by Scott Blade
“Solid color?”
“Yeah. Like an officer.”
“He ever come in here with his gun belt on before?”
“No. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think I’ve seen him wearing that before either. He was totally weird this morning. I knew something was up.”
I was quiet for a long moment, and she waited like she knew the conversation wasn’t over.
I asked, “What about his friends? You know anything about that?”
She shook her head.
“What about his job?”
“What about it?”
“He ever talk about his duties?”
“Oh sure. Nothing top secret. Or anything like that. But he told me things. Actually, now that I think about it. I suppose I’m the closest thing he had to a friend here.”
“What did he say about his job?”
She thought again. Looked up again.
I said, “Try to remember.”
She said, “He said once that he was a teacher. On the base. Which makes sense. It’s a training base.”
I stayed quiet.
“He taught language. You know he taught the soldiers to speak Arabic.”
I thought for a moment. That didn’t sound right. She must’ve been wrong about what he taught. Or he lied to her. The Marine Corps wouldn’t waste an Arabic language instructor at Arrow’s Peak. No way. Why the hell would guys that were training in mountain warfare need to know Arabic? But I didn’t press the issue. Then, I thought about it again. And I realized why they’d have a native speaker here teaching the Arabic languages. They were training for missions in Afghanistan. They had mountains. They even had snow.
She said, “I told all of this to the cops.”
“What about his wife?”
“His wife?”
“You know anything about her?”
“No. I didn’t even know he was married.”
I nodded. That didn’t mean anything. But someone in town must’ve seen her.
“Thanks. You can bring the check. I’m only going to have the coffee.”
She turned and walked away. I stared out the window. I watched cars pass by. I saw a blue Nissan Maxima barrel down the road. Then it stopped and U-turned and went back in the other direction like the driver was lost. I ignored it and stared up at the gray sky.
CHAPTER 17
KAREN SAID, “You want a refill?”
I opened my eyes, completely unaware of where the hell I was for a moment. I squinted, hard and tried to focus. I was still in the diner, but I’d fallen asleep on the table. My eyes were very heavy, like being wakened up way back during my first week training to be a SEAL. Hell Week, we called it.
The instructors would wait until four a.m. and then they’d wake us all up at the same time by tossing flashbangs into the barracks. They stormed our quarters with smoke grenades too. It wasn’t a fun week. Hell Week was when most candidates dropped out of the training. It was just about the worst week of my life. Which was the point.
I said, “Yeah. Sorry.”
She started to walk away and I said, “Wait. How long have I been asleep?”
She said, “It’s afternoon. I’m not sure when you first closed your eyes, but I’d guess at least an hour. I didn’t want to disturb you, but we don’t allow patrons to sleep in here. You know.”
I looked around and the place had several tables full. I nodded.
“Maybe if it was late night. I’d let you sleep.”
“It’s okay.”
She turned to walk away and I said, “Wait. Forget the refill.”
She nodded.
I stared down at the table, saw that she had left the bill. I tossed some money on it and decided I’d better walk around.
I left the diner and headed back in the direction toward downtown.
CHAPTER 18
I HAD TIME TO KILL. I decided to keep moving. I didn’t want to stay in Hamber any longer. Romey had asked me to stick around, but she was a military cop. Technically, I had the right to travel. No sense in getting any more involved than I already was.
I walked through the town, past the church again, and out toward the highway.
I started thinking about what Kelly had said. He’d told me that Turik fired eight rounds and one bullet was unaccounted for. Eight? Not seven. Not six, but eight.
Six people were dead, not seven. Which indicated that Turik had probably killed his wife.
I shrugged to myself. I came to a four-way stop and a light. Vehicles passed me on both sides, but there were more incoming than outgoing. I looked at one of them. It was a blue panel van with a news station’s call sign plastered along the side.
Great, I thought. The local media was here. Which meant that they must’ve picked up the story or were told that there was a story. A local probably called them. Some local citizen looking to sell the story. I figured.
Keep moving, Widow, I told myself.
Turik had been a decorated officer. Romey had told me. They suspected somehow that he was involved with ISIS. Which had been calling out to Muslims all over the world to commit acts of terrorism. And shooting innocent people, for no reason, was a part of their MO. No question. They’d committed acts of gun violence in Paris, blown up airports in Belgium and Turkey, and the mass shooting in Orlando, not long ago.
It made sense. A Muslim officer in the United States Marine Corps made for the perfect target to recruit. I imagined the headlines, once word got out. I imagined the national media. I imagined the talking heads on TV. Pundits commenting and fighting over topics of gun violence and then religion and immigration. People would be afraid. The fear-mongers would spread fear and do exactly what groups like ISIS had wanted.
I kept walking. I saw another big rig truck hauling bullets or whatever. The side of the truck read Lexigun.
About twenty minutes later I was a good way out of town and my adrenaline was winding down. I started to feel fatigue again.
