The Enemy

I asked Summer to file and forward all the appropriate notifications and reports and I headed back to my office. Rumor was spreading fast. I found three Delta sergeants waiting for me, looking for information. They were typical Special Forces guys. Small, lean, whippy, slightly unkempt, hard as nails. Two of them were older than the third. The young one was wearing a beard. He was tan, like he was just back from somewhere hot. They were all pacing in my outer office. My sergeant with the baby son was there with them. I guessed she was pulling a swing shift. She was looking at them like they might have been alternating spells of pacing with spells of hitting on her. She looked very civilized, in comparison to them. Almost genteel. I ushered them all into my inner office and closed the door and sat down at my desk and left them standing in front of it.

“Is it true about Carbone?” one of them asked.

“He was killed,” I said. “Don’t know who, don’t know why.”

“When?”

“Last night, nine or ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“This is a closed post.”

I nodded. “The perp wasn’t a member of the general public.”

“We heard he was messed up good.”

“Pretty good.”

“When are you going to know who it was?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“You got leads?”

“Nothing specific.”

“When you know, are we going to know too?”

“You want to?”

“You bet your ass.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” the guy said.

I nodded. Gay or straight, Carbone was a member of the world’s most fearsome gang. His buddies were going to stand up for him. I felt a little envious for a second. If I got offed in the woods late one night, I doubted if three tough guys would go straight to someone’s office, eight in the morning, champing at the bit, ready for revenge. Then I looked at the three of them again and thought, This particular perp could be in a shitload of trouble. All I’d have to do is drop a name.

“I need to ask you some cop questions,” I said. I asked them all the usual stuff. Did Carbone have any enemies? Had there been any disputes? Threats? Fights? The three guys all shook their heads and answered every question in the negative.

“Anything else?” I asked. “Anything that put him at risk?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything,” I said. It was as far as I wanted to go.

“No,” they all said.

“Got any theories?” I asked.

“Look at the Rangers,” the young one said. “Find someone who failed Delta training, and thinks he still has a point to prove.”

Then they left, and I sat there chewing on their final comment. A Ranger with a point to prove? I doubted it. Not plausible. Delta sergeants don’t go out in the woods with people they don’t know and get hit on the back of the head. They train long and hard to make such eventualities very unlikely, even impossible. If a Ranger had picked a fight with Carbone, it would have been the Ranger we found at the base of the tree. If two Rangers had gone out there with him, we’d have found two Rangers dead. Or at the very least we would have found defensive injuries on Carbone himself. He wouldn’t have gone down easily.

So he went out there with someone he knew and trusted. I pictured him at ease, maybe chatting, maybe smiling like he had done in the bar in town. Maybe leading the way somewhere, his back to his attacker, suspecting nothing. Then I pictured a tire iron or a crowbar being fumbled out from under a coat, swinging, hitting with a crunching impact. Then again. And again. It had taken three hard blows to put him down. Three surprise blows. And a guy like Carbone doesn’t get surprised very often.

My phone rang. I picked it up. It was Colonel Willard, the asshole in Garber’s office, up in Rock Creek.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In my office,” I said. “How else would I be answering my phone?”

“Stay there,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. Those are my direct orders. Just sit there quietly and wait.”

“For what?”

“I’m on my way down.”

He clicked off. I put the phone back in its cradle.

I stayed there. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t call anyone. My sergeant brought me a cup of coffee. I accepted it. Willard hadn’t told me to die of thirst.

After an hour I heard a voice in the outer office and then the young Delta sergeant came back in, alone. The one with the beard and the tan. I told him to take a seat and pondered my orders. Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t call anyone. I guessed talking with the guy would amount to doing something, which would contravene the don’t do anything part of the command. But then, breathing was doing something, technically. So was metabolizing. My hair was growing, my beard was growing, all twenty of my nails were growing, I was losing weight. It was impossible not to do anything. So I decided that component of the order was purely rhetorical.

“Help you, Sergeant?” I said.

“I think Carbone was gay,” the sergeant said.