Zero Option

8

Spec-5 Henderson threw his pencil across the darkened office. Mayfield, sitting in a chair at another desk, watched him with a small smile of satisfaction on her face. She had gone into the women’s locker room at 4:30, until one of the other girls told her that Mccallister had left for the day. Then she’d rejoined Henderson and helped him crunch the numbers. He’d gotten the hang of it during the first hour and then run the report audit himself.

“I give up,” he said. “I get the same thing you did. One number off. One fucking number.” She nodded. “Now what?” she asked.

“We tell Mccallister, that’s what. He’s the sergeant”

“He gonna go hermantile.”

He looked over at her. “Lenime get this straight: This discrepancy means one of three things, right? More shit went out of here than got there, or more shit got there than went out of here, or something’s missing, right?”

“That’s it.”

He shuffled back through the fifty-seven page destruction report and frowned.

She really wanted to go home, although this might get interesting very soon. “What?” she asked.

“I’m looking to see what was shipped.”

“Buncha alfa-bravo-charlie gobbledygook,” she said.

Henderson didn’t say anything while he studied the report. He’d been focusing on numbers. Now he was looking at the alpha-numeric ammunition designator codes down the left side of the printouts. He rubbed his eyes. Then he stopped.

“Whoa,” he said softly.

“What?”

“At first I couldn’t recognize this designator code. But now I remember what this shipment was. This is fucking Wet Eye.”

“Wet Eye. Now that sounds like some lovely shit.”

He looked back over at her, and something in his eyes made her straighten up.

“We need to call Mccallister,” he said, “Like right fucking now.” ‘

After a half hour of trying unsuccessfully to find Sergeant Mccallister, and then Lieutenant Biers, Mccallister’s boss, Henderson had taken it upon himself to call the depot’s command duty officer. He explained that he had a problem and couldn’t find either the sergeant or the platoon’s lieutenant, then asked if the CDO could come over to the control office.

The CDO, a first lieutenant who was an instructor at the Chemical Warfare School, wanted to know why Spec-5 Henderson wouldn’t come over to the duty office. Lieutenants did not go to see E-5s.

“Sir, it’s complicated. And it may turn into a really, really big deal.

That’s all I can say over an unsecure phone, sir.”

“We need MPs here, Henderson? This isn’t some sexual harassment shit, is it?”

“No, sir. Nothing like that. You just need to come over here. Please?”

Although he was just a first lieutenant, the CDO had been in the Army long enough to recognize what that “please” meant: An enlisted man thought he was looking at some serious trouble and now wanted an officer folded into it before whatever it was got worse.

“Okay, I’m on my way, Henderson. Tell me again where that office is.”

Ten minutes later, a green Ford sedan pulled up in front of the control office. Specialist Mayfield escorted the CDO in. She was pleased to see that he was black and, a Chemical Corps officer. Once they were hi the office, Henderson explained what he’d been doing, with Mayfield’s assistance. At first the CDO did not understand what the problem was.

Henderson laid out the bottom line for him.

“A cylinder of Wet Eye may be unaccounted for.”, The CDO stared at him.

“No shit? You sure of this, you two?”

Henderson shook his head. “The destruction inventory audit doesn’t add up,” he said. “Mayfield here worked it all day, then another guy did it, and then Mayfield here told the sergeant, who had me do it again. We’ve been here since sixteen-thirty. It still doesn’t add up.” He paused. “It could be a fuckup at the other end, at Tooele,” he said hopefully.

“Let’s hope and pray it is. When was the shipment?”

“It left here by train not quite a month ago,” Mayfield said. “This report came in last Thursday.”

The lieutenant stared down at the report for a long moment. “Okay,” he said. “You two come with me. I’m going to call the CO.” “How about our chain of command?” Henderson asked. “Sergeant Mccallister is gonna kick our asses, we jump the. chain and go right to the CO.”

“You didn’t jump it. I did. And I’m the command duty officer. This looks like a possible shit storm to me, so I’m calling the CO. He’s always telling us, when in doubt, call, him. So I’m gonna call his ass, if it’s all the same to you, Specialist.”

Carson eased his government pickup truck down the street on which Bud Lambry lived. Used to live, he reminded himself. The dilapidated neighborhood was an enclave of old houses cornered by the airport rail lines on one side, a phalanx of trucking terminals on another, and Interstate 285. At this hour, the street was dark and empty.

Lambry’s house lay at the dead end of the last street, nestled under a fifty-foot-high embankment carrying the rail line. It wasn’t much more than a one-story shack, with sagging front and back porches, a few dying trees on either side, a rusty propane tank, and a dirt front yard containing three junked cars. There were some small outbuildings in various states of collapse out back at the base of the railroad embankment. The house across the street appeared to be abandoned; the house next door looked possibly occupied, but darkened for the night.

There was a mound of trash at the dead end of the badly potholed street, and one rusting car nosed into the embankment like some burrowing animal.

