A Line in the Sand, page 8
Not even a quarter mile down the road, the boys turned off the sidewalk again and coasted through the parking lot to the far corner of the park’s seagrass, gray and waving in the welcome night breeze. They stashed their bikes one by one in the depths of the grass and crested the small dune and slid down its backside. They sat all in a line watching the low whitecaps fall over the gray shore. The older boy opened the pack of Kools and handed out five smokes each to his companions. One said, “Fucking score, Dougie,” and another was the first to open his beer and take a giant slug, which he nearly spat out, shaking his head against the bitter taste of it.
Dougie pulled a Bic out of his pocket and lit one of the smokes awkwardly, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. He puffed on it a few times and passed the lighter down the line. His friends lit their own smokes and took turns coughing as they inhaled. Dougie feigned experience, and he looked upward and watched as a colony of gulls circled the moon. A few clouds rolled in, and the beach and the boys resting at its edge went from dark to faintest light to dark again in a slow hypnotic rhythm. Terns ran up and down the waterline, racing against its rise and fall, stippling the wet sand with their beaks and retreating when the waves broke and rushed in, erasing the pockmarked record of their hunger.
Dougie reached into the grass behind him for the beer he’d set down. His hand brushed against some other metal before he found the beer. He ran his fingertips across the metal surface, almost stroking it. Dougie felt a pattern like that of a rasp from his father’s woodshop but without the bite. He closed his hand around the object and pulled it out of the grass and brought it out before him in the darkness. He held a pistol with a longish pipe on the business end, which he guessed from the movies was a silencer. He had grabbed the thing around its grip naturally and automatically as if he would never have picked it up by any means other than the way it was meant to be held. As if its maker had considered a young boy’s wonderment while grasping it as the most crucial element of its design.
Lamar stood in the reception area and watched the clock on the wall behind Mr. Peters. “I really think you ought to close for the evening, sir. I’ve got a patrol unit coming to sit in the parking lot. You don’t have to worry about the motel. It’s almost nine thirty. Surely anybody coming in off the street can find another room.”
Arman sat on a stool behind the reception desk next to the old man. “I think it’s a good idea, Mr. Peters. Like the detective said, if it’s nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s something even a little dangerous, why stay?”
“So lemme ask you something, Detective.”
“Shoot.”
“You’re saying this Charger I seen might be the two fellers did the crime you think Arman here was witness to?”
“Might be.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“I don’t know for sure. Might could be a couple of kids cruising on a Friday.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
The old man looked at Arman and settled his eyes on the young man as if he might want to tell him something, but he did not.
Arman said, “Really, Mr. Peters. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”
“Sir, I promise you the commonwealth has resources for situations like this,” said Lamar. “I’ll take Mr. Bajalan to his apartment. We’ll pack him a bag, and he can stay with me tonight. State troopers will put him in another apartment tomorrow morning, and we’ll have a detail on him until the trial’s over. A little inconvenience. No skin off your back at all.”
The old man leaned against the wood paneling and looked at the ceiling’s popcorn surface. He looked back at Lamar. “Son, what trial?” he said. “Don’t sound to me like you have a goddamn clue what’s going on out there except Arman here might be in some kind of danger. And for the record, it ain’t my skin I’m worried about.” He put one of his big hands on Arman’s shoulder and squeezed. “I never did think these sons of bitches would have the onions to hunt you up all the way across the ocean.”
Arman patted the old man’s hand and stood up, holding on to it for a moment. “It’ll be all right, Mr. Peters. Probably just kids out cruising. Probably the whole thing has nothing to do with me.” He stepped through the door separating the employee section from the reception area and stood on the opposite side of the desk.
“You ready, Mr. Bajalan?” Lamar asked.
“Sure.”
“You’re gonna have a unit sitting in that gravel there in just a minute, sir,” Lamar said to the older man.
“All right, then,” said Mr. Peters. “I’ll get to locking things up. Be out in a jiffy.” The furtive circling of the cars made sense now. If it wasn’t police patrols, it was one vehicle on a scouting expedition. Mr. Peters felt he now had a more complete picture of what was happening than the two younger men did. Whoever was in that Charger was coming for Arman. They all knew that. And while Mr. Peters understood that Arman and the detective had each felt the adrenalized atmosphere of combat, he did not think they could read the situation the way he could. They were conversant on the subject of men trying to kill each other, but Mr. Peters was fluent. He’d spent the better part of his life speaking that language. With all other plausible explanations exhausted, he could now read the signs the strangers in the Charger had left as clearly as he could read the pages of his Westerns.
The motel had been scouted by professionals. That much was obvious. But there was no reason to think the scouts knew they’d been discovered. In moments like this, Mr. Peters reverted to an instinctive practicality in his thinking. As long as Arman and the detective were away from the motel, Mr. Peters could solve the problem the men in the Charger presented by himself. He looked them over a last time before he decided. Whatever was coming, he planned to be the one waiting for it.
