Sweepers (13 page)

“Well, okay. You come home Friday at rush hour, it’s back-to-back, belly-to-belly, right? But her street clothes were clean-much too clean.

No one else’s hair. No traces of another human being anywhere on her collar or her raincoat. We checked.”

“Like somebody had vacuumed them?” Karen asked.

Mcnair gave her a look, as if to say she had just incriminated herself.

“Maybe. Or the clothes she was wearing weren’t the clothes she wore to work.”

“How about her shoes?” Train asked.

Mcnair smiled. “Bingo,” he said softly. “Oh, we found shoes aplenty up in the closet, but none that showed evidence of having been worn to the office that day and then exchanged for slippers.”

Karen let out a long breath. “So can’t you check with the people in her office, find out what she was wearing that day?”

“We did,” replied Mcnair., “Slacks, blouse, sweater. But no one remembers exactly which ones, which colors. One guy said gray; another guy said dark. They were mostly men in the office. You know how it is, Commander: Men never notice a woman’s shoes. And you review investigations, right? You know how poorly even eyewitnesses’ statements correlate.”

Karen knew only too well. “Yes, I do. How about her vacuum cleaner?”

“New bag.”

“Ah,” she said, understanding what he was trying to say.

“So the evidence in this case is backward. It’s the evidence you didn’t find that’s bothering you.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” the admiral muttered. “The dog that didn’t bark.”

“That’s correct, Admiral,” Mcnair said, nodding. “So your news about the slippers is, unfortunately, entirely consistent. But until you told me about this letter, it was still ambiguous. What was this guy’s name, Admiral?”

“He was a hospital corpsman-a medic, as well as a SEAL. HMI Marcus Galantz.”

Mcnair blinked, almost as if the name meant something to him. But then he asked the admiral to spell it for him, and he wrote it’in his notebook. Then he asked another question. “Since Mr. von Rensel is here, can we assume the Navy’s working on this Galantz I angle, Commander Lawrence?” t,” That came out of nowhere, Karen thought quickly. “On getting his old service records, yes,” she replied. “Beyond that-“

Beyond that, the Navy didn’t yet know about Galantz.

“The records may be of use, and they may not,” the admiral interjected.

“My guess is that they’ll end abruptly in 1969.

Mcnair stared at him, his expression making it clear that the admiral could not go on with all this secrecy.

Sherman looked back at him for a moment and then got up, walked over to a front window, and stared out at the growing darkness. Mcnair, as if sensing a critical moment, remained quiet, watching him. Then he spoke.

“Admiral, it’s becoming pretty clear that something happened to Elizabeth Walsh, something that was not an accident. We-‘re reasonably satisfied that you didn’t go over there Friday night and do something to her. Now you’ve given us another lead to pursue, but you’re leaving too much out. We need your help. We need to make this guy real.”

And to get you entirely off the hook, Karen thought.

The admiral remained at the window, his back to them, for almost a minute. “Okay,” he said finally, so quietly that Karen wasn’t sure she had heard him. Then he turned around, and she was startled by the pain in his eyes. “Okay.

This’ll take a while.”

He returned to his chair and sat down, his eyes slightly out of focus as the memories came flooding back. Then he told them the story of the aborted SEAL pickup and that terrifying night on the river.

“Did they go back the next night?” Train asked.

Sherman hesitated. “No. They didn’t. Saigon naval headquarters called it off. They concluded that the SEAL never made the rendezvous and that the VC probably had him, which was why there was a mine ambush waiting.”

“But they were wrong, weren’t they, Admiral?” Train said. The two men stared at each other for a long moment.

Then Sherman looked away and exhaled. “Yes. They were wrong. Because three years later, the SEAL came to see me.

I was finishing up my department-head tour in a destroyer and was actually home for a change. But I remember it.

God, do I remember it. He was a memorable guy. I was sitting in my dining room, working on some overdue fitness reports.”

