The Valley
Page 40
He read it over, then took the mouse and highlighted most of it. He hit DELETE and started typing from scratch.
I did get your note. I am safe. I’ve been away, but I should have told you before I went.
He punched a couple of ENTERs and typed
There is a lot to tell.
Then deleted it. Instead he typed
Don’t read too much into dreams.
He hit SEND, logged off, and slung his backpack.
He fetched his shoes and trudged across the camp to the chow hall. After he ate, he went back to the Green Beans for a fresh coffee and settled in for an afternoon with his book on the deck outside.
He was only a few pages in when he heard the puckish voice behind him.
“Mediocrates, I presume.”
It was the name his friend from Officer Candidate School had called him in the e-mail before he left Omaha for the Valley. The smartass. Camp Alabama was the last place on Earth Black would have expected to hear his voice. For a moment he thought he must be mistaken.
But when he turned and saw the figure of the Monk, clean-shaven and grinning wryly in civilian clothes, he knew he hadn’t been mistaken at all.
Danny stood with him, looking sheepish.
51
They both had coffees in their hands. Black gawked. His friend looked at him expectantly.
“So?” he said, holding palm and cup to the sky. “May we?”
His actual name, Black knew, was Pyne. He hadn’t used it much since O.C.S.
Pyne put on a horrible French accent.
“Mais oui?”
He went back to his own voice.
“Or what?”
Dumbfounded, Black nodded. The two men stepped forward, Danny cradling his cup as he shrank into the seat farthest from Black.
“Hello, L.T.,” he mumbled, eyes to the floor.
“Nice one, by the way, in the e-mail,” Pyne cracked as he toed a metal chair out for himself. “‘Lord of the Files.’ I get it. Well played, you.”
He made himself comfortable.
“So, how long you planning to hide out from the world?”
He looked around the gravel concourse with its lash-up shops and low-rent vendors.
“I mean, this is some fine living,” he said appreciatively. “Don’t get me wrong. But seriously.”
He sipped his coffee and burned his lips.
“Corelli,” Black stated flatly.
This sobered his friend, who shook his head grimly.
Black stared at the tabletop.
“I’m on it,” Pyne said quietly.
Black watched the steam rise from his coffee.
“You know I would have been there in a heartbeat,” Pyne said, “if . . .”
“Yeah.”
Black said nothing else. Pyne shrugged off the moment, taking up his scalding coffee and changing the subject.
“Thanks for not blowing my cover,” he said brightly. “That was smooth.”
Black nodded glumly.
“And for not shooting me,” Pyne went on, blowing over the top of his cup. “Not so smooth.”
“I did shoot you. My rifle didn’t shoot you.”
They sat in silence for a minute.
“How’d you rig it for yourself to hide out here anyway?” Pyne asked, appraising their surroundings.
“‘On my way home,’” Black said, making morose quotes in the air.
Pyne, squinching his face over his coffee, looked up and cocked his head.
“One of the benefits of being a paper-pusher,” Black said. “How’d you find me here?”
“One of the benefits of being me,” his friend said from behind his cup, eyebrows raised mischievously.
Black waited to see if there was anything more forthcoming, but Pyne just shook his head.
“You don’t want to see the sausages get made.”
He took a careful sip and opened his mouth to speak. Black held up a finger and turned to Danny, who seemed to think his coffee cup was big enough to hide all of him.
“Danny,” he said. “I know.”
Danny hung his head miserably.
“I am shame, L.T. I swear it I don’t know Sergeant Caine’s . . . business was . . . was the middle of this.”
Pyne nodded quietly and sipped.
“I only translate for him one time,” Danny went on. “He takes me to the main grower, big guy, and has me make the business, for him to tell the others. After that Caine never told me nothing and I don’t see it.”
“What did he say he’d do if you didn’t help?”
“Kill.”
Black nodded.
“It wasn’t your fault, Danny. You saved my life.”
“A-hem,” Pyne said.
Black looked at him quizzically.
“You’re welcome,” Pyne said generously. “Saving your ass on another Land Nav course again.”
Black squinted at the two of them.
“Danny, so you’re . . .”
He drifted off.
“Nah,” Pyne cut in. “Not formally.”
He swirled his cup.
“Danny helped me keep tabs on what those eleven-bravo boneheads were up to in my valley.”
Eleven-Bravo was the Army’s job classification for an infantryman. “My” was Pyne’s classification for anyplace he saw fit to ply his wares.
“It was Danny that told me something was going on at the COP. I mean, something besides your Sergeant Caine’s amateur drug lord impersonation.”
Black’s eyes widened.
“Yeah, I knew about that nonsense,” his friend said blandly. “I let that play out for a bit.”
