled roof and no windows. “Right up there.”
Gravel pinged under the wheels. On the left was a chain-link fence woven through with beige vinyl. On the right was a series of lean-to garages. Blum and Sommer stared through the windshield at the bank’s rear parking lot. The time was 5:11 p.m.
“That’s a lot of people,” observed Specialist Sommer.
Even now, Alex told me, whatever part of his mind did more than follow dumbly along had halfway managed to convince itself the game ended here.
Of course he’s not really going to do this. Sommer would never do this.
“What do you think?” Sommer said to the space behind Blum’s head.
“Maybe we should take a lap around the block and get a better idea of things,” came a voice from the back—PFC Palmer’s.
“Yeah,” added the voice of one of the Canadians. “We could look through the windows. See how many people are inside.”
In the parking lot, a steady trickle of civilians walked out to their cars, pushed buttons on keyless entries, climbed in. The bank was probably closing. Nothing, Blum felt certain now, was going to happen. He could go home and see his girlfriend. He could sleep in his own bed. He shifted the car into reverse.
PFC Blum did not know that all four of the others had stayed out late the night before practicing dry runs by flashlight on Noble Hill.
“Fuck it,” said a new voice from the back. “If we don’t do it now, we never will.”
There came the sound of a door unlatching, a small melodious chime.
PFC Blum’s gaze was directed toward Specialist Sommer, so his first glimpse into the strange new world pouring like gas through the opening rear door was of Sommer’s expressionless face. The specialist’s hands fumbled in the front pocket of his sweatshirt to pull out a laser-sighted pistol, then something black and flexible: a ski mask. Past him, through the right passenger window, the unmistakable barrel and wood stock of an AK-47 assault rifle accelerated into view, followed by a dark-clad body. Specialist Sommer pulled the mask down over his eyes. There was a flurry of shouting and movement. Doors slammed open, doors slammed shut. Blum was alone with the luxuriant hum of the still-running Audi.
Say your father takes you deep into a dangerous foreign country, then abandons you there with no means of getting out. Everything you believed is wrong. The sun does not rise. Jesus Christ robs a bank.
“When you were little,” Alex asked me, “did you ever get lost in the mall?”
The specialist was no longer beside PFC Blum to assure him that this was all okay. The specialist had crossed over into someplace else. Four figures in sweats and ski masks ran down the alley in ragged formation, empty duffels flapping, two with AK-47s held across their chests and two with dangling pistols. The last of them—Luke Elliott Sommer, soon to be distinguished on security-camera footage by his gray shirt—waved at an approaching pickup truck before running on. The truck braked hard. Behind the steering wheel, the terrified eyes and mouth of a middle-aged woman shrank away down the alley as the truck wove off wildly in reverse, bright red in the afternoon sun.
It was then that PFC Blum realized that he was in the strange position of deciding for himself what to do next. The sob of helpless remorse called up in him by the sight of this unfamiliar woman’s fear had triggered one thought I recognized as coming from the guy I knew: This is all wrong. I have to