by Lee Child
She asked, “Doesn’t coffee keep you awake?”
I nodded. “Until I want to go to sleep. That’s what it’s for.”
She took a last sip of water and left a rind of bun and six or seven fries on her plate. She wiped her mouth and then her hands on her napkin. She folded her napkin and laid it down next to her plate. Dinner was over.
I asked, “So are you making progress?”
She smiled at some inner amusement and then leaned sideways away from the table, hands braced to increase her angle, and she looked me over again, slowly, a crooked path, all the way from my feet in the shadows to my head. She said, “You’re pretty good. Nothing to be ashamed about, really. It’s not your fault.”
I asked, “What isn’t?”
She leaned back in her chair. She kept her eyes on mine. She said, “My daddy was sheriff here before me. Since before I was born, actually. He won about twenty consecutive elections. He was firm, but fair. And honest. No fear or favor. He was a good public servant.”
I said, “I’m sure he was.”
“But I didn’t like it here very much. Not as a kid. I mean, can you imagine? It’s the back of beyond. We got books in the mail. I knew there was a big wide world out there. So I had to get away.”
I said, “I don’t blame you.”
She said, “But some ideas get ingrained. Like public service. Like law enforcement. It starts to feel like a family business, the same as any other.”
I nodded. She was right. Kids follow their parents into law enforcement far more than most other professions. Except baseball. The son of a pro ballplayer is eight hundred times more likely to make the Majors than some other random kid.
She said, “So look at it from my point of view. What do you think I did when I turned eighteen?”
I said, “I don’t know,” although by that point I was pretty sure I did know, more or less, and I wasn’t happy about it.
She said, “I went to South Carolina and joined the Marine Corps.”
I nodded. Worse than I had expected. For some reason I had been betting on the Air Force.
I asked her, “How long were you in?”
“Sixteen years.”
Which made her thirty-six years old. Eighteen years at home, plus sixteen as a jarhead, plus two as Carter County Sheriff. Same age as me.
I asked her, “What branch of the Corps?”
“Provost Marshal’s office.” I looked away.
I said, “You were a military cop.”
She said, “Public service and law enforcement. I killed two birds with one stone.”
I looked back, beaten.
I asked her, “Terminal rank?”
“CWO5,” she said.
Chief Warrant Officer 5. An expert in a specific specialized field. The sweet spot, where the real work was done.
I asked her, “Why did you leave?”
“Rumblings,” she said. “The Soviets are gone, reductions in force are coming. I figured it would feel better to step up than be thrown out. Plus my daddy died, and I couldn’t let some idiot like Pellegrino take over.”
I asked her, “Where did you serve?”
“All over,” she said. “Uncle Sam was my rich uncle. He showed me the world. Some parts of it were worth seeing, and some parts of it weren’t.”
I said nothing. The waitress came back and took away our empty plates.
“Anyway,” Deveraux said. “I was expecting you. It’s exactly what we would have done, frankly, under the same circumstances. A homicide behind a bar near a base? Some kind of big secrecy or sensitivity on the base? We would have put an investigator on the post, and we would have sent another into town, undercover.”
I said nothing.
She said, “The idea being, of course, that the undercover guy in town would keep his ear to the ground and then step in and stop the locals embarrassing the Corps. If strictly necessary, that is. It was a policy I supported back then, naturally. But now I am the locals, so I can’t really support it anymore.”
I said nothing.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “You were doing it better than some of our guys did. I love the shoes, for instance. And the hair. You’re fairly convincing. You ran into a bit of bad luck, that’s all, with me being who I am. Although the timing wasn’t subtle, was it? But then, it never is. I don’t see how it ever could be. And to be honest, you’re not a very fluent liar. You shouldn’t have said the 110th. I know about the 110th, of course. You were nearly as good as we were. But really, Hayder? Far too uncommon a name. And the khaki socks were a mistake. Obvious PX. You probably bought them yesterday. I wore socks just like them.”
“I didn’t want to lie,” I said. “Didn’t seem right. My father was a Marine. Maybe I sensed it in you.”
“He was a Marine but you joined the army? What was that, mutiny?”
“I don’t know what it was,” I said. “But it felt right at the time.”
“How does it feel now?”
“Right this minute? Not so great.”
“Don’t feel bad,” she said again. “You gave it a good try.”
I said nothing.
She asked, “What rank are you?”
I said, “Major.”
“Should I salute?”
“Only if you want to.”
“Still with the 110th?”
“Temporarily. Home base right now is the 396th MP. The Criminal Investigation Division.”
“How many years in?”
“Thirteen. Plus West Point.”
“I’m honored. Maybe I should salute. Who did they send to Kelham?”
“A guy called Munro. Same rank as me.”
“That’s confusing,” she said.
I said, “Are you making progress?”
She said, “You don’t give up, do you?”
“Giving up was not in the mission statement. You know how it is.”
