The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [106]
“Tests would have proved it came from an animal.”
“I know,” she said. “But how long would that have taken? I don’t even know where the nearest lab is. Atlanta, maybe. It could have taken two weeks or more. And I can’t afford to be under a cloud for two weeks or more. I literally can’t afford it. This is the only job I have. I don’t know where I’d get another one. And voters are weird. They always remember the suspicion, and they never remember the outcome.”
I thought about my old pal Stan Lowrey, back on post, with his want ads. A brave new world, for all of us.
“OK,” I said. “But it was a fairly dumb thing to do.”
“I know it was. I panicked a little bit.”
“Do you know other hunters? And other trestles?”
“Some.”
“Because I still think that’s how those women were killed. I don’t see how it could be done any other way.”
“I agree. Which is why I panicked.”
“So sooner or later we might need to get those Blackhawks in the air.”
“Unless we find Reed Riley first and ask him some questions.”
“Reed Riley is gone,” I said. “He’s probably army liaison at Thule Air Force Base by now.”
“Which is where?”
“Northern Greenland,” I said. “The top of the world. It’s certainly the Air Force’s most remote place. I was there once. I was on a C-5 that had a problem. We had to land there. It’s part of the distant early-warning system. No sunlight for four months of the year. They’ve got radar that can see a tennis serve three thousand miles away.”
“Did you get their phone number?”
I smiled. “We’re going to have to do it another way. I’ll see what comes out of the woodwork the day after tomorrow.”
She said nothing in reply to that. We ate our pie slowly. We had time to kill. At that point the midnight train was probably just easing its way out of the yards in Biloxi.
* * *
Deveraux was still worried about the old man in the hotel, and she didn’t want to repeat her charade at the top of the stairs, so I gave her my key and we left the diner separately, ten minutes apart, which left me with the check and time for a third cup of coffee. Then I strolled down the street and nodded to the guy behind the desk and headed up the stairs and tapped on my own door. Deveraux opened up instantly and I stepped inside. She had taken her shoes and her gun belt off, but everything else was still in place. Uniform shirt, uniform pants, ponytail. All good.
We went at it like a junkie heats a spoon, half-fast, half-slow, full of intense anticipation, willing to make the investment, barely able to wait for the payoff. She started by taking the elastic out of her hair, shaking it loose, smiling at me from behind its thick dark curtain. She undid the first three buttons on her shirt, and the weight of her name plate and badges and stars dragged the loose material askew and showed me a deep triangle of bare skin. I took off my shoes and my socks and pulled my shirt tails out of my pants. She put one hand on the fourth button on her shirt, and the other on the button on the waistband of her pants, and she said, “Your choice.”
Which was a tough choice to make, but I thought long and hard about it and came to a firm conclusion. I said, “Pants,” and she popped the button and a long minute later she was barefoot and bare-legged in just her tan uniform shirt. I said, “Now you get the same choice,” and she went the other way and I took off my shirt. This time she asked about my shrapnel scar, and I gave her the short version, which was all about unfortunate timing at the start of my career, and a routine liaison visit to a Marine encampment in Beirut, Lebanon, and being passed