“How’d you die?” I asked.
“What?” The man’s face colored as if I’d asked him if he wore boxers or tighty-whities.
“If you went to the camp, it means you died, then woke up and some asshole turned you in to the feds. So how did you die?”
“A tractor rollover,” he said.
Of course you did, I thought but didn’t say it. The aspirin must’ve kicked in.
“When did Eric get to the camp?”
“March 1997,” he said.
“So you were only friends for a few months before you were released.”
“About ten months. It was New Year’s Day when they released me. But Eric wasn’t with me.”
“Why not?”
“When they closed all the camps, they let us go in batches,” he said and laced his fingers.
It would have been impossible to release all the detainees at once. They’d be owed transportation at the very least. Compensation and a big fat fucking apology at best. They’d only be able to carry so many at a time, and for the sake of order they would let them go in groups. How’d you like to be the last bastard out of that shit hole?
I fumbled for a pen and found one. I tried to scrawl out the few details he’d given me so far, but the pen wouldn’t write. “If you were separated, how did you know to plan to contact each other on the outside?”
Memphis clasped his hands together, then shrugged. “Everyone knew for months we were getting out. They told us at the end of October when the election stuff was in full swing. But they kept pushing back the actual release date. First we heard it’d be November. Then it was December.”
“So you had time to kill. And he was released after you, but you didn’t hear from him like you were supposed to.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. The sir hackled me. “So I tracked down his wife and kid but they haven’t heard from him either.”
I lifted up the folders for the missing girls and found a blue pen that actually worked. “He’s got a wife and kid?”
“Not anymore. She remarried and popped out another. But they haven’t heard from him. Cute though.”
“Excuse me?” With a thick blue smear along the inside of my right thumb, I threw the leaky pen in the trash and resumed searching.
“His kid. Looks just like him. She’ll be fifteen this year.”
“A little young for you, don’t you think?”
“Christ,” he said. His jaw fell open and his brow furrowed. “It’s not like that. She was twelve or thirteen when I saw her. I was just saying she looks like him.”
“Mmhmm.” With a fresh black pen I scrawled just the essentials: the dates of their release and imprisonment, the location of the camp, and names.
“What are you writing?” he asked.
“What you’ve told me,” I said. “You don’t want me to forget, do you?”
“Well, no.” He frowned. “What else do you need to know?”
“That should do it,” I said. “But I need a way to get ahold of you in case I have more questions.”
“OK,” he said. He gave me a local number.
My head cleared just enough to ask a final question. “Before you go, I’ve got one more.”
“Yeah?”
“The wife and kid. What can you tell me there?”
Chapter 4
44 Weeks
There isn’t a night I don’t dream about him.
Sometimes he will die in my arms, sometimes in the dirt. But however he dies, it is always some variation of this truth:
In the winter of 2002, I’d been asked to come to Afghanistan. Car bombs were going off every day and the higher-ups were looking for long-range solutions that would keep the casualties low. They liked one or two bodies to roll through the media every once in a while. It kept up the American spirit and fueled the anger and purpose for us being in that god forsaken place to begin with, but if our body counts got too high, well, that was bad for business.
So they’d called in snipers like me to sit in the hillsides which were more like mountainous mounds of dirt than any hills I’d seen back home, or anywhere else really, and shoot at anything that went where it wasn’t supposed to.
Look out for women and children, they told us, even dogs. Insurgents had been favoring them lately. Understanding a threat in your head is different than seeing it on the ground, less black and white. When I saw Aziz, a 13-year-old boy for the first time, it was a whole area of gray.
I was above the western gate of a military base on the north side of town. It was mostly an epicenter for supplies near Pakistan, which was easier to travel through than Afghanistan. Convoys would go in and out at all hours of the day, while I lay crouched on the mountain above with my scope trained on the entrance. You can imagine how much time I spent laying there, in the dirt, hiding behind large rocks with my scope sweeping the desert.
When it got really boring, I would imagine all the ways in which I would likely have to use the rifle. I’d practiced the scenarios in my head the way a politician might rehearse his speech before the big day. Running through my strategies over and over again would keep me ready, prepared, I thought. What a joke.
When Aziz died, it was late in the evening. The sun had just reached that unbearable position in the sky where it shined into my eyes for about an hour before finally lowering itself enough that I could see again. The sun had just dipped enough to clear my scope when I saw him. The boy.
He was small for his age, which I learned later, and the second youngest son of a herder who lived in Kunar. Small and thin-limbed, not like our beefy hams back home, fattened on fast food and soda. Just a scrawny thing walking toward the entrance of the base.
At first I assumed he was a lost. Why else was there a kid wandering around in the desert? Not just wandering. He swooped and staggered on those thin legs. I found out later it was the weight of the vest that made him walk that way. How far had he walked with it on his chest? We’d seen a few cars try pulling up to various American bases, before shoving women and children out their doors. They realized shoving people from vehicles put us on alert, and had switched to subtler approaches. Now they made them walk across the desert, arriving half-dead and delirious at our doorsteps.
“Hostile,” someone yelled into my earpiece. I had a direct line to the guard below.
