Chapter

42

I pushed in through the diner door and found the place empty apart from the waitress and the old couple from Toussaint’s. They looked to be about halfway through their nightly marathon. The woman had a book, the man had a paper. Deveraux wasn’t there yet.

I told the waitress I was expecting company. I asked her for a table for four. I figured the tables for two would be cramped for a long social engagement. She set me up in a spot near the front and I headed for the bathroom.

I rinsed my face and washed my hands and forearms and elbows with hot water and soap. I ran wet fingers through my hair. I breathed in and breathed out. Adrenaline is a bitch. It doesn’t know when to quit. I flapped my hands and rolled my shoulders. I took a look in the mirror. My hair was OK. My face was clean.

There was blood on my shirt.

On the pocket. And above. And below. Not much, but some. A definite comma-shaped curl of droplets. Like it had been flung at me. Or like I had walked into a mist. Which I had. The second guy. I had hit him on the bridge of his nose. His nose had bled like a flushing toilet.

I said, “Shit,” quietly, to myself.

My old shirts were in the trash in my room.

The stores were all closed.

I edged closer to the sink and took another look in the mirror. The droplets were already drying. Turning brown. Maybe they would end up looking deliberate. Like a logo. Or a pattern. Like a single element taken from a swirling fabric. I had seen similar things. I wasn’t sure what they were called. Paisley?

I breathed in, breathed out.

Nothing to be done.

I headed back to the dining room and got there just as Deveraux stepped in through the door.

She wasn’t in uniform. She had changed her clothes. She was wearing a silver silk shirt and a black knee-length skirt. High heeled shoes. A silver necklace. The shirt was thin and tight and tiny. It was open at the top. The skirt sat at her waist. I could have spanned her waist with my hands. Her legs were bare. And slim. And long. Her hair was wet from the shower. It was loose on her shoulders. It was spilling down her back. No ponytail. No elastic band. She was smiling, all the way up to her amazing eyes.

I showed her to our table and we sat down facing each other. She was small and neat, centered on her bench. She was wearing perfume. Something faint and subtle. I liked it.

She said, “I’m sorry I’m late.”

I said, “No problem.”

She said, “You have blood on your shirt.”

I said, “Is that what it is?”

“Where did you get it?”

“Across the street from the hotel. There’s a store.”

“Not the shirt,” she said. “The blood. You didn’t cut yourself shaving.”

“You told me not to.”

“I know,” she said. “I like you like that.”

“You look great too.”

“Thank you. I decided to quit early. I went home to change.”

“I see that.”

“I live in the hotel.”

“I know.”

“Room seventeen.”

“I know.”

“Which has a balcony overlooking the street.”

“You saw?”

“Everything,” she said.

“Then I’m surprised you didn’t break the date.”

“Is it a date?”

“It’s a dinner date.”

She said, “You didn’t let them hit you first.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I had.”

“True,” she said, and smiled. “You were pretty good.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“But you’re killing my budget. Pellegrino and Butler are getting overtime to haul them away. I wanted them gone before the hotel folks finish their dinner. Voters don’t like mayhem in the streets.”

The waitress came by. She brought no menus. Deveraux had been eating there three times a day for two years. She knew the menu. She asked for the cheeseburger. So did I, with coffee to drink. The waitress made a note and went away.

I said, “You had the cheeseburger yesterday.”

Deveraux said, “I have it every day.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Every day I do the same things and eat the same things.”

“How do you stay thin?”

“Mental energy,” she said. “I worry a lot.”

“About what?”

“Right now about a guy from Oxford, Mississippi. That’s the guy who got shot in the thigh. The doctor brought his personal effects to my office. There was a wallet and a notebook. The guy was a journalist.”

“Big paper?”

“No, freelance. Struggling, probably. His last press pass was two years old. But Oxford has a couple of alternative papers. He was probably trying to sell something to one of them.”

“There’s a school in Oxford, right?”

Deveraux nodded again.

“Ole Miss,” she said. “About as radical as this state gets.”

“Why did the guy come here?”

“I would have loved the chance to ask him. He might have had something I could use.”

The waitress came back with my coffee and a glass of water for Deveraux. Behind my back I heard the old guy from the hotel grunt and turn a page in his paper.

I said, “My CO still denies there are boots on the ground outside the fence.”

Deveraux asked, “How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t know. If he’s lying to me, it will be the first time ever.”

“Maybe someone’s lying to him.”

“Such cynicism in one so young.”

“But don’t you think?”

“More than likely.”

“So how does that make you feel?”

“What are you, a psychiatrist now?”

She smiled. “Just interested. Because I’ve been there. Does it make you angry?”

“I never get angry. I’m a very placid type of a guy.”

“You looked angry twenty minutes ago. With the McKinney family.”

“That was just a technical problem. Space and time. I didn’t want to be late for dinner. I wasn’t angry, really. Well, not at first. I got a bit frustrated later. You know, mentally. I mean, when there were four of them, I gave them the chance to come back in numbers. And what did they do? They added two more guys. That’s all. They showed up with a total of six. What is that about? It’s deliberate disrespect.”

