“What about the thugs tonight? Have you run into them before?”
“Not until this,” he says. “You hadn’t shown up at the range for a while, so I decided to catch up with you. I was outside during your meeting with Englewood, and that’s when the Hummers rolled up. One of them got out and put something on your car, under the bumper—” I spring out of my chair, but he calms me with a smile. “Don’t worry, it’s not there anymore. After they pulled out, I moved it to another car. That’s why the second Hummer wasn’t on the scene. It was following the wrong signal.”
When they pulled alongside me and shot out the window, Jeff was taken by surprise. Trailing in his own car, he hung back as far as he could, then passed us by once I’d skidded down the embankment. He parked and doubled back, not sure how exactly to help. “I figured we were headed for the O.K. Corral.” Then inspiration struck. He saw that the Hummer’s keys were in the ignition and decided to take it.
“I wasn’t thinking too far ahead,” he says. “It didn’t occur to me they’d think I was you. I just thought that without their ride, they’d be sitting ducks when the cops arrived.”
“They would’ve been,” I say, “assuming I’d made the call.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Why do you think? That would have been game over for me. We’ve had a shakeup in my shop, and I’m precariously placed at the moment. This would have been just the excuse they needed to clip my wings down to the nub.”
“Well,” he says, “what do we do now?”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, his eyes full of trust and expectation. And I look back, seeing him in a new light entirely. The feat of tactical mimicry he’d pulled off on the range, the mature cynicism that comes from battlefield experience (something I admire because, despite my hitch in the Army, I never had any), the bravery he showed tonight—all of that goes transparent, revealing the youth and uncertainty underneath. Like a spy in a Le Carré novel, he’s been out in the cold and now he’s looking to me for instructions, as if I have the power to bring him back into the light.
“You’ve got to stay out of this,” I say. “I appreciate what you did tonight, but if you keep going down this path”—I wave my hand to encompass the surreal surroundings—“I’m afraid you’ll get into some serious trouble.”
“I’m already in. There’s no going back for me. I’ve been in this for months, keeping my head down and my eyes open, biding my time until I can hit back where it hurts.”
“You can’t, Jeff. It’s not your job. You’ve got to leave this to the police.”
“The police are who killed him.”
“That’s not . . . You’re not looking at the whole picture. Nesbitt drew first. He fired first. Whatever the rumors are on the Internet, those cops didn’t assassinate him.”
“Yeah,” he says, “and those guys tonight didn’t come after you. It was just a fender bender, right? Wrong place at the wrong time. You don’t get it. You still have blinders on. It’s time to wake up and see what’s happening in this country. If tonight didn’t do the trick, what’s it gonna take?”
It’s so late it’s early. Despite my warning that I might be out well past midnight, Charlotte will be worried about me. I should have called. If I do it now, though, I risk waking her up if she’s managed to get to sleep. Look at me, finding more excuses not to pick up the phone.
I rise to my feet, tucking the file under my arm.
“Lemme see that picture again,” he says.
I hand it over and he studies the faces like he’s committing them to memory.
“There’s one thing more I can tell you about this woman. Hilda, you called her? I liked her. She reminded me a lot of my own mom. Maybe she felt the same. After Mr. Nesbitt got shot, she did call me. Just checking to see if I was all right. This was after the others caught up to me and burgled my place. She gave me the address of somewhere I could hole up. A safe house, she said. But to be honest with you, I didn’t know if I could trust her. And I already had this scoped out.” He sweeps his hand through the air, indicating the garage.
“Do you remember where this safe house was?”
He goes to the table where his books are stacked and hands me The Foxhole Atheist. “You were flipping through it just a minute a go. It’ll be somewhere in the readings for April.”
I skim the section until I find a handwritten note on the entry for April 14, a page with the heading COMFORT IN LIES IS NO COMFORT AT ALL. Down the inside margin, scrawled in blue ink, is the address of a Midtown apartment tower.
I start to tear out the page.
“Don’t,” he says. “Just take it with you. I have another copy, and it’s such a good book. You should read it.”
I slip the book into my jacket pocket, then give the garage a final once-over. There’s nothing more I can do at the moment.
“Hey,” he says, “I’m still in this.” Issuing a challenge.
“Give me your number.” I program him into my phone, then outline the various numbers he can use to get in touch with me. Although I realize it will do no good, I warn him to keep his nose clean anyway. “Wait until I get back in touch, Jeff. Can you at least do that?”
He answers with a noncommittal shrug.
As I leave, the dead bolts start turning behind me.
Interlude : 1986
I ran into Magnum on base fairly regularly after our first conversation, but we always kept our distance. Sometimes I’d pretend like I didn’t see him. Other times he’d acknowledge me with a far-off nod. Though we never talked, over time we were coming to understand each other better. I was conscious of his presence even when he wasn’t there.
This was some kind of test, I decided. Magnum was keeping an eye on me to see what I was made of. After all, he had told me things he probably had no right to reveal. Had he divined something in me—some kind of trustworthiness or cunning—that suggested there was no danger in opening up?
“I’m a talent scout,” he’d said. And I was a willing recruit.