It startled me. I’d been watching the boy stagger the way a man might watch a snake dance.
“Hostile,” a voice said again. “We can see a vest.”
I lifted the scope to my face and felt the hot rim of metal brush my brow. I focused on the boy, and saw him and the vest for myself. But there was something wrong about it. I wasn’t quite sure what it was that put me off, or what I saw that gave me pause, but I pressed the earpiece and said. “Are you sure it’s active?”
“I see a flashing red light, goddamnit,” the voice came clear and urgent. “Are you going to wait until he gets to the fucking door?”
I lifted the rifle again and found the boy in the scope, my crosshairs dissecting his skull. I was sure I couldn’t do it. It didn’t feel right. He was a kid. As I crouched there, watching the boy stagger, I gradually became aware of the growing chaos in my earpiece. Someone was yelling, barking an order. Voices grew and collided with one another.
The boy fell. He hit the dirt hard. No longer fighting against the vest, it brought him down. He wasn’t moving. Not a muscle twitched and the smallest echo of the shot rang off the mountain.
I didn’t realize I was the one who’d shot him until I eased my finger off the trigger.
Chapter 5
Saturday, March 22, 2003
I parked my ‘67 Impala outside a squat one-story house. The white wood had mud-scuffs along the side walls, and the windows were in need of a good clean after an assault of spring showers. A woman emerged from the house with a towel over one shoulder and a bottle of window cleaner in the other hand. I had one of those weird moments when you realize—I was just thinking that. Her chestnut hair was pul
led up away from her face and her denim shirt was rolled up to the elbows.
“Mrs. Sullivan?” I asked and stepped away from the Impala. I extended my hand. “James Brinkley. We spoke on the phone. I’m real sorry to bother you, ma’am.”
Expecting resistance, I laid it on thick. “I’ve only got a couple of questions. I won’t take up much of your time.”
“I told you today wasn’t a good day.” She didn’t remove the rubber gloves to shake my hand, nor did she lower the spray bottle pointed at my eyes. I learned long ago not to underestimate a woman, however frail she might seem, so I thought it best to keep a safe distance.
“I know and I apologize, Mrs. Sullivan.” I did my best to look up at her with downturned eyes, but it was hard when I was a good head and shoulders above her. If that didn’t work I could try to charm her another way, but I had a feeling it would backfire with Mrs. Sullivan. She had the look of a beautiful woman who was damn tired of being looked at like she was beautiful.
“Phelps,” she said and turned away from me toward the first window.
“Ma’am?”
“Phelps,” she said again. “I’ve remarried.”
“Right.” I put my hands in my pockets. “Mrs. Phelps, I have someone looking for your hus—first husband, Eric. Do you have any information about where he might be? I just want to talk to him. He isn’t in any kind of trouble.”
She laughed. “Of course he isn’t.”
I noticed the tension in her shoulders, the way they crept up toward her ears.
“Do you know for a fact he isn’t in any kind of trouble?”
Her fist hovered over the glass, rag gripped tightly. “No. I do not know where Eric is.” She squirted glass cleaner against the first window pane and handed me the bottle to hold. I remember the way she said his name.
Eric. With sarcasm and resentment sure, but a hint of something softer there on the end. The ‘c’ not quite as hard as it could’ve been.
When I didn’t move or speak, she continued. “It’s been six years since he died. Undied—whatever they are calling it.”
“You were married for almost nine, correct?” I asked. I wanted to keep her talking because even if she didn’t know where he was, she might know where to point me. So I tried to give the impression that I knew more than I really did because the public records surrounding Eric and Danica were few and far between. “How long had you known him?”
She stopped wiping the glass and turned those bright green eyes on me. Those few stray hairs falling down around her face drew the eye to her jaw and neck. “My whole life. We both grew up around here and got all the way through high school in the same class, most years. We’d been just friends, good friends, until the summer of ’87. He was married before, at 18 to his high school sweetheart, Shannon Flick. But they divorced a couple of years later.”
“Is she still around?” I asked. Because this was the first time I’d heard of her.
“No, she moved to California or something like that.”
“Any kids or anything to tie him to her?”
“Not that I know of,” she said. “He let her go and stayed in town to work at his father’s garage, another mechanic from a family of wrench-turners, that sort of thing. I was still working at Mabel’s Grocer. Neither of us were really the college types. I thought about going to get my teaching degree, but I pretty much let that idea go when I got pregnant with Jesse.”
“Eric’s daughter?”
She nodded. Her voice had changed at the mention of Jesse. There was more to that, but I was making good progress on Eric, gathering up my next leads. I’d have to come back to the girl.
“She had a real hard time when he died,” Danica said. “She hasn’t really been the same actually.”
“It’s hard to lose a father,” I said. I handed her the bottle again so she could spray the next pane. I let her make whatever assumptions she liked about me. She must have made some sort of assumption, because when she took the bottle from me she smiled.
“She had nightmares about him for the longest time after he died,” she said, scrubbing at the glass. “She would wake up screaming, and we saw doctors about it, tried sedatives, but it didn’t work. Then one night she woke me up and climbed into bed with me. She told me Eric was here, that he’d come home.”