A blue Nissan Maxima drove by me heading west, out of town. It was the same one that I’d seen earlier. I watched its brake lights flare on and then it made a sloppy U-turn, like before, and headed back in my direction.
I stopped on the shoulder and watched the Nissan pass me and swivel around with another sloppy U-turn. The car came up beside me and stopped.
The passenger side window buzzed down. I half squatted down and looked in.
The driver was a dark-skinned woman with thick black hair, slick straight back. She was about my age. She had huge brown eyes, glassy like she’d been crying all morning. She wore no makeup, which she didn’t need. At first glance she had a flawless face. I couldn’t tell how tall she was because she was seated, but she had long arms. And her seat was pushed back farther than most female drivers, which made me think that either she was tall or she had big wooden blocks strapped to her pedals. Which was plausible, I supposed, but unlikely. She had a gangly body, which was genetics. I imagined her to be a runner.
I said, “Hello. You headed out of town?”
I thought she was stopping to offer me a ride. Then I noticed that she wasn’t alone. In the backseat, a small boy looked up at me. He looked to be about five or six years old. He wore a patterned T-shirt with one of those new comic book movie characters on it underneath a tightly wound white scarf and a green winter coat that was at least one size too big for him. Maybe he was meant to grow into it.
He wore a little baseball cap with two orange letters and logo all on a black background—the San Francisco Giants. Good team, once, I thought. But like the forty-niners, they had been a complete disappointment to me in the last decade or so.
The little boy looked up at me with big brown eyes, like the woman driver. In fact, he was a little replica of her, except that he had curly, fair hair. She must’ve been his mother and there must’ve been a fair-haired father somewhere.
The woman said, “Are you him?”
“Him? Who?”
She said, “Widow?”
I said, “Do
I know you?”
“It is you?”
I nodded.
“Get in.”
I stayed where I was and asked, “Who are you?”
She said, “I’m Maya Harris. Turik is my brother.”
CHAPTER 19
MAYA HARRIS looked like she was bundled up in two layers of clothes. A sweater under a short coat and a green scarf, wrapped over twice, like a big green snake choking her to death. She had wire-rimmed glasses with thin lenses almost like she was barely off the mark of twenty/twenty vision. She was a little underfed, a little too thin, but not in a sick way, just a little too lean. I could see it in her face and cheeks, but she was attractive.
She said, “I’ve been looking for you.”
I paused a beat and then asked, “How’d did you find me?”
“The waitress at the diner. She told me about you.”
“She told you about me?”
Maya nodded.
That waitress sure did like to run her mouth about me. Small towns.
I looked back at the little boy. He stared at me with utter confusion in his eyes. He was clean and healthy looking and well behaved. He didn’t ask questions. Maybe he was a little shy because there was a new face in his life, my long concrete-looking face. I could only imagine what I looked like to a kid his age. I had never had any children of my own. I liked kids, but hadn’t gotten to that stage of life yet. Call it the luck of the draw, not a lack of opportunity. I had had plenty of girlfriends, but none stayed around too long. Not when they tried to learn who I was and all they got was silence or lies. I think most of them hated the silence more than the lies.
Maya spoke again. “She said you were the last person to talk to my brother. I didn’t tell her that he is my brother. Of course. I just asked her if she knew a Marine who was Muslim. I figured he would stand out in a place like this.”
I stayed quiet.
She said, “I’ve been looking for him.”
“What made you stop at the diner? Why not go to his house?”
“I drove by his house, but there’re police cars everywhere. And police tape. And soldiers.”
“Marines,” I said.
“What?”
“They’re not soldiers. They’re Marines.”
“I don’t know the difference.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I saw the Marines and I didn’t know where to go. I drove around town. I stopped at the diner. Everything else seemed closed. I asked the waitress what was going on. I told her that I saw the Marines everywhere.”
I nodded. Hamber wasn’t the smallest town that I’d ever seen—far from it. But it was small enough for a coincidence like that to be believable. Plus, I had also noticed the local businesses were closed because of the Danner funeral.
“What can I do for you?”
“Can you get in?”
I stopped and looked both ways. She was headed out of town, which was where I wanted to go. Getting in the car meant that I was getting more involved, which was what I didn’t want. I got in anyway, front seat. I turned back and smiled at the boy, quickly.
I shut the door and felt the heat blasting me in the face. I looked around the front interior of the car. It was clean and new. There was a car rental sticker on the windshield. The carpets were vacuumed and the seats were wiped and oiled.
I said, “I’m sorry about your brother, but like I told the MPs, I didn’t know him.”
“Can we go somewhere? I don’t want to talk about it here in the car. In front of my son.”
Then she paused a beat and said, “Oh, sorry. This is my son, Christopher. Chris, say hello.”
I looked back at Chris again and he smiled and said, “Hi.”
I put my hand out for him to shake, which he did. I said, “Nice to meet you, Chris.”
“Nice to meet you, sir.”