Whenever scuttlebutt on base touched on the doings of Magnum and his cabana boys, Sgt. Crewes reported everything in thrilling detail. He kept an ear to the ground, presumably on Shattuck’s orders, though he never said as much. According to the Spanish-speaking master sergeant, Magnum’s men were Uruguayans, or possibly Argentines. They were junior officers of similar rank to one another with the exception of César, who gave orders and never seemed to get his hands dirty. Unlike the others, César also had the run of the town. He’d been observed sampling the Leesville night life, such as it was, doling out hundred-dollar bills like he had an endless supply. The whole group had come direct from Ft. Benning, meaning they were School of the Americas alumni. Crewes had to explain to me what that meant.
Unfortunately the sergeant’s intel was low-grade product, spiked with implausible rumors.
“One of them’s missing,” he revealed one afternoon. “They’re keeping everything hushed up, but the word is, he took a nosedive out of a Huey.”
“One of the cabana boys? He fell out of a chopper?”
“More likely he was pushed,” the sergeant said, a gleam in his eye. “It’s all over base.”
By “all over base,” he meant the tight-knit circle of long-serving NCOs who were the only soldiers who mattered to Sgt. Crewes. I was incredulous.
“You’re saying one of them was thrown out of the copter—for what? To demonstrate how it’s done? Let me guess. Nobody actually saw this, but they heard it from someone who did. The Huey pilot will never turn up, and neither will the crew, but that doesn’t stop the word from getting around.”
“What’s your problem?”
I stiffened.
“Let me rephrase that,” he said. “What’s your problem, sir?”
“My problem is, you’re supposed to be a sergeant, but you gossip like an old woman.”
The words were out before I could stop them. I paused and swallowed hard, bracing myself from the reaction.
Crewes cocked his head like a pointer catching the scent of the fox.
“Oh,” he said to the air over our heads. “I think I know what the problem is now. Somebody has a crush.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s all those secret meetings,” he said, still talking to the ceiling. “Only the major already laid down the law on that point.”
He knew.
Crewes looked me in the eye and grinned. “I’m just saying, you’d better watch yourself, Lieutenant. Things aren’t always what they seem. And neither are people.”
———
The next time I spotted Magnum on base, he was coming out of the PX. I made a beeline for him, still shaken by the sergeant’s warning. Our paths would have crossed in the parking lot, but at the final moment I veered away, spooked. A few steps behind Magnum came a warrant officer assigned to our company, one of our criminal investigators. He looked preoccupied and nondescript, the way you would if you were tailing somebody.
Maybe he had just been doing some shopping. But I doubted it. I bent down between two cars to tighten my bootlaces, letting both of them pass. Then I headed off in the opposite direction, sweat blooming on my brow.
That night, dressed in jeans and a pullover, I made a round of the Leesville clubs. Since I’d grown up in Houston, there wasn’t much Sleezville’s bars and nightclubs and strip joints could do to shock me. Besides, I was moderate in my vices and preferred to indulge them outside the public eye. In the hot, intermingling crowd, the thumping music, the alluring shadows, I became too self-conscious ever to lose myself. I was an observer, an all-seeing eye. Sometimes that was all the escape I needed.
I passed the night in a series of dank settings, matte-black walls and jury-rigged stage lights, local bands offering a semblance of live music, half the crowd probably underage. Although I recognized a few faces, I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. I thought about the girl I’d met in Alexandria and taken to the movies. I thought about the girl in the blue gown at the ball in Austin, too, her strange and lofty world so different from mine. Mostly I thought about Magnum and the way he’d led me on and groomed me. And the fact that, whatever he was up to, it was enough to infuriate an officer like Shattuck.
Past midnight I decided to call it quits. Out in the parking lot I recognized the Buick. Glancing around and seeing no one, I decided to walk over. Through the tinted glass I couldn’t tell whether anyone was inside the car. As I approached, the passenger door flung open. I took this as an invitation and went for it.
I had plenty I wanted to say to Magnum. The words lined up behind my teeth like paratroopers ready for the big jump. As I ducked down, a girl’s bare leg touched the ground. She rolled a little and propelled herself from the passenger seat, running smack into me. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but she almost knocked me over. All I got was a glimpse of streaked mascara, the smell of alcohol on her breath, and a fleeting sob. She was past me then, stumbling and confused, turning backward to see what she’d struck. In the streetlight her face glowed amber. Her hair was chopped in a bob and there was a stud in her nostril—a strange sight in those days. Then she was gone.
I watched her, then leaned through the open passenger door. As I did, the driver got out. We faced each other across the roof of the Buick. He lit one of his thin cigars.
“You,” he said, exhaling smoke. “The policeman. From the base.”
He spoke in a low vibrating purr, the kind of voice he might use with a woman. He rested his elbows on the car and gazed up at the night sky.
“What an evening!”
“You want to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.
“This place,” he said, waving the cigar. “It’s not like my home.”
As he sighed, I felt an anger boiling inside me. Despite his aristocratic airs, César looked like he could take care of himself. But I reckoned he was ten, fifteen years older than me, and all those cigars couldn’t have helped his conditioning. I started thinking of what I’d like to do to him, realizing this was what it felt like to snap.