Carson rolled to a quiet stop in front of Lambry’s house and switched off the engine. He took a final drag on his cigarette and then mashed it out. It had taken him a few hours and a visit to the officers club’s bar to muster up the courage to come out here, and another hour to find the house. But if Stafford was going to start poking around into Bud Lambry’s sudden disappearance, then Wendell Carson” had better take a look inside Lambry’s house to see if he had stashed any sort of incriminating evidence. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do here. Given “

Lambry’s Alabama hillbilly antecedents, he could just imagine what it was like in there.

After waiting fifteen minutes to see if anything was stirring, he stepped out of the truck. He paused again to make sure there were no dogs. A quick scan of the street revealed nothing moving but a single gray cat skulking through the cone of light produced by the one remaining streetlight, which was about a hundred feet away. He walked as casually as he could to the side of the house, trying not to act like some kind of burglar.

A lot of things had changed since Friday night. He had the advantage of knowing that the owner would be out forever, so there should be no surprises here, unless Lam bry had a wife or someone else in the house.

That thought stopped him as he approached the trash-littered back porch.

No, no wife. Lambry had no dependents listed in his personnel file. But then again, Lambry, ever the secretive hillbilly, might not have bothered to tell anyone.

He took a deep breath and stepped up onto the back porch. The porch boards felt soft and spongy. He tried the back door, which was not locked. It appeared to be warped. He let himself into a kitchen area, where his nose told him instantly that this place was going to be every bit as bad as he’d expected. All the windows appeared to be closed, and the air was warm and fetid. He stood there for a moment in the dark kitchen, almost afraid to go farther into the house. It didn’t feel like there was anyone in the house, but he would have to make sure. He realized he hadn’t even brought a flashlight; some burglar he’d make.

Okay, he would have to depend on the dun streetlight filtering through dirty windows. “

The rest of the house was as cluttered and smelly as the kitchen area, but there was no one there. After a quick survey, he realized that he would never find anything that Lambry had purposefully hidden. More important, Lambry’s house definitely did not look like he’d left the area, but, rather, like he had just gone to work one day and not come back.

That was a problem. If Stafford or the cops came out here, they’d conclude at once that something had happened to Lambry. With a sinking feeling, Carson also understood there was no way he could make this place look like the owner had made a planned, orderly departure. Not in less than three days, anyway.

He looked around in despair. Then he had an idea. What if I could start a fire? Burn the damn thing down and then there’d be nothing to search.

But how, without triggering an arson investigation? He walked back out into the kitchen area and saw the flickering blue light under the hot-water heater in what looked like a laundry room. Gas. Propane gas — he’d seen the tank outside, now that he thought about it. He went over and checked the stove. Also gas. Well, hell, there it was. Leave a burner cracked on the stove, make sure all the windows were closed, and then let the pilot light of that water heater ignite the pooled propane.

He could be miles away when it happened.

He turned a stove burner on full blast to see if it had an automatic pilot, but it was an old stove that required matches. He reduced the gas to low, then went out the back door. And right back in, to wipe his fingerprints off the burner switch. Jesus, he thought. You make a pretty shitty criminal. Then he stepped back outside, wiped off the door handle on both sides, and went back to his truck. He stood by the truck for a moment, shook his head, and went back. He crossed the creaking porch carefully and reentered the kitchen, where he shut off the stove burner.

The stink of propane was already strong in the kitchen, so he cracked open a window.

He sat down at the kitchen table, careful not to touch anything. He wasn’t thinking too clearly here, he realized. Maybe too much of Mr. Beam’s liquid courage. Any decent arson investigator would catch the stove burner trick and ask why the house hadn’t gone up four days ago, if Friday was when its owner presumably last used the stove? Shit! It couldn’t be so blatant as leaving a burner on. He thought he heard a noise out front and rose to peer out a window, afraid that he might see a cop car out there by his truck. But there was still nothing stirring.

He commanded his heart to slow down.

A fire was the obvious answer, but how to ignite it and not arouse suspicion? He got up and started going through kitchen drawers, looking for a flashlight. He finally found one in a drawer with some hand tools.

He crouched down at the back of the stove and examined the gas line’s connection. It seemed to be a threaded coupling of some kind. He went back to the tool drawer and got out a pair of pliers. He was about to grab the coupling when he realized the tube and the coupling were copper. Soft metal. Which would show tool marks. He got back up and found a greasy dish towel, which he wrapped around the coupling. Then he unscrewed it until he heard and smelled propane.’He removed the rag and saw no tool marks. Good. This would do it. A leaky coupling — that might take a few days for propane to accumulate.

He sat back on his haunches. Destroying the house wouldn’t change the fact that Lambry had just disappeared. But it would remove evidence that, he might not have disappeared of his own volition. It would leave a mystery surrounding Lambry, but unless there was a woman or some other relative who cared a lot, it should be a mystery without interest to the cops. The guy was gone, his house burned up, but no one at his place of employment would be looking for him. Except Stafford, maybe, but so what? And if Stafford did uncover the auction scam, the missing Lambry might become the suspect. Perfect.

