Choppy Water

16

Colonel Wade Sykes sat in a rear treatment room at a veterinarian’s office a few miles from his base and watched the DVM inject a man’s left arm with lidocaine, then flush the wound, and after testing for numbness, used a probe to locate the bullet. When he had done so, he used another tool to extract it and dropped it into a steel tray. He flushed the wound again and applied a coagulant, then trimmed the edges, stitched it closed, and bandaged it. “Okay, you can sit up now or, if you’re feeling ill, just lie there for a few minutes.”

“He doesn’t feel ill,” Sykes said. “Let’s go, kid. We’ve got to get out of here before daylight comes.” He handed the DVM ten folded hundreds. “It was our lucky day, Doc, when you grabbed that nurse’s ass and got drummed out of med school for your trouble.”

“Maybe my lucky day, too. My work here is easier, and my patients don’t complain. Let this guy rest for twenty-four hours, Colonel, before you put him in harm’s way again.” He gave the man another injection of something, then handed him an unmarked bottle of pills. “One, twice a day, until they’re all gone.”

“Is there a painkiller in there?” the colonel asked.

“There is not. I know your policy on pain. Those are an antibiotic. You don’t want the trouble of an infected patient.”

“He’s going to get back on that pony pretty soon,” Sykes shot back, slapping the young man on the back and causing him to wince. “C’mon, boy.” He led the man outside and put him in the rear seat of his pickup, then drove off toward home.

Once there, he put the man on a bed in the bunkhouse, threw a blanket over him, and went home for dinner. His cook, an older black man named Elroy, a fine practitioner of the old Southern school, set down a plate filled with a fried chicken breast, collard greens, and creamed corn. A plate of biscuits followed, then he poured a glass of a wine his boss had already chosen. Two of Sykes’s men and a young woman called Bess were waiting for him.

“How’s he doing?” the woman asked.

“We don’t discuss business at table,” Sykes replied, rolling his eyes toward Elroy. They all continued eating in silence. When they were done they left the dirty dishes for Elroy, then adjourned to the living room, where Sykes poured everyone a brandy.

“Sorry about that, Colonel,” Bess said. “I thought you trusted Elroy.”

“I’m alive because there exists only a very short list of those I find trustworthy. Elroy’s not very bright, and obviously he’s... not one of us. Who knows what hatreds he harbors?”

“Quite right,” she said. “Now, how is the boy?”

“He’s asleep. The doctor gave him something, I think, and his wound has been properly treated. He’s going to experience some pain when he wakes up, but that will be good for him. Up until today, he was a raw recruit, but tonight, he was blooded.” He took a sip of his brandy. “Now,” he said. “I want a proper report.”

One of the men leaned forward in his chair. “Bess drove us to within a block of the house. We took a turn around the place and found it mostly dark, with a lamp on here and there. We found a window with no alarm module on it and broke a pane. The boy was halfway through when I heard the shot from inside and saw the flash. The boy fell into my arms, and I fired two rounds to keep the on-duty man away from the window. Bess was there in a hurry, and we beat it out of there. We drove back to where we had left the van, and Bess got a combat bandage on the boy’s arm, while I wiped down the pickup, then we got the hell out of there.”

“Sounds like Bess is the only one of you with any brains,” the colonel said.

His man flushed and sat back in his chair, silent now.

“It’s obvious now that Ms. Barker was not in residence,” Bess said. “She must have got out Sunday or Monday, probably after dark. A New York City newspaper put her at Bloomingdale’s yesterday morning. We need better intelligence than this, Colonel. We shouldn’t be reading about it in the New York Post.”

Sykes took that as a rebuke and glowered a bit. “We’re working on it.”

“Best thing would be a Secret Service agent, maybe one who’s recently retired or fired; somebody with an axe to grind,” Bess said. “Just knowing their procedures better would be a big help.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Sykes shot back.

“I don’t see much evidence that you do,” she said coolly. “After the cockup in Maine, we need people who can, at the very least, read a map.”

“We’re working on a retired agent,” Sykes said.

“What are his particulars?”

“Been with the Service for twenty-two years, the last three or four becoming progressively marginalized. His wife died — a woman he hated, by all accounts — but it still threw him. I’ve got a man drinking with him two or three nights a week at his local pub. He’s finding it hard to stretch his pension to cover his expenses.”

“He sounds ideal,” Bess said. “Do you want me to see him and observe?”

“Maybe,” the colonel replied. “Maybe soon. I could use another opinion.”

“Wire up your man, and I can nurse a drink at another table and hear their conversation. I’d like to question him, but I suppose it’s too soon for that.”

“Maybe not,” Sykes said. “We’ll see.”

They finished their brandy and departed the house for bed, except for Bess, who had a guest room upstairs, to keep the men away from her, or, perhaps, vice versa.

Sykes performed his bedtime ablutions, then got into the pajamas under his pillow and had his nighttime think.

Bess was on the cheeky side, but he put up with it because she was the smartest member of his group, and he did not necessarily exclude himself from that assessment. He had met her on a firing range in D.C., where she worked as a personal assistant to somebody important at Justice, and thus had had a proper vetting, which cut down on the work he otherwise would have had to pay for.

After they put away their weapons, Sykes had approached her in the small coffee bar. “Can I get you something?” he had asked.

“Thank you, a double espresso.”

“No sweetener?”

“No.”

He got one for each of them. “May I join you?”

“Sure.”

She was fairly good-looking: slim, with nice breasts — he liked that. She looked as though she would clean up nice, so she might be a good candidate to accompany him to one of those dinner parties he kept getting invited to since his wife had left him four years ago, a year before she died. He had not been broken up about that, since he had contrived for her benefits from the divorce to die with her, keeping him twice as rich as he otherwise would have been. Then, because she had not updated her will, he had inherited the house and property that had belonged to her father, where he now lived and ran his group.

“What do you do? Something in government, I would imagine.”

“You have a good imagination,” she had replied. “I’m assistant to the deputy director for criminal investigations.”

Oh, good, he had thought.