A Line in the Sand, page 19
“We got the ball, but I don’t think the other side’s gonna forfeit.”
“That’s the game, right?” Garza said. He looked down at the body in the photograph—the proverbial one who got away. He sat there taking in the image for a few moments, then said, “Dios tarda pero no olvida, motherfucker.” He looked up at Lamar. “I hope you catch all these vultures, man. Put their asses under the jail.”
“I’m gonna try,” Lamar said. “You able to get that other file for me?”
“Yeah, no problem.” He peeled off the top folder and passed the one beneath it across the table to Lamar. “Got curious and looked it over. Why are you interested in a single-car accident in the sticks?” asked Garza.
“Victim’s connected to my witness. Could be nothing. Just want to check.”
“Cars end up in those arroyos all the time. You get tired. It’s dark. Corner sneaks up on you.”
“Like I said, just want to dot my i’s,” Lamar said.
Late in the day, Lamar headed west on the two-lane road that curved off into the rolling landscape like a white ribbon. The sun leaned down and beat on the windshield of Lamar’s rental. On either side of the road, the low hills fell and rose in gentle waves. Mountain cedar here and there in thick brakes on the steeper slopes. A scattering of Bigelow oaks gave shade to skinny cattle in the parched fields. He reached the Pedernales, pulled the car to the side of the road, stepped out, and walked down to the crossing. More a ford than a bridge; there were no rails, just a series of low concrete castellations as the boundary between the road and the water beneath. A yellow flood gauge to mark the river at high water. He looked out over it, clear and shallow and almost gray. The limestone bed layered beneath the slow water like peeled mica. Above him, the sky was shot through with slender clouds and blue as patterned china.
Lamar took out his map again, moved his finger up the ranch road highlighted on it, and got back in the car. He turned off onto a dirt track hidden in the brushy cedar along the road. A hundred yards through the dark scraggle, the land opened up around him. The wheels buzzed over a cattle guard. He crested a hill, and the dirt road turned back to parallel the river, and he watched the river flash reflected sunlight through the scrub. Another minute and he came to a fence around a modest stone ranch house. There was no gate, but Lamar eased the rental into the grass before he passed the fencing and got out. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and walked up to the porch. He looked around. Lieutenant David Taylor, he thought. What happened to you, bud?
The front door swung open when he got about ten yards from the house. An older man stepped out onto the porch. He was thin and lean, and his hair grayish blond and wispy above his ears. When the man took the steps down to the dooryard, he put a hand over his eyes to block the sun, and Lamar saw that his arms were liver-spotted and taut as halyard line.
“Something I can do for you, mister?” the man asked.
“My name’s Detective Adams. I came out from Norfolk, Virginia, this morning. I was hoping you might give me a few minutes of your time. I’m sorry, I tried to leave a message.”
The man put his hands at the small of his back, stretched unhurriedly, and rolled his head around. “I don’t have no machine,” he said.
“But you are Mr. Taylor, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“I was hoping I could ask you some questions about your son,” said Lamar.
“He’s been dead a fair bit now.”
“Yes, sir. I know it. And I’m sorry. I’ve heard he was a good man.”
“Do you have kids, Detective?”
“No, sir.”
The man stood there considering Lamar’s answer but didn’t address it. After a few moments, he said, “You carry a badge on you or something?”
Lamar pulled it out of his pocket, walked over, and gave it to him. The man turned it over in his hand. “All right, well, come on in the house,” he said and went back up the steps. Lamar walked up behind him and entered the living room. There was a woodstove off to the side on a small brick pedestal and a little mantel over it. They passed it, and Lamar took in the pictures lined up on it. Family portraits. David in his uniform at West Point. He and his father holding shotguns with bobwhites lined up at their feet in a gray autumn field. An in memoriam picture of a woman in her thirties wearing clothes from twenty years before.
They got to the kitchen and Mr. Taylor cleared off a few dishes from the table and asked him to sit. “You want some tea, Detective?”
“Please.”
