I said, “Let me see. There's a fight between Cole and Bradley. Wade jumps in. Cole kills Wade. Then Cole takes Wade's gun and shoots Bradley.”
“Right.”
“And then Cole does what?”
“He hides the van, strips Bradley naked, and dumps her onto Isaac Hernandez’ truck at the morgue while he's there to pick up more specimen samples from Myers.”
I mulled that over, not liking it.
“Why not?” Chunk asked.
“Why does he only strip Bradley? Why take only her back to the morgue? If he wanted to dispose of the bodies, why risk bringing even one of them onto the loading docks at Arsenal where any number of people could have seen him? An old man carrying a naked pretty girl is going to cause some eyebrows to go up, even in this place.”
Chunk frowned under his mask. “I don't know.”
“And how does he get her onto Isaac Hernandez’ truck without Hernandez knowing it?”
“Well, Hernandez is sleeping, right? So he doesn't notice.”
“Maybe.”
Chunk checked his watch. Still forty minutes till Laurent's due back.
“What about this one?” I asked. “Wade and Bradley are jumped by those looters in the GZ.”
“Maybe,” he said. I could tell he liked that one. A light switch turned on behind his eyes.
“A small group of them surprise Wade, and he shoots them,” I said. “Or at least two of them.”
“The two you found next to the garage?”
“Right.”
“And then there are more of them? Enough to beat up Wade and take his gun?”
“Right,” I said.
“Then they kill Bradley?”
“That would explain why she's naked.”
He frowned, doesn't get it. He looked at me. What are you talking about?
I said, “When they were chasing me they knew I was a woman. They said things. What they wanted to do when they caught me.”
“Oh,” he said. And then, as it hit him, “Oh. Lily, I'm sorry.”
“It didn't happen, Chunk. Thanks to you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Of course the ME told us there was no sign of forced sexual activity, post-mortem or otherwise. And remember, she was shot while she was wearing her space suit. I think that kind of clouds up the looter theory.”
“True,” he said.
“And that still doesn't explain how Bradley's body ended up at the morgue. Those looters wouldn't have brought her here.”
“True.” Chunk leaned back in the seat and crossed his arms. I could see the muscles shifting beneath his shirt. “So where does that leave us?” he asked.
“I don't know,” I admitted. “Stuck, I guess.”
A few minutes later, Chunk's cell phone rang. He flipped it open, looked at the caller ID, and frowned.
“Treanor,” he said to me, and accepted the call.
Chunk didn't get to do a lot of talking. Most of what he said was “Yes, sir. Twenty minutes, maybe. Ten? Okay, well we're… Yes, sir. Ten minutes. Yes, sir.”
He hung up and dropped the car in gear.
“What's up?” I asked as he wheeled us toward the gates, mashing down on the gas hard enough to throw me back in the seat.
“The shit's hit the fan,” he said.
Chapter 18
News of the shortage spread fast.
By the time Chunk and I made it to the Bandera Road Food Distribution Center, a large, anxious crowd had already gathered in the parking lot outside the center, and more were pouring in every minute. I saw a thousand desperate faces, maybe more, and I imagined rumors and misinformation spreading through the crowd like a lit torch dragged over dry grass.
Treanor was there. He ordered us into riot gear.
“What happened?” I asked him. “Is it true the drop didn't come?”
“It came,” he growled. “It's just short. That's all. There's not enough for these people.”
I said, “What are we supposed to tell them? Is there another drop coming?”
“Get in your riot gear, Harris. They ask you anything, you tell them to get back to their homes. They don't like it, give them the stick if you have to.”
“Nice,” I said, the sarcasm in my voice obvious.
“You have a problem with that, Harris?”
“No, sir.”
He stared at me. “You need to watch your tone with me, Harris. You're pretty damn close to being insubordinate.”
“I'm not being insubordinate, Lieutenant. I just don't think you have anything to say worth listening to.”
His eyes went wide inside his black riot helmet, then narrowed to little slits.
“Get into your riot gear right now.” His voice was amazingly subdued considering he probably would have liked nothing better than to rip the windpipe out of my throat with his bare hands. “Do it now and report to me in five minutes.”
With that he stormed off, barking orders at anybody unlucky enough to cross his path.
There goes a major asshole.
“Why you gotta do that?” Chunk said.
“The man's an asshole.”
“I know that. Why do you have to throw it back in his face like that?”
“I'm sorry,” I said, though only for making things hard on Chunk and not for what I said to Treanor.
“Yeah, well, if he gives us a crappy post because you can't keep your smart assed remarks to-”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Riot gear.
We changed into black BDUs with reinforced knees and elbows, black jackboots, black padded gloves, and a black riot helmet made to fit over a gas mask, plus a clear plastic shield that the manufacturer guaranteed was bulletproof and a thirty-six inch black riot baton made of hickory wood.
With practice, it takes about three minutes to get dressed.
While I was putting myself together, I heard Sergeant Jennifer Langley talking to a patrol officer I didn't recognize. Langley's duty assignment was the food distribution network, so I figured she knew what she was talking about.
“We only got six boxes on the last drop,” Langley said, referring to the intermodal containers that the city's food stocks came in.
The containers are basically railroad boxcars flown in by helicopters that never land inside the walls, and once they're unloaded, they're placed on the backs of trucks or on trains and hauled off to someplace.
Six boxes was a pretty light shipment. My own food distribution center, which served a much smaller area than the Bandera Road Center, got thirty-five boxes each week. The usual drop for a station Bandera's size should have been something like sixty boxes per week.
I was lacing up my boots when the other officer asked, “What are they going to do? Are they bringing in
