twice more, then shook his head slowly, sighing.
'Well,' Tommy said.
'Back home I'd probably claim these items were all seized illegally, without due process.'
'Now, I'm not thinking that's an argument likely to work here and now.
Tommy,' Townsend said.
'Maybe back home, but-' Tommy interrupted him.
'But not here. You're right about that. Now about that list?'
Townsend reached into his shirt breast pocket and removed a piece of paper containing ten names and their hut locations. He handed it over to Tommy, who accepted it, without looking at the names, sliding it into his own shirt pocket.
'I suppose it is premature to start talking about sentencing,' he said slowly.
'I mean, I think I managed today to prevent a lynching from taking place. But we should discuss the possibilities given the likely outcome, don't you think, captain?' With a defeated look in his eyes.
Tommy swung his hand over the array of evidence.
'Why, Tommy, please call me Walker. And yes, I do believe that is premature, as you say. But I am most willing to have these discussions at a later point. Maybe on Monday afternoon, what do you think?'
'Thanks, Walker. I'll get back to you on that. And thanks for being so reasonable about all this. I think Major Clark is-' Townsend interrupted.
'A mite difficult? Temperamental, perhaps?'
He laughed and Tommy, smiling falsely, joined him.
'That's for sure,' he said.
'The major has been in the bag too damn long. As have we all, I suppose, because maybe one minute's a minute too long.
But he and the colonel mostly. Far, far too long, I'd say. And too long for you, too. Tommy, from what I've been told.'
Tommy patted his chest where the list was now located.
'Well,' he said, stepping back.
'Thanks again. I'm back to work.'
Walker Townsend gave a small nod and reached for his crossword puzzle.
'Well, then, you need anything from the prosecution,-Tommy, you just feel welcome to come see me anytime, day or night, at your convenience.'
'I appreciate that,' Tommy said. Liar, he thought to himself.
He made a small, false-friendly wave, and turned quickly.
He took in a razored, long breath of cool air, thinking that for the first time since the moment he'd viewed Trader Vic's body stuffed into the filthy Abort, he'd just seen hard evidence instead of mere words, no matter how forcefully spoken, that persuaded him that Lincoln Scott was absolutely innocent of the airman's murder.
The luminous dial on the watch Lydia had given him read ten minutes past midnight when Tommy gingerly slipped from the relative warmth of his bunk and felt the cold floor penetrate through his thin, oft-damp wool socks. He perched on the edge of the bed for an instant, like a diver waiting for the right moment to launch himself toward the water.
The night sounds of the bunk room surrounded him with a steady familiarity, the same snores, coughs, whimperings, and wheezes coming from men he'd known for months and yet thought he hardly knew at all.
The darkness seemed to envelop him, and he fought off a momentary, unsettled panicky sense, some of the leftover residue of his claustrophobia. The nights always seemed to be as close as the closet he'd shut himself into as a child. It took a conscious force of will to remind himself that the bunk-room darkness wasn't the same.
One of the guard tower searchlights swept across the outside window, boarded to the night, the strong light penetrating the cracks in the wooden shutters for a few seconds, traveling across the far wall. He welcomed the light; it helped to orient him to where he was and push away the childhood nightmare memories that dogged him in all tight, dark spaces.
Reaching down beneath the bunk, he found his boots.
Then, with his left hand, he located his leather flight jacket and the stub of a candle fixed into an empty processed-meat tin can. He did not light the candle, preferring to wait for the next searchlight sweep, which would provide him with just enough light to slip from the bunk through the door and out into the hut's central corridor.
Tommy did not have to wait long for the light to sweep past. As it threw its filmy yellow brightness across the room, he rose, boots, jacket, and candle in hand, took three quick strides to the door, and slipped through. He stopped in the corridor for an instant, listening behind him, making certain that he had arisen without waking any of the other men in his room. Silence, save for the routine noises of sleep, surrounded him. He reached into his pants pocket and removed a single match, which he scraped on the wall and which burst into flame. He lit the candle, and moving like some ghostly apparition, he tiptoed down the corridor, heading steadily toward Lincoln Scott's room.
The black flier was asleep in a heap in the solitary bunk, but the pressure of Tommy's hand on his shoulder made him lurch upright, and for a moment Tommy thought Lincoln Scott was going to throw one of his lethal-looking right crosses in his direction, as Scott twisted in the bed, groaning obscenities.
'Quiet!' Tommy whispered.
'It's me. Hart.'
He held the candle up to his face.
'Jesus, Hart,' Lincoln Scott muttered.
'I thought…'
'What?'
'I don't know. Trouble.'
'Maybe I am,' Tommy continued, speaking softly.
Scott swung his feet out of the bunk.
'What're you doing here, anyway?'
'An experiment,' Tommy replied. He grinned.
'A little reenactment.'
'What do you mean?'
'Simple,' Tommy said, still speaking softly.
'Let's pretend this is the night Vic died. First you show me exactly how you got up and moved around on that night. Then we're going to try to figure out where Vic went before he landed nice and dead in the Abort' Scott's Clark head nodded.
'Makes sense,' he said briskly, shaking sleep from his eyes.
'What time is it?'
'A little after midnight.'
Scott rubbed a hand across his face, moving his head up and down.
'That would be about right,' he said.
'I don't have a clock, so there was no way for me to tell for certain what the time was. But it was pitch black and the place was quiet and it seems to me that would be about right. Maybe a little earlier or an hour or so later, but not much more. Certainly not close to dawn.'
'Just before dawn was when his body was discovered.'
'Well, I was up earlier. I'm sure of it.'
'Okay,' Tommy said.
'So, you got up…'
'This is more or less where my bunk was,' Scott continued.
