Amerikan Eagle

Sam was torn, God, how he was torn. He wanted so much to help his old friend, but he had to keep moving. There were so many important things going on, things he couldn’t talk about or even afford to think about too much.

“That was different, Donna. Police business. I’m sorry, there’s nothing else I can do.”

Her hand grabbed his. “Sam. Please… we’ve known each other for years… I thought I could rely on you…”

“Donna—”

Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Don’t you remember when we were kids, how you saved me?”

He knew the look on his face said it all: He didn’t remember. She went on. “I had. I had started to develop… you know? And a couple of the neighborhood boys, the Taskers, they wanted to see my boobies… they were holding me down, they were trying to pull off my shirt. You were there, and you pulled them off of me, slugged them, and I ran home crying. You saved me, Sam, you saved me…”

She squeezed his hand and went on, faster. “I don’t have much in the way of money, but I can make it worth your while. You know I can. Pay you back… for then and now…”

For the briefest of moments, he closed his eyes. Thought about the other desperate women he had heard of, offering the only thing they had to try to free their men. How had it come to this? He opened his eyes, took his hand back from her, and gently said, “Donna, I can’t.”

By then it made no difference. Donna turned back toward the closed gate, her shoulders slumped against the biting wind, her possible savior no help at all.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Sam spent the night at the station, having no desire to go back to the wood-frame building that had once been a home. He hoped being here would push away the thought of Donna, standing alone, betrayed by her government and by the man who had been a childhood hero. By now the National Guardsmen and the cops not on regular shift had gone home, leaving him alone with a desk sergeant who was content to sit in a wooden swivel chair and read the latest copy of Action Comics. Sam dragged a cot up to his office area and made a bed there. Before stretching out, he read and reread his notes and the medical examiner’s report from those few first days when everything seemed possible, his very first homicide case, one that he would solve and get off probation and make everything safe and secure for his family.

Sarah. Toby.

The pages fluttered as he read them. He supposed he should have fought harder when she left with his son, should have made a scene, but there was too much going on, too much knowledge—his wife a revolutionary, her own father her contact, Toby a courier as well. He had just let her go.

Would Tony have done that? Just let her go?

He doubted it. Tony was a fighter, always a fighter, even going into a suicide mission with his eyes and purpose clear.

And Sam? What was Sam Miller?

He read the report one more time, saw what he had been looking for.

The papers shook in his hands.

Who was Sam Miller?

He was going to find out.

* * *

Later that night, he got up from his cot, padded down to the lobby in his stocking feet. As he had hoped, the desk sergeant was still in his swivel chair, but he was snoring, hands clasped across his belly. Even as the department’s janitor, operating in the darkness as a spy, was probably busy signing arrest or execution warrants back at Sam’s high school playing field. Sam went back upstairs, where a desk lamp was on, illuminating both his desk and Mrs. Walton’s.

In his upper drawer he reached to the back. He pulled out a screwdriver that he used now and then to fix his own swivel chair. Not tonight. Hell, he thought, looking up at the clock, not this morning. He went over to Mrs. Walton’s desk, which smelled of her lilac scent. He knelt and jammed the screwdriver into the lower drawer. The wood squealed, and a piece of metal snapped free, and then the drawer came out.

Sitting there in plain sight was the infamous Log, the record of every upper-ranking officer in the Portsmouth Police Department. Luckily, Mrs. Walton had prim schoolteacher handwriting, for everything was as clear as day. When he got to a certain page and a certain date, he stopped, sucking in his breath. He read the entries three more times before he was satisfied, and then he tore out the page, tossed the book back inside, and closed the broken drawer.

The page now folded, he stuck it in his pants pocket and stretched out again on the cot and stared up until the morning light came through the windows. Then he got up and did some work at his desk. After that he went into Marshal Hanson’s office and propped a note on his desk blotter.

As he drove away in the early hours, he looked back one more time at the old brick building and thought, I’m never coming back.

* * *