He brought out a big plastic jug from one of the cabinets and unscrewed the lid. He took a spoon, dipped it into a Crystal Light container, and turned the spoonful over into the jug. He ran the jug under the sink and let it fill, then he screwed the cap back on and with both hands sloshed the water around in the jug until it bore a resemblance to tea. He put two cups out on the table and poured the tea. “I ain’t got no ice,” he said.
“That’s all right,” Lamar said and took a sip of the lukewarm sweet tea.
Mr. Taylor sat at the head of the table and looked at Lamar. “Well, you brought your questions a long way. Go ahead and ask them.”
Lamar took out his notebook, laid it on the table, and pulled a pen from the chest pocket of his shirt. “Do you mind?”
“Not a bit.”
“Did your son ever mention a man named Arman Bajalan?” Lamar asked.
“Not that I recall. What sort of name is that?”
“Kurdish. Where was he stationed when he had the accident?”
“He was deployed. Home on leave.”
“Afghanistan?”
“I think so. He went all over the place. Sometimes didn’t tell me where. Sometimes couldn’t.”
“What was his duty station stateside?”
The man drummed his fingers on the table and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Let me see. He was last at Fort Belvoir.”
“You said he sometimes couldn’t tell you. Do you know why?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind filling in the blanks for me?”
Mr. Taylor looked at him until Lamar set his pen down and turned his notebook over. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in it now. What’re they gonna do, send federal agents out here to arrest me for revealing classified information?”
“I don’t think it’s likely.”
“No. Some sumbuck probably got it in a spy novel as we speak. He was in something called Intelligence Support Activity. Task Force Orange, he called it once.”
Lamar leaned back in his chair, thinking of the video they’d watched in the hotel room the night before, and tried to connect the dots to it. The dead man Arman found on the beach had been Australian Special Air Service. Probably in both Iraq and Afghanistan at one time or another. David Taylor, captain in a classified U.S. military unit and Arman’s former platoon leader, also in Afghanistan. The likelihood that they crossed paths was considerable. Not guaranteed, of course, but those circles were nothing like the army Lamar had served in, where you might not know anyone in your battalion who wasn’t in the same company as you.
“When he… passed, sir. Did the army send you his personal effects?”
Mr. Taylor got up from his chair and headed toward a hallway. He looked back at Lamar. “Come on, son,” he said. Lamar got up and followed. Mr. Taylor opened the door to a bedroom and held it so Lamar could go in first. Lamar stood in the center of the room, preserved just as David Taylor had left it when he’d gone to join the long gray line almost ten years earlier.
A twin bed stood neatly made with plaid sheets at the far corner of the room, a Delbert McClinton concert poster thumbtacked to the plain white wall above it. A wooden desk and chair were up against the other wall. Lamar walked over to it and looked at Mr. Taylor. He nodded, and Lamar opened the drawer. Inside there was a three-ring binder with LBJ Eagles Seniors!!! handwritten in Sharpie on the cover. Beside it, a graphing calculator and rows of sharpened pencils and Bic pens lined up ruler-straight. Lamar turned to the dresser by the door and once again looked over at Mr. Taylor, who raised his hand and walked over to the bed and sank down onto it. Lamar ran his finger along the top edge of the dresser. A Texas 2A Baseball Regional Playoff MVP plaque next to a framed photo of the young David and the woman from the in memoriam picture in the living room. He opened the top drawer, saw crisply folded underpants inside, and closed it again. Lamar set both hands back on the dresser and hung his head.
“Gear’s in the closet,” Mr. Taylor said.
Lamar walked over to it and opened it up. Two pairs of creased jeans and three Wrangler button-downs lined up on hangers. Beat-up high-top Nike Air Force 1s and a pair of boots with the leather so worn the shafts spilled over to the side. Under the hanging clothes, Lamar saw a duffel bag standing in the corner and two Pelican hard travel cases of different sizes stacked on top of each other. He knelt down on the carpet and opened up the first case.
“He had an apartment off post, but he was hardly ever there. Not much to it. I asked one of his buddies to help me out and send back his stuff and square away the gear that needed to be turned in. This here was his personally owned stuff. Uniforms, that sort of thing.”