“OK, I’ll trade,” she said. “One answer for one answer. And then you ship back out. You hit the road at first light. In fact I’ll get Pellegrino to drive you back to where he picked you up. Do we have a deal?”
What choice did I have? I said, “We have a deal.”
“No,” she said. “We’re not making progress. Absolutely none at all.”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks. Your turn.”
“Obviously it would give me an insight to know if you’re the ace, or if the guy they sent to Kelham is the ace. I mean, in terms of the army’s current thinking. About the balance of probabilities here. As in, do they think the problem is inside the gates or outside? So, are you the big dog? Or is the other guy?”
“Honest answer?”
“That’s what I would expect from the son of a fellow Marine.”
“The honest answer is I don’t know,” I said.
Chapter
13
Elizabeth Deveraux paid for her burger and my pie and coffee, which I thought was generous, so I left the tip, which made the waitress smile again. We stepped out to the sidewalk together and stood for a moment next to the old Caprice. The moon had gotten brighter. A thin layer of high cloud had moved away. There were stars out.
I said, “Can I ask you another question?”
Deveraux was immediately guarded. She said, “About what?”
“Hair,” I said. “Ours is supposed to conform to the shape of our heads. Tapered, they call it. Curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of the neck. What about yours?”
“I wore a buzz cut for fifteen years,” she said. “I started growing it out when I knew I was going to quit.”
I looked at her in the moonlight and the spill from the diner window. I pictured her with a buzz cut. She must have looked sensational. I said, “Good to know. Thanks.”
She said, “I had no chance, right from the beginning. The regulation for women in the Corps required what they called a non-eccentric style. Your hair could touch your collar, but it couldn’t fall below the bottom edge. You were allowed to
pin it up, but then I couldn’t get my hat on.”
“Sacrifices,” I said.
“It was worth it,” she said. “I loved being a Marine.”
“You still are,” I said. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
“Is that what your daddy said?”
“He never got the chance. He died in harness.”
She asked, “Is your mom still alive?”
“She died a few years later.”
“Mine died when I was in boot camp. Cancer.”
“Really? Mine too. Cancer, I mean. Not boot camp.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” I said, automatically. “She was in Paris.”
“So was I. Parris Island, anyway. Did she emigrate?”
“She was French.”
“Do you speak French?”
I said, “Un peu, mais doucement.”
“What does that mean?”
“A little, and slowly.”
She nodded and put her hand on the Caprice’s door. I took the hint and said, “OK, goodnight, Chief Deveraux. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
She just smiled.
I turned left and walked down toward the hotel. I heard the big Chevy motor start up, and I heard the tires start to roll, and then the car passed me, going slow, and then it pulled a wide U-turn across the width of the street and stopped again, just ahead of me, facing me, at the curb right next to the Toussaint’s hotel. I walked on and got there just as Deveraux opened her door and got out again. Naturally I assumed she had something more to say to me, so I stopped walking and waited politely.
“I live here,” she said. “Goodnight.”
She had already gone upstairs before I got into the lobby. The old guy I had seen in the diner was behind the reception counter. He was open for business. I could tell he was disconcerted by my lack of luggage, but cash money is cash money, and he took eighteen dollars of mine and in return he gave me the key to room twenty-one. He told me it was on the second floor, at the front of the building, overlooking the street, which he said was quieter than the back, which made no sense at all until I remembered the railroad track.
On the second floor the staircase came up in the center of a long north–south corridor, which was uncarpeted and dimly lit by four mean and ungenerous bulbs. It had eight doors off the back side and nine off the street side. There was a slim bar of brighter yellow light showing through the crack under room seventeen’s door, which was on the street side. Deveraux, presumably, getting ready for bed. My room was four doors further north. I unlocked it and went in and turned on the light and found the kind of still air and dusty chill that indicates long disuse. It was a rectangular space with a high ceiling and what would have been pleasant proportions, except that at some point in the last decade an attached bathroom had been shoehorned into one corner. The window was a pair of glazed doors that gave out on the iron balcony I had seen from the street. There was a bed and a chair and a dressing table, and on the floor there was a threadbare Persian rug worn thin by use and beating.
I pulled the drapes closed and unpacked, which consisted solely of assembling my new toothbrush and propping it upright in a milky glass on the bathroom shelf. I had no toothpaste, but then, I had never been convinced toothpaste was anything more than a pleasant-tasting lubricant. An army dentist I had known swore that the mechanical action of the brush’s bristles was all that was needed for perfect oral health. And I had chewing gum for freshness. And I still had all my teeth, apart from a top-row molar knocked out many years before by a lucky knuckle in a street fight in Cleveland, Ohio.
The clock in my head said it was about twenty after eleven. I sat on the bed for a spell. I had been up early and was moderately tired, but not exhausted. And I had things to do, and limited time to do them in, so I waited long enough to let an average person get off to sleep, and then I went out to the corridor again. Deveraux’s light was off. There was nothing showing under her door. I crept down the stairs to the lobby. The reception desk was once again unattended. I went out to the street and turned left, toward territory as yet unexplored.
