The Deep Zone

“You mean, almost drowned?”

“No, I mean drowned. Dead.”

“What the hell happened?”

“My old man took me fishing for bullheads in this creek. He called it fishing, anyway. Mostly it was about drinking whiskey and smoking weed. So he got drunk and stoned and fell asleep on the bank. I waded in. Five years old, you know? Creek just sucked me away, man. A guy downstream pulled me out. I wasn’t breathing. He did CPR and I came around.”

“Oh.” A story like that was pretty much a conversation stopper. But then Kathan continued.

“You know how people have dreams? So now I have this dream where I drown. It’s not a good way to go, trust me. There’s a reason we used waterboarding to get intel out of the hajis. People who think it’s all quiet and peaceful, they need to try it for themselves. Take it from one who’s been there. It feels like somebody’s pouring acid into your chest.”

“You have that dream often?”

“Often enough.”

Stikes started to say something about a dream he had, but Kathan spoke first: “He’s been gone too long.”

“Maybe it was a huge dump.”

“No. We need to look. Leave everything here except your M4. Let’s go.”

Fifteen minutes later, Stikes found him. “Kathan. Here.”

Dempsey’s body had fallen backward and lay with its legs stuck out stiffly, frozen in the spasm of death. Around his shoulders, blood had pooled into a shape that reminded Stikes of those thought balloons over cartoon characters’ heads. But Dempsey had no head. It was lying five feet away, face up, on top of its own small blood pond, still warm enough to appear bright green in the NVDs. Stikes had seen plenty of decapitations, most of them haji-done. Usually the cut edges were ragged, like steak hacked with a dull knife. Not Dempsey’s.

“Look at his neck,” Stikes said. “A scalpel could have done that. You ever seen anything like it?”

“No.”

“What the hell, Kathan? We were twenty-five mikes away. I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Me, neither. I’ll tell you this. Whoever killed him knew what they were doing. Dempsey was good at this work.”

“There’s no way anybody could sneak up on him through undergrowth like this. All those thorns and brambles scratching at your clothing, I mean,” Stikes said.

“Maybe somebody was waiting here for him,” Kathan said.

“I don’t see it. How would they know where he would be?”

“Something else, Stikes. There aren’t any tracks.”

The forest floor here was damp and soft. Their own tracks, and Dempsey’s, were clearly visible. And those three sets, with the distinctive Vibram patterns of their boot soles, were the only ones to be seen.

“This feels bad. Something’s not right here.”

They were down on one knee, facing away from each other, surveying. Through his NVDs Stikes saw the shimmering green columns of tree trunks with darker green empty space between them. Nothing moved. He listened for any sound, but except for their controlled breathing, there was nothing to hear. He sniffed the air for any dissonant scent, but nothing came.

“What do you think?” he whispered. “Narcos?”

“Could have been the federales or those Indians just as easily,” Kathan said. “My money’s on the narcos, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“What do we do with him?” Stikes asked.

“The body stays. We’ll take his comm gear and weapons,” Kathan said. Stikes thought he detected a hint of emotion in the big man’s voice, but he couldn’t be sure. It might have been fatigue.

TWENTY-SEVEN

PULLING INTO A PARKING SPACE IN HER APARTMENT BUILDING’S lot, Evvie Flemmer stabbed the brakes so sharply the old Camry’s tires screeched. She was never especially happy to be coming home, and with so much at stake now at the lab, she was especially unhappy. But after her fourth sixteen-hour day in a row, Dr. Casey had finally told her to take time off.

“And since I am aware that our definitions of ‘time off’ may vary considerably, let’s be clear that I mean sixteen hours, minimum, Evvie Flemmer. Sixteen. Do you read me?” Dr. Casey had delivered his little lecture in mock-stern tones, laying his hand on her shoulder for emphasis, but his fatherly smile never wavered as he spoke and she knew he thought he was doing a good thing.

It was after eight P.M., full dark, the parking lot washed in sodium-vapor sepia. She turned the engine off and just sat there. She was tired; he had been right about that. Not too tired to work properly, of course, but the thought of making it all the way to her apartment on the third floor was a bit daunting.

Flemmer passed through the small lobby, with its stainless steel mailboxes and blue barrels for recycling. She glanced briefly at the bulletin board where the property manager posted notices—time for parking sticker renewals, elevator maintenance, changing days for trash pickup—but there was nothing new.

She thought briefly about taking the stairs, but it was too late and she was too tired. To save money they had installed energy-saving bulbs that made riding the elevator like standing in a cube of dusk. The third-floor hallway itself was completely dark when she stepped out, but motion sensors detected her presence and turned on the lights—more dim energy savers. The hall smelled faintly of fried fish and cigarette smoke. The whole place was supposed to be nonsmoking, but of late new kinds of people had begun infiltrating the building. Sullen women with red dots on their foreheads. Hand-holding men who conversed in shouts. Pierced and tattooed families of astonishing corpulence that made her think of sideshows. Flemmer gladly would have moved, but Washington-area rents were exorbitant, and even this place stretched her $65,000 salary.

Inside her apartment, Flemmer closed the door, double-checked the locks, and hung her brown coat in the closet. She set her pocketbook on a table and stood waiting for her mind to issue some direction. At the lab she never hesitated like that because the work told her where to go and what to do; her mind broke big projects down into smaller tasks, and the tasks took her to certain places where she had to do specific things very precisely. Orchestrated, was how she thought of it, and how she liked it.

Finally she asked, out loud, “Are you hungry?” Like many who lived alone, she had acquired the habit of speaking to herself.

“Not really.”

“What, then?”

“Maybe a glass of wine would be nice.”

“Yes. Let’s have some wine.” From a box of Chablis in the refrigerator she filled a water glass halfway. She carried the glass of wine into the living-dining room, turned on a table lamp, sat on the sofa, and looked at the red paper poppies in the white vase on the coffee table. There was no television or radio—cracks in the wall of hell, was how she thought of those things. She watched the poppies and sipped wine and her mind whirred.

She thought of her parents, still out there in Oklahoma. What time would it be? About nine. Her father would be in bed already, snoring, sleep drool collecting into a dark stain on his pillow. She drank some more wine, swallowing it like water in audible gulps. She hummed “La Marsellaise” all the way through, and then halfway through again. She started to drink more wine but the glass was empty, so she filled it from the box in the refrigerator and came back to the couch.

She did not like being away from the lab. Being away from the lab made her angry. As the wine worked, she felt the anger more, and then her stomach growled. In the kitchen she heated a Stouffer’s frozen chicken a la king dinner, warmed three Parker House rolls, and slathered all with real butter. For years she had tried without success to lose weight. Finally she had seen a doctor, hoping to get some diet pills. Instead, he had told her to find out