by Tom Clancy
Trooper First Class Ben Freeland was on his regular patrol routine. Every so often something real would happen, and he figured it was his job to know the area, every inch of it, every farm and crossroads, so that if he ever did get a really major call he’d know the quickest way to it. Four years out of the Academy at Pikesville, the Somerset native was thinking about advancement to corporal when he spotted a pedestrian on Postbox Road near a hamlet with the unlikely name of Dames Quarter. That was unusual. Everybody rode down here. Even kids started using bikes from an early age, often starting to drive well under age, which was another of the graver violations he dealt with on a monthly basis. He spotted her from a mile away—the land was very flat—and took no special note until he’d cut that distance by three quarters. She—definitely a female now—was walking unevenly. Another hundred yards of approach told him that she wasn’t dressed like a local. That was odd. You didn’t get here except by car. She was also walking in zigzags, even the length of her stride changing from one step to another, and that meant possible public intoxication—a huge local infraction, the trooper grinned to himself—and that meant he ought to pull over and give her a look. He eased the big Ford over to the gravel, bringing it to a smooth and safe stop fifty feet from her, and got out as he’d been taught, putting his uniform Stetson on and adjusting his pistol belt.
“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “Where you heading. Ma’am?”
She stopped after a moment, looking at him with eyes that belonged on another planet. “Who’re you?”
The trooper leaned in close. There was no alcohol on her breath. Drugs were not much of a problem here yet, Freeland knew. That might have just changed.
“What’s your name?” he asked in a more commanding tone.
“Xantha, with a ex,” she answered, smiling.
“Where are you from. Xantha?”
“Aroun’.”
“Around where?”
“‘Lanta.”
“You’re a long way from Atlanta.”
“I know that!” Then she laughed. “He dint know I had more.” Which, she thought, was quite a joke, and a secret worth confiding. “Keeps them in my brassiere.”
“What’s that now?”
“My pills. Keep them in my brassiere, and he dint know.”
“Can I see them?” Freeland asked, wondering a lot of things and knowing that he had a real arrest to make this day.
She laughed as she reached in. “You step back, now.”
Freeland did so. There was no sense alerting her to anything, though his right hand was now on his gunbelt just in front of his service revolver. As he watched, Xantha reached inside her mostly unbuttoned blouse and came out with a handful of red capsules. So that was that. He opened the trunk of his car and reached inside the evidence kit he carried to get an envelope.
“Why don’t you put them in here so you don’t lose any?”
“Okay!” What a helpful fellow this policeman was.
“Can I offer you a ride, Ma’am?”
“Sure. Tired a’ walkin’.”
“Well, why don’t you just come right along?” Policy required that he handcuff such a person, and as he helped her into the back of the car, he did. She didn’t seem to mind a bit.
“Where we goin’?”
“Well, Xantha, I think you need a place to lie down and get some rest. So I think I’ll find you one, okay?” He already had a dead-bang case of drug possession, Freeland knew, as he pulled back onto the road.
“Burt and the other two restin’. too, ’cept they ain’t gonna wake up.”
“What’s that, Xantha?”
“He killed their ass. bang bang bang.” She mimed with her hand. Freeland saw it in the mirror, nearly going off the road as he did so.
“Who’s that?”
“He a white boy. dint get his name, dint see his face neither, but he killed their ass, bang bang bang.”
Holy shit.
“Where?”
“On the boat.” Didn’t everybody know that?
“What boat?”
“The one out on the water, fool!” That was pretty funny, too.
“You shittin’ me, girl?”
“An’ you know the funny thing, he left all the drugs right there, too, the white boy did. ‘Cept’n he was green.”
Freeland didn’t have much idea what this was all about, but he intended to find out just as fast as he could. For starters he lit up his rotating lights and pushed the car just as fast as the big 427 V-8 would allow, heading for the State Police Barracks “V” in Westover. He ought to have radioed ahead, but it wouldn’t really have accomplished much except to convince his captain that he was the one on drugs.
“Yacht Springer, take a look to your port quarter.”
Kelly lifted his mike. “Anybody I know?” he asked without looking.
“Where the H have you been, Kelly?” Oreza asked.
“Business trip. What do you care?”
“Missed ya,” was the answer. “Slow down some.”
“Is it important? I have to get someplace, Portagee.”
“Hey, Kelly, one seaman to another, back down, okay?”
Had he not known the man . . . no, he had to play along regardless of who it was. Kelly cut his throttles, allowing the cutter to pull alongside in a few minutes. Next he’d be asked to stop for a boarding, which Oreza had every legal right to do, and trying to evade would solve nothing. Without being so bidden, Kelly idled his engines and was soon laying to Without asking permission, the cutter eased alongside and Oreza hopped aboard.
“Hey, Chief,” the man said by way of a greeting.
“What gives?”
“I was down your sandbar twice in the last couple of weeks looking to share a beer with you, but you weren’t home.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to make you unfit for duty.”