Lamar and Arman started walking toward the door. Mr. Peters pulled the heavy Colt Python from its holster and held it below the level of the reception desk. He opened the cylinder, turned it until he’d confirmed it was loaded with six .357 cartridges, then put it back in the holster.
Lamar pushed the door open, and Arman turned around and said, “Thank you, Mr. Peters.”
The old man looked up. “For what?”
Arman smiled. “I’ll see you Monday morning.”
“I’ll have a want ad in the Pilot on Tuesday if I don’t. Now y’all get out of here so I can close this place down.”
The two younger men let the door shut behind them. Mr. Peters watched them through the glass and kept his eyes on the door for some time after they’d passed from view. He opened a drawer and put two speed loaders on the desk and walked over to the door Arman and Lamar had just gone through a minute before. He looked out over the parking lot, the white-shell aggregate seemingly aglow in the moon’s light. Mr. Peters watched the taillights of Lamar’s unmarked car disappear down the street, then locked the dead bolt and turned the placard over on its chain until it read CLOSED on the outside. He went back through the employee-only door, grabbed the 870 from where it leaned against the wall, and worked the action to confirm it was loaded. He set it down across the desk, the barrel pointed toward the reception area.
At 9:20, the radio in the patrol car en route to sit on the Sea Breeze Motel crackled with the usual Friday-night summer traffic: 10-12, vandalism at the Piggly Wiggly on Princess Anne; 10-43, drunks outside the clubs on Granby; 10-44, disturbance from an off-campus house party near Old Dominion University. Officers Sherwood and Washington from the Second Patrol Division kept their unit pointed north down Chesapeake Boulevard toward the water. It felt like getting over, being tasked to sit in a motel parking lot in the comfort of their patrol car with the AC running.
They pulled into a gas station at Little Creek Road, and Officer Sherwood ran in and came back out in under two minutes with a six-pack of High Life tucked under his arm. Second of the evening and three hours into the overnight shift. He jumped back in, put the beer down on the floorboard, and pulled one out for Washington, who expertly worked the twist-off cap with one hand and with his other wheeled the unit around quickly. Sherwood took a big swig and blipped the light and sirens as they passed through the intersection, and they were back on their way.
When they took the curve by the golf course, Officer Sherwood put the window down and took another pull on his beer and silently waited with childlike anticipation for the first glimpse of the ocean to come into view. He focused on a small patch of blackness at the end of the divided boulevard, tunneled down its length with leafed-out oaks and covered in its own lesser darkness.
Officer Washington took the call at 9:27. “Unit two-seven-one, what’s your twenty?”
“En route Sea Breeze Motel on Ocean View. Northbound Chesapeake Boulevard.”
“Two-seven-one, bypass that code one. Respond code two, ten-twenty-nine. Call came in from Red’s Beachside.”
“Ten-four, code two, person with gun, two-seven-one en route.”
They hit the lights and sirens, and Officer Washington punched the gas. Sherwood took both open beer bottles and flung them out the window, where they smashed against the curb and left shards of blue and red light glimmering in the gutter.
They flew through the light at Chesapeake and Ocean View, the heavy cruiser listing like a storm-blown ship. The sirens wailed, and the pulsing lights pushed against the dark as they floored it up the beachside strip of pavement. They blew the light at Granby too, and a few seconds later, they pulled into the parking lot of Red’s and skidded to a stop. Washington called out, “Dispatch, two-seven-one is ten-nine.”
“Ten-four, two-seven-one on scene.”
With his gun drawn, Sherwood exited the passenger door and slowly walked toward the building through the cloud of still-rising dust, the cruiser’s lights pulsing rhythmically off the cinder blocks. Washington killed the sirens and exited as well, and the two men approached the front door, from which music still spilled. The barman had his hands up when the officers entered. He turned his head away from the wall of light emitted by their flashlights, knowing the barrels of their pistols pointed at him in the darkness. “You can put your guns away. Boys here said it was an accident.”
At ten p.m., the two officers sat on the hood of their patrol car in front of Red’s giving their statements to their lieutenant. The parking lot was full of police vehicles, the bar shut down, and the customers gone. Evidence techs and a couple of uniforms were down on the beach. They watched the ambulance’s spinning lights disappear up Mason Creek Road.
“So, accidental discharge?” their lieutenant asked.
“The kid?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what it looked like, LT. Other kids said it was an accidental discharge too.”
“That right, Officer Sherwood?”
Sherwood sat there with his arms crossed, chewing his bottom lip. He stared at the gravel and the tips of his boots.
“Sherwood?” their sector lieutenant said again.
He looked up. “Yeah. Something spooked him and it went off.”
Lieutenant Billings scratched down the last bit of the statement in his notepad. Then he looked up. “All right, kid, it’s a shitty deal, but it was always gonna go this way. Kids like that, it was just a matter of time before the commonwealth put them on paper. This one’s just ahead of schedule.”
“Yeah, LT,” Sherwood said quietly. “That’s the way it goes.”
“Hey, sir?” Washington said. “What about that babysitting job at the motel? We got detoured off that to come here.”
