Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (4 page)

In the vestibule I run into a couple of latecomers.

“Hey, Roland, how’s it hanging? We thought you were bailing on us this time.”

We shoot the breeze as we strap on our gear. Meaningless small talk. There are a couple of law enforcement types in the club, but no one who knows me. I keep pretty much to myself. I’m here to blow off steam, not make new buddies. Still, there’s a charm to it all—the macho camaraderie, the obsessive focus on performance, the specialized vocabulary. Egregious rule-breakers, when they’re penalized, are charged with a “failure to do right.” I like the term. What is a homicide detective if not the living embodiment of such a charge. Do right and you’ll never tangle with me. Fail to do right, and there I am.

“I see you dropped some dollars on a new rig,” one of the guys says.

I pause in the midst of adjusting my new holster, the new matte-silver Browning inside. “I didn’t plan it. You just get sucked in, you know?”

When I started the league, I was shooting with my off-duty piece, a .40 caliber Kahr with all the sharp edges melted away. Long ago, the Kahr went to Teddy Jacobson for some work, coming back with an action slicker than glass. It’s a flat, short-barreled hideaway pistol, but I can hit targets with accuracy much farther out than you’d expect.

But after a couple of weeks, all the club’s magazine changes and malfunction drills had me yearning for a full-size pistol. Instead of bringing my duty gun or springing for one of the usual plastic-framed, high-capacity numbers, I’d toured the glass cases at Shooter’s Paradise and gone a little crazy, ending up with a custom Novak Browning Hi-Power. Compact for its punch, slender, and all metal, with a crisp single-action trigger pull. It’s also a natural pointer, which I appreciate.

In addition to the standard thirteen-round mags, I’d bought a bunch of hi-cap South African magazines, bringing the total up to eighteen with one in the spout. And I’d picked up a couple hundred dollars’ worth of saddle-tan holsters and mag carriers, keeping it all in the new gym bag ready to go.

I feel a little guilty at all the expenditure. When Charlotte lays out money like this, I can’t help giving her a lecture. But she’s not here to return the favor.

Out on the range I add my name to the sign-up sheet, then file to the back of the line. Already the air smells of gun smoke. I put my things in an empty lane, locking the Hi-Power’s slide back and slipping it into my belt holster, one of the club’s safety requirements.

“Hey, man, how’s it hanging?”

I turn to find Jeff, another new guy, unloading his gear next to me. He wears jeans and a tight-fitting linen safari shirt with epaulets and button tabs securing the rolled-up sleeves. The look is more fashion than function, but he’s the only shooter here I’ve really warmed up to. Maybe because, unlike most people here, we both know what it’s like to be shot at.

In Jeff’s case, the experience was racked up doing private security work somewhere in Iraq—“outside the Green Zone” is as specific as he’s ever gotten. He’s in his mid-to-late twenties, square-jawed, and sarcastic. His Glock 19 has a gunmetal shine where the finish has rubbed away from use. Compared to my chromed new toy, his gun is a battered workmanlike tool. I like that about him, too.

It’s hard to have a conversation with ear protection on and guns going off a few feet away. We lean through the lane openings, watching shooters work through the course. Tonight there’s a cardboard wall with a window in the middle. Downrange, two
IDPA
cardboard bad-guy targets are staggered on the left side of the wall, one at five yards and the other at ten. Through the window, a bad guy becomes visible, most of his body shielded by a hostage target, and on the right side of the wall a crowd of three bad guys stands between five and seven yards away. The shooter takes cover on the left, puts two rounds on each target, reloads, then puts one in the head of the hostage taker through the window. To finish, he angles around the wall’s right edge to put two rounds each on the three final targets. All this with the stopwatch running.

“Right,” Jeff says. “This would happen in real life.”

I shrug. “It’s just a game, but you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t like it.”

He smirks and turns back to the range. One of the hardcore shooters is getting ready to run the course. He wears a white germ mask over nose and mouth, marking him as one of the club’s several handloaders. For economy, since they’re sending so many rounds downrange, these guys make up batches of their own ammo at home. When they get together, they brag to each other about their “lead count”—not the number of bullets they’ve churned out of their presses, but how much lead has infiltrated the bloodstream as a consequence.

Jeff sighs. “Watch this guy.”

The shooter stands still, waiting for the buzzer with his hands raised. Once it sounds, he pistons his arm down, clears his holster, and starts firing. Before the spent brass of his initial shots reaches the ground, he’s already reloading and lining up the hostage shot through the window. The speed and economy of motion is something to behold. After the last round is fired, he keeps his weapon leveled, scanning back and forth like he’s expecting one of the cardboard adversaries to get up. Then he unloads and re-holsters.