Chapter
14
I looked at the whole length of Main Street as carefully as was possible in the gray moonlight. It ran on south for about two hundred yards, as straight as a die, and then it narrowed a little and started to meander and became residential, with modest homes randomly spaced in yards of varying sizes. The west side of the straight downtown stretch had stores and commercial operations of various kinds, punctuated with narrow alleys, some of which led onward into the scrub and had more small houses on the left and the right. Those stores and commercial operations were matched by similar establishments on the east side of Main Street, neatly in line with the diner and the hotel, and the alleys to the west were matched by broader paved passageways opposite, which linked all the way through to a one-sided street built parallel to and behind Main Street. I guessed that one-sided street had been the whole point of the town in the early days, and was certainly the point in my being there that night.
It ran north and south and had a long line of establishments that faced the railroad track across nothing but a blank width of beaten earth. I imagined old passenger trains wheezing to a stop, with their panting locomotives next to the water tower a little ways up the line, the trains’ long windowed sides stretching south. I imagined restaurant staff and café owners running across the beaten earth and placing wooden steps below the train doors. I imagined passengers stepping down, spilling out, dry and hungry from their long haul, hundreds of them eagerly crossing the width of earth, and then eating and drinking their fill. I imagined coins clattering, cash registers ringing, the train whistles blowing, the passengers returning, the trains moving onward, the wooden steps being retrieved, then stillness returning for an hour, then the next train easing in, and the whole process repeating itself endlessly.
That single-sided street had powered the local economy, and it still did.
The passenger trains were long gone, of course, and so were the cafés and the restaurants. But the cafés and the restaurants had been replaced by bars, and auto parts stores, and bars, and loan offices, and bars, and gun shops, and bars, and secondhand stereo stores, and bars, and the trains had been replaced by streams of cars coming in from Kelham. I imagined the cars parking on the beaten earth, and small groups of Rangers-in-training spilling out and spending Uncle Sam’s money up and down the row. A captive market, miles from anywhere, like Garber had said, just like the railroad passengers back in the day. I had seen the proposition repeated at a hundred bases all around the world. The cars would be old Mustangs or Gran Torinos or GTOs, or secondhand BMWs or Mercedes in Germany, or strange Toyota Crowns or Datsuns in the Far East, and the beer would be different brands and different strengths, and the loans would be in different currencies, and the guns would be chambered for different loads in different calibers, and the used stereo equipment would operate on different voltages, but other than that the give and take was exactly the same everywhere.
I found the spot where Janice May Chapman had been killed easily enough. Pellegrino had said she had bled out like a lake, which meant sand would have been used to soak up the spill, and I found a fresh spreading pile of it in a paved alley near the rear left-hand corner of a bar called Brannan’s. Brannan’s was about in the center of the one-sided street, and the alley in question ran along its left flank before dog-legging twice and exiting on Main Street between an old-style pharmacy and a hardware store. Maybe the hardware store was where the sand had come from. Three or four sixty-pound bags would have done the job. It was spread in a neat teardrop shape over the smooth flagstones, about three or four inches deep.
The spot was not directly overlooked. Brannan’s rear door was about fifteen feet away, and the bar had no side windows. The back of the pharmacy was a blank wall. Brannan’s neighbor was a loan office with a Western Union franchise, and its right flank had a window toward the rear, but the pla
ce would have been closed at night. No witnesses. Not that there would have been much to witness. Cutting a throat doesn’t take much time. Given a decent blade and enough weight and force, it takes as long as it takes to move your hand eight inches. That’s all.
I stepped out of the alley and walked halfway to the railroad track and stood on the beaten earth and judged the light. No point in looking for things I wouldn’t be able to see. But the moon was still high and the sky was still clear, so I kept on going and stepped over the first rail and turned left and hiked north, walking on the ties like guys used to way back, when they were leaving the land and heading to Chicago or New York. I passed over the road crossing, and I passed the old water tower.
Then the ground began to shake.
Just faintly at first, a mild constant tremor, like the edge of a distant earthquake. I stopped walking. The tie under my feet trembled. The rails either side of me started to sing. I turned around and saw a tiny pinpoint of light far in the distance. A single headlight. The midnight train, a couple of miles south of me, coming on fast.
I stood there. The rails hummed and keened. The ties hammered up and down through tiny microscopic distances. The gravel under them clicked and hopped. The ground tremors deepened to big bass shudders. The distant headlight twinkled like a star, jumping minutely left and right through hard constrained limits.
I stepped off the track and looped back to the old water tower and leaned against a tarred wooden upright. It shook against my shoulder. The ground shook under my feet. The rails howled. The train whistle blew, long and loud and forlorn in the distance. The warning bells at the roadside twenty yards away started ringing. The red lights started flashing.