Deveraux said, “I think most people would consider six against one to be fairly respectful.”

“But I warned them. I told them they’d need more. I was trying to be fair. But they wouldn’t listen. It was like talking to the Pentagon.”

“How’s that going, by the way?”

“Not good. They’re as bad as the McKinney family.”

“Are you worried?”

“Some people are.”

“They should be. The army is going to change.”

“The Marines too, then.”

She smiled. “A little, maybe. But not much. The army is the big target. And the easy target. Because the army is boring. The Marines aren’t.”

“You think?”

“Come on,” she said. “We’re glamorous. We have a great dress uniform. We do great close-order drill. We do great funerals. You know why we do all that? Because Marines are very good at PR. And we get good advice. Our consultants are better than yours, basically. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what it comes down to. So you’ll lose a lot, and we’ll lose a little.”

“You have consultants?” I said.

“And lobbyists,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, and his want ads. The waitress brought our meals. Just like the night before. Two big cheeseburgers, two big tangles of fries. I had had the same thing for lunch. I hadn’t remembered that. But I was hungry. So I ate. And I watched Deveraux eat. Which was some kind of a threshold. It has to mean something, if you can stand to watch another person eat.

She chewed and swallowed and said, “Anyway, what else did your CO tell you?”

“That he’s having you checked out.”

She stopped eating. “Why would he?”

“To give me something to use against you.”

She smiled. “There’s not much there, I’m afraid. I was a good little jarhead. But don’t you see? They’re proving my case for me. The more desperate they get, the more I know for sure it’s some Kelham guy’s ass on the line.”

She started eating again.

I said, “My CO was also quizzing me on my mail.”

“They’re reading your letters?”

“A postcard from my brother.”

“Why?”

“They must think it might help.”

“Did it?”

“Not in the least. It was nothing.”

“They are desperate, aren’t they?”

“My CO kept apologizing about it.”

“So he should.”

“He asked if there was a code in the postcard. But really I think he was talking in code. I think he has been all along. Right back at the beginning he wasted ten minutes giving me a hard time about my hair. That’s not like him, which I think was the point. He’s telling me this isn’t him. He’s telling me he’s in the dark, under orders, doing something he doesn’t want to do.”

“Nice of him to dump his problems on you. He could have sent someone else.”

“Could he, though? Maybe this whole thing was a package deal, soup to nuts, planned up above. Like when the owner picks the team. Me and Munro. Maybe they’re getting ready to thin the herd, and we’re being given a loyalty test.”

“Munro told me he knows you by reputation.”

I nodded. “We’ve never met.”

“Reputations are dangerous things to have, in times like these.”

I said nothing.

She said, “If I asked my old buddies to check you out, what would they find?”

“Parts of it aren’t pretty,” I said.

“So this is payback time,” she said. “It’s a win-win for somebody. Either they break you or they get rid of you. You’ve got an enemy somewhere. Any idea who?”

“No,” I said.

We ate in silence for a moment, and finished up. Clean plates. Meat, bread, cheese, potatoes, all gone. I felt full. Deveraux was half my size. Or less. I didn’t know how she did it. She said, “Anyway, tell me about your brother.”

“I’d rather talk about you.”

“Me? There’s nothing to say. Carter Crossing, the Marine Corps, Carter Crossing again. That’s the story of my life. No sisters, no brothers. How many do you have?”

“Just the one.”

“Older or younger?”

“Two years older. Born way far away in the Pacific. I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

“Is he like you?”

“We’re like two alternative versions of the same person. We look alike. He’s smarter than me. I get things done better. He’s more cerebral, I’m more physical. He was good and I was bad, according to our parents. Like that.”

“What does he do for a living?”

I paused.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said.

“His job is classified?”

“Not really,” I said. “But it might give you a clue about one of the things the army is worried about here.”

She smiled. She was a very tolerant woman. She said, “Should we get pie?”

We ordered two peach pies, the same as I had eaten the night before. And coffee, for both of us, which I took to be a good sign. She wasn’t worried about being kept awake. Maybe she was planning on it. The old couple from the hotel got up and left while the waitress was still in the kitchen. They stopped by our table. No real conversation. Just a lot of nodding and smiling. They were determined to be polite. Simple economics. Deveraux was their meal ticket, and I was temporarily the icing on their cake.

The clock in my head hit ten in the evening. The pies arrived, and so did the coffee. I didn’t pay much attention to either. I spent most of my time looking at the third button on Deveraux’s shirt. I had noticed it before. It was the first one that was done up. Therefore it was the first one that would need to be undone. It was a tiny mother-of-pearl thing, silvery gray. Behind it was skin, neither pale nor dark, and very three dimensional. Left to right it curved toward me, then away from me, then toward me again. It was rising and falling as she breathed.

The waitress came by and offered more coffee. For possibly the first time in my life I turned it down. Deveraux said no, too. The waitress put the check on the table, face down, next to me. I flipped it over. Not bad. You could still eat well on a soldier’s pay, back in 1997. I dropped some bills on it and looked across at Deveraux and said, “Can I walk you home?”

She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”