by Lee Child
“It was weird,” she said. “Obviously I didn’t have anything to compare it to, and we didn’t get television until I was ten, and we never went to the movies, but even so I sensed there had to be more out there. We all did. We all had island fever.”
Then she asked where I grew up, so I went through as much of the long list as I could remember. Conceived in the Pacific, born in West Berlin when my father was assigned to the embassy there, a dozen different bases before elementary school, education all over the world, cuts and bruises picked up fighting in hot wet alleys in Manila healing days later in cold wet quarters in Belgium, near NATO headquarters, then running across the original assailants a month later in San Diego and resuming the conflict. Then eventually West Point, and a restless, always-moving career of my own, in some of the same places but in many new and different places too, in that the army’s global footprint was not identical to the Marine Corps’.
She asked, “What’s the longest you were ever in one spot?”
I said, “Less than six months, probably.”
“What was your dad like?”
“He was quiet,” I said. “He was a birdwatcher. But his job was to kill people as fast and efficiently as possible, and he was always aware of it.”
“Was he good to you?”
“Yes, in an old-fashioned way. Was yours?”
She nodded. “Old-fashioned would be a good way to describe it. He thought I’d get married and he’d have to come all the way to Tupelo or Oxford to visit me.”
“Where was your house?”
“South on Main Street until it curves, and then first on the left. A little dirt road. Fourth house on the right.”
“Is it still there?”
“Just about.”
“Didn’t it rent again?”
“No, my dad was sick for a spell before he died, and he let the place go. The bank that owned it wasn’t paying attention. It’s more or less a ruin now.”
“All overgrown, with slime on the walls and a cracked foundation? A big old hedge in back? Eight letters on the mailbox?”
“How do you know all that?”
“I was there,” I said. “I passed by on my way to the McClatchy place.”
She didn’t answer.
I said, “I saw the deer trestle.”
She didn’t answer.
I said, “And I saw the dirt in the trunk of your car. When you gave me the shotgun shells.”
Chapter
61
The waitress came by and picked up our empty plates and took our orders for pie. Then she went away again and Deveraux was left looking at me, a little crestfallen. A little embarrassed, I thought. She said, “I did a stupid thing.”
I said, “What kind of stupid thing?”
“I hunt,” she said. “Now and then. Just for fun. Deer, mostly. Just for something to do. I give the meat to the old folks, like Emmeline McClatchy. They don’t eat well otherwise. Pork, sometimes, if a neighbor is butchering a pig. If the neighbor thinks to share. But that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the neighbors can’t afford to share.”
“I remember,” I said. “Emmeline had deer meat in the pot when we were there the first time. She offered us lunch. You declined.”
She nodded. “No point in giving and then taking away. I got that deer a week ago. I couldn’t take it back to the hotel, obviously. So I used my dad’s place. I always have, since I came back here. That’s a good trestle. But then you came up with your theory about Janice Chapman. I didn’t know you very well at that point. I thought you might get on the phone to HQ. I had visions of Blackhawks in the air, finding every trestle in the county. So I sent you off to ID the wrecked car so you would be out of the way for an hour, and I went over and dug up the blood.”
“Tests would have proved it came from an animal.”
“I know,” she said. “But how long would that have taken? I don’t even know where the nearest lab is. Atlanta, maybe. It could have taken two weeks or more. And I can’t afford to be under a cloud for two weeks or more. I literally can’t afford it. This is the only job I have. I don’t know where I’d get another one. And voters are weird. They always remember the suspicion, and they never remember the outcome.”
I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, back on post, with his want ads. A brave new world, for all of us.
“OK,” I said. “But it was a fairly dumb thing to do.”
“I know it was. I panicked a little bit.”
“Do you know other hunters? And other trestles?”
“Some.”
“Because I still think that’s how those women were killed. I don’t see how it could be done any other way.”
“I agree. Which is why I panicked.”
“So sooner or later we might need to get those Blackhawks in the air.”
“Unless we find Reed Riley first and ask him some questions.”
“Reed Riley is gone,” I said. “He’s probably army liaison at Thule Air Force Base by now.”
“Which is where?”
“Northern Greenland,” I said. “The top of the world. It’s certainly the Air Force’s most remote place. I was there once. I was on a C-5 that had a problem. We had to land there. It’s part of the distant early-warning system. No sunlight for four months of the year. They’ve got radar that can see a tennis serve three thousand miles away.”
“Did you get their phone number?”
I smiled. “We’re going to have to do it another way. I’ll see what comes out of the woodwork the day after tomorrow.”
She said nothing in reply to that. We ate our pie slowly. We had time to kill. At that point the midnight train was probably just easing its way out of the yards in Biloxi.
Deveraux was still worried about the old man in the hotel, and she didn’t want to repeat her charade at the top of the stairs, so I gave her my key and we left the diner separately, ten minutes apart, which left me with the check and time for a third cup of coffee. Then I strolled down the street and nodded to the guy behind the desk and headed up the stairs and tapped on my own door. Deveraux opened up instantly and I stepped inside. She had taken her shoes and her gun belt off, but everything else was still in place. Uniform shirt, uniform pants, ponytail. All good.