Inside the first, smaller case, a military-spec Panasonic Toughbook sat in a foam bed. Other compartments carved into the foam held cords and other accessories. Lamar closed it and set it to the side. He pulled out the larger of the two and opened it. A .40-caliber Glock with two magazines was tucked into the side of the case. The main compartment held an assortment of electronics. Lamar wasn’t sure what all of it was. Maybe a compact Wi-Fi router. Two nondescript black boxes each about the size of a pack of smokes. A short tube with a pistol grip. He looked back up at Mr. Taylor, who now sat on the bed with his face in his hands, quietly crying. Lamar turned around to the closet, pretending not to notice. He stayed there on one knee, looking into the closet at nothing in particular, until Mr. Taylor stopped crying, got up, walked over from the bed, and touched him on the shoulder. “I’ll be out back if you need anything, son,” he said.
Lamar looked at the electronics piece by piece. He guessed it was some kind of signals intelligence equipment or surveillance gear. Lamar pulled out the Glock and worked the slide back to confirm it was unloaded, then let it go forward again, put it back in the case, and closed it. He pulled both cases out of the closet and set them on the end of the twin bed. He saw a child’s rendering of the ranch house in flat-fired clay on a wooden stand on the night table next to the bed. He looked around some more but didn’t see anything in particular that he thought would have knocked Mr. Taylor back into his grief. After a moment, he shook his head, feeling guilty he’d assumed he’d ever come out of it in the first place.
Outside in the back, Mr. Taylor leaned against the far fence and looked out toward the horizon line. Lamar walked up, and when he was about ten feet behind Mr. Taylor, he asked if he needed privacy.
“No. That’s all right. Get plenty of that,” Mr. Taylor said.
Lamar came up next to him, put his arms on the fence, and joined him in taking in the view. “It’s quite a spot you’ve got here, sir,” he said.
“I been here all my life. Expect I will be too. I ain’t tired of it yet.”
They were looking west as the day began its slow retreat toward the bluffs above the river in the distance. The red ball of the sun was half hidden. One long ribbon of cloud splashed a golden light across the sky.
“When I was a kid, I turned over a tractor right there,” Mr. Taylor said, pointing to a spot where the field sloped down toward the knotty wood line and the low river beyond. “Got myself properly pinned under that sumbuck. Thought I was done for. Knew it, in fact. Probably should have been.” Lamar listened to the crickets and katydids as the man spoke. “Come nighttime, I hear someone close by and I try to call out, but it’s just wheezing. Felt like breathing through a dang coffee stirrer. Half my ribs busted. Arm broke all to hell. And I hear someone calling my name. It’s my brother, but I don’t know it’s him. Just my name on the wind, it sounded like. Before too long, there ain’t nothing but darkness, darkness, and my brother calling my name into it. When I tell you I was afraid, I mean that’s all there was. Just it and the dark. After a time, I knew what was coming, but I wasn’t scared of it the way folks get now. Not that I say I’m any better for it. I was scared shitless, but in the same way my daddy used to scare me. Not like folks now.”
“Can’t say it’s a thing you get used to, being that close to it and all,” Lamar said. “Don’t know that I’d want to.”
“Used to didn’t be that unusual,” Mr. Taylor said. “I don’t know if it was better. I don’t pretend to know much about the world anymore.” They stood there for a while, letting the whirl and buzz fill the silence sitting there between them. “Had to be about a year on the mend after they got that tractor off me. One day I give my daddy that old ‘Why me?’ number. You know what he said?”
“No, sir.”
“He said, ‘Why not you?’” The old man, almost whispering, repeated it: “Why not you?” He looked over at Lamar and went on. “Two years later, I turn eighteen and I head down to Austin. I’m gonna sign up for the army and go to Vietnam. Well, I got one arm can’t hardly raise above my head.” He raised it while speaking and moved his elbow out in a circle, mimicking a broken wing. “Couldn’t go. Wouldn’t have me.”
“My mother always said God don’t make mistakes,” Lamar said.
“Yeah,” he said. “My brother found me pinned under that tractor? He turned eighteen few years after me, in 1969. Fit as a fiddle. Got himself killed in someplace called Fire Base Ripcord the next year. Never did turn nineteen. But God don’t make mistakes. After David died, I used to like to tell myself that if my daddy carried on, I could too.”
