The Affair_ A Reacher Novel - Lee Child [47]
I picked it up and weighed it in my palm.
Dollars to doughnuts, it was a military round.
* * *
I looked ahead at Deveraux and Pellegrino and the dead guy in the distance. They were about a hundred and forty yards away. Practically touching distance, for a rifleman. The 5.56 NATO round was designed to penetrate one side of a steel helmet at six hundred meters, which works out to about six hundred and fifty yards. The dead guy was more than four times closer than that. An easy shot. Hard to miss, which was my only real consolation. The kind of guy that gets sent from Benning to Kelham for finishing school isn’t the kind of guy that misplaces a round at point-blank range. Yet this was clearly an unintentional hit. The bandage proved it. It was a warning shot gone wrong. Or a giddy-up shot. But the kind of guy that gets sent from Benning to Kelham has worked out his testosterone issues long ago. He puts his warning shots high and wide. And his giddy-up shots. All the subject needs is to see the muzzle flash and hear the noise of the gun. That’s all the situation requires. And no soldier does more than he has to. No soldier ever has, since Alexander the Great first put his army together. Initiative in the ranks usually ends in tears. Especially where live ammunition is involved. And civilians.
I put the brass in my pocket and hiked back. I saw nothing else of significance. Deveraux had snapped a whole roll of film, and she rewound it and took it out of her camera and sent Pellegrino back to the pharmacy to get it printed. She told him to ask for rush service, and then she told him to bring the doctor back with him, with the mortuary wagon. He departed on cue and Deveraux and I were left standing together in a thousand acres of emptiness, with nothing for company except a corpse and a blasted tree.
I asked, “Did anyone hear a shot?”
She said, “Mr. Clancy is the only one who could. Pellegrino talked to him already. He claims not to have heard anything.”
“Any yelling? A warning shot presupposes some yelling first.”
“If he didn’t hear a shot, he wouldn’t have heard yelling.”
“A single NATO round far away and outdoors isn’t necessarily loud. The yelling could have been louder. Especially if it was two-way yelling, which it might have been, back and forth. You know, if there was a dispute or an argument.”
“You accept it was a NATO round now?”
I put my hand in my pocket and came out with the shell case. I held it in my open palm. I said, “I found it a hundred and forty yards out, twelve feet off the straight vector. Exactly where an M16 ejection port would have put it.”
Deveraux said, “It could be a Remington .223,” which was kind of her. Then she took it from me. Her nails felt sharp on the skin of my palm. It was the first time we had touched. The first physical contact. We hadn’t shaken hands when we met.
She did what I had done. She weighed the brass in her palm. Unscientific, but long familiarity can be as accurate as a laboratory instrument. She said, “NATO for sure. I’ve fired a lot of these, and picked them up afterward.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I’m going to raise hell,” she said. “Soldiers against civilians, on American soil? I’ll go all the way to the Pentagon. The White House, if I have to.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“Why the hell not?”
“You’re a country sheriff. They’ll crush you like a bug.”
She said nothing.
“Believe me,” I said. “If they’ve gotten as far as deploying soldiers against civilians, they’ve gotten as far as working out ways to beat local law enforcement.”
Chapter
27
The guy was finally pronounced dead thirty minutes later, at one o’clock in the afternoon, when the doctor showed up with Pellegrino. Pellegrino was in his cruiser and the doctor was in a fifth-hand meat wagon that looked like something out of a history book. I guessed it was a riff on a 1960s hearse, but built on a Chevrolet platform, not Cadillac, and devoid of viewing windows or other funereal hoo-hah of any kind. It was like a half-height panel van, painted dirty white.
Merriam checked pulse and heartbeat