Дэвид Балдаччи - Walk the Wire

Reel put the SUV in gear and they drove off.

“Amos Decker? Rex Manners. Heard you wanted a line on an AWOL named Ben Purdy.”

Decker had answered the call while sitting in his hotel room the next day.

“That’s right, Rex, thanks for getting back to me. What do you have?”

“A name and an address. Beverly Purdy. She lives in Montana, a few hours from the border with North Dakota, which I understand is where you are now.”

“That’s right.”

Manners gave him the address. “Beverly Purdy is the mom. She’s a widow, and Ben is her only kid. She lives on a farm, raises some crops and cattle. I don’t know if Purdy is there or not, but it seemed like a good place for you to start.”

“I appreciate the assist. Be sure to email me a bill. I can give you my address.”

“Don’t worry about it. PIs do each other favors. You’ll be able to return it one day. Good luck.”

Manners clicked off, and Decker put his phone away. He called Jamison and filled her in. When they Googled the location of Purdy’s farm, they found it was about five hours from London.

“Should we grab Kelly?” asked Jamison.

“I don’t want to involve him in something that might come back to haunt him. There may come a time when we have to tell him, but now is not that time.”

They met up downstairs and drove out of town heading west.

“Did you contact Robie?”

“Not yet. I was going to when the PI called. Let’s check out Purdy and then we can hook up with Robie when we get back.”

The long drive seemed longer than it was because there was nothing to see except landscape that never changed.

“I’ve never been in a car this long without seeing another car,” observed Jamison as she drove along. “And I grew up in Indiana.”

“This is Big Sky country.”

Jamison looked out the window. “You got that right. You don’t get this sort of impression in DC or New York.”

Decker glanced at her wrist, where she had tatted Iron Butterfly . “You said your mother got you onto that band when you were a kid. After they re-formed.”

She smirked. “Wow, good memory .”

“Still listen to their music?”

“I’ve moved on to Janis Joplin, and the Doors.”

He glanced at her hand. “When I first met you, I noticed the slight indentation on your ring finger from when you were married before.”

She glanced sharply at him. “I’ve never known you to make small talk. What gives?”

“Maybe I’m evolving.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve never really spoken about your ex. You just told me you were married for two years and three months, then things went sideways. He wasn’t the man you thought he was and maybe you weren’t the woman he thought you were.”

She frowned. “Sometimes your perfect recall is really irritating.”

“How do you think I feel? So?”

“Nothing to really say about it other than what I already did. Dan was different when we dated. He was all things I liked. After we said our vows and started living together, he became all things I disliked. And maybe I became that way to him. Though I don’t think I ever really changed.”

“Amicable split?”

“We were both too young and I was too naïve. Way too naïve. He... he took advantage of that, at least thinking back I see that.”

“Where is he now?”

She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.” She glanced at him again with an annoyed look that she finished off with a warm smile. “Right now, I think I liked it better when you had no interest at all in personal matters.”

He held up his hands in mock surrender and then stared out the window. “When I woke up from my coma in the hospital after getting wrecked on that football field, I thought everything was normal. I thought I was still normal. Until it happened.”

“What happened?”

“You know the little monitor on the stand they have to record your vitals?”

“Yeah.”

“When I looked at the numbers there, I was seeing them in all sorts of different colors. At first, I just thought my vision was still funky, or maybe I was just out of sorts. You have to understand that I still didn’t know what had happened to me. But later, when I looked at the clock on the wall, same thing — weird-ass colors. Then I knew I was definitely not the same. And when I had to interact with people, well, it was a brave new world. I’m sure the doctors and nurses were glad to be rid of me. I was a royal pain in the ass. I was somebody else but only in the same body. My way of coping was just to... not cope. Just move on as though I’d always been that way.”

“But you seem to understand it a lot better than when we first met. Back then you were really aloof, and impossible to read. And you had absolutely no—”

She stopped and looked nervous.

He glanced at her. “No filter? You’re right. And I’m not that much better now.”

“You don’t walk out of rooms while people are still talking to you nearly as much as you used to,” she said encouragingly.

“I guess progress is measured in baby steps.”

“I know we’ve talked about this before, but what is it really like not to forget anything?”

“My personal cloud, you mean?” he said, tapping his temple. “It’s probably a lot like your memory, only mine’s a little more neatly organized and a lot more accessible than yours. You have it all up there, too, but some memories are so crowded out by others that you can’t reach them anymore. I don’t have that problem.”

“A blessing, and a curse.”

“It is if you have something you’d rather forget, which most of us do.”

“I know it’s hard, Decker.”

He stared out the window at an endless sky, which, to him right now, seemed as big as his personal memory. “Life is hard for everybody, Alex. Anybody who says otherwise has just decided to ignore all the shit that comes with waking up every day and walking out the door.”

She said, “So your way of coping is focusing entirely on your work?”

Decker glanced at her, his features inscrutable. “My way of coping is just finding the truth, Alex. If I can do that, then I can deal with everything else.”

The farm looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath , only with less dust and a modicum of water sources.

They pulled to a stop in front of the plank-sided house and got out. There was a dirty and ancient Jeep two-door parked in the front. They could see a barn in the distance, and corrals full of cows collected around a water trough and salt lick. There was also a paddock where some bow-backed horses nibbled grass. The overall operation looked neat and efficient.

The leaning mailbox at the end of the dirt road had said PURDY, so they knew they were in the right place.

Before they could reach the front steps, the screen door opened and a woman stood there, a Remington over-under shotgun in hand. She was in her midfifties, with long gray hair, a slender, wiry build, and a pair of piercing blue eyes. She had on faded dungarees, weathered boots, and a checkered shirt tucked into the pants. The belt holding them up was made of knotted leather. Her face was wrinkled and tanned. And full of suspicion.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

Jamison immediately took out her FBI creds and badge.

“FBI Special Agent Alex Jamison. My partner, Amos Decker. Are you Beverly Purdy?”

Instead of de-escalating the situation, this only caused the woman to raise the gun and point it directly at them, her finger near the trigger. “What the hell do you want? You tell me right now.”

Decker stepped forward, putting himself between Jamison and the gun. “We wanted to talk to Ben, if he’s here.”