“I could see how that’d help.”
“I don’t know. I fought with him. David, I mean. You know that? Before he went to West Point. I can tell you served, so don’t get me wrong. I love my country. Love this little bit of it in particular.”
“You don’t have to explain to me, Mr. Taylor.”
“I guess you can tell I don’t have a chance to talk to folks much.”
“I don’t mind a bit. Part of my job is letting folks talk, sir.”
“I wrestled with it, being older. His mother gone. You think the world’s just wearing your ass out. I know it sounds silly to young folks, but you try to find a way to take it. So before he went, I tell him the Good Book says, ‘Thou shall not kill.’ Don’t say unless nowhere in it.”
“Not something I’d argue with.”
“Well, I laid that on him. ‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘You’ll put your soul at peril.’ But of course, your son is gonna do with his life what he thinks is best. Anyways, after David died, I was out here one evening, and I got to thinking about my own father. Occurred to me, I don’t actually know what the hell he felt about losing my brother. I didn’t know a darn thing about the man my daddy was, you understand?” Mr. Taylor started digging at the ground beneath the fence with the toe of his boot and sighed. “I only knew the man it happened to. What was left of him, anyway.”
Lamar never asked about David’s accident. They walked back up to the house a few minutes later as afternoon drifted into twilight. Pink became purple while it waited for dark. Mr. Taylor wrote down the name and number of the officer who had helped him sort out his son’s apartment after he died. Lamar asked if he could take the two Pelican cases if he promised to bring them back, and Mr. Taylor said it was fine. He walked Lamar out to the porch, and Lamar reached up and put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. Mr. Taylor patted him on the back and said, “Go on, son. I’ll be all right.”
Lamar walked to the rental, got in, and backed it out. He looked in the rearview and saw Mr. Taylor standing there with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. A shroud of moths swirled around him in the porch light. The sun’s last rays slanted toward him. When Lamar turned back onto the ranch road, it was silver with twilight. He looked down at the phone on the passenger seat and saw he’d missed half a dozen calls from Detective Wheel. He picked it up to call but couldn’t get a signal. He put one hand on the wheel and rubbed the metal band on his wrist with the other while he drove. Lamar had spent a lot of time trying not to think about it, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know what all right was.
TWENTY-ONE
After they dropped off Lamar at Dulles and after Sally collected her things from her hotel, Catherine turned the cruiser onto 95 South and headed toward Maryland. Before long, they crossed the bridge over the Potomac at Dahlgren back into Virginia. From the top of the bridge, the view spiderwebbed through crisscrossed iron beams, she looked out the window toward the river’s mouth and the bay beyond.
Sally, Arman, and Catherine rode together in silence. Sally, in the back seat, dialed Trey’s number every five minutes for the first stretch of the trip, letting it ring through to voice mail without leaving a message. The silence broke only when they passed the Rappahannock and then Port Royal, where Sally leaned between Arman and Detective Wheel sitting up front and said, “Here. Take this left. On this till Saluda.”
“All right,” Catherine said.
“Please, Catherine,” she said. “Give him a chance to make it right.”
“I get back to Norfolk, and he hasn’t called, Sally…” Cat said. She’d known something was off about Trey. The 757 number he’d ignored; the way he’d kept his eyes down when he talked about working for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Two qualities had made Catherine a good detective: her attention to detail and her ability to put those details into a story that made sense. She’d built a career relying on instinct and experience, and both had failed her last night. She looked over at Arman. He’d been paying for other people’s mistakes for a long time. More than any man ought to be called on to pay. She wouldn’t ask him to pay for hers.
Sally sat back in the seat and redialed the number.
Another hour and another turn into deeper, less traveled country. As they drove along the river and then over the Piankatank, fields went by, hardwood stands like tall fences in between. Tractor Supply and Dollar General. A Fas Mart where they tried to stop for gas was closed. A handwritten sign in the window read Billy no-showed I quit. After leaving 17 at Saluda, they passed Middlesex High School. Next to it, the courthouse and the Middle Peninsula Regional Jail loomed with institutional brutality as if to remind the students that the short distance between the two was more than a metaphor.