It had been after ten o’clock on a rainy February night, one of the few such nights in San Diego’s unvarying pattern of monotono usly beautiful weather. Sherman had been downstairs in the dining room when he thought he heard the front door open. He remembered sitting up and thinking, What the hell? I locked that door. There had been a gust of wind and the sudden sound of rain, and then suddenly a figure was standing in the entrance to the dining room, just outside the cone of light from the chandelier. Sherman absorbed a vague image of jeans and a wet black windbreaker, but the face-the face looked familiar. Only this time, there was no brown and green paint. Just those eyes. Actually, just one eye. I

“Remember me?” the figure asked in a husky, strangled I voice.

There was something wrong with his throat. There was a small swatch of gray bandage where his voice box should have been, and a livid scar.

Sherman had been speechless, glued to his armchair, try-I ing to comprehend what he was seeing. A very dangerous looking one-eyed man was n his dining room, dripping rainwater on the rug.

“How-who-“

“Oh, you remember, Lieutenant. You know who I am.

Or who I was,” the man said, advancing closer to the table, into’ the light, appearing to get bjgger as he did so. He was not visibly armed, but there was no mistaking the menace in that mutilated face. And then Tag Sherman knew.

“You’re-you’re the SEAL.”

“Yeah, the SEAL. The one you left behind. In the Rung Sat.”

Sherman could only stare at him, trying to remember what the division commander had said-what, exactly? He couldn’t recall the words, other than him saying, “You did the operationally right thing, aborting the mission.” But by then, the SEAL had come even closer to the table, and with a sweeping motion of his left arm, he scattered Sherman’s pape rwork. That’s when Sherman saw the glove, the black glove with a glint of stainless steel at, the-left wrist. What was his name? he’d asked himself. Galantz, that was it.

Galantz perched on the edge of the dining room table, making it creak, and leaned down to stare directly into Sherman’s eyes. His face was pale, gaunt, hollow-eyed, with taut skin, a bony forehead fringed with only a stubble of closecropped black hair. The right eyebrow was flat, but the left was bisected by an ugly red and obviously unstitched scar running from his voice box up into his jaw and then exiting across the left cheek up into his scalp, transacting the puckered skin of his empty left eye socket. Sherman had been able to smell the wet clothes, overlaid with the rising scent of his own fear.

“See this?” the SEAL asked, pointing to his face and throat with his finger. “One of your fifties did this. Ricochet round. While you girls were busy running away, shooting that stuff indiscriminately all over the riverbanks-where I was hiding, waiting for you. And this”-he brandished the bulky black glove in Sherman’s face-“this is where I had to amputate my own hand after a croc bit most of it off.”

He leaned even closer to Sherman, who remained frozen in his seat.

Sherman had to crane his neck just to look up at this man, whose single eye burned in his face like the headlight of that proverbial oncoming train.

“It had lots of time to’get infected, Lieutenant,” he whispered. “Five nights in the mangrove roots, while I tried to get down out of the Rung Sat and into the harbor. Couldn’t quite make it, though, because the Cong knew I was running, see? And I couldn’t go into the main river because by then the crocs could smell the arm. All that heat and mud and humidity. They call it gangrene. Stinks real bad. I’m a medic. Know it when I smell it. Crocs love rotten meat. So finally one night, I found a tree stump and chopped it off at the wrist with my trusty knife. This knife, right here.” Out of nowhere, he brandished a heavy dulled steel knife, then deliberately put it down on the table right in front of Sherman. It looked bigger than he remembered it, when the SEAL had had it strapped to his ankle. It made an audible clunk when Galantz laid it on the table.

Galantz had leaned back then, staring down at the knife, and continued his story, “I clamped off the artery with a piece of string and then that night I bellied into a VC camp and killed some people so I could get to their fire and cauterize the stump. Didn’t happen to have any anesthetics, by the way. It hurt a lot. But I did what I had to do.

Stuck that bloody stump into the fire and bit a piece of bamboo right in half waiting for it to cook. I gotta tell you: I did scream.

But the screaming sounded better than the barbecue noises, you know?”

“We were in an ambush,” Sherman had said, feeling his stomach grab. His voice seemed to be stuck in his throat, which was as dry as sand. “There were mines. We had standing orders to withdraw. We came back the next night.”

And then he remembered: No, they hadn’t.