“Perfect round,” someone says.

Glancing down the lanes, I see the timekeeper shaking his head in admiration.

But Jeff looks amused. “I wouldn’t want him on my side.”

“Seriously?” I say. “He looked good to me.”

“I doubt that, Roland. You saw the way he uses cover? Just enough to satisfy the rules. If those targets could shoot back, believe me, he wouldn’t be leaning out that way.”

A couple of shooters in front of us glance back, not liking what they’re overhearing. I know better than to try and shut him up, though. A little experience combined with the arrogance of youth is a potent combination.

“Now
you
,” he says. “You I’d take with me into combat.”

“You would, huh?”

“Maybe not with that fancy gun.” He smiles. “But yeah, I would. I can tell who’d keep his head when the flare goes up and who wouldn’t. You can handle yourself, I bet.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Whatever.”

The line advances and we get closer to the front, with members crowding behind us once they’re done. The middle shooters are mostly citizens. They joined the club after getting their Texas
CHL
s, concealed handgun licenses, or maybe they grew up in the gun culture like I did and the club offers an escape from the banking or lawyering or used-car dealing.

The club draws a strange cross section of Houston society. It’s all male, but apart from that fairly diverse. Hispanics and Asians, whites, blacks, some with money to burn and others scrimping to afford the gear. Meticulously law-abiding to a man, though not without some grumbling about the
ATF
and the administration. There are short-barreled, high-capacity assault rifles on sale up front, with thirty-round clips, flash suppressors, and collapsible stocks thanks to the lapse in the assault-weapons ban. But most of the guys out here seem to think that’ll all disappear at a moment’s notice. At least they tell themselves that to justify the next big-ticket purchase. I know the type from working for my uncle.

As the shooters progress, Jeff keeps a running commentary on their technique, half of it lost to the muffled noise. He can’t help it. Whenever the rules don’t match up to his take on reality, he has to open his mouth.

“Don’t you think you’re stating the obvious?” I ask. “The point isn’t to replicate a gunfight; it’s to have some fun while working on the repetitive skills that would come in handy in real life—reloads, clearing a jam, whatever.”

A couple of shooters nearby grunt their approval. They’re a little tired of what they see as his bragging. Noticing this, Jeff concedes with a good-natured shrug. “I hear you, but what can I say? I run my mouth under pressure.”

Now it’s my turn to say, “Whatever.” I have a good sense how Jeff would operate under real pressure, just like he has of me.

When his turn comes, he gives me a
watch this
look. He approaches the start line, crouches slightly, and raises his hands. At the buzzer he goes into action. It takes me a moment to realize what he’s doing. Every movement mimics the masked shooter from before. The timing is identical, like he’s imitating a film running in his head. The bullets even perforate the targets in more or less the same places. At the finish he scans back and forth.

“Wow,” somebody says.

“He’s just a show-off.”

“If he can shoot like that,” I say, “then who cares?”

Muscle memory is one thing. Reproducing someone else’s action like that, after an interval of time—I’ve never seen anything like it. The timekeeper notes the scores on his clipboard without giving anything away. From this I gather Jeff finished a hair quicker than the man he was copycatting.

“That was amazing,” I tell Jeff when he files back.

He pats my shoulder. “Get ’em, killer.”

I toe the start line and take a deep breath. The buzzer sounds. I draw and move forward to the edge of the cardboard wall, double-tapping each of the targets. At the window, though, a needle of pain shoots up into my back. I try to ignore it. During my reload, I fumble one of the fat Browning mags, watching it bounce to the ground. I leave it, slotting the fresh one into place, then take the hostage shot. Everything’s a blur, and then I’m at the right-hand side of the wall, blazing away at the final trio.

I put my gun away, embarrassed.

“You’ve got a failure to neutralize,” the timekeeper says, meaning I missed one of the bad guys entirely.

The safety officer, standing off to the side, adds: “Also got a hit on a non-threat target.”

I turn around and glance through the window. Sure enough, the hostage has been clipped in the region of the right shoulder.

Returning to the lanes, dragging my sore leg a bit, I smile awkwardly and feel the heat rising in my cheeks. Since I started, I’ve never dropped below the top third of shooters. This is a disastrous showing. I want to get out of here. Back at my spot I begin packing my gear.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Jeff says.

“I think I’m done for tonight.”

He watches me. “Hey. Roland. You wanna get a beer or something.”

“Maybe next time.”

“Seriously,” he says. “I’d really like to talk.”

The guys around us give me pitying looks, apart from a couple of underperformers who just look satisfied, and one or two who won’t meet my eye.

