“Oh, Tessa!” a woman’s voice called out.
“Tessa, I’m so sorry!”
There was a chorus of sniffling and nose-blowing.
The family.
Zig could feel them, even from here.
Before Zig could react, the door slammed shut, the two beefy guys following Clifford into the room with the family, which left Zig alone. No surprise. No one wants to be with the body.
“Okay, Colonel—it’s just us now. You can tell all the dirty jokes you want,” Zig whispered, locking the wheels of the rolling cart and taking off his camouflage backpack. “By the way, your family loves you. A lot.”
With a gentle tug, Zig removed the flag from the coffin and folded it carefully, making sure it never touched the floor. “I saw your wife next door. Lucky man,” Zig said, now thinking of his own ex, which caught him by surprise. They’d been divorced for nearly fifteen years. “Just remember, sir—your wife was lucky to have you, too.”
Zig snapped on a pair of nitrile medical gloves, then lowered his head for the quick prayer he said in every case. “Please give me strength to take care of the fallen so their family can begin healing.” Yet no matter how much strength Zig prayed for, he knew the grieving family would always need more.
At that moment, Zig thought that the government was taking extra good care of Mint. But as he was about to find out, he had no idea what the government was really up to.
Unhooking the coffin’s wooden latch, Zig lifted the lid and got his first good look inside—at Archie Mint’s broken body.
3
A clear plastic bag covered Lieutenant Colonel Mint’s face, like he was suffocating. Standard Dover procedure—to make sure that in transit, makeup didn’t get on the fallen soldier’s uniform.
Zig pulled out his phone and some earbuds. Fighting the urge to put on “La Vie Bohème,” he instead went with Paul Simon’s Graceland. “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.” Zig’s best work was always done with music.
“There you go—just like that,” Zig said, gently removing the plastic, then carefully lowering the colonel’s head back onto the satin pillow.
“You earned your rest, sir,” Zig said, taking a longer look at Mint’s face. Chiseled features, jaw like a movie star. Handsome, even now, Zig thought, noticing the ribbon rack on Mint’s chest, decorated with medals. Among them, one stood out—the Soldier’s Medal, which was awarded for a heroic act that didn’t involve enemy combat, like saving someone in a fire. “Real superhero, huh?” Zig asked as Paul Simon sang in his ear about a poor boy who was empty as a pocket with nothing to lose.
Whoever prepped the body at Dover had done tremendous work. The problem was, so had the heat. With the high temperatures in the hearse, the molding clay that’d been used to rebuild the colonel’s face was now waxy and melted, revealing the outlines of the bullet hole in his cheek, as well as the pockmarks from the glass that had torn through his skin. According to the medical examiner’s report, Mint was shot through a car window.
“Um . . . Mr. Zigarowski? I’m sorry to do this, but in terms of timeline . . .” Clifford called, sticking his head in the room. He motioned to Mint’s family behind him. “They’re . . . uh . . . they want to know when they can begin.”
“Five minutes,” Zig said as Clifford shut the door.
Turning up the Paul Simon, Zig pulled out a bottle of . . . “Got you some lighter fluid,” he told the colonel, wetting a makeup brush with one of the few liquids that would break down the wax and make it more pliable. “Don’t tell the suburban moms—this is the cheapest face-lift of all.”
With a few artful swirls of the makeup brush, Zig slowly redistributed the wax, meticulously resculpting everything back into place. This was Zig’s gift: no matter how bad the damage, he could put back together what had been taken apart, giving families a sense of closure they never thought they’d—