“Willard has been and gone,” he said. “Unbelievable.”
“Told you so.”
“He pitched all kinds of hissy fits.”
“But you’re fireproof.”
“Thank God.”
I paused. “Did you tell him about my guy?”
He paused. “You told me to. Shouldn’t I have?”
“It was a dry hole. Looked good at first, but it wasn’t in the end.”
“Well, he’s on his way up to see you about it. He left here two hours ago. He’s going to be very disappointed.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“What are you going to do?” Summer asked.
“What is Willard?” I said. “Fundamentally?”
“A careerist,” she said.
“Correct,” I said.
Technically the army has a total of twenty-six separate ranks. A grunt comes in as an E-1 private, and as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid he is automatically promoted to an E-2 private after a year, and to an E-3 private first class after another year, or even a little earlier if he’s any good. Then the ladder stretches all the way up to a five-star General of the Army, although I wasn’t aware of anyone except George Washington and Dwight David Eisenhower who ever made it that far. If you count the E-9 sergeant major grade as three separate steps to acknowledge the Command Sergeant Majors and the Sergeant Major of the Army, and if you count all four warrant officer grades, then a major like me has seven steps above him and eighteen steps below him. Which gives a major like me considerable experience of insubordination, going both ways, up and down, giving and taking. With a million people on twenty-six separate rungs on the ladder, insubordination was a true art form. And the canvas was one-on-one privacy.
So I sent Summer away and waited for Willard on my own. She argued about it. In the end I got her to agree that one of us should stay under the radar. She went to get a late dinner. My sergeant brought me a sandwich. Roast beef and Swiss cheese, white bread, a little mayo, a little mustard. The beef was pink. It was a good sandwich. Then she brought me coffee. I was halfway through my second cup when Willard arrived.
He came straight in. He left the door open. I didn’t get up. Didn’t salute. Didn’t stop sipping my coffee. He tolerated it, like I knew he would. He was being very tactical. As far as he knew I had a suspect that could take Brubaker’s case away from the Columbia PD and break the link between an elite colonel and drug dealers in a crack alley. So he was prepared to start out warm and friendly. Or maybe he was looking for a bonding experience with one of his staff. He sat down and started plucking at his trouser legs. He put a man-to-man expression on his face, like we had just been through some kind of a shared experience together.
“Wonderful drive from Jackson,” he said. “Great roads.”
I said nothing.
“Just bought a vintage Pontiac GTO,” he said. “Fine car. I put polished headers on it, big bore pipes. Goes like shit off a shiny shovel.”
I said nothing.
“You like muscle cars?”
“No,” I said. “I like to take the bus.”
“That’s not much fun.”
“OK, let me put it another way. I’m happy with the size of my penis. I don’t need compensation.”
He went white. Then he went red. The same shade as Trifonov’s Corvette. He glared at me like he was a real tough guy.
“Tell me about the progress on Brubaker,” he said.
“Brubaker’s not my case.”
“Sanchez told me you found the guy.”
“False alarm,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Totally.”
“Who were you looking at?”
“Your ex-wife.”
“What?”
“Someone told me she slept with half the colonels in the army. Always had, like a hobby. So I figured that might include Brubaker. I mean, it was a fifty-fifty chance.”
He stared at me.
“Only kidding,” I said. “It was nobody. Just a dry hole.”
He looked away, furious. I got up and closed my office door. Stepped back to my desk. Sat down again. Faced him.
“Your insolence is incredible,” he said.
“So make a complaint, Willard. Go up the chain of command and tell someone I hurt your feelings. See if anyone believes you. Or see if anyone believes you can’t fix a thing like that all by yourself. Watch that note go in your file. See what kind of an impression it makes at your one-star promotion board.”
He squirmed in his chair. Hitched his body from side to side and stared around the room. Fixed his gaze on Summer’s map.
“What’s that?” he said.
“It’s a map,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of the eastern United States.”
“What are the pins for?”
I didn’t answer. He got up and stepped over to the wall. Touched the pins with his fingertips, one at a time. D.C., Sperryville, and Green Valley. Then Raleigh, Fort Bird, Cape Fear, and Columbia.
“What is all this?” he said.
“They’re just pins,” I said.
He pulled the pin out of Green Valley, Virginia.
“Mrs. Kramer,” he said. “I told you to leave that alone.”
He pulled all the other pins out. Threw them down on the floor. Then he saw the gate log. Scanned down it and stopped when he got to Vassell and Coomer.
“I told you to leave them alone as well,” he said.
He tore the list off the wall. The tape took scabs of paint with it. Then he tore the map down. More paint came with it. The pins had left tiny holes in the Sheetrock. They looked like a map all by themselves. Or a constellation.
“You made holes in the wall,” he said. “I won’t have army property abused in this way. It’s unprofessional. What would visitors to this room think?”
“They’d have thought there was a map on the wall,” I said. “It was you that pulled it down and made the mess.”
He dropped the crumpled paper on the floor.
“You want me to walk over to the Delta station?” he said.
“Want me to break your back?”
He went very quiet.
“You should think about your next promotion board, Major. You think you’re going to make lieutenant colonel while I’m still here?”
