imagined Deveraux was in an even worse state. I turned my head to check and saw she had my Beretta in her hand.
Chapter 75
The Marine Corps never liked the Beretta as much as the army did, so Deveraux was handling mine with proficiency but less than total enthusiasm. She dumped the magazine, ejected an unfired round, checked the chamber, racked the slide, and then put the whole thing back together again. She said, “I’m sorry. It was in your jacket pocket. I wondered what it was. It was digging into my ass. I’m going to have a bruise.”
“In which case it’s me that’s sorry,” I said. “Your ass deserves nothing but the best. It’s a national treasure. Or a regional attraction, at the very least.”
She smiled at me and stood up, unsteady, and went in search of her pants. Her shirt tail hung down, but not far enough. No bruise yet. She asked, “Why did you bring a gun?”
“Habit,” I said.
“Were you expecting trouble?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“I left mine in the car.”
“So did lots of dead people.”
“It’s just the two of us here.”
“As far as we know.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“But alive,” I said. “And you haven’t arrested anyone yet.”
“The army can’t prove a negative,” she said. “Therefore they must know who it was. They should tell me.”
I said nothing in reply to that. I followed her lead and staggered to my feet and picked up my pants. We got dressed, hopping from foot to foot together, and then we perched side by side on the Caprice’s rear bumper and laced our shoes. Getting back to the road was no real problem. Deveraux did it in reverse, backing up onto the track like parallel parking, then backing all the way to the crossing, and then turning the wheel and taking off forward. We were in my hotel room five minutes later. In bed. She went straight to sleep. I didn’t. I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought.
Mostly I thought about my last conversation with Leon Garber. My commanding officer. An honest man, and my friend, as far as I knew. But cryptic.
The conversation replayed endlessly in my head.
The truth.
Instincts.
The right thing.
In the end I fell asleep very late and completely unsure whether Garber had been telling me something, or asking me something.
My long-held belief that there is no better time than the second time was put to a severe test when we woke up, because the fifth time was also pretty terrific. We were both a little stiff and sore after our outdoor extravaganza, so we took it gently, long and slow, and the warmth and the comfort of the bed helped a lot. Plus neither one of us knew whether there would ever be a sixth time, which added a little poignancy to the occasion. Afterward we lay quiet for a while, and then she asked me when I was leaving, and I said I didn’t know.
We ate breakfast together in the diner, and then she went to work, and I went to use the phone. I tried to call Frances Neagley at her desk in D.C., but she wasn’t back yet. Probably still on an all-night bus somewhere. So I dialed Stan Lowrey instead, and got him right away. I said, “I need you to do something else for me.”
He said, “No jokes this morning? About how you’re surprised I’m still here?”
“I didn’t have time to think of any. I wanted Neagley, not you. You should try to get hold of her as soon as you can. She’s better than you at this kind of stuff.”
“Better than you, too. What do you need?”
“Fast answers,” I said.
“To what questions?”
“Statistically speaking, where would we be most likely to find U.S. Marines and concrete flood sluices in close proximity?”
“Southern California,” Lowrey said. “Statistically speaking, almost certainly Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego.”
“Correct,” I said. “I need to trace a jarhead MP who was there five years ago. His name is Paul Evers.”
“Why?”
“Because his parents were Mr. and Mrs. Evers and they liked the name Paul, I guess.”
“No, why do you want to trace him?”
“I want to ask him a question.”
Lowrey said, “You’re forgetting something.”
“Like what?”
“I’m in the army, not the Marine Corps. I can’t get into their files.”
“That’s why you need to call Neagley. She’ll know how to do it.”
“Paul Evers,” he said, slowly, like he was writing it down.
“Call Neagley,” I said again. “This is urgent. I’ll get back to you.”
I hung up with Lowrey and shoveled more coins into the slot and called the Kelham number Munro had given Deveraux, right back at the beginning. The call went through to some guy who wasn’t Munro. He told me Munro had left at first light, in a car to Birmingham, Alabama. I said I knew that had been the plan. I asked the guy to check if it had actually happened. So the guy called the visiting officers’ quarters and came back to me and said no, it hadn’t actually happened. Munro was still on the post. The guy gave me a number for his room and I hung up and redialed.
Munro answered and I said, “Thank you for sticking around.”
He said, “But what am I sticking around for? Right now I’m just hiding out in my room. I’m not very popular here, you know.”
“You didn’t join the army to be popular.”
“What do you need?”
“I need to know Reed Riley’s movements today.”
“Why?”
“I want to ask him a question.”
“That could be difficult. As far as I know he’s going to be pretty much tied up all day. You might be able to grab him over lunch. If he gets time for lunch, that is. And if he does, it will be very early.”
“No, I need him to come to me. In town.”
“You don’t understand. The mood has changed here. Bravo Company is out from under the cloud. Riley’s father is flying in for a visit.”
“The senator? Today?”
“ETA close to one o’clock this afternoon. Billed as an off-the-record celebration of what the guys are doing in
