Zero Option

7

Sergeant Mccallister was not pleased. “Forty-five minutes before we secure the area for the day, and you’re bringing me this shit? I do not need this, Mayfield. I do not need this.”

Latonya Mayfield stared down at the pile of reports she bad put on the sergeant’s desk, but she said nothing. The sergeant was not one of her favorite people on this planet, and he was also not one of the world’s great listeners.

“Well?” he said. “Are you completely sure of these numbers? You’ve run ‘em more than once? You’ve checked them?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she said patiently. “Even had Spec Three Luper run them.” Luper was the clerk who was supposed to do this audit. “There’s a discrepancy.”

Mccallister stared down at the report as his face got red. “Where’s a discrepancy, for Chrissakes? This is the destruction inventory match audit, goddamn it. There can not be a discrepancy in the destruction inventory match audit. You know that I know that. The whole fucking Army knows that. This thing has to match up. If there’s a discrepancy, it has to be in your paperwork, not in this report.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” she said in a “if you say so” tone of voice.

“Damn right, yes, Sergeant,” he said. “All right Tell Henderson I want to see him. Don’t tell him why.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Mayfield replied, and went out to find Spec-5 Henderson. It took her a few minutes because Henderson, getting a little jump on four-thirty secure, had been in the men’s locker room changing into civvies.

“It’s sixteen-ten, Mayfield. What is this shit, anyway?” “Man said for me to tell you to go see him,” she said. “Said he’d tell you when you got there.”

“Aw, man! Shit!” He looked at his watch. “All right I gotta get back in the bag first.” He went back into the locker room.

Mayfield went back to her cubicle, wondering what to do next. Henderson was a weapons safety specialist, not a clerk. He would be seriously pissed when he found out that he had to do the destruction inventory match audit. She had to decide in the next five minutes whether to hit the road, Jack, or stay to help him. She thought about it. Henderson was an okay guy for a white man, but he’d hate her forever if he thought he was having to pick up after her. On the other hand, she had discovered the discrepancy; for a clean audit, he would have to do it by himself to catch her mistake.

Fifteen minutes later, Henderson solved it for her. He came by her desk with the report in his hands and gave her a black look. “Thanks a fucking heap, Mayfield.”

“I’ll stay and help you with it, you want,” she offered.

He shook’his head. “Man said I had to do it by myself. Said you’d fucked it up. Shit, I’ve never done a goddamn audit. This’ll take fucking hours.”

“I didn’t mess it up,” she said. “I found a discrepancy. That’s why he’s pissed. I’D show you how it’s done. Maybe you can find it.”

“You serious? There really is a discrepancy?”

“I think there is. Spec Three Luper says there is, but he couldn’t find it, either.”

Henderson’s anger evaporated. He looked back across the room, but Mccallister’s door was closed

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t let old Shit for Brains see us.”

Carson sat as his desk and considered the word that had reached him thirty minutes earlier.

That the Washington guy had been seen talking to people out in the warehouse.’ That the DRMO’s pet rock, Corey Dillard, had said something to Stafford about Bud Lambry. What, or in what context, had not been overheard. Or the blue-collar guys weren’t willing to say.

Great, he thought. Just fucking great. Dillard had been Bud Lambry’s helper from time to time, but Bud had assured Carson that Dillard knew nothing about the scam. But what might genius Lambry have told genius Dillard about the magical cylinder and all the money that might be coming Bud’s way? He got up and looked out into the flea-market warehouse. The auction had been today, and the bidders had been carting out the spoils to the loading dock all day.

He turned away from the window and walked slowly around his office, feeling uneasy as he relived what had happened to Lambry. He repeated to himself his new mantra: It was an accident. Wendell Carson is not a murderer. But there was no getting around the enormity of what he had gotten himself into: stealing the cylinder in the first place, and now the death of Bud Lambry. He went over to the bookcase and put his hands between the binders. He felt with his fingers the smooth steel, cold and deadly to the touch.

Before Stafford had begun nosing around, it would have been sufficient for him simply to announce that Lambry had quit and disappeared. Now he might have to think of something more elaborate. And then a scary thought occurred to him: If Stafford really started looking into Lam bry’s disappearance, what loose ends had Lambry left?