“No,” I said. “I really don’t. But then, I don’t expect you’ll be here very long.”
“Think again. This is a nice niche. The army will always need cops.”
“But it won’t always need clueless assholes like you.”
“You’re speaking to a senior officer.”
I looked around the room. “But what am I saying? I don’t see any witnesses.”
He said nothing.
“You’ve got an authority problem,” I said. “It’s going to be fun watching you try to solve it. Maybe we could solve it man-to-man, in the gym. You want to try that?”
“Have you got a secure fax machine?” he said.
“Obviously,” I said. “It’s in the outer office. You passed it on your way in. What are you? Blind as well as stupid?”
“Be standing next to it at exactly nine hundred hours tomorrow. I’ll be sending you a set of written orders.”
He glared at me one last time. Then he stepped outside and slammed the door so hard that the whole wall shook and the air current lifted the map and the gate log an inch off the floor.
I stayed at my desk. Dialed my brother in Washington, but he didn’t answer. I thought about calling my mother. But then I figured there was nothing to say. Whatever I talked about, she would know I had called to ask: Are you still alive? She would know that was what was on my mind.
So I got out of my chair and picked up the map and smoothed it out. Taped it back on the wall. I picked up all seven pins and put them back in place. Taped the gate log alongside the map. Then I pulled it down again. It was useless. I balled it up and threw it in the trash. Left the map there all o
n its own. My sergeant came in with more coffee. I wondered briefly about her baby’s father. Where was he? Had he been an abusive husband? If so, he was probably buried in a swamp somewhere. Or several swamps, in several pieces. My phone rang and she answered it for me. Passed me the receiver.
“Detective Clark,” she said. “Up in Virginia.”
I trailed the phone cord around the desk and sat down again.
“We’re making progress now,” he said. “The Sperryville crowbar is our weapon, for sure. We got an identical sample from the hardware store and our medical examiner matched it up.”
“Good work,” I said.
“So I’m calling to tell you I can’t keep on looking. We found ours, so we can’t be looking for yours anymore. I can’t justify the overtime budget.”
“Sure,” I said. “We anticipated that.”
“So you’re on your own with it now, bud. And I’m real sorry about that.”
I said nothing.
“Anything at your end? You got a name for me yet?”
I smiled. You can forget about a name, I thought. Bud. No quo, no quid. Not that there ever was a name in the first place.
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
Summer came back and I told her to take the rest of the night off. Told her to meet me for breakfast in the O Club. At nine o’clock exactly, when Willard’s orders were due. I figured we could have a long leisurely meal, plenty of eggs, plenty of coffee, and we could stroll back over about ten-fifteen.
“You moved the map,” she said.
“Willard tore it down. I put it back up.”
“He’s dangerous.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Time will tell.”
She went back to her quarters and I went back to mine. I was in a room in the Bachelor Officers’ row. It was pretty much like a motel. There was a street named after some long-dead Medal of Honor winner and a path branching off from the sidewalk that led to my door. There were posts every twenty yards with streetlights on them. The one nearest my door was out. It was out because it had been busted with a stone. I could see glass on the path. And three guys in the shadows. I walked past the first one. He was the Delta sergeant with the beard and the tan. He tapped the face of his watch with his forefinger. The second guy did the same thing. The third guy just smiled. I got inside and closed my door. Didn’t hear them walk away. I didn’t sleep well.
They were gone by morning. I made it to the O Club OK. At nine o’clock the dining room was pretty much empty, which was an advantage. The disadvantage was that whatever food remained had been stewing on the buffet for a while. But on balance I thought it was a good situation. I was more of a loner than a gourmet. Summer and I sat across from each other at a small table in the center of the room. Between us we ate almost everything that was left. Summer consumed about a pound of grits and two pounds of biscuits. She was small, but she could eat. That was for damn sure. We took our time with our coffee and walked over to my office at ten-twenty. There was mayhem inside. Every phone was ringing. The Louisiana corporal looked harassed.
“Don’t answer your phone,” he said. “It’s Colonel Willard. He wanted immediate confirmation that you’d gotten your orders. He’s mad as hell.”
“What are the orders?”
He ducked back to his desk and offered me a sheet of fax paper. The phones kept on ringing. I didn’t take the sheet of paper. I just stood there and read it over my corporal’s shoulder. There were two closely spaced paragraphs. Willard was ordering me to examine the quartermaster’s inward delivery note file and his outward distribution log. I was to use them to work out on paper exactly what ought to be there in the on-post warehouse. Then I was to verify my conclusion by means of a practical search. Then I was to compile a list of all missing items and propose a course of action in writing to track down their current whereabouts. I was to execute the order in a prompt and timely fashion. I was to call him to confirm receipt of the order immediately it was in my hand.
It was a classic make-work punishment. In the bad old days they ordered you to paint coal white or fill sandbags with teaspoons or scrub floors with toothbrushes. This was the modern-day MP equivalent. It was a mindless task that would take two weeks to complete. I smiled.
The phones were still ringing.
“The order was never in my hand,” I said. “I’m not here.”
“Where are you?”
