The Right Side

by Spencer Quinn

  “So,” LeAnne said, “you showed this to the sheriff? We’re done?”

  “Not quite exactly done,” Stallings said. “Although very close. It’ll give me real pleasure to wrap this up, get you out of this ridiculous situation, but first I’d like it if you’d do one little thing for me.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Stallings smiled, not one of those weaponized smiles, but a sincere one, and gentle. Which only demonstrated to her that gentle people could be dickheads, too. “I don’t blame you for being miffed,” he said.

  “Miffed?”

  “Or something else much stronger. But this is the kind of situation that calls for a realistic approach—realpolitik, if you will.”

  LeAnne held up her hand to stop all his bullshit. “What do you want?”

  “Your presence for seventy-two hours, tops. Just say yes and I’ll march myself right over to your sheriff buddy and show him the whole shebang.”

  “And suppose I say no.”

  Stallings looked sad. “Then whatever happens will be under the purview of our sheriff here.”

  “He wants to put me in a cell.”

  “So I heard.”

  LeAnne tried to think, could come up with nothing better than “What if I double-cross you?”

  Stallings shook his head. “I’ve seen your record. You’re incapable of doing something like that. And not just because you’ve behaved heroically. That was only an expression of what you are inside.”

  “What a load of crap,” LeAnne said.

  Stallings shrugged his shoulders; maybe he was an odd two-layered type, gentle on the outside, icy within. “Believe what you want,” he said.

  What did she want to believe? Only impossible things. “Seventy-two hours,” LeAnne said. “Tops.” Maybe some people had the kind of brain that could come up with another way, but not her, not now. Locked up? Behind bars? She couldn’t allow that, not even overnight, or for an hour, or a single minute.

  Stallings made a little bow. “Thank you.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’d prefer to discuss that en route.”

  “Of course, you would.” LeAnne didn’t push him. She was pretty sure she already knew.

  Stallings laughed, went over to Cosgrove and did what he’d said he’d do. It took maybe two minutes. That left only the question of Goody. She looked down. Goody was beside her, on the blind side, looking back with those coal-black eyes. She wanted Goody with her, but what was right?

  “Find me a number for Harvey Wald,” LeAnne said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Harvey lived in a little white house at the end of a cul-de-sac on the flat side of town. He was waiting outside when they drove up, Goody in the passenger seat and Stallings in the back.

  “Harvey Wald,” LeAnne said. “Captain Stallings.”

  The men shook hands.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on,” Harvey said.

  “Didn’t LeAnne explain?” said Stallings. “I’m borrowing her for seventy-two hours. You’re taking care of the pooch.”

  “I got that part,” Harvey said.

  LeAnne noticed Harvey’s posture, erect like a soldier, but relaxed at the same time. “Let’s get Goody inside,” she said. And to Stallings: “Mind waiting here?”

  Stallings checked his watch. “We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “Will it leave without us? Come on, Goody.”

  Goody jumped out of the car and ran to Harvey’s door, like she was somehow way ahead of them. Harvey opened up and they went inside.

  “This is interesting,” LeAnne said.

  “I took down all the walls,” Harvey told her. “Well, except for the bedroom and the bathroom.”

  She gazed at a black-and-white photo of a dark thunderhead split by a lightning bolt. “You took this?”

  “I fool around with photography a bit.”

  He went into the kitchen area, filled a bowl with water, and laid it on the floor. “Here, Goody.”

  Goody, who’d been sniffing around, immediately went to LeAnne and sat on her foot.

  “She prefers to drink from the toilet.”

  “I’ll act accordingly.”

  “She eats kibble twice a day. Plus snacks. She likes walks. Here’s her leash.”

  She gave Harvey the leash. Their hands touched.

  “I’m hearing strange things,” Harvey said. “Like about you being a suspect.”

  “That’s old news, Harvey.”

  “Totally false, of course.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Totally false. But I don’t get why you’re leaving all of a sudden. I thought you were . . . involved in all this.”

  “I am,” LeAnne said. “But I made a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “The deal part doesn’t really matter. It’s army business.”

  “Army business that has to do with Marci?” Harvey said.

  “No.”

  “Then with what?”

  With what? With Jamie. With the whole team. With protection. With herself and her whole goddamn life.

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  LeAnne gazed at Harvey. She had a crazy thought: that photo of the thunderhead was too much like what went on inside her and would have to go. Meanwhile, how was she going to answer his question on the subject of her army business? LeAnne found a simple way. She patted the damaged part of her face.

  Harvey gazed back at her. Slowly, leaving plenty of time for LeAnne to stop him, he leaned forward and kissed the bad side.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because anything I said would be, quote, easy for me to say.”

  “Like—time to put it behind me, move on with life, all that shit?”

  Harvey shook his head. “Your face looks good to me,” he said. “That’s all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Kiowa had two-by-two seating. LeAnne rode in back, Stallings up front with the pilot. It was too noisy to talk, unless you were wearing a communication headset, which LeAnne was not. The noise bothered her and so did the rotor tips flashing by at the top of her field of vision, over and over, a dizzying visual static against the blue sky. She spent most of the flight hunched over, her head almost between her knees, like some totally boot newbie on day one.

