Amerikan Eagle

He looked down at his notes again, trying to get Donna out of his mind. Not much in his notes. Dead man, no identification, nice clothes, and a tattoo: 9 1 1 2 8 3. What the hell did that mean? A series of numbers so important they couldn’t be forgotten? Like what? A bank account? A phone number? Or if they were added in some sort of combination—or did they stand for letters? He did some scribbling on his pad, substituting each number with the corresponding letter in the alphabet, and came up with IAABHC. He tried rearranging those letters and came up with nothing. So maybe it was just the numbers.

But why go to the trouble of having them tattooed?

Sam looked up from his notebook and watched the boy at the other end of the counter whisper something to his mother. She pointed to the rear of the diner. The boy slid off his stool, then walked away from the counter, toward the bathroom. The boy was about Toby’s age. Sam wondered what it must be like to be that young and torn from your home, to live in a strange land where sometimes the people treated you nice and other times they arrested you and put you in a camp.

He took his wallet out, looked inside. Sighed. Being a cop meant a paycheck, but not much of one. Still…

For the second time this night, Sam slid out a dollar bill. He waited until the boy came back out, then let the bill fall to the linoleum. As the boy went by—Sam noted the sharp whiff of mothballs from the boy’s coat, probably a castoff from the Salvation Army—he reached out and caught his elbow. “Hey, hold on.” The child froze, and Sam felt the sudden trembling of the thin arm.

“Sir?” the boy said.

Sam pointed to the floor. “You dropped this on the way over.”

The boy—brown-eyed with olive-colored skin—shook his head gravely. Sam reached to the dirty floor, picked up the dollar bill, and pressed it into the boy’s palm. “Yes, I saw you drop it. It belongs to you.”

The boy stared, looked at Sam. Then his fingers curled around the bill and he ran back to his parents. The father started whispering furiously to the mother, but she shook her head and took the dollar bill from her boy. She picked up the check and nodded at the Shanty’s owner, Jack Tinios, who had just ambled out of the kitchen. He pocketed both the check and dollar bill, then came over to Sam, wiping his hands on a threadbare towel.

Like most of the restaurant owners in this stretch of New Hampshire, Tinios was from Greece but had moved here before the Nazis overran his country back in ’41. His real first name began with the letter J and had about a dozen syllables; he and everyone else made it easier by calling him Jack. His face was florid, his mustache damp with perspiration, and his arms and hands were thick and beefy. He had on a T-shirt and stained gray slacks, an apron around his sagging middle.

“Found a body on the tracks a hundred yards or so away,” Sam said.

Jack grunted. “So I hear.”

“Guy in his sixties, maybe a little younger. Thin blond hair, wearing a white shirt, black suit, no necktie. He come in here today?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Guys in suits come in here, I notice. I don’t notice no guy in a suit.”

“Okay, then,” Sam said. “Another guy came in here about two hours ago, wanting to use the phone to call the cops. He didn’t have a suit. You notice him?”

“Sure. Bearded guy, long coat. Told ’im to beat it.”

“You wouldn’t even let him use the pay phone?”

“Bum wanted a nickel. You know what happen, I give ’im a nickel to make a phone call? He runs out. I never see him, never see nickel again.”

“You might have impeded an investigation, Jack. We might have gotten here earlier if you’d let him make that call.”

“Hell with that. One dead man, what do I care? What I do care is those bums down the tracks, living like animals, pissing and shitting in the woods, always breakin’ in my place, goin’ through my trash, lookin’ for scraps to eat, dumpin’ it all on the ground. Why don’t they get cleaned out? Huh? I’m a taxpayer. Why don’t they get cleaned out?”

Sam dropped two quarters on the counter. “Priorities, Jack, priorities. One of these days…”

Jack said something in Greek and palmed the coins. “You sound like the President. One of these days. Every man a king. One of these days.”

“Sure,” Sam said, “and make sure Donna gets that tip, okay?”

“Yeah, I make sure.”

The door opened and another Portsmouth cop came in, his slicker glossy with rain. He held his uniform cap in one hand, shaking off the water to the wet floor. Rudy Jenness was one of the oldest cops on the force and the laziest, but because his brother ran the city’s public works, he was safe in his job as shift sergeant. He walked over, his face splotchy red and white. “Sam, glad I saw your car parked out there.” Without a word, Jack pressed a cup of coffee into Rudy’s palm.

“Yeah, lucky me, what’s up?” Sam said.

“Marshal Hanson, he wants to see you. Like now.”

“He say why?”