“Tell him someone dropped a gum wrapper in the flower bed outside the post commander’s office. Tell him I won’t have army real estate abused in that way. Tell him I’ve been on the trail since well before dawn.”
I led Summer back out onto the sidewalk, away from the ringing phones.
“Asshole,” I said.
“You should lay low,” she said. “He’ll be calling all over.”
I stood still. Looked around. Cold weather. Gray buildings, gray sky.
“Let’s take the day off,” I said. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“We’ve got things to do.”
I nodded. Carbone. Kramer. Brubaker.
“Can’t stay here,” I said. “So we can’t do much about Carbone.”
“Want to go down to Columbia?”
“Not our case. Nothing we can do that Sanchez isn’t doing.”
“Too cold for the beach,” Summer said.
I nodded again. Suddenly wished it wasn’t too cold for the beach. I would have liked to see Summer on the beach. In a bikini. A very small one, for preference.
“We have to work,” she said.
I looked south and west, beyond the post buildings. I could see the trees, cold and dead against the horizon. I could see a tall pine, dull and dormant, a little nearer. I figured it was close to where we had found Carbone.
Carbone.
“Let’s go to Green Valley,” I said. “Let’s visit with Detective Clark. We could ask him for his crowbar notes. He made a start for us. So maybe we could finish up. A four-hour drive might be a good investment at this point.”
“And four hours back.”
“We could have lunch. Maybe dinner. We could go AWOL.”
“They’d find us.”
I shook my head.
“Nobody would find me,” I said. “Not ever.”
I stayed there on the sidewalk and Summer went away and came back five minutes later in the green Chevy we had used before. She pulled in tight to the curb and buzzed her window down before I could move.
“Is this smart?” she said.
“It’s all we’ve got,” I said.
“No, I mean you’re going to be on the gate log. Time out, ten-thirty. Willard could check it.”
I said nothing. She smiled.
“You could hide in the trunk,” she said. “You could get out again when we’re through the gate.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to hide. Not because of an asshole like Willard. If he checks the log I’ll tell him the hunt for the gum-wrapper guy suddenly went interstate. Or global, even. We could go to Tahiti.”
I got in beside her and racked the seat all the way back and started thinking about bikinis again. She took her foot off the brake and accelerated down the main drag. Slowed and stopped at the gate. An MP private came out with a clipboard. He noted our plate number and we showed him ID. He wrote our names down. Glanced into the car, checked the empty rear seat. Then he nodded to his partner in the guard shack and the barrier went up in front of us, very slowly. It was a thick pole with a counterweight, red and white stripes. Summer waited until it was exactly vertical and then she dropped the hammer and we took off in a cloud of blue government-funded smoke from the Chevy’s rear tires.
The weather got better as we drove north. We slid out from under a shelf of low gray cloud into bright winter sunshine. It was an army car so there was no radio in it. Just a blank panel where the civilian model would have had AM and FM and a cassette slot. So we talked from time to time and whiled the rest away riding in aimless silence. It was a curious feeling, t
o be free. I had spent just about my whole life being where the military told me to be, every minute of every day. Now I felt like a truant. There was a world out there. It was going about its business, chaotic and untidy and undisciplined, and I was a part of it, just briefly. I lay back in the seat and watched it spool by, bright and stroboscopic, random images flashing past like sunlight on a running river.
“Do you wear a bikini or a one-piece?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Just checking,” I said. “I was thinking about the beach.”
“Too cold.”
“Won’t be in August.”
“Think you’ll be here in August?”
“No,” I said.
“Pity,” she said. “You’ll never know what I wear.”
“You could mail me a picture.”
“Where to?”
“Fort Leavenworth, probably,” I said. “The maximum security wing.”
“No, where will you be? Seriously.”
“I have no idea,” I said. “August is eight months away.”
“Where’s the best place you ever served?”
I smiled. Gave her the same answer I give anyone who asks that question.
“Right here,” I said. “Right now.”
“Even with Willard on your back?”
“Willard’s nothing. He’ll be gone before I am.”
“Why is he here at all?”
“My brother figures they’re copying what corporations do. Know-nothings aren’t invested in the status quo.”
“So a guy trained to write fuel consumption algorithms winds up with two dead soldiers in his first week. And he doesn’t want to investigate either one of them.”
“Because that would be old-fashioned thinking. We have to move on. We have to see the big picture.”
She smiled and drove on. Took the Green Valley ramp, going way too fast.
The Green Valley Police Department had a building north of town. It was a bigger place than I had expected, because Green Valley itself was bigger than I had expected. It encompassed the pretty town center we had already seen, but then it bulged north through some country that was mostly strip malls and light industrial units, almost all the way up to Sperryville. The police station looked big enough for twenty or thirty cops. It was built the way most places are where land is cheap. It was long and low and sprawling, with a one-story center core and two wings. The wings were built at right angles, so the place was U-shaped. The facades were concrete, molded to look like stone. There was a brown lawn in front and parking lots at both sides. There was a flagpole dead center on the lawn. Old Glory was up there, weather-beaten and limp in the windless air. The whole place looked a little grand, and a little bleached in the pale sunlight.
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