Black goggled.
“You let it play out?”
Pyne shrugged.
“He was making himself part of the natural food chain of the valley, and for a time it was . . .”
He circled a hand in the air.
“Nondisruptive to my activities.”
Black just gawked, speechless.
“And then, later on,” Pyne went on casually, “things were, uh . . .”
He swirled his cup again.
“Disrupted.”
He sat back and shook his head, remembering.
“First time I felt like people genuinely hated me there,” he said distantly.
Everyone considered that.
“After the night of that fire I was freaking radioactive. Even Merak shut me down.”
“Merak?”
“Darreh Sin chief.”
“That’s his name?”
“You didn’t know his name?”
“Caine never told me.”
Pyne shook his head contemptuously.
“You were working him?” Black asked.
“Duh,” Pyne replied. “Obviously.”
“Did you tell him about the wall?”
Pyne looked to Danny for signs of recognition.
“Why?” he said blankly.
“After I showed him the heroin brick—”
Pyne rolled his eyes.
“—he said he would kill us all to the end of the world.”
“Damn,” his friend said sarcastically. “Stone-cold.”
He swigged eagerly, finally happy with the temperature.
“Anyway,” he said. “Yeah, after the fire that place went straight sideways on me.”
He eyed Black.
“That’s when I knew Americans fucked something up and somebody had to figure out what.”
Black nodded and sipped his own.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “I can see . . .”
He caught the meaning in Pyne’s casual words.
“Wait, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Pyne smiled i
nto his cup.
“Hey, Danny,” he said. “Wanna meet me back at the hootch before chow?”
Danny nodded and turned to Black.
“I see you, L.T.”
He rose and left. Black turned to his friend.
“You initiated the investigation.”
Pyne shook his head.
“I just reached out to, uh, some friends in the Civil Affairs community.”
“The water project.”
Pyne shrugged.
“Maybe Merak opens up a little.”
“Which he did.”
Pyne pinched the air in his fingers.
“Teeny little crack. But somebody needed to blow it open.”
“You made the fifteen-six happen.”
Pyne shook his head again.
“Not the fifteen-six itself,” he said, appreciating the beauty of the thing. “That happened all on its own after Merak complained about the freaking goats.”
Black stared at him.
“You got me put on it!”
His friend looked off at the horizon with an innocent-cherub expression.
Black gawked.
“You think this is funny?” he blurted out, too loudly. “People are dead!”
Pyne looked left and right to see if Black had drawn anyone’s attention. He leaned across the table, turning serious.
“No,” he said tersely. “I don’t think it’s funny. I’m not a fan of closet psycho freaks going for a little free play in my own geostrategically significant piece of backyard. I needed that unfucked.”
“So you just picked me?”
Pyne leaned back and shrugged again.
“I knew you were located at FOB Omaha. Who did you want me to pick?”
“Anybody!”
Pyne looked insulted.
“Yeah, right,” he scoffed.
“It’s supposed to be random!”
“‘It’s supposed to be random!’” Pyne mocked. “The siren song of Army mediocrity.”
“So you hacked it?”
Pyne smiled, sipping.
“We’ve got good hackers,” he said with evident pride.
“You had no right!”
Pyne grew annoyed, leaning in again.
“Don’t wuss out on me,” he said sharply, jabbing the tabletop with a finger. “Have you noticed you’re a soldier in a war? Soldiers get picked arbitrarily for shitty missions all the time, including missions where people get killed. Including missions where people are guaranteed to get killed.”
He leaned back in his chair, calming.
“This shitty mission happened to be yours.”
Black realized his jaw was literally hanging open.
“You’re not in my chain of command!” he practically shouted.
Pyne rolled his eyes.
“Oh, that’s your objection?” he said languidly. “That your arbitrary assignment didn’t come from your Colonel Goldenhair? Excuse me, but when you swore your commissioning oath there wasn’t anything in there about you being guaranteed not to get random assignments from God-knows-who.”
Black just spluttered, speechless. Pyne frowned at him dismissively.
“I mean, it’s not like I sent you out there all alone,” he said, exasperated. “You knew I had my eye on you the whole time.”
“What? No I didn’t!”
Pyne crinkled his brow.
“What’d you think the note with the coordinates and the freek was for?”
“I didn’t open that note until after Danny disappeared and Caine was trying to kill me!”
Pyne was flabbergasted.
“Why not?!”
“I thought it was a love note like you said!”
His friend’s mouth hung open, then closed. Then formed itself into a pinched, suppressed smile.
“When was the last time I had a girl?” he said, trying not to laugh.
“I don’t know!” Black shot back. “I never see you!”