The SEAL had just looked at him with that one baleful eye. “Sure you did, Lieutenant. But you know what? I was three klicks from the main river by then, trying to lick my wounds with my tongue swelling out of my mouth, hiding out inside the hollow trunk of a dead tree that was full of that Agent Orange stuff. And trying to figure out if that was my eyeball dangling on my left cheek or just another leech.

And that was just the beginning. It took me five weekv to get back to friendly territory. Five weeks of crawling around in the Rung Sat, no compass, no landmarks, no food, no clean water, moving only at night, going the wrong god damned way every god damned time. And killing people.

Lots of people, you know? Anyone who got anywhere near me ate steel.

This steel, right here. Men, women, children anyone. Five bloody weeks until I got into the outskirts of Saigon. And then I got arrested by the White Mice, who put me in a Chinese jail for a year in Cholon until they found somebody who would buy my ass out. All thanks to a bunch of chickenshit Swift boat guys. Like you.”

“I did what I had to,” Sherman had protested. “They were setting off mines. Lose the boat and nobody gets out.

I’m sorry it happened. But we had no choice.”

The SEAL had stared down at him with that one glaring eye, his ravaged face twisting in contempt.

“What do you want?” Sherman whispered.

“Want?” The SEAL leaned forward again. “I want revenge. I want to stick this knife through your hand and into this table here so you don’t go anywhere. Then I want to go upstairs and rape your wife and blind your kid, and then I want to come back down here and open up your belly with this knife and strangle you with your own guts. That’s what I want.

The knife had been lying on the table the whole time, right in front of him, but Sherman was transfixed in the chair, a watery feeling in his stomach, his mouth still arid.

And then with the swiftness of a rattlesnake, the man had him hauled up out of his chair and bent over the table, his right arm pinned behind his back by the SEAL’s knee in a bone-cracking arch, his face pressed down on the table by the SEAL’s left forearm, the edge of the table pressing hard against his windpipe. He could barely breathe, and then he felt, rather than saw, the cutting edge of that knife resting across the bridge of his nose about one millimeter from his eyes. The SEAL’s voice hissed in his ears.

“What do I want, Sherman? I want to pop your eyeballs out and make you eat them while the nerves are still attached. I want to drive twentypenny nails into your skull and wire them to your car battery. I want to jam your mouth open with a bent fork and put a black widow spider in there and piss her off. I want lots of fun shit for you and yours, Lieutenant, but guess what?-I’ve learned to wait for what I want.

I’ve learned to be a patient man. I’m going to wait some more. I’m going to wait until you have accumulated some things of real value. And then I’m going to make you pay for what you and your crew did to me, no matter how long it takes. You were the skipper, so you’re the Man.

You’ll never know when I’m coming. Until I tell you. And I will tell you, you son of a bitch. You will get one warming.”

His air shut off by the table’s edge, Sherman’s vision had gone red and his ears were roaring ominously. He had barely heard the small voice from the edge of the room. “Daddy?”

The SEAL had come off his back in an instant, leaving Sherman to slide off the table and onto the floor like a sack of potatoes, his mouth working but nothing coming out, all his muscles putty. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Galantz had grabbed his son, Jack, and was holding the petrified child off the floor with his good arm, growling at him like a wild animal, as if he was about to dash him against the wall.

Sherman had tried desperately to move, to get up, but he had been perfectly helpless, gagging on the floor, his nearly dislocated right shoulder preventing him from even beginning to get up.

And then suddenly, it was over. The terrified child was sobbing in the comer of the dining room, and Sherman was pulling himself across the floor to get to him. His wife had slept through it all, even when little Jack had begun to wail like a banshee in his arms. It had taken him an hour and a half to calm the child and get him back to bed. He had not awakened his wife. There seemed to be no point in her being terrified, too. He had gone back downstairs to get some brandy to steady his shaking hands and to close the front door, which was still standing wide open in the rain. He had nearly lost it again when he found the knife lying on the dining room table-a little reminder that it had all been real.

A little message from the SEAL: I don’t need the knife anymore. But you might.

Now Sherman’s eyes refocused and looked over at Mcnair. “I was mostly ashamed when it was all over.

Ashamed for what we had done back there in the Rung Sat.

Ashamed that I had been scared to death in this guy’s presence. Ashamed that I had been helpless to do anything when he had my son up against the wall like a rag doll.”