“Kinda lonely out here with nobody to harass.” Suddenly it was clear that both men were uneasy, but neither one knew why the other was. “Where the hell were you?”
“I had to go out of the country. Business,” Kelly answered. It was clear that he’d go no further than that.
“Fair enough. Be around for a while?”
“I plan to be, yeah.”
“Okay, maybe I’ll stop by next week and you can tell me some lies about being a Navy chief.”
“Navy chiefs don’t have to lie. You need some pointers on seamanship?”
“In a pig’s ass! Maybe I ought to give you a safety inspection right now!”
“I thought this was a friendly visit,” Kelly observed, and both men became even more uncomfortable. Oreza tried to cover it with a smile.
“Okay, I’ll go easy on you.” But that didn’t work. “Catch you next week. Chief.”
They shook hands, but something had changed. Oreza waved for the forty-one-footer to come back in, and he jumped aboard like the pro he was. The cutter pulled away without a further word.
Well, that makes sense. Kelly advanced his throttles anyway.
Oreza watched Springer continue north, wondering what the hell was going on. Out of the country, he’d said. For sure his boat hadn’t been anywhere on the Chesapeake—but where, then? Why were the cops so interested in the guy? Kelly a killer? Well, he’d gotten that Navy Cross for something. UDT guy, that much Oreza knew. Beyond that, just a good guy to have a beer with, and a serious seaman in his way. It sure got complicated when you stopped doing search-and-rescue and started doing all that other cop stuff, the quartermaster told himself, heading southwest for Thomas Point. He had a phone call to make.
“So what happened?”
“Roger, they knew we were coming,” Ritter answered with a steady look.
“How, Bob?” MacKenzie asked.
“We don’t know yet.”
“Leak?”
Ritter reached into his pocket and extracted a photocopy of a document and handed it across. The original was written in Vietnamese. Under the text of the photocopy was the handwritte
n translation. In the printed English were the words “green bush.”
“They knew the name?”
“That’s a security breakdown on their side, Roger, but, yes, it appears that they did. I suppose they planned to use that information for any of the Marines they might have captured. That sort of thing is good for breaking people down in a hurry. But we got lucky.”
“I know. Nobody got hurt.”
Ritter nodded. “We put a guy on the ground in early. Navy SEAL, very good at what he does. Anyway, he was watching things when the NVA reinforcements came in. He’s the guy who blew the mission off. Then he just walked off the hill.” It was always far more dramatic to understate things, especially for someone who’d smelled gunsmoke in his time.
That, MacKenzie thought, was worth a whistle. “Must be rather a cool customer.”
“Better than that,” Ritter said quietly. “On the way out he bagged the Russian who was talking to our people, and the camp commander. We have them in Winchester. Alive,” Ritter added with a smile.
“That’s how you got the dispatch? I figured SigInt,” MacKenzie said, meaning signals intelligence. “How’d he manage that?”
“As you said, a cool customer.” Ritter smiled. “That’s the good news.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear the bad news.”
“We have an indicator that the other side might want to eliminate the camp and everyone in it.”
“Jesus . . . Henry is over in Paris right now,” MacKenzie said.
“Wrong approach. If he brings this up. even in one of the informal sessions, they’ll just deny, and it might spook them so much that they’ll try to make sure they can deny it.” It was well known that the real work at such conferences was done during the breaks, not when people had to address the issues formally over the conference table, the very shape of which had taken so much time.
“True. What then?”
“We’re working through the Russians. We have a pipeline for that. I initiated the contact myself.”
“Let me know how it turns out?”
“You bet.”
“Thanks for letting me talk to you,” Lieutenant Ryan said.
“What’s this all about?” Sam Rosen asked. They were in his office—not a large one, and the room was crowded with four people in it. Sarah and Sandy were there, too.
“It’s about your former patient—John Kelly.” That news didn’t come as much of a surprise, Ryan saw. “I need to talk to him.”
“What’s stopping you?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know where he is. I was kind of hoping you folks might.”
“About what?” Sarah asked.
“About a series of killings,” Ryan answered at once, in the hope of shocking them.
“Killing who?” This question came from the nurse.
“Doris Brown, for one, and several others.”
“John didn’t hurt her—” Sandy said before Sarah Rosen was able to touch her hand.
“Then you know who Doris Brown is,” the detective observed, just a little too quickly.
“John and I have become . . . friends,” Sandy said. “He’s been out of the country for the past couple of weeks. He couldn’t have killed anybody.”
Ouch, Ryan thought. That was both good and bad news. He’d overplayed his hand on Doris Brown, though the nurse’s reaction to the accusation had resulted in a little too much emotional response. He’d also just had a speculation confirmed as fact, however. “Out of the country? Where? How do you know?”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to say where. I’m not supposed to know that.”
“What do you mean by that?” the cop asked in surprise.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to say, sorry.” The way she answered the question showed sincerity rather than evasion.