“When I do have a girl, since when do I write her love notes with freaking hearts on them?”
Black stewed.
“Speaking of which,” his friend added. “You talk about way too much stuff on your personal e-mail.”
Black looked up in surprise, then reddened. Pyne waved him off.
“There’s more interesting dirt on the ground outside this coffee shop.”
Black scowled and sulked.
“I’m sorry, man,” his friend said, still grinning but softening. “I just thought when you saw me at Vega my cryptic-handshake-and-significant-look routine made it pretty obvious.”
Black sighed, deflated.
“You know I wouldn’t leave you out there flapping,” Pyne said, mildly wounded. “That’s why I had people keeping an eye on you.”
“What?”
“Well, Danny had your back as much as he could . . .”
Black realized.
“Bosch.”
The graffiti. Taking the heat on himself when Shannon threw the grenade.
Pyne nodded.
“Seemed like a good kid, for certain purposes,” he said, growing somber. “We might’ve been interested in him.”
Black looked at him but nothing more was offered. He sank back into memory.
Bosch. All the guys at the O.P.
Something occurred to him. He looked at Pyne narrow-eyed.
“What do you know about Traynor?”
“O.P. or guy?”
“Guy.”
“Still working on him too.”
“Still working on him?”
“Yeah, of course. You think I was going to leave it to your Sergeant Caine to try to . . .”
He trailed off as he saw the look of incomprehension on Black’s face.
“Never mind.”
“What?” Black pressed.
“Don’t worry about it,” his friend said blankly. “This part’s sort of out of your lane.”
Black fished in his pocket and slapped Jason Traynor’s ID on the table.
“Screw my lane.”
Pyne eyed the card and looked around furtively. He crossed his arms, sighed, and pointed at the table.
“They gave me that.”
“Who?”
“Duh. The people who took Jason.”
“Took him?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s alive.”
“Not officially.”
Black screwed up his brow.
“What people?”
“Complicated.”
“Was Caine there?”
Pyne shrugged.
“Don’t know about that. I didn’t meet that dude until I found out he was kinda double-working me.”
“Double-working you?”
“Yeah, like, working all the growers and all his other contacts to try to find out what happened to Traynor and get him back.”
Black’s jaw was hanging open again.
“Anyway,” Pyne went on casually. “That was disruptive to my activities.”
Black’s head spun.
“What did you do?”
Pyne took up his cooling cup.
“Went and met him and gave him the I.D. card and told him his boy was alive, and we’re working on it, and stop making so much noise.”
He peered down into it.
“I don’t think he did stop, though. He was pretty shook up about the kid.”
He sipped and reflected.
“Think that’s why he was stockpiling cash,” he mused. “Trying to get a big enough bounty stacked up that Valley dudes would have an incentive—”
His tilted cup hovered in front of his face.
“—I mean a real incentive, like, fuck-your-daughter-murder-y
our-cousin incentive, to find out where Traynor was.”
He shook his head sadly and downed the last of his coffee.
“Dude was desperate.”
Black could only think of one thing to say.
“Who the hell are you guys?”
The Monk looked around the town square, milling with people.
“We should walk.”
—
They loped along an empty dirt road near the edge of the camp, Pyne trying without success to mollify his sullen friend.
“I picked you because this was important and you are excellent. You can talk to people, and you can handle people.”
“Yeah, like I handled the chief.”
Pyne chuckled.
“Sounds like you were handling him pretty good until you whipped your brick out,” he cracked, smiling at his own pun.
Black sulked. Pyne sighed.
“Don’t sell yourself short, dude. You put that whole thing together in a week’s time. That’s no joke.”
“I got people killed.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Pyne scoffed. “The war got people killed. A bad sergeant and a bad lieutenant got people killed. Shitty leaders at echelons above—”
He swirled a finger up to heaven.
“—who left that stupid COP in place long after it had outlived its reason for being got people killed.”
He pointed at Black.
“You got the truth.”
Black wondered if there was anything his friend didn’t have an answer for. His friend, as always, read his mind.
“I needed to know what was going on in the Valley,” Pyne said sharply. “And I preferred seeing you assigned to it than some randomly selected twenty-three-year-old douchebro wearing a lieutenant’s bar.”
He drove on unapologetically.
“You want—what’s your friend’s name? Derr? You want him trying to crack COP Vega? I decided you had as good a shot as anyone of getting it done. And I obviously was right.”
Black shook his head wearily. They walked.
“Why not just get me alone and tell me what you knew?”
“Not so simple.”
“You talked to Danny and Bosch.”
“Bosch, I just passed a note to in the courtyard,” Pyne admonished. “Danny was, uh, easier to communicate with. You, that’s tricky without blowing my cover.”