Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

75

Jesse had a long talk with Ozzie Smith over a few Black Labels. The thing with Suit hadn’t hit him until he was on the way home that evening. He’d taken his usual drive around town, but added a slow cruise along Trench Alley past what was now a cracked concrete slab where the bodies had been found, and a drive up into the Bluffs. With the exception of the detour down Trench Alley, it was the same route he’d taken the night of the nor’easter. That storm had brought more with it than wind and snow. It brought with it the past.

As he sat in his Explorer on the grounds of the old Rutherford mansion, the place where he’d confronted John Millner the night of the storm, Jesse remembered something he’d once read in a magazine on a long bus trip from Vero Beach to Fort Myers. That’s what you did in spring training, you rode buses to away games. And on those long, boring bus rides, you read or played cards or listened to music. That was a special spring, the spring he’d been anointed, the spring when the GM of the Dodgers told him that if he hit at all in Triple-A, he’d be a September call-up to the big club.

The article he’d read on that long-ago bus ride was about an almost perfectly preserved P-38 Lightning discovered in the North African desert. It had disappeared in late August 1944 and the military had given up all hope of ever finding it. The article said that this sort of thing wasn’t that unusual. That in the scheme of things, given the enormous scale of Allied air force operations during the war, dozens of planes had gone missing in every theater of battle, the most famous being a B-24D Liberator called Lady Be Good, lost in Libya in 1943 and discovered in 1958. The remains of the crew were discovered miles away from the wreckage in 1960. He remembered that he’d heard about the Lady Be Good even before reading about it. You grow up in Arizona, the home of the airplane graveyard, you hear stories. And the Lady Be Good incident had inspired one of his favorite Twilight Zone episodes.

The thing about the P-38 that made it different was that it had been buried in a sand dune for forty years and it had been uncovered, finally, by a historically violent sandstorm. Another thing that made it different was that the remains of the pilot, who’d apparently been killed on impact, had been found in the plane. Not only had the plane been preserved, if somewhat flattened by the weight of the dune, but so, too, had the remains of the pilot. He had been sort of mummified by the sands. It was no wonder to Jesse why he should be thinking about that long-ago bus ride and the article he’d read. The parallels were obvious enough. But there was something eating at him. Something about the article that he’d forgotten, that he wanted to remember yet just couldn’t.

By the time he’d made it home, his mind had turned back to Paradise’s own case of history delayed and his complicated feelings about Suitcase Simpson. Suit had acted with incredible valor, shielding Jameson from Dragoa with his own body. Jesse wasn’t sure he would have reacted as quickly as Suit had. So why had he been unable to bring himself to pat Suit on the shoulder for a job well done? Ozzie Smith was of no help.

“I don’t know, Wiz,” Jesse said, shaking his head at Smith’s poster. “At least I can get a reaction from Dix. I may have to pinch-hit for you next inning.”