“Better luck next time,” one of them says.

“I’m getting out of here,” I tell Jeff. “We’ll hang out some other time.”

He looks like he might insist, but seeing my agitation, relents instead.

“No problem. We’ll do it another week.”

I sling my bag and get out of there, not even bothering to wait for the final scores to be calculated. With my penalties I’ll be at the bottom.

I don’t need anybody to remind me of that.

———

Driving home, I check my phone for missed calls. Maybe Charlotte tried to return mine from earlier in the evening. There’s nothing from her, but Bascombe called and left a voicemail, telling me to get in touch no matter what the time. I hit the redial button and wait.

“You and me have a special errand to run in the morning,” he says.

“And what’s that?”

“Search me. After you left, I got a strange call from a special agent at the
FBI
. You ever heard of Bea Kuykendahl?”

“Kuykendahl like the road?” There’s a stretch of road in the northwest suburbs by that name, pronounced something like
Kirk-en-doll
.

“Apparently so. She’s the one who called.”

“Never heard of her. What did she want?”

“What she wants is for us to meet her at the field office. She wouldn’t say what it was about, but I have a good idea.”

“Are you going to share, sir?”

“Well, I got this call maybe half an hour after I checked on your John Doe’s
DNA
test results. And it came on my cell, March, not my office line. Agent Kuykendahl made a point of asking us to be discreet.”

My mind whirls with possibilities, the humiliation on the range all but forgotten.

“If I didn’t know better,” he says, “I’d guess that we’ve got a hit on our identification. And whoever our victim is, he had something to do with the Feds.”

Interlude : 1986

After the passage of years
, I can’t recall whether or not Sgt. Crewes gave Magnum his nickname, but he was certainly the first to use it in my hearing. On a rainy Friday afternoon, as I sat at my desk watching the clock tick down, mentally planning my fifty-odd-mile drive over to Alexandria, where I hoped to meet a girl and catch a movie, Crewes appeared in my doorway holding a fierce-looking plastic gator. Without any explanation, he shifted my stapler and tape dispenser around to make room for the animal.

“You prefer it with the jaws facing you, or facing the door?”

“Facing the door,” I said. “What’s the deal?”

“I believe it’s intended to instill fighting spirit. Everybody’s getting one.”

I reclined in my chair, smiling. “I’m going to miss all this.”

My four years were counting down quickly, and while I’d originally planned to re-up for life, making a career of the U.S. Army, somewhere between getting my commission after
ROTC
and my most recent assignment to the
MP
battalion at Ft. Polk, Louisiana, all that had changed. At the time, I couldn’t have put my finger on the inciting incident. Looking back, it was probably the ball I had reluctantly attended in Austin the year before, invited by a fellow officer to make up the numbers, instructed to wear my dress blues. There I met Charlotte for the first time. Several years would pass before we saw each other again. But it was a fateful night.

Sgt. Crewes, who’d put in eighteen of his twenty years, including a wild and well-remembered tour as an
MP
in Saigon, looked at me like I was crazy. However surreal military life could get—and he made no excuses on that score—compared to the insanity of the outside world, it all made sense. But then Crewes had come back from Germany with a cherished Audi coupe, which he lovingly detailed every other weekend, and a foulmouthed, chain-smoking bride he called his Marlene Dietrich. He was no judge of normality.

Something about the tail end of the plastic gator didn’t look right to me, so I rotated him so that the painted white teeth and the red mouth growled up at me.

Crewes stood at ease in the doorframe, arms crossed. “When you’ve got your gator squared away, sir, you’re wanted in Major Shattuck’s office on the double.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I jumped from my chair, excited to be called and equally anxious that whatever duties the major had in mind would make me late for my evening plans. As I passed, the sergeant shook his head and smiled for the millionth time at the irrationality of the officer class, the way a misogynist smiles at the ways of women. I liked Shattuck, but for the sergeant’s benefit I called over my shoulder: “What does he want this time?”

The sound of Crewes chuckling made me happy.

“Don’t complain,” he said. “You’ll get to meet Magnum face-to-face.”

On the stairwell between floors, I paused, but not to wonder who Magnum was. I felt ashamed, as I often did after an encounter with Sgt. Crewes. I’d made a cheap crack in hope of pandering favor. He’d laughed, but the joke was on me. Didn’t the silver bar on my shoulder mean anything? Not for the first time I cursed myself for being such a bad, such a
weak
officer, then took comfort in the thought that I wouldn’t be one for much longer. Life had other plans for Roland March.

