House on Fire

29

Seven years ago

I was surprised when Major Margret Benson, a.k.a. Maggie, called me in to her shoebox-size office the next morning.

I’d been assigned to pore over records of orders processed through Harkins’s office. That was the guy she’d had dinner with the night before as the blowsy Texan. She’d completely snowed him. But now, instead of making an immediate arrest, she wanted to do a complete assessment of the extent of his possible criminality. There was a lot more, she was convinced.

“Sergeant Heller, you’ve driven Humvees, right?”

“In Afghanistan and Iraq, yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to go over these shipping records.” She indicated a mountain of banker’s boxes stacked four high. “Humvee parts. Check for anomalies.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, whatever you can find. I need someone who’s familiar with the Humvee, inside and out.”

I wouldn’t have considered myself an expert on Humvees, or military vehicles in general, but I didn’t object, because I couldn’t. Also I’d begun to figure out that after four years in the Special Forces, I’d actually learned a lot. And maybe I wanted to impress Maggie Benson. That could have been part of it.

“Okay,” I said.

She cocked her head, looked at me aslant, and smiled. “I just handed you the baton, sergeant. Your only job is to run like hell and bring it home.”

It was tedious work, scanning thousands upon thousands of pages of paper records. After two days I’d made no breakthroughs. She left me alone, didn’t check up on me. She expected a status update, and probably soon.

That night I stayed late. I was the only one in the office. The Pentagon never shuts down, but my section at the generic office building was quiet, all the other lights off.

At around ten o’clock something clicked in my head. I got up from the table of boxes and went over to my cubicle, signed into my email, and sent Major Benson a quick note telling her the good news.

Then I went back to my boxes of printouts and continued making notes on a legal pad. About half an hour later, Major Benson walked in. No more uniform. She was wearing a black leather jacket and jeans and a T-shirt, and she looked incredible. It was ten thirty at night, and she looked like she’d been out on the town. She smelled like patchouli and cigarette smoke even though I knew she wasn’t a smoker. Like she’d been hanging out with smokers outside a bar.

“Tell me, Sergeant Heller.”

“It’s pretty clever, actually. The invoice prices they charge for the parts are all reasonably standard. A little high, maybe, but this is the Pentagon we’re talking about.”

“So where’s the padding?”

“Check this out,” I said, pulling out a file folder. “LED headlights for the Humvee, right? Around two hundred bucks a pop. You can get them for half that on eBay, but this is still within the realm of normal. But it’s the shipping that’s inflated, and hugely. A crate of ten headlights weigh almost a thousand pounds? I don’t think so. More like ten pounds. They’re padding the shipping. A lot. That’s where they’re making the money.”

She inspected the pages I showed her. “All these shipments, from a company in Indiana, use the same less-than-truckload carrier RedLine Ball Shipping.”

She was taking notes on one of the yellow pads she always used. I could see redline ball shipping underlined and circled. led headlights underlined three times.

“Right,” I went on. “RedLine Ball is in on it with Harkins, I’ll guarantee that.”

“Hot damn, Heller! You found it!” She dropped her yellow pad on her desk.

“It was just a lot of grunt work,” I said, attempting modesty, which is not one of my strengths.

“You brought the baton home,” she said.

She left the room and came back a minute later with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two plastic cups. She splashed some into each cup and handed me one.

“Thank you, Major Benson.”

“After hours I’m Maggie, Heller,” she said.

“And I’m Nick. But I prefer Heller.”

“So it’ll be Heller, then. Heller, do you ever leave this place? You ever get dinner?”

Was she asking me out? “Once in a while, yeah.”

“How about tomorrow night?”