“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 not 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?”