  Death was good. A new thought, somewhat surprising but true. Mighty engines droned on and on, taking her closer and closer. One side of her face seemed to have a hot iron was pressing on it, but her face happened to be far away and so there was no pain. All she felt was a kind of shifting around in her head, a crumbling, like after an earthquake, also not painful. She couldn’t see a thing. Perhaps she was sleeping.

  She heard a voice she knew: “How much longer?”

  Another voice, new to her, said something about headwinds and the Alps. The first speaker—a woman—wasn’t happy to hear that. “Why in hell did they transfer her so soon?”

  “Her only chance—wasn’t going to make it otherwise.”

  A hand took hers. She remembered that hand, so similar to hers in size, strength, and power.

  “Hang in there,” said Colonel Bright. “I’m not letting you go.”

  A city appeared to the east: low skyline, mountains beyond—had to be Spokane. The helo tilted, banked in a long curve, and landed on a pad at Fairchild AFB. Stallings picked up his briefcase, and LeAnne followed him out of the helicopter to a runway a few hundred yards distant. They mounted roll-up stairs and entered the hold of a C-17, which could accommodate fifty-four soldiers in the sidewall seats but today had none. Only two of the seats were locked down in the sitting position. LeAnne and Stallings sat. The rest of the cargo was ASVs, six of them, all brand new.

  Stallings gazed at them. “Eight hundred grand apiece,” he said. “It never ends.”

  “Right,” said LeAnne.

  He turned to her. “I didn’t mean that personally, regarding your . . . your sacrifice or anything like th
at. I was just referring to this conflict in general.”

  “I don’t really care,” LeAnne said. “Just say what you’ve got to say.”

  Stallings nodded. “What galls me more than anything is that someone of your brains and capability got taken off the board.”

  LeAnne snorted.

  Stallings’s face went pink; for a moment he looked like some teenager’s embarrassed uncle. “Sorry if I’m off on the wrong foot here,” he said. “If you’ve been thinking about this at all, you’re probably aware that my assignment is to unpack the events of January seventeen, find out exactly what went wrong with Operation Midnight Special, separate the bad actors from the good.”

  “Why bother, if it never ends?” LeAnne said.

  “Way above my pay grade, questions like that,” Stallings said. “The point is that six on our side—including Captain Cray—were killed on that mission, and let’s not leave out what happened to you. Why not do everything in our power to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”

  LeAnne didn’t answer. She was stuck on let’s not leave out what happened to you. Like there was a choice, and it could have gone the other way; and maybe in the long run it would go the other way, probably more comfortable all around.

  “So what I’d like to nail down first,” Stallings resumed, “is your take on the terp’s behavior that night, in fact her behavior in general.”

  “Katie? Haven’t we already gone over this?”

  “We’ve only touched on it. I need you to remember everything she did.”

  Everything? That was impossible. Also she didn’t want to remember any of it.

  “By the way,” Stallings said, taking an envelope from inside his flight jacket, “I’ve secured some funding for this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Research. It’s a line item in my budget. There’s three grand in here, all yours.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “You’re still active in a technical sense—I could order you to take it.” Stallings laid the envelope in the space between them. “Let’s start with a terp’s duty, which is predicated on being directly at the side of his or her military counterpart at all times during a mission. From the fact that Katie was completely unharmed in an attack involving the detonation of two M67s in a small, mostly enclosed space, we can infer that she was derelict.”

  LeAnne searched her memory. At first, all that would come was Katie’s BBC accent and how she used it to mock the Afghani men. But then from out of nowhere LeAnne caught a whiff of the sweet and sour fruity smell of Jolly Ranchers, and a clear image of the muttering boy in that crowded dwelling on the night of January seventeen rose in her mind, quivered a bit, and then stabilized itself: a runny-nosed boy who seemed very nervous, although you couldn’t be sure about things like that on account of cultural differences, and she’d asked Katie what he was saying. To which there’d been no response. And she’d looked for Katie. And Katie wasn’t there.

  “I don’t see it,” LeAnne said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “She loved American things. Like learning our slang—shitkickers, for example.”

  “Did you know she prayed five times a day?”

  That seemed a bit familiar. But so what? “I had grunts under me who did the same thing,” LeAnne said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, one.”

  “Was he any good?”

  “Average.”

  “But still,” Stallings said, “that’s the most encouraging thing I’ve heard in a long time. As for Katie and her motivations—” He reached again inside the flight jacket, this time producing a photograph. Was this particular photo familiar or was it the actual subject—a man in a President Karzai–style karakul hat, narrow-faced with prominent ears and deep-set eyes, dark and highly intelligent?

  “Who’s this?”

  “Never seen him before?”

  “Are you saying I have?”

  “Nothing like that,” Stallings said. “Just gathering information. His name—real name, although there was some question about that at first—is Gulab Yar-Muhammad. He works for Taliban intelligence—we’d probably call him assistant to the director, or something like that. He’s also Katie’s uncle.”