“Why did that girl take off like that? What were you doing to her?”
I didn’t wait to hear the answer. I was already making my move, rounding the back of the Buick so I wouldn’t have the open door between us. He watched, but that was all.
“Are you upset about that puta?” he asked, calm as ice. “It was not me doing anything to her, quite the other way around. Anyway, that was not the reason for the trouble. There was a disagreement over the price.”
My fist was half cocked. He looked at it, amused.
“You understand what I am saying?” he asked. “She was just a whore.”
What was I doing here? What right did I have—? I paused, then lowered my hand. The moment was gone.
“Come,” he said. “I have heard all about you. A drink, yes?”
He closed the car door and gestured toward the club. Only after he’d stepped past me and turned did I realize he was inviting me inside.
“What do you take me for?” I said. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“For a drink, yes? There are plenty of them to go around in there. You don’t get angry over just one.”
“What?”
“The whore,” he said, smiling. “I will show you. Come on.”
It was all an act, I realized. The crossed signals, the failure to communicate. For all his smiling bonhomie, he couldn’t get the reptilian calculation out of his eyes. He would put a knife in me first chance. All he was doing was trying to decide where to slide it in.
“Come,” he said.
I left without turning my back on him, then spent the night dreaming of that mole on his face and the glacier underneath his smile.
CHAPTER 17
The next morning, with the sun blazing through the half-open blinds and the clock on my nightstand reading a quarter past ten, I roll over to find Charlotte long gone, the sheets cool, the damp of her morning shower all but dissipated. It’s a strange feeling, sleeping in. Nowhere to be, no one expecting me. I’ve slept on my right side, intermittently aware of the numbness in my left leg. Now, as I test my foot on the wood floor, a dull ache radiates through my thigh and into my lower back. I swallow more pills and go downstairs.
As I brew coffee, I notice the back door ajar. In a rush, Charlotte must have neglected to pull it closed. The problem with an old Victorian house is that no matter how much of the woodwork is restored and replaced, fluctuations in temperature cause what remains to expand and contract. In the summer heat, none of our doors seem to fit their frames anymore. I shove the door closed, then use the keypad on the wall to arm the security system.
For years we did without one, not wanting to tamper too much with the aesthetic, but when the sanctity of our home was violated last year and my wife was attacked by a maniac named David Bayard in our bedroom, we decided there were things more important than the historical character of an old house. If it hadn’t been for Carter, she might have been killed. I was hours away, pursuing a lead in New Orleans, while he was upstairs over the garage. Now that the Robbs have moved out, I’m grateful Charlotte spends her days away from home.
We’re on the grid, in Jeff’s terms. Easy to find. If the men from last night want to catch up with me, it won’t be too hard.
With a mug in one hand, I settle down in front of the computer, sifting through search results until I’ve located the video from Nesbitt’s shooting that’s all over the Internet. The resolution on most of the copies is pretty poor, but after a string of misses I find one that’s not too bad, complete with subtitles to help with the grainy audio, probably added by a helpful news desk. I download the video and copy it onto a USB drive, which I take into the living room and plug into the flat screen. It takes some trial and error, but within a couple of minutes I’m reclining on the couch, watching Nesbitt’s death clip again and again.
I wouldn’t be doing this if Englewood hadn’t mentioned Reg
Keller’s name. Wilcox’s assurance that the shooting was justified is enough for me. Even without it, I have never questioned what really happened. Nesbitt drew and fired. Case closed. Corrupt cops exist, but they typically fall into two categories: cops on the pad and cops exceeding their authority. Sometimes the lines blur. A guy taking kickbacks will compensate by going extra hard on crime, busting heads to balance his own sense of guilt. There aren’t many cops, I reckon, who would cold-bloodedly execute a man on orders. Not in front of a dashboard camera.
To my eyes, everything looks right. The subtitles tag the dialogue with the names of each uniform. The rookie is Farouk, his training officer Silvestri. I’ve never met either one. In the opening frames, a vintage Mercedes 450SL, signature ride of the ’80s oil boom in Houston, is pulled over on the curb, lit by the patrol car’s powerful spotlight. The back of a man’s head is visible through the rear window. Farouk advances on the driver’s side, his torso stiff and upright, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. On the passenger side, Silvestri carries himself more relaxed, scanning the car with an offhand flashlight.
“What’s going on here? What is this?”
Nesbitt’s already edgy. Farouk glances toward Silvestri, just a microscopic turn, probably looking for reassurance. Then he launches into his patter, his voice even and reassuring. He requests identification, and Nesbitt responds by demanding to know why he’s been pulled over. When Farouk asks again, Nesbitt snaps at him.
“Who put you up to this? You think I don’t see what’s going on here?”
He sounds crazy, frankly. Delusional. And the rookie takes this in stride, aware that people are strange and you can never predict how they’ll react. Silvestri crouches down a little for a better look into the car. I can’t see his face, but judging by his body language, he’s still not overly concerned. He’s a T.O. He’s seen it all before. It would take a lot to rattle a man like him.
“I will not submit to this. I’m under no obligation to cooperate.”
Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) Page 17