———

Though he’d never seen combat, never fired a single shot in anger, in his sharp-creased woodland camo
BDU
s, Maj. Shattuck looked the part of a battlefield commander. Whenever Shattuck arrived on scene, men fell naturally into line. I’d seen generals who couldn’t boast the same. The way he carried himself reminded me of a fishing line with a little slack left in, ready at the first sign of action to be pulled taut. I’d actually practiced this stance in the mirror, hoping I might become a better officer by looking the part.

I found him at his rain-streaked window taking in the gray skies, his hands clasped at the small of his back. The air-conditioning formed condensation at the four corners of the glass. Before I could announce myself, he turned and motioned me to stand at attention in front of his desk. I could perceive from the corner of my eye a second man in the room, a slack civilian seated on the stiff vinyl couch beside the entrance, his arm draped languidly along the back of the sofa. This, presumably, was Magnum.

“Now,” Shattuck said, addressing the man on the couch, “I’d like you to repeat what you’ve just told me in the presence of this officer.”

The iron in his tone was unmistakable. Shattuck was angry.

Magnum answered with a snort, a response so unexpected that I turned my head to look. He wore a charcoal suit and a black knit tie, his thick eyebrows balanced by the full mustache. A long, pale face with a hint of a smile on the lips. Laugh lines that bracketed the mustache in parentheses. He wasn’t cowed by the major’s authority. Instead, he seemed amused.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Shattuck demanded.

“Hey,” Magnum said. “No offense.” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I guess I’ll get out of here and leave you to it. Just thought maybe I could spare us both some trouble.”

He eased himself off the couch.

“I’d like you to repeat your offer in Lieutenant March’s presence.”

“Is that his name, this witness of yours?” Magnum peered at the name above the breast pocket of my fatigue jacket, like he doubted the major’s words. “Well, now, Lieutenant”—he patted my shoulder in a familiar way—“I expect we’ll be seeing more of each other.”

And with that, he walked out. The major let him go.

“Close the door,” he said.

I did.

“If you see that man, if he asks for anything or seems to be engaged in any activity out of the ordinary, I want you to inform me immediately.”

“Sir.”

“I’m serious, Lieutenant March. Whatever you may think, men like that are nothing but trouble.”

“Sir,” I repeated. I hadn’t been thinking anything at all.

The major dismissed me and I went downstairs in search of Crewes, finding him in the corridor outside my office. Waiting for me, I realized, which sent a slight thrill through me. Crewes was as anxious to hear what had happened as I was to talk about it.

“Well? What happened in there?”

I stopped myself. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything.

“What happened in there,
sir
,” I said, channeling Shattuck for an instant, then immediately feeling stupid.

“All right.” The sergeant narrowed his eyes. “What happened in there,
sir
?”

Then I told him, ignoring my inner disgust at my own weakness, the words coming out in an eager rush. Once I’d spilled, it was his turn. “So you wanna tell me what’s going on?” I asked. “Who is this Magnum guy? And where does he get off disrespecting the major like that?”

“What do
you
think he is?”

“How should I know?”

“Really?” He shook his head at my ignorance. “That’s your best guess?”

He led me into my office and closed the door. Before saying anything, he took me to the blinds for a look at the parking lot and, beyond it, the parade grounds. Magnum was crossing the lot with a newspaper to shield him from the rain, heading toward a big Buick with tinted windows. Slouched elegantly on the bumper, a brown-skinned man in woodland camo smoked a thin cigar, indifferent to the rain.

“There are about a dozen of them,” Crewes said, pointing to the smoking man. “The generalissimos of tomorrow. Supposedly the course they’re on is something to do with logistics, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that’s just a euphemism for counterinsurgency. And get this: none of them have last names. It’s just Juan and Pedro and Carlo and Jaime and Jesus. That one there is César—they pronounce it
say-czar
—so I reckon he’s the boss man.”

“Maybe that’s just his name.”

“Maybe,” he said. “They don’t wear their own uniforms, either. We have guests on base all the time—those West Germans, for example—but they don’t wear
BDU
s from the
PX
, Lieutenant. These boys are special.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning they’re from some Latin American banana republic, and they’re not here to learn how to service their country’s newly purchased helicopters. They’re learning how to throw Marxist rebels out of them.”

I gazed down at the man leaning against the Buick. From this distance it was hard to tell, but he seemed to be conscious of my presence. He flicked his cigar away and said something to the approaching Magnum, who paused to glance in my direction. Magnum smiled, then ditched the sodden newspaper and got behind the wheel of the Buick. Before joining him, the generalissimo of tomorrow aimed a mock salute at my office window.

“All right, then,” I said. “So what does that make Magnum?”

“What else?” Crewes said. “
CIA
.”