He cleaned up after himself, wiping down anything he might have touched in the house, closed the kitchen window, and took a sniff. He wasn’t sure he could smell the gas, but he knew propane was heavier than air and would gather along the floor before filling the room. He let himself out the kitchen door and pulled it as shut as it would go, wiping the door handle with the dishrag. He turned to leave and plunged right through the rotten floorboards, pitching forward onto his stomach, his knees bent awkwardly. His head hit something hard and he saw stars for a moment.

He tried to right himself, but his right foot was stuck, jammed by something under the porch. He tried to get his left foot back onto the porch for leverage, but the boards continued to disintegrate, leaving him nothing to grab. His right knee hurt like hell every time he tried to move. He swore and pulled again on his right foot, but it was jammed tight; it felt like maybe his foot was stuck in a cinder block.

This is fucking ridiculous, he thought as he began to perspire. He tried turning around in the hole, balancing on his hands, but it didn’t quite work. The distance from the porch to the ground underneath was about six inches more than he could effectively reach. He was stuck, and everything he tried to use for leverage crumbled under his hands. And then he smelled the propane.

Oh, shit, he thought. The propane. A faint whiff was coming through the partially closed door. He imagined he could hear the opened coupling hissing in the kitchen. How fast would that stuff leak out? How long before it got to the pilot light in the alcove? He struggled hard then, but all he did was to break off more rotten wood and get his foot jammed even tighter. There was a broom parked next to the kitchen door. He grabbed that, tried to pry his foot out, but succeeded only in pinching the hell out of it. He laid the broom down across the opening and tried to lever himself bodily up out of the hole. That almost worked, until the broom handle cracked and then broke under his weight. He was stuck, and there was definitely propane in the air.

He tried the opposite tack, beating at the edges of the hole, breaking off rotten wood to enlarge it. Finally he had it big enough that he could bend down partially and feel around by his stuck foot. His hand encountered a thick, sticky spiderweb, conjuring up visions of black widows about to bite his fingers, which he pulled the hell out of there.

But he had felt the cinder block, and his right foot was jammed hard into one of the holes. It felt like there was space under the cinder block, but it was cemented into some kind of structure under there. He looked around the yard to see if anyone was coming, but there were only shadowy piles of junk looking back.

Somewhere nearby a dog had begun to bark.

The propane, he kept thinking. It won’t happen right away, but I have got to get out of here. Then he had an idea. Instead of pulling, he tried pushing, jamming his foot as hard as he could downward, forcing it through the hole. After a minute or so of grunting effort, he felt his foot go all the way through, the edge of the block skinning his shin.

Now there was no way around it: He had to put his hands back down there.

He reached down, hit the webs again and shook them off, and then got his fingers under the block and onto his shoe, which he pried off his foot With that, he was able to extract his foot, stand on the cinder block, and lever himself out of the hole in the porch. He sprawled on his belly and crawled to the steps, where he was able to roll over, get up, and hop down to the solid ground of the backyard.

He glanced back at the warped back door, behind which the kitchen was tilling with explosive gas. He thought about retrieving his shoe, said to hell with it, and hopped across the yard to his truck, hoping and praying he still had time to get out of there before the house went up.

Once in the truck, he was careful to make no noise when he pulled the driver’s door shut. How much tune? he wondered. And will it burn or explode? Probably explode in the kitchen, and then the rest of the place will go up. How much time — minutes? Seconds? He tried to think if there was anything else he should have done. Had he left anything behind? He was more frightened now than he had been going in.

Finally, he started up the track and made a creeping U turn at the end of the street, keeping the engine as quiet as he could so as to not wake anyone up. He then drove back by the house, afraid to look right at it in case it blew up. He concentrated on just getting up the deserted street and away from there. He saw no signs of life in any of the darkened houses as he made his way out of the neighborhood.

When he reached the state road, almost a mile from Lambry’s house, he pulled over onto the parking apron of a closed gas station. He backed the truck up against the building to make it look as if it was just parked there for the night. He watched the dark horizon in the direction of Lambry’s house and waited. He wondered if the thing would let go before gas. filled the whole house, with that pilot light right there in the kitchen. Jesus, he’d get a lot more than just a house fire if the whole thing filled up with gas first. Then he worried that it might not work at all. Shit! Had he closed that window? He couldn’t remember. He could remember only the feel of those spiderwebs.

When a car came past, he slumped down in the seat to avoid being seen.

After another half hour or so, he was starting to panic. Suppose it didn’t work? Suppose the cops went there, found the hole, found his shoe? Christ! He looked at his watch; it was now two-fifteen in the morning. He began to wonder if he should go back. But how could he do that, when he knew there was propane accumulating in there? And then there was a sudden orange glare through the distant trees, followed by a powerful thump. A very powerful thump, considering he was at least a mile away. Damn, just how big had that explosion been?

He started up the truck and pulled back out on the state road, pointing toward Atlanta, driving awkwardly with just a sock on his right foot. He could see a red glare in his rearview mirror. That had to be a big fire.

He hoped like hell that none of the surrounding houses had been damaged.

The good news was that if the explosion had been big enough, the arson squad would have nothing to work with. But then he worried again. What had he missed? And what kind of monster was he turning into?