“That’s the game, right?” Garza said. He looked down at the body in the photograph—the proverbial one who got away. He sat there taking in the image for a few moments, then said, “Dios tarda pero no olvida, motherfucker.” He looked up at Lamar. “I hope you catch all these vultures, man. Put their asses under the jail.”
“I’m gonna try,” Lamar said. “You able to get that other file for me?”
“Yeah, no problem.” He peeled off the top folder and passed the one beneath it across the table to Lamar. “Got curious and looked it over. Why are you interested in a single-car accident in the sticks?” asked Garza.
“Victim’s connected to my witness. Could be nothing. Just want to check.”
“Cars end up in those arroyos all the time. You get tired. It’s dark. Corner sneaks up on you.”
“Like I said, just want to dot my i’s,” Lamar said.
Late in the day, Lamar headed west on the two-lane road that curved off into the rolling landscape like a white ribbon. The sun leaned down and beat on the windshield of Lamar’s rental. On either side of the road, the low hills fell and rose in gentle waves. Mountain cedar here and there in thick brakes on the steeper slopes. A scattering of Bigelow oaks gave shade to skinny cattle in the parched fields. He reached the Pedernales, pulled the car to the side of the road, stepped out, and walked down to the crossing. More a ford than a bridge; there were no rails, just a series of low concrete castellations as the boundary between the road and the water beneath. A yellow flood gauge to mark the river at high water. He looked out over it, clear and shallow and almost gray. The limestone bed layered beneath the slow water like peeled mica. Above him, the sky was shot through with slender clouds and blue as patterned china.
Lamar took out his map again, moved his finger up the ranch road highlighted on it, and got back in the car. He turned off onto a dirt track hidden in the brushy cedar along the road. A hundred yards through the dark scraggle, the land opened up around him. The wheels buzzed over a cattle guard. He crested a hill, and the dirt road turned back to parallel the river, and he watched the river flash reflected sunlight through the scrub. Another minute and he came to a fence around a modest stone ranch house. There was no gate, but Lamar eased the rental into the grass before he passed the fencing and got out. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and walked up to the porch. He looked around. Lieutenant David Taylor, he thought. What happened to you, bud?
The front door swung open when he got about ten yards from the house. An older man stepped out onto the porch. He was thin and lean, and his hair grayish blond and wispy above his ears. When the man took the steps down to the dooryard, he put a hand over his eyes to block the sun, and Lamar saw that his arms were liver-spotted and taut as halyard line.
“Something I can do for you, mister?” the man asked.
“My name’s Detective Adams. I came out from Norfolk, Virginia, this morning. I was hoping you might give me a few minutes of your time. I’m sorry, I tried to leave a message.”
The man put his hands at the small of his back, stretched unhurriedly, and rolled his head around. “I don’t have no machine,” he said.
“But you are Mr. Taylor, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“I was hoping I could ask you some questions about your son,” said Lamar.
“He’s been dead a fair bit now.”
“Yes, sir. I know it. And I’m sorry. I’ve heard he was a good man.”
“Do you have kids, Detective?”
“No, sir.”
The man stood there considering Lamar’s answer but didn’t address it. After a few moments, he said, “You carry a badge on you or something?”
Lamar pulled it out of his pocket, walked over, and gave it to him. The man turned it over in his hand. “All right, well, come on in the house,” he said and went back up the steps. Lamar walked up behind him and entered the living room. There was a woodstove off to the side on a small brick pedestal and a little mantel over it. They passed it, and Lamar took in the pictures lined up on it. Family portraits. David in his uniform at West Point. He and his father holding shotguns with bobwhites lined up at their feet in a gray autumn field. An in memoriam picture of a woman in her thirties wearing clothes from twenty years before.
They got to the kitchen and Mr. Taylor cleared off a few dishes from the table and asked him to sit. “You want some tea, Detective?”
“Please.”
He brought out a big plastic jug from one of the cabinets and unscrewed the lid. He took a spoon, dipped it into a Crystal Light container, and turned the spoonful over into the jug. He ran the jug under the sink and let it fill, then he screwed the cap back on and with both hands sloshed the water around in the jug until it bore a resemblance to tea. He put two cups out on the table and poured the tea. “I ain’t got no ice,” he said.
