The Summer House(96)

Sanchez waits for a reply, and then the lieutenant says, “You know, this yelling back and forth, it sure is cumbersome. How about I slide in a portable phone, we can talk easier?”

Sanchez laughs. “Sure. A portable phone with a hidden microphone and camera or a flash-bang grenade or a tear-gas canister. Not going to happen, Lieutenant.”

He takes out his iPhone, sends off a quick text message. He doesn’t think he’s going to have much more time in here and wants to make things clear to Pierce and Huang as this day proceeds.

“All right,” the lieutenant says. “Can we get you anything in the meantime, Agent Sanchez? Water? Juice? Something to eat?”

He takes another sniff. Damn, is it getting foul in here.

“I want two cops,” he says.

“What?”

“Two cops,” Sanchez says. “Dressed in nothing except their underwear. No shoes, no socks, nothing. They come in with hands out, and they slowly turn around and lower their shorts, so I know they’re not concealing anything. Got it?”

The Savannah lieutenant says, “Are you joking, Agent Sanchez? You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, serious indeed,” he says. “Those two cops come in, just as I say, and they take out the dead guy. That gives you a chance to fingerprint him, do an ID, find out why he tried to kill my boss. How does that sound?”

Sanchez looks at his iPhone. In the upper left-hand portion of the screen, small letters now announce, where they didn’t before: No service.

The cops are blocking his cell phone.

No matter.

Sanchez settles in for a long wait, and looks up to York and says, “Hang in there, boss. We need to know what you know.”



Captain Allen Pierce is driving their rental Ford sedan right behind the dark-brown van of the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department when his phone chimes, and so does Huang’s.

He says, “What’s up, John? Who’s trying to talk to us? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution?”

Huang holds his phone close to his face. “It’s from Sanchez.”

“What does it say?”

“It says, Still guarding York. Pierce in charge. Protect the Rangers.”

“Text him back.”

“And tell him what?”

Pierce takes a look in the rearview mirror, sees the line of rented cars and vans belonging to the news media streaming behind them like some ghoulish parade.

“Tell him message received,” Pierce says. “Nothing else. Poor guy’s got his hands full.”

Huang’s fingers start working on the handheld’s screen. “So do we. Shit, why haven’t we heard from Major Cook?”

Pierce says, “Maybe he’s gotten held up in some carpet bazaar. Forget Cook for the moment, John. We’re on our own.”



Gus Millner is a maintenance worker and transport assistant at the Memorial Health University Medical Center, and he’s having a busy day. When the ER is busy, he’s busy, and right now he’s carrying a heavy plastic bag that holds the belongings of a female gunshot victim who was admitted yesterday. There was some sort of foul-up yesterday in delivering this bag, so he needs to bring the bag up to the ICU’s nurses’ station. Afterward, there’s a restroom on the third floor that needs attention.

He’s alone in an elevator, going up, when something starts ringing in the bag.

It keeps ringing.

He opens the bag, looks inside. Black slacks, shoes, and—

A heavy phone with a big keypad and a thick, stubby antenna. Not a type of cell phone he’s ever seen.

What to do?

Answer it?

He closes the bag, and when he gets to the right floor for the ICU, it stops ringing.

Good.

Last month one of his buds got shit-canned for answering some patient’s phone in a bag of possessions like this, and Gus isn’t about to lose his job over something so simple and silly.





Chapter 88





Afghanistan




I SWITCH OFF my Iridium phone and put it back in my rucksack. Chief Warrant Officer Cellucci is standing to the right of the Little Bird helicopter and waves me forward. It’s windy out on the airstrip, hitting us with dust and gravel.

“No answer, Major?”

“None,” I say, walking to him as best as I can without my cane, rucksack in my right hand. I’m dressed in a dark-green flight suit, carrying an oversized crash helmet in my left hand.

He shrugs. “Happens sometimes, the signals don’t go through. Cosmic rays, sunspots—the atmospherics around here are pretty strange. Here, I’ll take your bag.”

Cellucci grabs it with little effort, tosses it into the rear, which is used for storage. I go to climb in and hesitate, my left leg screaming at me how stupid this is, and then Cellucci says, “Here you go.”

He grabs two fistfuls of my flight-suit fabric and pushes me in, the fabric from the one-piece suit jamming into a very sensitive area, and I sit down in the small, tight canvas seat. Cellucci helps strap me in and then walks around the bubble-glass front, eases himself into the pilot’s seat.

“Put your helmet on. Let’s get the comm set up so we can chat with each other.”

He helps me put the borrowed helmet on, adjusts the mic in front, hooks up the communications cable. I feel like I’m being put into a carnival ride by some smug traveling carnie who secretly hopes I piss myself when the ride ends.