Ли Чайлд - Этаж смерти with W_cat

[ 868] Saturday morning, a long fax was in from the Pentagon about my service record. Thirteen years of my life, reduced to a few curling fax pages. It felt like somebody else’s life now, but it backed my story. Finlay had been impressed by it. Then my prints came back from the FBI database. They’d been matched by the tireless computer at two thirty in the morning. U.S. Army, printed on induction, thirteen years ago. My alibi was solid, and my background checked out.

[ 869] “Finlay was satisfied,” Roscoe told me. “You are who you say you are, and midnight Thursday you were over four hundred miles away. That was nailed down. He called the medical examiner again just in case he had a new opinion on the time of death, but no, midnight was still about right.”

[ 870] I shook my head. Finlay was one very cautious guy.

[ 871] “What about the dead guy?” I said. “Did you run his prints again?”

[ 872] She concentrated on passing a farm truck. The first vehicle we’d seen in a quarter hour. Then she looked across and nodded.

[ 873] “Finlay told me you wanted me to,” she said. “But why?”

[ 874] “They came back too quickly for a negative result,” I said.

[ 875] “Too quickly?” she said.

[ 876] “You told me there was a pyramid system, right?” I said. “The top ten, then the top hundred, then the top thousand, all the way down, right?”

[ 877] She nodded again.

[ 878] “So take me as an example,” I said. “I’m in the database, but I’m pretty low down the pyramid. You just said it took fourteen hours to get down to me, right?”

[ 879] “Right,” she said. “I sent your prints in about twelve thirty at lunchtime and they were matched at two thirty in the morning.”

[ 880] “OK,” I said. “Fourteen hours. So if it takes fourteen hours to reach nearly to the bottom of the pyramid, it’s got to take more than fourteen hours to get all the way down to the bottom. That’s logical, right?”

[ 881] “Right,” she said.

[ 882] “But what happened with this dead guy?” I said. “The body was found at eight o’clock, so the prints went in when? Eight thirty, earliest. But Baker was already telling me there was no match on file when they were talking to me at two thirty. I remember the time, because I was looking at the clock. That’s only six hours. If it took fourteen hours to find out that I’m in there, how could it take just six hours to say the dead guy’s not in there?”

[ 883] “God,” she said. “You’re right. Baker must have screwed up. Finlay took the prints and Baker sent them. He must have screwed up the scan. You got to be careful, or it doesn’t transmit clearly. If the scan’s not clear, the database tries to decipher it, then it comes back as unreadable. Baker must have thought that meant a null result. The codes are similar. Anyway, I sent them again, first thing. We’ll know soon enough.”

[ 884] We drove on east and Roscoe told me she’d pushed Finlay to get me out of Warburton right away yesterday afternoon. Finlay had grunted and agreed, but there was a problem. They’d had to wait until today, because yesterday afternoon Warburton had been just about shut down. They had told Finlay there had been some trouble in a bathroom. One convict was dead, one had lost an eye, and a full-scale riot had started, black and white gangs at war.

[ 885] I just sat there next to Roscoe and watched the horizon reeling in. I’d killed one guy and blinded another. Now I’d have to confront my feelings. But I didn’t feel much at all. Nothing, in fact. No guilt, no remorse. None at all. I felt like I’d chased two roaches around that bathroom and stomped on them. But at least a roach is a rational, reasonable, evolved sort of a creature. Those Aryans in that bathroom had been worse than vermin. I’d kicked one of them in the throat and he had suffocated on his smashed larynx. Well, tough shit. He started it, right? Attacking me was like pushing open a forbidden door. What waited on the other side was his problem. His risk. If he didn’t like it, he shouldn’t have pushed open the damn door. I shrugged and forgot about it. Looked over at Roscoe.

[ 886] “Thank you,” I said. “I mean it. You worked hard to help me out.”

[ 887] She waved away my thanks with a blush and a small gesture and just drove on. I was starting to like her a lot. But probably not enough to stop me getting the hell out of Georgia as soon as I could. Maybe I might just stay an hour or two and then get her to drive me to a bus depot somewhere.

[ 888] “I want to take you to lunch,” I said. “Kind of a thank-you thing.”

[ 889] She thought about it for a quarter mile and then smiled across at me.

[ 890] “OK,” she said.

[ 891] She jinked the right turn onto the county road and accelerated south toward Margrave. Drove past Eno’s shiny new place and headed down to town.

[ 892] I GOT HER TO DUCK IN AT THE STATION HOUSE AND BRING me out the property bag with my money in it. Then we drove on and she dropped me in the center of Margrave and I arranged to meet her up at the station house in a couple of hours. I stood on the sidewalk in the fierce Sunday morning heat and waved her off. I felt a whole lot better. I was back in motion. I was going to check out the Blind Blake story, then take Roscoe to lunch, then get the hell out of Georgia and never come back.

[ 893] So I spent a while wandering around looking at the town, doing the things I should have been doing on Friday afternoon. There wasn’t really much to the place. The old county road ran straight through, north to south, and for about four blocks it was labeled Main Street. Those four blocks had small stores and offices facing each other across the width of the road, separated by little service alleys which ran around to the back of the buildings. I saw a small grocery, a barbershop, an outfitter’s, a doctor’s office, a lawyer’s office and a dentist’s office. In back of the commercial buildings was parkland with white picket fences and ornamental trees. On the street, the stores and offices had awnings over wide sidewalks. There were benches set on the sidewalks, but they were empty. The whole place was deserted. Sunday morning, miles from anywhere.

[ 894] Main Street ran north, straight as a die, past a few hundred yards of more parkland up to the station house and the firehouse, and a half mile farther on than that was Eno’s diner. A few miles beyond Eno’s was the turn west out to Warburton where the prison was. North of that junction there was nothing on the county road until you reached the warehouses and the highway cloverleaf, fourteen empty miles from where I stood.

[ 895] On the south edge of town I could see a little village green with a bronze statue and a residential street running away to the west. I strolled down there and saw a discreet green sign which read: Beckman Drive. Hubble’s street. I couldn’t see any real distance down it because pretty much straight away it looped left and right around a wide grass square with a big white wooden church set on it. The church was ringed by cherry trees and the lawn was circled by cars with clean quiet paint parked in neat lines. I could just about make out the growl of the organ and the sound of the people singing.

[ 896] The statue on the village green was of a guy called Caspar Teale who’d done something or other about a hundred years ago. More or less opposite Beckman Drive on the other side of the green was another residential street, running east, with a convenience store standing alone on the corner. And that was it. Not much of a town. Not much going on. Took me less than thirty minutes to look over everything the place had to offer.

[ 897] But it was the most immaculate town I had ever seen. It was amazing. Every single building was either brand-new or recently refurbished. The roads were smooth as glass, and the sidewalks were flat and clean. No potholes, no cracks, no heave. The little offices and stores looked like they got repainted every week. The lawns and the plantings and the trees were clipped to perfection. The bronze statue of old Caspar Teale looked like somebody licked it clean every morning. The paint on the church was so bright it hurt my eyes. Flags flew everywhere, sparkling white and glowing red and blue in the sun. The whole place was so tidy it could make you nervous to walk around in case you left a dirty footprint somewhere.