“That’s all right,” Lamar said and took a sip of the lukewarm sweet tea.
Mr. Taylor sat at the head of the table and looked at Lamar. “Well, you brought your questions a long way. Go ahead and ask them.”
Lamar took out his notebook, laid it on the table, and pulled a pen from the chest pocket of his shirt. “Do you mind?”
“Not a bit.”
“Did your son ever mention a man named Arman Bajalan?” Lamar asked.
“Not that I recall. What sort of name is that?”
“Kurdish. Where was he stationed when he had the accident?”
“He was deployed. Home on leave.”
“Afghanistan?”
“I think so. He went all over the place. Sometimes didn’t tell me where. Sometimes couldn’t.”
“What was his duty station stateside?”
The man drummed his fingers on the table and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Let me see. He was last at Fort Belvoir.”
“You said he sometimes couldn’t tell you. Do you know why?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mind filling in the blanks for me?”
Mr. Taylor looked at him until Lamar set his pen down and turned his notebook over. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in it now. What’re they gonna do, send federal agents out here to arrest me for revealing classified information?”
“I don’t think it’s likely.”
“No. Some sumbuck probably got it in a spy novel as we speak. He was in something called Intelligence Support Activity. Task Force Orange, he called it once.”
Lamar leaned back in his chair, thinking of the video they’d watched in the hotel room the night before, and tried to connect the dots to it. The dead man Arman found on the beach had been Australian Special Air Service. Probably in both Iraq and Afghanistan at one time or another. David Taylor, captain in a classified U.S. military unit and Arman’s former platoon leader, also in Afghanistan. The likelihood that they crossed paths was considerable. Not guaranteed, of course, but those circles were nothing like the army Lamar had served in, where you might not know anyone in your battalion who wasn’t in the same company as you.
“When he… passed, sir. Did the army send you his personal effects?”
Mr. Taylor got up from his chair and headed toward a hallway. He looked back at Lamar. “Come on, son,” he said. Lamar got up and followed. Mr. Taylor opened the door to a bedroom and held it so Lamar could go in first. Lamar stood in the center of the room, preserved just as David Taylor had left it when he’d gone to join the long gray line almost ten years earlier.
A twin bed stood neatly made with plaid sheets at the far corner of the room, a Delbert McClinton concert poster thumbtacked to the plain white wall above it. A wooden desk and chair were up against the other wall. Lamar walked over to it and looked at Mr. Taylor. He nodded, and Lamar opened the drawer. Inside there was a three-ring binder with LBJ Eagles Seniors!!! handwritten in Sharpie on the cover. Beside it, a graphing calculator and rows of sharpened pencils and Bic pens lined up ruler-straight. Lamar turned to the dresser by the door and once again looked over at Mr. Taylor, who raised his hand and walked over to the bed and sank down onto it. Lamar ran his finger along the top edge of the dresser. A Texas 2A Baseball Regional Playoff MVP plaque next to a framed photo of the young David and the woman from the in memoriam picture in the living room. He opened the top drawer, saw crisply folded underpants inside, and closed it again. Lamar set both hands back on the dresser and hung his head.
“Gear’s in the closet,” Mr. Taylor said.
Lamar walked over to it and opened it up. Two pairs of creased jeans and three Wrangler button-downs lined up on hangers. Beat-up high-top Nike Air Force 1s and a pair of boots with the leather so worn the shafts spilled over to the side. Under the hanging clothes, Lamar saw a duffel bag standing in the corner and two Pelican hard travel cases of different sizes stacked on top of each other. He knelt down on the carpet and opened up the first case.
“He had an apartment off post, but he was hardly ever there. Not much to it. I asked one of his buddies to help me out and send back his stuff and square away the gear that needed to be turned in. This here was his personally owned stuff. Uniforms, that sort of thing.”