I let go of his hand and he went back to just staring out the window. I turned to Maya Harris and said, “Sure. I guess so. We can go somewhere, but the only place I know of is the diner.”
“What about your motel?”
“Don’t have one.”
She took a deep breath and said, “Let’s get out of town. There’s another roadside diner about twenty miles southwest. I saw it on my way in.”
“Sure. Whatever you want,” I said. Southwest was as good as any direction to me since it was out of Hamber.
We drove in silence, except for the occasional small talk for the better part of about thirty minutes. Occasionally, we slowed for vehicles turning across the highway and there was one traffic light that seemed to be at the intersection of two highways, but there was no sign of civilization on either side.
We finally reached the roadside diner that she was talking about. It was set back off from the highway so far that I wouldn’t have called it a roadside diner.
The structure was a one-story desert-colored building with a dark brown roof, the color of coffee.
Harris pulled into the lot, which was all gravel and white shells. She drove up to the side of the diner and parked. She said nothing, just killed the engine and got out. I followed suit and so did Chris.
We walked in together and a young girl, who looked like she should’ve been in high school, greeted us. She said, “Hello. Are you guys looking for a table?”
Harris said, “Please.”
The girl smiled and took two menus out of a wooden cubby and led us across a dining room and into an addition that seemed like it came much later after the main room, like an afterthought. The diner was about half full. Mostly truckers seated alone at their own tables. There was no countertop space like at the Wagon Hash.
The hostess took us into a less populated area of the diner and sat us at a booth near the back windows. Through the windows, we could see a great view of the mountains and tops of the forest.
We sat and the waitress came. She took our orders, which for me was just coffee, for Harris was green tea, no food, and for Chris, Maya ordered a soda and fries. The waitress frowned at the simplicity of our order, but brought the coffee, the tea, and the soda and left us.
Mya reached in her purse for a moment, dug out a Gameboy or some portable gaming device, and gave it to her son. He slipped a pair of earbuds and started playing.
I took a sip of the coffee. It wasn’t bad. Better than the coffee at the diner back in Hamber and far better than the coffee at the Marine base. That was for damn sure.
Finally, Harris said, “Mr. Widow, I know that you don’t know my brother.”
I nodded.
“But you spoke to him last. Can I ask, why did you do that? The waitress didn’t know.”
I ignored the question and said, “Did you talk with the MPs?”
“They won’t see me.”
“That’s not what they told me. When I spoke to them, they were very eager to talk with you.”
“I went to the base. Of course, I did. That was the first place I drove to.”
“And?”
“They wouldn’t let me on the base.”
“You told the guard at the gate?”
“Of course! I told him. I told him who I was. I told him that Turik was my baby brother. He dismissed me like that. I don’t think he believed me. He asked if I was a reporter. I told him I wasn’t. Then he said he didn’t believe me.”
I looked out the window for a moment. I shook my head. I said, “That doesn’t sound right. The guard at the gate. What did he look like?”
She shrugged and said, “I don’t know. He looked like a soldier. He was big.”
“Did he have any features that stuck out to you? Think about his face.”
She shook her head, said, “I can’t remember.”
“What about his nose?”
“Nose?”
“Yeah. Anything that you remember about it?”
She said, “I guess. The guy had a big nose.”
I nodded.
She said, “Like really big.”
I nodded, said, �
��About what time did you go there?”
“That was the first place I went, after his house. I’ve been driving around looking for you for all afternoon.”
“How long since you were at the base?”
She thought for a moment and looked at her watch. She said, “It’s two-thirty now. I’d say I was there around noon.”
“How long have you been in town?”
“I don’t know. Since eleven. I rented a car and headed straight here.”
“From San Francisco?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother shot and killed five people around 07:30.”
She nodded. Her eyes began to tear up.
“If you didn’t know what he did, then why come?”
“I got a message from him.”
“What message?”
“I was at home. I got a video message from Jimmy. I called him back—immediately. I called his cell, his house phone, and the phone he called me from. No answer. So, I rented a car and rushed here. Only it was too late. The guard at the gate told me that he’d killed five people.”
She paused a beat and then she said, “I just can’t believe it! I can’t believe he’d do that!”
I noticed that she’d called him Jimmy. Not James. Not Muhammad, but Jimmy. I asked, “Maya, what video message?”
She didn’t answer. She just looked away, out the window, and then back at her son.
I said, “The MPs there should be talking to you, not me. You should try to go back.”
“I can’t. They never gave me a business card or anything. I don’t want to help them. I should be talking to Jimmy’s lawyer. Don’t they give him a JAG lawyer?”
“Technically no. JAG isn’t for Marines. They have the JAD.”
She looked at me.
“It’s basically the same thing. JAG is for every other branch of military. The Marine Corps has to be special. So they got their own thing.”
“Whatever. But that’s who he needs right now. He needs a lawyer. I want to talk to him.”
I stared at her. Confusion must’ve been obvious on my face because she said, “What?”