What the hell did that mean? There was no answering that one, and Ryan decided to go on. “Someone named Sandy called the Brown house in Pittsburgh. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Officer,” Sarah said, “I’m not sure I understand why you’re asking all these questions.”
“I’m trying to develop some information, and I want you to tell your friend that he needs to talk with me.”
“This is a criminal investigation?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And you’re asking us questions,” Sarah observed. “My brother is a lawyer. Should I ask him to come here? You seem to be asking us what we know about some murders. You’re making me nervous. I have a question—are any of us under suspicion of anything?”
“No, but your friend is.” If there was anything Ryan didn’t need now, it was to have an attorney present.
“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “If you think John might have done something wrong, and you want us to find him for you, you’re saying that you think we know where he is, right? Doesn’t that make us possible . . . helpers, accessories is the word, isn’t it?”
Are you? Ryan would have liked to ask. He decided on, “Did I say that?”
“I’ve never had questions like this before, and they make me nervous,” the surgeon told his wife. “Call your brother.”
“Look, I have no reason to believe that any of you has done anything wrong. I do have reason to believe that your friend has. What I’m telling you is this: you’ll be doing him a favor by telling him to call me.”
“Who’s he supposed to have killed?” Sam pressed.
“Some people who deal drugs.”
“You know what I do?” Sarah asked sharply. “What I spend most of my time on here, you know what it is?”
“Yes, Ma’am, I do. You work a lot with addicts.”
“If John’s really doing that, maybe I ought to buy him a gun!”
“Hurts when you lose one, doesn’t it?” Ryan asked quietly, setting her up.
“You bet it does. We’re not in this business to lose patients.”
“How did it feel to lose Doris Brown?” She didn’t reply, but only because her intelligence stopped her mouth from reacting as it wanted to. “He brought her to you for help, didn’t he? And you and Mrs. O’Toole here worked very hard to clean her up. You think I’m condemning you for that? But before he dropped her off with you, he killed two people. I know it. They were probably two of the people who murdered Pamela Madden, and those were his real targets. Your friend Kelly is a very tough guy, but he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. If he comes in now. it’s one thing. If he makes us catch him, it’s something else. You tell him that. You’ll be doing him a favor, okay? You’ll be doing yourselves a favor, too. I don’t think you’ve broken the law to this point. Do anything for him now except what I’ve told you, and you might be. I don’t usually warn people this way,” Ryan told them sternly. “You people aren’t criminals. I know that. The thing you did for the Brown girl was admirable, and I’ m sorry it worked out the way it did. But Kelly is out there killing people, and that’s wrong, okay? I’m telling you that just in case you might have forgotten something along the way. I don’t like druggies either. Pamela Madden, the girl on the fountain, that’s my case. I want those people in a cage; I want to watch them walk into the gas chamber. That’s my job, to see that justice happens. Not his, mine. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I think we do,” Sam Rosen answered, thinking about the surgical gloves he’d given Kelly. It was different now. Back then he’d been distant from things—emotionally close to the terrible parts, yet far away from what his friend was doing, approving it as though reading a news article on a ballgame. It was different now, but he was involved. “Tell me, how close are you to getting the people who killed Pam?”
“We know a few things.” Ryan answered without realizing that with his answer, he’d blown it after coming so close.
Oreza was back at his desk, the part of his work that he hated, and one reason he worried about striking for chief, which would entail having his own office, and becoming part of “management” instead of just being a boat-driver. Mr. English was on leave, and his
second-in-command, a chief, was off seeing to something or other, leaving him as senior man present—but it was his job anyway. The petty officer searched on his desk for the card and dialed the number.
“Homicide.”
“Lieutenant Ryan, please.”
“He’s not here.”
“Sergeant Douglas?”
“He’s in court today.”
“Okay, I’ll call back.” Oreza hung up. He looked at the clock. Pushing four in the afternoon—he’d been at the station since midnight. He pulled open a drawer and started filling out the forms accounting for the fuel he’d burned up today, making the Chesapeake Bay safe for drunks who owned boats. Then he planned to get home, get dinner, and get some sleep.
The problem was making sense out of what she said. A physician was called in from his office across the street, and diagnosed her problem as barbiturate intoxication, which wasn’t exactly news, and then went on to say that they’d just have to wait for the stuff to work its way out of her system, for which two opinions he charged the county twenty dollars. Talking to her for several hours had only made her at turns amused and annoyed, but her story hadn’t changed, either. Three people dead, bang bang bang. It was less funny to her now. She’d started remembering what Burt was like, and that talk was quite foul.
“If this girl was any higher she’d be up on the moon with the astronauts,” the Captain thought.
“Three dead people on a boat somewhere,” Trooper Freeland repeated. “Names and everything.”
“You believe it?”
“Story stays the same, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” The Captain looked up. “You like to fish out there. What’s it sound like to you, Ben?”
“Like around Bloodsworth Island.”