“Be careful.”

“Always am.”

I hung up and walked back to our table.

“Where now?” Summer said.

“Now we’re going to go see girls take their clothes off,” I said.

It was a short walk across the lot from the greasy spoon to the lounge bar. There were a few cars around, but not many. It was still early. It would be another couple of hours before the crowds really built up. The locals were still home, eating dinner, watching the sports news. Guys from Fort Bird were finishing chow time in the mess, showering, getting changed, hooking up in twos and threes, finding car keys, picking out designated drivers. But I still kept my eye out. I didn’t want to bump into a crowd of Delta people. Not outside in the dark. Time was too precious to waste.

We pulled the door and stepped inside. There was a new face behind the register. Maybe a friend or a relative of the fat guy. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. And we were in BDUs. No unit designations. No indication that we were MPs. So the new face was happy enough to see us. He figured us for a nice little upward tick in his first-hour cash flow. We walked right past him.

The place was less than one-tenth full. It felt very different that way. It felt cold and vast and empty. Like some kind of a factory. Without a press of bodies the music was louder and tinnier than ever. There were whole expanses of vacant floor. Whole acres. Hundreds of unoccupied chairs. There was only one girl performing. She was on the main stage. She was bathed in warm red light, but she looked cold and listless. I saw Summer watching her. Saw her shudder. I had said: So what are you going to do? Go work up at the strip club with Sin? Face-to-face, it wasn’t a very appealing option.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“For the key to everything,” I said. “My biggest mistake.”

“Which was?”

“Watch,” I said.

I walked around to the dressing room door. Knocked twice. A girl I didn’t know opened up. She kept the door close to her body and stuck her head around. Maybe she was naked.

“I need to see Sin,” I said.

“She’s not here.”

“She is,” I said. “She’s got Christmas to pay for.”

“She’s busy.”

“Ten dollars,” I said. “Ten dollars to talk. No touching.”

The girl disappeared and the door swung shut behind her. I stood out of the way, so the first person Sin would see would be Summer. We waited. And waited. Then the door opened up again and Sin stepped out. She was in a tight sheath dress. It was pink. It sparkled. She was tall on clear plastic heels. I stepped behind her. Got between her and the dressing room door. She turned and saw me. Trapped.

“Couple of questions,” I said. “That’s all.”

She looked better than the last time I had seen her. The bruises on her face were ten days old and were more or less healed up. Her makeup was maybe a little thicker than before. But that was the only sign of her troubles. Her eyes looked vacant. I guessed she had just shot up. Right between her toes. Whatever gets you through the night.

“Ten dollars,” she said.

“Let’s sit,” I said.

We found a table far from a speaker. It was relatively quiet there. I took a ten-spot out of my pocket and held it out. Didn’t let go of it.

“You remember me?” I said.

She nodded.

“Remember that night?” I said.

She nodded again.

“OK, here’s the thing. Who hit you?”

“That soldier,” she said. “The one you were talking to just before.”

twenty-one

I kept tight hold on the ten-dollar bill and took her through it, step by step. She told us that after I slid her off my knee she had gone around looking for girls to check with. She had managed whispered conversations with most of them. But none of them knew anything. None of them had any information at all, either firsthand or secondhand. There were no rumors going around. No stories about a co-worker having a problem in the motel. She had checked back in the private room and heard nothing there either. Then she had gone to the dressing room. There was nobody in there. Business was good. Everybody else was either up on the stage or across the street. She knew she should have kept on asking. But there was no gossip. She felt sure someone would have heard something, if anything bad had actually happened. So she figured she would just give up on it and blow me off. Then the soldier I had been talking to stepped into the dressing room. She gave us a pretty good description of Carbone. Like most hookers she had trained herself to remember faces. Repeat customers like to be recognized. It makes them feel special. Makes them tip better. She told us Carbone had warned her not to tell any MP anything. She put emphasis in her voice, echoing his own from ten days before. Any MP anything. Then to make sure she took him seriously he had slapped her twice, hard, fast, forehand, backhand. She had been stunned by the blows. She hadn’t seen them coming. She sounded impressed by them. It was like she was ranking them against other blows she had received. Like a connoisseur. And looking at her I figured she was reasonably familiar with getting hit.

“Tell me again,” I said. “It was the soldier, not the owner.”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

“The owner never hits us,” she said. “We’re his meal ticket.”

I gave her the ten bucks and we left her there at the quiet table.

“What does it mean?” Summer said.

“Everything,” I said.

“How did you know?”

I shrugged. We were back in Kramer’s motel room, folding stuff, packing our bags, getting ready to hit the road one last time.

“I saw it wrong,” I said. “I guess I started to realize in Paris. When we were waiting for Joe at the airport. That crowd. They were watching people coming out and they were kind of half-prepared to greet them and half-prepared to ignore them, depending. That’s how it was in the bar that night. I walked in, I’m a big guy, so people saw me coming. They were curious for a split second. But they didn’t know me and they didn’t like what I was, so they turned away again and shut me out. Very subtle, all in the body language. Except for Carbone. He didn’t shut me out. He turned toward me. I thought it was just random, but it wasn’t. I thought I was selecting him, but he was selecting me just as much.”

“It had to be random. He didn’t know you.”

“He didn’t know me, but he knew MP badges when he saw them. He’d been in the army sixteen years. He knew what he was looking at.”

“So why turn toward you?”

“It was like a double-take. Like a stutter step. He was turning away, then he changed his mind and turned back. He wanted me to come to him.”

“Why?”

“Because he wanted to know why I was there.”

“Did you tell him?”

I nodded. “Looking back, yes, I did. Not in detail. I just wanted him to stop people from getting worried, so I told him it was nothing to do with anyone, just some lost property across the street, maybe one of the hookers had it. He was a very smart guy. Very subtle. He reeled me in like a fish and got it out of me.”

“Why would he care?”

“Something I once said to Willard. I said things happen in order to dead-end other things. Carbone wanted my inquiries dead-ended. That was his aim. So he thought fast. And smart. Delta doesn’t hire dumb guys, that’s for sure. He went in and smacked the girl, to shut her up in case she knew anything. And then he came out and let me think the owner had done it. He didn’t even lie about it. He just let me assume. He wound me up like a clockwork toy and pointed me in the direction he wanted. And off I went. I smacked the owner on the ear and we fought it out in the lot. And there was Carbone, watching. He saw me work the guy over like he knew I would and then he put in the complaint. So he got it coming and going. He got both ends bottled up. The girl was silenced and he thought I would be taken out of the picture because of the disciplinary procedure. He was a very smart guy, Summer. I wish I had met him before.”