  LeAnne looked into this image of the eyes of Gulab Yar-Muhammad. She wanted no part of anything they projected. “How . . . how did this happen?”

  “Meaning how did this get missed in Katie’s vetting process?”

  LeAnne’s voice rose. “Yes, for Christ sake, exactly that.”

  “We’re looking into it,” Stallings said.

  “Who is? You, specifically?”

  “No, not me, specifically. Although that will obviously change if our little plan bears fruit.” Stallings rubbed his soft hands together like he couldn’t wait.

  “What little plan are you talking about?”

  “This one right here,” Stallings said, patting his briefcase. “Involving you.” He held up two fingers. Every little thing he did was starting to bother her. “Two objectives. One—determine whether Katie set you up—not just you, of course, but . . . well, us. And two—use her to get to her uncle. No need to explain how valuable an asset he would be. Agreed?”

  LeAnne shrugged. Almost right away she forgot what she was supposed to be agreeing to, and instead found herself picturing the six Afghan girls, standing shyly by the jumping pit. Their names wouldn’t come to her, not one. The only names she could recall were Mia and B.J.

  “Here’s where we stand at the moment,” Stallings was saying. “We’ve taken Katie in, and we’re holding her at a safe house in Kabul. She denies having any foreknowledge whatsoever of the attack. She claims that she did not leave your side, while also claiming she was stunned by the explosion and has no memory of what happened, a self-contradicting position to my way of thinking, but we can’t budge her off it.” He opened his briefcase, went through some papers. LeAnne liked the leathery smell of the briefcase. Stallings’s own smell—some sort of limey deodorant overlaid on nervous sweat—was unpleasant. The combination twisted around itself in a way that was hard to describe. Was she having a Goody-type experience? She realized she was missing Goody already. Meanwhile, Stallings was looking at her in an expectant way, as though awaiting a reply.

  “What?” LeAnne said. “What do you want?”

  Stallings sat back. Had she spoken at high volume? Hard to tell, especially since the four turbofans of the C-17 were starting to rev.

  “I just wanted to make sure you realize we’re headed for Kabul,” Stallings said.

  LeAnne nodded.

  “Okay, then.” Stallings patted the briefcase. “Same page. We’re good.”

  The C-17 taxied down the runway. LeAnne wished there’d been a window, wanted badly to see out. She had a strong premonition that she wasn’t coming back.

  Meanwhile, Stallings was shooting her a sidelong look, back in the uneasy uncle role again.

  “Spit it out,” LeAnne said.

  The C-17 shuddered slightly and lifted off.

  “This might be a little awkward,” Stallings said. “Please don’t take it personally. But I can’t help noticing . . . maybe that’s not the way to put it. What I’m trying to say is they’ve done a great job with your new eye. So realistic, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “What can I take personally?” LeAnne said.

  “Touché,” said Stallings. “And, of course, in civilian life I wouldn’t dream of going . . . where I’m going. But it concerns the mission.”

  “What does?”

  “Your new . . . your prosthetic eye. Is it removable?”

  “Huh? Of course, it’s removable.”

  “Is it easy to take out and put back in?”

  LeAnne shrugged. “I guess so. Why?”

  Stallings rubbed his hands together again. “Did you know Katie was a big admirer of yours? Or at least purports to be?”

  “We got along all right.”

  “For her, y
ou’re the model of . . . how to put it? American womanhood? Something like that. You made a huge impression on her. Which was probably why she was so relieved when we told her that you hadn’t been badly hurt in the attack.”

  LeAnne tried to rise, but she’d forgotten about the seat belt and it kept her in place. “What did you just say?”

  “Concussed, yes, and there’d been some concern, even worry, for a while, but the stateside docs were able to save your eye and you were pretty much as good as new, no, uh, scarring or anything of that nature.”

  LeAnne tried to unbuckle herself. Her fingers just couldn’t do it.

  “She actually fell to her knees and thanked God—well, Allah—when we told her,” Stallings went on. “That’s why we think the sudden, unannounced appearance of the real, present you will shock the truth right out of her. It’ll be a stunner, if you see what I mean, psychologically speaking.”

  LeAnne’s voice seemed to come to her from far away. “And you want me to take my eye out first?”

  “Thank you for saying that. It was going to be an awkward request.”

  LeAnne felt her face blushing bright red—at least the undamaged side, the right side now beyond blushing—like she was deeply embarrassed about something. But wasn’t it Stallings who should have been blushing? His color was that of your ordinary office worker on an ordinary day. At last the buckle opened. LeAnne thrust the seat belt aside and stood right up.

  “Sorry if I didn’t prepare you better,” Stallings said.

  LeAnne didn’t even look at him. She marched herself aft, past the six ASVs, snapped the very last seat into place, and sat down. LeAnne folded her arms across her chest and after that remained completely still. Inside was turmoil beyond comprehension, at least to her.

  “Is it illegal?” LeAnne said.

  “Illegal under the law, no,” said Katie. “But taboo. Taboo is stronger than the law, as maybe you don’t know in America.”