Seattle Noir by Curt Colbert Page A

eluding an officer.” He is led out of camera range as the officer tells him his rights.
    There is the crackling sound of radios. An ambulance pulls up. The camera seems to sag with fatigue, again showing Danny prone on the ground.
    The ambulance crew hustles out a stretcher, sets it on the ground next to Danny.
    “What happened?”
    “He has a gunshot wound. He tried to attack me.”
    Someone clamps a collar around Danny’s neck, and two men turn him onto his back.
    “Jesus!”
    He is placed on the stretcher and taken away. There is a lot of shouting, doors slamming, and the sound of the ambulance siren starting up and fading away.
    More radio noise, and a figure slams the door on the car. The video ends.
    The man who played the video has been standing in the corner, watching it silently, observing Danny. “The officer’s name is Troy Amboy,” the man announces, “and we are going to sue him into the Stone Age.”
    “Who are you?” asks Danny.
    “I’m your attorney, Jason Ritchie.”
    Danny glances at Aimee.
    “He called,” she explains. “He says we don’t pay him. He only gets paid if we win the case.”
    “Why did he shoot me?” asks Danny.
    “That’s the million-dollar question,” replies Ritchie. “He claims you lunged at him, that he thought you were armed, but it’s pretty clear he was entirely unprovoked. Look here.” He points a remote at the TV and rewinds the tape back to where Danny is about to exit the car. “Right there,” Ritchie says, waving the remote and stopping the video where Danny has gotten up from the ground to a kneeling position. “He says you reached into your shirt, but you didn’t even touch your chest.”
    Danny tries to look down at his body. In addition to the tubes, a complex web of bandages cover his chest, and he feels the pull of adhesive tape across the back of his left shoulder. “When can I get this damn neck brace off?” he asks.
    There was the incident outside of Kirkuk. Two soldiers had died earlier that day, and everyone was jumpy. A rumor was spreading that a new shipment of weapons had just arrived from Afghanistan, including IEDs.
    Danny had spent the previous day escorting a group of Iraqi detainees from one prison to another, always a dangerous business. One man in particular haunted Danny. As he was led out of the foul-smelling holding area along with fifteen others, the man had fixed an eye on him and said in broken English, “I know you. You promised to get me out of here! Where we are going, they will kill me.”
    Danny did not recognize the man, had never been to that prison before. Did the man have him mixed up with someone else? Was it a ruse?
    Danny didn’t answer, had merely gestured with his rifle for the man to move along onto the truck that would take them to another foul-smelling prison. Danny knew there was torture. He knew there was death. On their way to reinforce the battalion that had lost two soldiers, they had stumbled across a trash heap with five more Iraqi bodies, hands fastened with plastic ties behind them, no IDs.
    Danny did not want to be recognized by anyone in Iraq. He just wanted to do his job and get home.
    The following day, he was back on the AFB checkpoint. Forbes, Yamada, Meyer, and he had been checking IDs and searching cars for five hours. Their shifts had ended an hour before, but their relief had not shown up. They couldn’t leave their posts. All they knew was that there had been an “unexpected delay.”
    Later, it turned out that Vice President Cheney had made an unannounced visit to the Green Zone to meet with top officials. All members of Danny’s squadron who had not been on duty at the time were called in to provide extra security.
    “Dang!” said Sergeant Klein when they got back. “They’ve got hot water twenty-four hours a day in there. And a swimming pool! It’s like paradise, while we’re roasting out here like hot dogs on a stick!”
    The incident started when a new black Humvee pulled