“Had he?” I asked.
Danica looked at her reflection in the dirty glass before speaking. “I know he’s—not dead—but no, I didn’t see him.”
A strange sensation traced my spine as I listened to Danica. I recognized this feeling from cases in the past. I was hearing something important—even if I didn’t know what the hell to do with this information yet, it meant something.
“I asked her if she’d seen him, thinking, ‘Oh god, he’s finally come back.’”
“Would that have been a problem?” I asked.
“I’d just had Daniel,” she said, wiping at a smudge of dirt on her face. “Another man was sleeping in the house. What do you think?”
“Did you know he’d return?” I pressed.
“We got a notice that he would be released New Year’s Day. I was at my mother’s with the kids for Christmas, you know, so I wasn’t sure if he’d come home or not. I don’t know if you know, but I am the one who called and—reported—him.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s not like I wanted them to come and take my husband away,” she said, her voice rising. “They told me these people were sick and needed help. People were panicking about what it meant and everything was just—I didn’t want him to be taken away, but I have a child, you know.”
“But he was taken away.”
“And I knew he might be angry at me for that, so I wasn’t sure if he’d come home. But I wanted him to. I really did.”
“Sure,” I said and wondered if she was lying to herself as well as to me. “Is your daughter home now?”
“No.” Danica’s shoulders tensed again. “She’s with her friend Alice, at the Methodist egg hunt. They’re bound at the hip those two. But Alice is a sweet girl—and it gets her out of the house.”
“Does she know he’s alive?”
“No. I don’t want her to know,” she said, firm. “I told her he was dead.”
As I looked at the back of her denim shirt, I realized the door to this conversation was closed and trying to pry it open wouldn’t get me anywhere. So I handed Danica my card. “I’ve taken up enough of your time, Mrs. Phelps. I won’t take up anymore. But if you think of something, anything else about Eric that might help me find him, I’d appreciate it if you gave this number a call.”
“Is he in trouble?” she asked. She laughed. “Would you tell me if he was?”
“Like I said, a friend just wants to find him.”
“What friend?” she asked. “I knew all his friends.”
“Maybe you did,” I said and turned toward the Impala. “But that was another life.”
Chapter 6
Saturday, March 22, 2003
I found the county morgue empty on the Saturday before Easter. The examiner agreed to meet with me, despite the holiday. I sure as hell wasn’t going to complain about that, even though the spring air was freezing my balls by the time the skeleton decided to show up and let me in.
A balding, crooked man climbed out of his hearse and shuffled toward me. His face was gaunt with the pallor of a vampire and he looked like he would fall over any second. Someone needed to feed grandpa a good steak dinner.
“Brinkley,” I said, forgetting again for the thousandth time to refer to myself as Agent Brinkley or even Sergeant Brinkley.
“Oscar Sampson, at your service.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Sampson.” I pointed at the hearse. “Are you a funeral director as well?”
“Funeral director, mortician, county examiner, all of the above. In small towns it is more profitable to be a jack of all trades, if you get what I am saying.”
“I do, sir, and I’m real sorry to pull you
away from your family on Easter weekend."
The old man croaked and cawed and I realized he was laughing. “Purely my pleasure, my dear boy.”
“Why’s that?” I asked and waited behind him as he turned the key in the lock, and when the door stuck, bumped it open with his bony hip.
“Easter is an excuse for the whole family to come home,” he said.
“Isn’t that a good thing, sir?” I stepped into the cramped dark room after him. A wave of dusty, stagnant air welcomed me. Cabinets full of medical textbooks and artifacts. A few jars, probably responsible for the rancid chemical smell, rested on shelves. A half-eaten sandwich lay forgotten on a desktop overflowing with papers. In the middle of the room were two large metal slabs for what I imagined to be bodies. That day, they were clean and bare.
As crowded and claustrophobic as the room might’ve been, at least it was warm.
“I had six children with my late wife, God love her,” he said. “But all six of them are no better than shit on my shoe.”
I clenched my teeth together rather than laugh aloud.
“The first two—my two eldest sons, John and Jack, fight about everything. This morning, they had a two hour diatribe about butter. Butter. ‘It’s good for you. No, bad for you. Margarine is worse. Is life worth living without a bit of cholesterol’—that sort of thing. When you get to be my age, Agent Brinkley, you simply cannot dream of giving up even one hour, let alone an entire precious morning arguing about a condiment.”
“I understand, sir.”
“My third, my first girl Denise, is a lawyer and is always pestering me about my will and financial assets. ‘Are you ready to go?’ she asks. ‘Is everything prepared?’ ‘What are your wishes?’ These would be splendid questions if she intended to send me on a Mexican cruise, mind you. But since it pertains to my death, it gives the impression that she has nothing better to do than wait for me to die,” he said. “And maybe that is true. The fourth and fifth, Peter and Pauline, have launched and destroyed no less than ten business ventures, and neither one has reached their fortieth birthday. If even one makes it to retirement with their head above destitution, I’ll be surprised. Not that I’ll be alive to see it. If nothing else, I pray they soon discover the willpower not to tell me about the latest opportunity.”
Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) Page 2
