“You seem to have gone quiet, Captain.”
“That trick, taking the olives off the stick with your tongue. How do you do it?”
“Only with lots of practice.”
Standing where only Jason could see his face, the bartender rolled his eyes. The major was a regular here.
“Live on base, Major?” Jason asked, more to make conversation than curiosity.
She shook her head, sending blond ripples rolling. “Nope. Have a condo in Alexandria. And by the way, I’m Judith, not ‘Major,’ when I’m off duty.”
Jason finished the dregs of his drink and motioned to the bartender. “If you’d told me, I could have met you somewhere else, saved you the drive.”
She took a sip of the icy-clear liquid in her glass. “Getting you to meet me here was a slam-dunk. Getting you to venture off base might have been a bit dicey.”
“I can’t believe you have a hard time getting men to do anything.”
She looked at him over the rim of her glass. He had not noticed earlier how green her eyes were. “Have you always flattered women?”
“Only the pretty ones.”
“Touché!”
They were both silent for a moment, preparing for the next round.
“Hope you like Kinkead’s,” she said.
“The seafood place on Pennsylvania Avenue? Love it. Why?”
She checked her watch. “Because we have reservations there in about twenty minutes.”
“Let me get a couple of things from my room.”
The last time Jason had dined at Kinkead’s had been with Laurin, a thought that flashed through his mind as the cab pulled up to the thirteen early nineteenth-century town houses that had been joined when the eight-story office complex, part of the tony Shops at 2000 Penn and Red Lion Row, had commenced construction in the 1980s. Now the old homes housed upscale shops, galleries, and Kinkead’s. The restaurant hadn’t changed: light wood, a jazz trio playing downstairs beside an open square bar that had its own menu. Upstairs was a more traditional restaurant specializing in seafood dishes.
With every step, heads turned. Watching the skirt stretch tight across Judith’s derriere as she climbed the stairs interrupted more than one conversation.
And was something more than one husband would hear about later.
Noting the season, Jason ordered the clam and oyster chowder as a prelude to tempura soft shells with green papaya salad and a fruity dipping sauce. Judith opted for the crab cakes with the Eastern Shore corn flan. He was delighted to find a Gaja on the wine list.
Jason learned that Judith came from a small town in Iowa. The Air Force had put her through medical school, obligating her to five years as a military doctor. At the end of her tour, she had decided to reenlist.
“No hassles, no med mal insurance, no Medicare forms,” she explained. “And even if the pay isn’t all that great, the travel benefits are. But what about you?”
Jason became instantly defensive. “Ah, I served my time. Got married and was planning on moving into civilian life when 9/11 came along. Both my wife and I were in the Pentagon. I survived; she didn’t.”
Judith’s hand went out to rest on top of his. “I’m sorry….”
Jason made no effort to move his hand. “You had no way to know. Anyway, my plans changed. I went to work with a civilian contractor.”
She looked at him, half smiling. “I can imagine what a former Special Operations Command guy would be doing in the private sector.”
He looked at her quizzically.
“It’s in your service jacket. We routinely download all patients’ service records when they come in for treatment. Yours is the first I’ve seen that has more classified than specified. I don’t know what you’re doing for your civilian contractor, but I sure hope you’re paid enough to make getting shot worth it.”
“I got shot at for a lot less money in the service.”
By the time they were at the maître d’s stand awaiting the arrival of the cab they had requested, Jason had successfully deflected most questions about his personal life. Easily done when the other person is encouraged to talk about themselves.
Judith checked her watch. “Where’s the cab? I’ve got an oh-seven-hundred staff meeting at the clinic tomorrow.”
“I called the cab ten minutes ago,” the maître d said defensively. “Maybe someone hijacked it en route.”
As in most large cities, cabbies were not above picking up a fare on the street on their way to responding to a call. If the street fare was short enough, they could make both it and the call. The results were an additional fare and a delayed response.
Jason stepped toward the door. “I’ll see if I can flag one down while we wait.”
Outside, Jason stepped into a wall of heat and damp that was a Washington summer night. Built on a drained swamp just like most of New Orleans, the two cities shared a muggy humidity.
Training embedded so deeply that it had become reflex rather than thought took over as Jason scanned the empty street. At this hour, Pennsylvania Avenue was quiet. Parked cars lined the curb, their windshields giving back the pale orange of the sodium-vapor streetlights. Each had a residential parking permit sticker, a prerequisite for not getting towed in DC, where cars overwhelmingly outnumbered parking places.
There were no cruising cabs in sight.
His eyes followed a Metrobus lumbering in the direction of the George Washington University/Foggy Bottom Station. As his eyes followed the bus, he noted a Lincoln Town Car at the curb across the street. The make and model was common enough in the District, usually hired with driver to ferry the area’s nobility, politicians, from place to place. But this one did not have the windshield sticker that would allow temporary parking anywhere in Washington. And it appeared empty, no dark-suited chauffeur smoking a cigarette while he waited for his patron to finish whatever had brought him into the neighborhood.
An anomaly. Like a jungle suddenly gone silent, a junk car in an upscale residential section of town, an open door late at night.
Careful to seem to be doing nothing more than looking for a cab, Jason searched the shadows, potential hiding places for whoever had arrived in the Lincoln. Of course, it was quite possible the occupants of the car had not included a hired driver but only patrons of the restaurant who would appear at any moment, loud with alcohol and cheerful after a good meal, and drive away.
But Jason wasn’t prepared to bet his life on it.
There! Was that movement he had seen between two parked cars about fifty feet away? Could have been some nocturnal animal, a cat, a stray dog. Something had definitely moved.
He turned and went back inside.
Judith smiled. “No cab?”
“No cab.” He took her hand, leading her away from the door. “Come on, we’re leaving.”
“But the door’s back there,” she protested.
“Not the door we’re using tonight.”
Years ago, he and Laurin had noticed a senator across Kinkead’s dining room, one currently in the news for his purported involvement with a young intern. Jason had noted the senator’s departure was in the opposite direction from the entrance, no doubt to avoid the cadre of reporters who dogged his every move. Ergo, there was an exit somewhere other than the one used by the establishment’s customers.
Jason and Judith walked quickly past the open square of the bar and into the kitchen, where, in their frenzied activities, none of the white-clad staff seemed to notice. Straight back was a doorway. Beyond that, an alley.
Jason guessed the narrow space had originally been for deliveries and garbage removal from the row of town houses. Now it served the same purpose for the restaurant and adjacent establishments. The faint odor of rotting vegetables confirmed the hypothesis