Inside the first, smaller case, a military-spec Panasonic Toughbook sat in a foam bed. Other compartments carved into the foam held cords and other accessories. Lamar closed it and set it to the side. He pulled out the larger of the two and opened it. A .40-caliber Glock with two magazines was tucked into the side of the case. The main compartment held an assortment of electronics. Lamar wasn’t sure what all of it was. Maybe a compact Wi-Fi router. Two nondescript black boxes each about the size of a pack of smokes. A short tube with a pistol grip. He looked back up at Mr. Taylor, who now sat on the bed with his face in his hands, quietly crying. Lamar turned around to the closet, pretending not to notice. He stayed there on one knee, looking into the closet at nothing in particular, until Mr. Taylor stopped crying, got up, walked over from the bed, and touched him on the shoulder. “I’ll be out back if you need anything, son,” he said.
Lamar looked at the electronics piece by piece. He guessed it was some kind of signals intelligence equipment or surveillance gear. Lamar pulled out the Glock and worked the slide back to confirm it was unloaded, then let it go forward again, put it back in the case, and closed it. He pulled both cases out of the closet and set them on the end of the twin bed. He saw a child’s rendering of the ranch house in flat-fired clay on a wooden stand on the night table next to the bed. He looked around some more but didn’t see anything in particular that he thought would have knocked Mr. Taylor back into his grief. After a moment, he shook his head, feeling guilty he’d assumed he’d ever come out of it in the first place.
Outside in the back, Mr. Taylor leaned against the far fence and looked out toward the horizon line. Lamar walked up, and when he was about ten feet behind Mr. Taylor, he asked if he needed privacy.
“No. That’s all right. Get plenty of that,” Mr. Taylor said.
Lamar came up next to him, put his arms on the fence, and joined him in taking in the view. “It’s quite a spot you’ve got here, sir,” he said.
“I been here all my life. Expect I will be too. I ain’t tired of it yet.”
They were looking west as the day began its slow retreat toward the bluffs above the river in the distance. The red ball of the sun was half hidden. One long ribbon of cloud splashed a golden light across the sky.
“When I was a kid, I turned over a tractor right there,” Mr. Taylor said, pointing to a spot where the field sloped down toward the knotty wood line and the low river beyond. “Got myself properly pinned under that sumbuck. Thought I was done for. Knew it, in fact. Probably should have been.” Lamar listened to the crickets and katydids as the man spoke. “Come nighttime, I hear someone close by and I try to call out, but it’s just wheezing. Felt like breathing through a dang coffee stirrer. Half my ribs busted. Arm broke all to hell. And I hear someone calling my name. It’s my brother, but I don’t know it’s him. Just my name on the wind, it sounded like. Before too long, there ain’t nothing but darkness, darkness, and my brother calling my name into it. When I tell you I was afraid, I mean that’s all there was. Just it and the dark. After a time, I knew what was coming, but I wasn’t scared of it the way folks get now. Not that I say I’m any better for it. I was scared shitless, but in the same way my daddy used to scare me. Not like folks now.”
“Can’t say it’s a thing you get used to, being that close to it and all,” Lamar said. “Don’t know that I’d want to.”
“Used to didn’t be that unusual,” Mr. Taylor said. “I don’t know if it was better. I don’t pretend to know much about the world anymore.” They stood there for a while, letting the whirl and buzz fill the silence sitting there between them. “Had to be about a year on the mend after they got that tractor off me. One day I give my daddy that old ‘Why me?’ number. You know what he said?”
“No, sir.”
“He said, ‘Why not you?’” The old man, almost whispering, repeated it: “Why not you?” He looked over at Lamar and went on. “Two years later, I turn eighteen and I head down to Austin. I’m gonna sign up for the army and go to Vietnam. Well, I got one arm can’t hardly raise above my head.” He raised it while speaking and moved his elbow out in a circle, mimicking a broken wing. “Couldn’t go. Wouldn’t have me.”
“My mother always said God don’t make mistakes,” Lamar said.
“Yeah,” he said. “My brother found me pinned under that tractor? He turned eighteen few years after me, in 1969. Fit as a fiddle. Got himself killed in someplace called Fire Base Ripcord the next year. Never did turn nineteen. But God don’t make mistakes. After David died, I used to like to tell myself that if my daddy carried on, I could too.”
“I could see how that’d help.”
