by Lee Child
“Your husband not here?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Where is he?”
She didn’t answer.
“My guess is he’s in the hospital,” Summer said. “Am I right?”
Elena just looked at her.
“Mr. Trifonov helped you,” I said. “Now you need to help him.”
She said nothing.
“If he wasn’t here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That’s the situation. So I need to know which it was.”
She said nothing.
“This is very, very important,” I said.
“What if both things were bad?” she asked.
“The two things don’t compare,” I said. “Believe me. Not even close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?”
She didn’t answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and education on the tube.
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” she said. “Mr. Trifonov just came here and took my husband away.”
“When?”
“The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a letter from my brother in Sofia.”
I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at Summer. She nodded. Easy.
“How long was he here?”
“Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why.”
“And that was it?”
She nodded.
“What was he wearing?”
“A leather jacket. Jeans.”
“What kind of car was he in?”
“I don’t know what it’s called. Red, and low. A sports car. It made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes.”
“OK,” I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved toward the door.
“Will my husband come back?” Elena said.
I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty, shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes, and the five years with GRU.
“I seriously doubt it,” I said.
We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine. I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire cage.
“Where did you leave the guy?” I asked him.
“On the road to Wilmington,” he said.
“When?”
“Three o’clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and called 911. I didn’t give my name.”
“You spent three hours on him?”
He nodded, slowly. “I wanted to be sure he understood the message.”
Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned west and then north toward Wilmington. We passed the tourist sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It was mostly two-story and had an ambulance entrance with a broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them in my pocket.
“What was the guy’s name?” I asked him.
“Pickles,” he said.
The three of us walked in together and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is, it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.
“Early morning of January fifth,” I said. “Sometime after three o’clock, there was an admission here.”
The guy riffed through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.
“Male or female?” he said.
“Male.”
He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the other all the way out.
“John Doe,” he said. “Indigent male, no ID, no insurance, claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road.”
“That’s our guy,” I said.
“Your guy?” he said, looking at my uniform.
“We might be able to take care of his bill,” I said.
He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards, like he was thinking, One down, two hundred to go.
“He’s in post-op,” he said. He pointed toward the elevator. “Second floor.”
He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my badge.
“Pickles,” I said.
She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across the hallway.
“Five minutes only,” she said. “He’s very sick.”
Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room’s door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn’t see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital’s radiography budget all by himself.
I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.
“You two wait outside,” I said.
Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.
“How are you, asshole?” I said.
The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.
“That was the man,” he said. “Right there. He did this to me.”
“Did what to you?”
“He shot me in the legs.”
I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been kneecapped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.
“Front or side?” I said.
“Side,” he said.
“Front is worse,” I said. “You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Didn’t you? I just met your wife.”
“Foreign bitch.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s her own fault. She won’t do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am. Watch.”
I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.
“He is very sick,” I said.
We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.
“I apologize,” I said.
“Am I in trouble?” he said.
“Not with me,” I said. “You’re my kind of guy. But you’re very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different.”
He smiled, briefly. He was calm.
“I trained five years with GRU,” he said. “I know how to kill people. And I know how no
t to.”
sixteen
We gave Trifonov his Steyr back and let him out at the Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and then legged it to his room and picked up his book. Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We parked the Humvee and walked back to my office. Summer went straight to the copy of the gate log. It was still taped to the wall, next to the map.
“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They were the only other people who left the post that night.”
“They went north,” I said. “If you want to say they threw the briefcase out of the car, then you have to agree they went north. They didn’t go south to Columbia.”
“OK,” she said. “So the same guy didn’t do Carbone and Brubaker. There’s no connection. We just wasted a lot of time.”
“Welcome to the real world,” I said.
The real world got a whole lot worse when my phone rang twenty minutes later. It was my sergeant. The woman with the baby son. She had Sanchez on the line, calling from Fort Jackson. She put him through.
“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?”
&nb
sp; “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 on 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.