Джеймс Паттерсон - The Summer House

I go down a narrow corridor with a concrete floor, more plywood doors and cubicles on it, and the smell is of aviation fuel, sweat, and ill-washed clothes. This smell is also called FAN, for feet, ass, and nuts.

The corridor opens into an operations center with computer screens, communications equipment—radios, secure telephones—and more maps and photographs up on the walls.

Boy, I really don’t belong here.

An officer with a colonel’s rank starts to get up and say something, and I turn around and take three quick steps, nearly knocking down Chief Warrant Officer Carmine Cellucci, who’s carrying a tan plastic bag in his right hand.

He laughs. “Hey, Major, there’re two MPs out there looking for a Major Cook who’s using a cane. What a coincidence, huh?”

I say, “You see me with a cane?”

“Ah, no, but the MPs will probably go beyond just that,” he says. “By the way, two years.”

“What?”

He takes my upper arm, starts leading me away from the inquisitive colonel back in the operations center. “You give me what you promised back there, except it’s for two years, not one.”

“Deal.”

“And it includes my girlfriend.”

“You’re pushing it, Cellucci.”

He stops, opens the plastic bag, and lets me look inside. A pile of Hershey’s chocolate bars, in their familiar dark-brown packages with gray lettering. “You need to pay to get in.”

I don’t hesitate. “Your girlfriend, too.”

He closes up the bag. “Good,” he says. “Just don’t tell the wife. C’mon.”

“But orders,” I say. “Paperwork. What changed?”

“Oh, a sweet coincidence,” he says. “One of the Little Birds in my company just finished a maintenance cycle. Somebody needs to take it up for a test flight, make sure the oil doesn’t leak or a screw doesn’t fall off. How does that sound?”

“Sounds great,” I say.

He takes me through a door to the outside and says, “We’ll be heading out in about an hour after I do a preflight check and get our gear together. By the way, what kind of investigation you doing, you need to talk to Kurtz about it?”

“A Ranger staff sergeant,” I say. “He’s up on murder charges, intends to plead guilty later today. I don’t think he did it. I hope Kurtz will back me up on this.”

“Where’s the Ranger being held?”

“Georgia,” I say. “And I think he’s in danger.”

Cellucci whistles. “Once spent six months in Georgia, training some of their pilots. Young and scared, and I’d be scared, too, with Russia and its shit-ass military right next door.”

“Not that Georgia,” I say as we approach a set of tents. “The one back in the States.”

“Oh,” he says. “That Georgia. Man, that could be worse.”

I say, “It certainly could.”

Another glance at my watch.

Time is still slipping away, and I’m so far from being where I need to be.

Chapter 85

FOR THE PAST few minutes, dogs have been barking as Sheriff Emma Williams maneuvers her cruiser down the narrow, bumpy dirt road a few hours before sunrise on this day she has to control from start to finish.

The dirt road widens and ends in a wide spot of dirt and gravel, where half a dozen ATVs, four battered pickup trucks with large muddy tires, and one bright-blue and highly polished Mercedes-Benz A-Class sedan are parked.

There are also three trailers set in a semicircle, and another one is farther away. Even at this time of the morning, there are lights on in every trailer, because the chained hound dogs back there make for an effective early warning system. There’s also a heavy scent of nail polish remover, and as Williams gets out of her cruiser, then puts on her hat, she knows that not a single ounce of nail polish exists in these four trailers.

She leaves the cruiser’s engine running, as well as keeps the headlights on.

The wind comes up and the smell doesn’t lessen, because that farther trailer is a meth lab, and in one random spasm of intelligence, the family that operates the lab made sure it was far enough away so that if it exploded, the rest of this isolated compound wouldn’t go up as well. Two large barns are visible in the distance, through a stand of trees, which they use to dry their marijuana harvests.

“Hiram Tolliver,” she yells. “You up in there?”

Dogs bark inside, and then the door to the closest trailer opens up, and a tall, heavyset man stumbles out, tying tight the string around his dirty gray sweatpants. He also has on an Atlanta Braves tank top. His upper arms are hairy and flabby, and quiver as he comes toward the cruiser.

“You’re not Hiram,” she says.

“Nope,” he says, yawning, rubbing at the back of his head. “I’m his nephew Boyd.”

“Boyd,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“No, ma’am,” he says, shielding his eyes with a beefy hand. “Look, can you switch off those headlights?”

“No,” Williams says. “What did your uncle tell you to do?”

He coughs, scratches at his stomach. “He told me to do whatever you wanted, no questions, no talk back.”

“That’s a hell of an open ticket, you know.”

“Uncle Hiram, he says he’d make it good for me. ’Scuse me.” Boyd turns and clears his lungs, spits twice on the dirt. Turning back, he wipes a hand across his mouth and says, “Whaddya need, Sheriff?”

She says, “You’re coming with me to the county jail. You’re going to be placed in a cell. Later this morning, maybe just before noon or somewhere close to that, a prisoner is going to be put in that cell.”

From her left pants pocket she takes out a slim knife. “After he’s placed in there with you, you’re going to slit his throat with this.”

She holds out the knife, and he takes it. “Gosh, ma’am, that’s pretty cold, you know? Killin’ a man I don’t know, I don’t have a grudge against.”

“He’s an uppity nigger that thinks he’s better than you.”

“Oh,” he says, taking the blade, sliding it into the pocket of his sweatpants. “That’s okay, then.”

“Good.”

“But…ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“How do I get there? I mean, there’s no warrants or anything out there on me. Ma’am?”

Williams smiles. This is going to be all right.

“Boyd, come over here and knock off my hat. Okay?”

“Um, okay.”

Boyd comes over, knocks off her hat.

“Now,” she says. “Pick it up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He picks up her hat and hands it over, and she puts it back on. She grabs his wrist, turns him around, and quickly and efficiently puts on the handcuffs.

“Boyd Tolliver, I’m placing you under arrest for assaulting a law enforcement officer,” she says.

“Ma’am.”

“Yes?”

“My wrists are sore from chopping wood yesterday. Mind not putting on the cuffs too tight?”

Williams leads him back to her cruiser.

“Not at all,” she says.

Chapter 86

CAPTAIN ALLEN PIERCE gets up from his chair and kicks at Lieutenant John Huang’s legs. For the past couple of hours Huang has tried to sleep with three chairs pushed together, and that hasn’t gone well, with Huang falling twice onto the floor.

Huang jerks awake. “What’s up?”

“Circus is about to start,” Pierce says, looking at the crowds suddenly moving toward the door of the jailhouse. “A sheriff’s van just pulled in.”

Huang yawns, stretches, winces. “What’s our job?”

Pierce checks his service weapon. “Make sure the staff sergeant gets to the courthouse without a Jack Ruby getting in the way.”

The door flings open, and Deputy Sheriff Clark Lindsay comes in, looking the same as he did a few hours ago, except now he’s wearing a bullet-resistant vest over his uniform, with yellow letters denoting SULLIVAN COUNTY SHERIFF and a stylized badge underneath.