We went at it like a junkie heats a spoon, half-fast, half-slow, full of intense anticipation, willing to make the investment, barely able to wait for the payoff. She started by taking the elastic out of her hair, shaking it loose, smiling at me from behind its thick dark curtain. She undid the first three buttons on her shirt, and the weight of her name plate and badges and stars dragged the loose material askew and showed me a deep triangle of bare skin. I took off my shoes and my socks and pulled my shirt tails out of my pants. She put one hand on the fourth button on her shirt, and the other on the button on the waistband of her pants, and she said, “Your choice.”
Which was a tough choice to make, but I thought long and hard about it and came to a firm conclusion. I said, “Pants,” and she popped the button and a long minute later she was barefoot and bare-legged in just her tan uniform shirt. I said, “Now you get the same choice,” and she went the other way and I took off my shirt. This time she asked about my shrapnel scar, and I gave her the short version, which was all about unfortunate timing at the start of my career, and a routine liaison visit to a Marine encampment in Beirut, Lebanon, and being passed by a truck which then blew itself up near the barracks entrance, a hundred yards from where I was standing.
She said, “I heard about an army MP there. That was you?”
I said, “I’m not sure who else was there.”
“You went into the ruin and helped people.”
“Only by accident,” I said. “I was looking for a medic. For myself. I could see what I had eaten for dinner the night before.”
“You got the Silver Star.”
“And blood poisoning,” I said. “I could have done without either thing.”
I undid my waistband button and she u
ndid the last of her shirt buttons and then we were in nothing but our underwear. That state of affairs did not endure long. We set my shower running and climbed into the tub together and pulled the curtain. We grabbed soap and shampoo and lathered up and washed each other up and down, side to side, inside and out. No one on earth could have faulted our standards of hygiene, or our approach to insuring them. We stayed in the shower until Toussaint’s tank ran cool, and then we grabbed enough towels to make sure we wouldn’t put puddles in my bed, and then the serious business began. She tasted warm and slick and soapy, and I’m sure I did too. She was lithe and strong and full of energy. We were very patient. I figured the midnight train was by then north of Columbus, south of Aberdeen, maybe forty miles and forty minutes away.
And forty minutes is a good long time. Halfway through it there was precious little we didn’t know about each other. I knew the way she moved, and what she liked, and what she loved. She knew the same about me. I got to know the way her heart hammered against her ribs, and the way her ribs moved as she panted, and the difference between one kind of panting and another. She got to know equivalent facts about me, the early-warning catch in my throat, the things to do to make my skin flush red, where I liked to be touched, and what drove me absolutely crazy.
Then we began, a long slow build-up, with a time certain in mind, like an invading army approaching a D-Day H-Hour, like infantrymen watching the beach come closer, like pilots seeing the target grow large in the bomb sights. Long and slow, closer and closer, long and slow, for five whole minutes. Then eventually faster and harder, faster and harder, faster and harder. The glass on my bathroom shelf began to tinkle right on cue. It shook and rattled. The pipes in the walls made muffled metallic sounds. The French doors shook, one sound from the wood, another from the glass, a third from the latch. The floorboards vibrated like drum skins, a discarded shoe rolled right side up, her sheriff’s star beat a tiny tattoo against the wood, the Beretta in my pocket thumped and bounced, the bed head beat on the wall in a rhythm not our own.
The midnight train.
Right on time.
All aboard.
But this time it was different.
And wrong.
Not us, but the train. Its sound was not the same. Its pitch was low. It was suddenly slowing hard. Its distant rumble was overlaid with the binding, grinding, screeching howl of brakes. I saw in my mind iron blocks jammed against the rims, locked wheels, long showers of superheated sparks in the nighttime air, one car after the other slamming and buffeting the next in front, as the mile-long length telescoped together behind the slowing locomotive. Deveraux slipped out from under me and sat up straight, her eyes nowhere, listening hard. The grinding howl kept on going, loud, mournful, primitive, impossibly long, and then eventually it started to fade, partly because the train’s momentum had carried it far beyond the crossing, and partly because it was finally almost at a stop.
By my side Deveraux whispered, “Oh, no.”
Chapter
62
We dressed fast and were out on the street two minutes later. Deveraux stopped and took two flashlights from her trunk. She lit one up and gave one to me. We used the alley between the hardware store and the pharmacy, past Janice Chapman’s sad pile of sand, between the loan office and Brannan’s bar, and out to the beaten earth beyond. She walked on ahead of me. Almost limping. Which didn’t surprise me. I was on my knees. But she kept on going, dogged, committed, reluctant but determined to serve.
She was going to the railroad track, of course. She scrambled up the packed stones and stepped over the bright steel onto the ties. She turned south. I followed her. I figured the engineer would be about twenty minutes behind us. I figured his train would weigh about eight thousand tons. And I knew a little about trains that weigh eight thousand tons. Sometimes MPs are traffic cops like any other cops, but our traffic is specialized, in that it includes tank trains, which usually weigh about eight thousand tons, and part of directing traffic at that level is understanding it takes a tank train about a mile to stop even in a panic. And it takes an average man twenty minutes to walk a mile, so we would get there twenty minutes before the engineer did.