“Don’t worry about it. Priorities, am I right? I’ll get someone over there. And one more thing, Officers,” Lieutenant Billings said as he walked back to his car, “find a fucking breath mint. I can smell the Schlitz on you two from ten feet away.”
Washington looked over at Dougie, hooked up in the back seat of their cruiser. Sherwood seemed lost in thought. “What’s up, partner?”
“What’re we doing out here, Wash?”
“What do you mean?”
“One in the back of the cruiser and another in the back of a bus. Look around. No one cares. Shouldn’t we be… I don’t know… fucking alarmed?”
Lieutenant Billings put his notepad in his shirt pocket and slipped the pencil beside it. He took his cell phone from his belt, flipped it open, and dialed. “Yeah. Lieutenant Billings here. Tell Detective Adams we found that gun he was looking for.” He pulled out a cigarette and waved at another cop to give him a light. “Yeah, the James Bond–looking one. You won’t believe what it’s been up to.”
NINE
Where to, Mr. Bajalan?” asked Lamar.
“Do you know Boissevain Ave.?”
“In Ghent?”
“Yeah.”
Lamar put the car in drive and took the backstreets behind the Sea Breeze toward Granby at a crawl, keeping his eyes moving down each cross street, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Charger. He checked his rearview when he turned to head southbound on Granby. He saw only an empty road until a patrol car tore ass with lights and sirens through the traffic light to where the street dead-ended at Ocean View.
Lamar kept his eyes moving, but the long straight road was otherwise quiet for a Friday night. He looked over at Bajalan in the passenger seat with his arms crossed and his head leaning against the roof pillar. He looked out the window without interest, and if any aspect of the little bungalows and run-down brick commercial buildings caught his attention, he gave no indication of it. They stopped at a light, and Lamar said, “Arman, you mind if I ask what Mr. Peters meant when he said he didn’t think anybody would come looking for you over here?”
Arman leaned back in the passenger seat and looked out the windshield now. The light turned green, and Lamar stepped on the gas and let the silence sit between them for a minute.
“I saw something,” Arman said.
“You saw something?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Something like what? Terrorists? What?”
“Yeah, maybe something like that.”
“That why they fast-tracked your SIV?”
“Someone did me a favor. Platoon leader I was interpreting for.”
“You trade what you saw for the visa?”
“That’s not how I would put it.”
“Well, Arman, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. How you would put it,” Lamar said.
Trust had not served Arman well in his interactions with Americans. There were exceptions, of course. Mr. Peters. The lieutenant whose platoon he’d worked with. But they only reminded him what trusting the rest had cost him, and it had cost him everything. He looked at the detective sitting next to him. There was nothing to distinguish him from the men who had killed his wife and son. And there was nothing to ensure that he’d be like Mr. Peters. He was just a man. Unpredictable. And like all men, there was no avoiding the fact that he was dangerous. “I don’t know who they are,” he said quietly. “I just know they were looking for me over there. The lieutenant got me out. He knew they were trying to kill me, so he got me out.”
“How’d he know they were trying to kill you?”
“They’d already tried. He started the paperwork for me.”
“These guys?”
“I don’t know if it’s the same exact guys, but it’s the same guys, if you know what I mean.”
“Arman?” Lamar looked over at him. His face had gone gray except around his eyes, which were red and welling up with tears. “Did you have American forces after you?”
“Contractors.”
Lamar exhaled hard. “Did your LT try to help?”
“You’re relieved.”
“I guess so.”
“He couldn’t prove anything. I couldn’t prove anything. But I know what I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“They opened up on a crowd at the university.”
“In Mosul?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. I heard about shit like that when I was there, Arman. But I don’t know. Guys say they took fire, and that’s the end of it.”
“They didn’t take fire.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Detective, I was there.”
“With your unit?”
“No. I was a graduate student. I didn’t run missions all the time.”
“Can your PL corroborate any of this?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Arman, I’m a cop now. It doesn’t matter what I believe. It only matters what I can prove.”
“He can’t.”
“He can’t, or he won’t?”
“He’s dead.”
Lamar drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He looked over at Arman again. “How?”
“Car accident. Last year.”
“Single vehicle?”
“Yeah.”
Lamar stared out the windshield. “Do you know where?”
“I think he was home on leave. He’d been in Afghanistan.”
“Where was home for him?”
“Texas.”
“You remember where in Texas?”
“No. I might have an e-mail from him. Maybe he mentioned it.”
“So y’all kept in touch?”
“Yeah. A little.”
“He must have had a company by then.”
“I guess he did after I got to Virginia. I didn’t hear much from him on his last tour.”
Lamar dug in his pocket, pulled out a notepad and a pen, and flipped them over to Arman in the passenger seat. “Start writing, will you?”
“What do you want to know?”
“You want me to catch these bastards?”
“Yeah.”
“Then write down everything. Everything that happened. Everyone you told. Everyone they told. I don’t care how irrelevant you think it is. Write it down.”
He started writing. After a few moments, he paused and said, “I gave him my camera.”
