The Affair

Deveraux came back from her car with a camera. It was a silver SLR. She got ready to take her crime-scene pictures and I followed the line of panicked running prints away from the area. I kept them three feet to my right and tracked them a hundred yards, and then they petered out on a broad vein of bone-hard dirt. Some kind of a geological issue, or an irrigation thing, or I had reached the limit of what old man Clancy liked to plow. I saw no reason why a fleeing man would change direction at that point, so I kept on going straight, hoping to pick up the prints again, but I didn’t. Within fifty yards the ground became matted with low wiry weeds of some description. Ahead of me they grew a little taller, and then they shaded into the brush that had grown up at the base of Kelham’s fence. I saw no bruised stalks, but it was tough vegetation and I wouldn’t have expected it to show much damage.

I turned back and took a step and saw a glint of light twelve feet to my right. Metallic. Brassy. I detoured and bent down and saw a cartridge case lying on the dirt. Bright and fresh. New. Long, from a rifle. Best case, it was a .223 Remington, made for a sporting gun. Worst case, it was a 5.56 millimeter NATO round, made for the military. Hard to tell the difference, with the naked eye. The Remington case has thinner brass. The NATO case is heavier.

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."

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 and poked around the wound for a minute. He said, "This man bled out through his femoral artery. Death by gunshot." Which was obvious, but then he added something interesting. He teased up the slit edge of the guy’s pants leg and said, "Wet denim is not easy to cut. Someone used a very sharp knife."

I helped Merriam put the guy on a canvas gurney, and then we loaded him in the back of the truck. Merriam drove him away, and Deveraux spent five minutes on the radio in her car. I stood around with Pellegrino. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. Then Deveraux got out of her car again and sent him about his business. He drove away, and Deveraux and I were alone once more, except for the blasted tree and a patch of dark tone on the ground, where the dead guy’s blood had soaked into the soil.

Deveraux said, "Butler claims no one came out of Kelham’s main gate at any time this morning."

I said, "Who’s Butler?"

"My other deputy. Pellegrino’s opposite number. I’ve had him stationed outside the base. I wanted a quick warning, in case they cancel the lockdown. There’s going to be all kinds of tension. People are very upset about Chapman."

"But not about the first two?"

"Depends who you ask, and where. But the soldiers never stop short of the tracks. The bars are all on the other side."

I said nothing.

She said, "There must be more gates. Or holes in the fence. It’s got to be, what? Thirty miles long? And it’s fifty years old. Got to be weak spots. Someone came out somewhere, that’s for sure."

"And went back in again," I said. "If you’re right, that is. Someone went back in bloody to the elbows, with a dirty knife, and at least one round short in his magazine."

"I am right," she said.

"I never heard of a quarantine zone before," I said. "Not inside the United States, anyway. I just don’t buy it."

"I buy it," she said.

Something in her tone. Something in her face.

I said, "What? Did the Marines do this once?"

"It was no big thing."

"Tell me all about it."

"Classified information," she said.

"Where was it?"

"I can’t tell you that."