“I don’t know. I fought with him. David, I mean. You know that? Before he went to West Point. I can tell you served, so don’t get me wrong. I love my country. Love this little bit of it in particular.”
“You don’t have to explain to me, Mr. Taylor.”
“I guess you can tell I don’t have a chance to talk to folks much.”
“I don’t mind a bit. Part of my job is letting folks talk, sir.”
“I wrestled with it, being older. His mother gone. You think the world’s just wearing your ass out. I know it sounds silly to young folks, but you try to find a way to take it. So before he went, I tell him the Good Book says, ‘Thou shall not kill.’ Don’t say unless nowhere in it.”
“Not something I’d argue with.”
“Well, I laid that on him. ‘Don’t go,’ I said. ‘You’ll put your soul at peril.’ But of course, your son is gonna do with his life what he thinks is best. Anyways, after David died, I was out here one evening, and I got to thinking about my own father. Occurred to me, I don’t actually know what the hell he felt about losing my brother. I didn’t know a darn thing about the man my daddy was, you understand?” Mr. Taylor started digging at the ground beneath the fence with the toe of his boot and sighed. “I only knew the man it happened to. What was left of him, anyway.”
Lamar never asked about David’s accident. They walked back up to the house a few minutes later as afternoon drifted into twilight. Pink became purple while it waited for dark. Mr. Taylor wrote down the name and number of the officer who had helped him sort out his son’s apartment after he died. Lamar asked if he could take the two Pelican cases if he promised to bring them back, and Mr. Taylor said it was fine. He walked Lamar out to the porch, and Lamar reached up and put his hand on the older man’s shoulder. Mr. Taylor patted him on the back and said, “Go on, son. I’ll be all right.”
Lamar walked to the rental, got in, and backed it out. He looked in the rearview and saw Mr. Taylor standing there with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. A shroud of moths swirled around him in the porch light. The sun’s last rays slanted toward him. When Lamar turned back onto the ranch road, it was silver with twilight. He looked down at the phone on the passenger seat and saw he’d missed half a dozen calls from Detective Wheel. He picked it up to call but couldn’t get a signal. He put one hand on the wheel and rubbed the metal band on his wrist with the other while he drove. Lamar had spent a lot of time trying not to think about it, but he was pretty sure he didn’t know what all right was.
TWENTY-ONE
After they dropped off Lamar at Dulles and after Sally collected her things from her hotel, Catherine turned the cruiser onto 95 South and headed toward Maryland. Before long, they crossed the bridge over the Potomac at Dahlgren back into Virginia. From the top of the bridge, the view spiderwebbed through crisscrossed iron beams, she looked out the window toward the river’s mouth and the bay beyond.
Sally, Arman, and Catherine rode together in silence. Sally, in the back seat, dialed Trey’s number every five minutes for the first stretch of the trip, letting it ring through to voice mail without leaving a message. The silence broke only when they passed the Rappahannock and then Port Royal, where Sally leaned between Arman and Detective Wheel sitting up front and said, “Here. Take this left. On this till Saluda.”
“All right,” Catherine said.
“Please, Catherine,” she said. “Give him a chance to make it right.”
“I get back to Norfolk, and he hasn’t called, Sally…” Cat said. She’d known something was off about Trey. The 757 number he’d ignored; the way he’d kept his eyes down when he talked about working for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Two qualities had made Catherine a good detective: her attention to detail and her ability to put those details into a story that made sense. She’d built a career relying on instinct and experience, and both had failed her last night. She looked over at Arman. He’d been paying for other people’s mistakes for a long time. More than any man ought to be called on to pay. She wouldn’t ask him to pay for hers.
Sally sat back in the seat and redialed the number.
Another hour and another turn into deeper, less traveled country. As they drove along the river and then over the Piankatank, fields went by, hardwood stands like tall fences in between. Tractor Supply and Dollar General. A Fas Mart where they tried to stop for gas was closed. A handwritten sign in the window read Billy no-showed I quit. After leaving 17 at Saluda, they passed Middlesex High School. Next to it, the courthouse and the Middle Peninsula Regional Jail loomed with institutional brutality as if to remind the students that the short distance between the two was more than a metaphor.