Which was not a privilege.
Although I doubted there would be much left to find.
We pressed on, almost jogging, trying to match awkward strides to the intervals between the ties. Our flashlight beams bounced and swung, through a fading cloud of smoke left behind by the train’s tortured brakes. I figured we were headed right where I had already walked twice that day, where the path through the field to the east crossed the track before heading into the woods to the west. Deveraux’s own childhood street, in effect, more or less. She must have been thinking about the same place, because as we approached the spot she slowed right down and started playing her flashlight beam carefully left and right.
I did the same thing, and it fell to me to find it. All that was left. Except, I supposed, a red pulverized mist that must have filled the air and touched everything within a hundred yards, a molecule here, a molecule there.
It was a human foot, amputated just above the ankle. The cut was clean and straight. Not ripped or torn or ragged. It was a neat straight line. That line had been hit by some unbelievable instantaneous shockwave, some kind of savage subsonic pulse, like an acoustic weapon. I had seen such a thing before. And so had Deveraux. Most traffic cops have.
The shoe was still in place. A polished black item, plain and modest, with a low heel and a strap and a button. The stocking was still in place under it. Its top edge looked like it had been trimmed with scissors. Under its beige opacity was dark ebony skin, ending neatly in what looked like a plaster-cast cross-section displayed in a medical school lecture hall. Bone, veins, flesh.
“Those were her church shoes,” Deveraux said. “She was a nice woman at heart. I am so, so sorry this happened.”
“I never met her,” I said. “She was out. That was the first thing the kid ever said to me. My mom’s out, he said.”
We sat on a tie about five yards north of the foot and waited for the engineer. He joined us fifteen minutes later. There wasn’t much he could tell us. Just the lonely glare of the headlight, and the briefest subliminal flash of a white lining inside a black coat falling open, and then it was all over long ago.
“Her church suit,” Deveraux said. “Black gabardine, white lining.”
Then the engineer had slammed on the brakes, as he was required to by railroad policy and federal regulations and state laws, all of which were a totally pointless waste of time, in his opinion. Stress on the train, stress on the track, and for what? A mile’s walk, and nothing when he got there. It had happened to him before.
He and Deveraux exchanged various reference numbers and names and addresses, again as per regulations, and Deveraux asked him if he was OK or wanted help in any way, but he brushed the concerns aside and set off walking north again, a mile back to his cab, not at all shaken up, just weary with routine.
We walked back to Main Street, past the hotel, to the Sheriff’s Department. No one was on duty at night, so Deveraux let us in with a key and turned on the lights. She called Pellegrino and told him to come back in on overtime, and she called the doctor and told him he had more duties to perform. Neither one was happy, but both were quick. They arrived almost together within a matter of minutes. Maybe they had heard the train too.
Deveraux sent them off together to collect the remains. We waited, not saying much, and they were back within half an hour. The doctor left again for his office, and Deveraux told Pellegrino to drive me to Memphis. Much earlier than I had planned, but I would have wanted it no other way.
Chapter
63
I didn’t go back to the hotel. I left directly from the Sheriff’s Department, with nothing except cash in one pocket and the Beretta in the other. We saw no passing traffic. No big surprise. It was the dead of night, and we were far from anywhere. Pellegrino didn’t talk. He was mute with fa
tigue, or resentment, or something. He just drove. He used the same route I had come in on, first the straight-shot east–west road through the forest, and then the minor road I had ridden in the old Chevy truck, and then the dusty two-lane I had ridden in the sagging Buick sedan. We crossed the state line into Tennessee, and passed by Germantown, where I had gotten out of the lumber guy’s pick-up, and then we headed through the sleeping southeast suburb and arrived in downtown Memphis, still well before dawn. I got out at the bus depot and Pellegrino drove away without a word. He went around a block and I heard his motor beating between buildings, and then it faded to nothing and he was gone.
The early start gave me a big choice of buses, but the first of them didn’t leave for an hour. So I quartered the surrounding low-rent blocks, looking for an all-night diner, and I found a choice of two. I picked the same place I had used for lunch three days previously. It was cheap, and it hadn’t killed me. I got coffee from a crusted pot, and bacon and eggs from pans that had been hot since the Nixon administration. Fifty minutes later I was in the back of a bus, heading north and east.
I watched the sun come up through the window on my right, and then I slept for the rest of the six-hour ride. I got out at the same place I had gotten in three days before, at the depot on the edge of the town close to the post where I was based. The town bore no obvious similarity to Carter Crossing, but all the same elements were there. Bars, loan offices, auto parts, gun shops, used stereo stores, each one of them thriving on the supportive stream of Uncle Sam’s military dollars. I walked past them all and headed into open country, stopping at the diner half a mile out for lunch, then continuing onward. I was back on post and in my quarters before two o’clock in the afternoon, which was much earlier than I had expected, and which gave me the chance to improve my plan a little.
