She thought about the odd phone call from W. Cooper on the outbound segment of her morning jog. Maybe she was becoming a mean-spirited person, but she had to admit her most enjoyable moment in weeks had come when she outed the inebriated, so-called college recruiter. She’d easily been able to tell he was hammered, the man working hard enough against slurring his words to give it away, but Laramie had an unfair advantage on reading such mannerisms after spending the first twelve years of her life with a similarly and consistently inebriated father. No matter how frequently W. Cooper tossed ’em back, Laramie thought, it was unlikely he could have hung with Dad in the consumption department.
W. Cooper’s voice had sounded familiar to her. Not because she had met him before-she knew she hadn’t-but there’d been an ease between them, the kind you shared with a friend you’d been holding daily water-cooler conversations with, bonding in the copy room of some high-stress office environment. It occurred to her now that this was largely due to the fact that W. Cooper actually sounded a lot like her father-though this, she thought, probably stemmed from the fact he’d have tested out at somewhere near the blood-alcohol percentage Dad would have registered the last time she’d seen him.
Or maybe he was just an asshole, and because of this, she’d enjoyed coming out ahead in their little sparring match.
She came around a corner and slipped into the Kinko’s. She checked her watch and saw it was almost six-forty-five; as with the two other mornings she’d visited, the store was just opening for the day. It said OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS on the window, but for reasons on which Laramie chose not to speculate, the place usually opened at six-thirty and closed before midnight.
She bought a computer-hour in cash, logged on, and found senator Kircher’s reply. She read his request a few times and still couldn’t figure out how to answer.
Did it make any sense to continue the game? After Korea, she’d been unable to find even a shred of additional supporting evidence. Rogue faction, my ass, she thought. Rogue analyst, yes-sitting here like a buffoon in my running bra, digging for trouble where none exists. Still, she thought, at least Kircher might be able to tell me whether this connect-the-dots guesswork of mine has any legitimacy, or whether I’m simply full of shit.
She composed an adaptation of the pair of reports she’d filed during the prior two weeks. She included all of it-everything she’d written, all the material she’d presented totally against Agency protocol, even the speculative guesswork she’d shared with Malcolm Rader in the commissary.
When she’d worked up a draft, she reread it four, then five times, editing nearly every word on each pass. She nearly deleted the entire document twice, then ultimately decided the whole thing needed an introductory statement, which she added as the first line of her note:
It’s better for the both of us if my identity remains confidential. Look at it this way: I’m an informed source, privy to the following intelligence, which you may or may not find useful. Some of this is theory, in fact most of it is theory, but my voice is not being heard in the community you oversee. Thus it occurred to me you might want to hear what I’m about to tell you.
She inserted a paragraph break between her introductory statement and the body of her document, reread the entire thing a sixth time, and decided to add some closing remarks:
Since I find it useful to remain gainfully employed, chances are you will not hear from me again. I leave what I am disclosing for you to do with as you see fit. Thank you for your time.
She resisted the impulse to read the document a seventh time, further resisted the impulse to delete the entire composition, clicked Send, logged off, waved to the clerk at the counter despite the fact that his eyes lingered too long in the vicinity of her sports bra, and set out on the return leg of her run.
24
One day a nineteen-year-old named Travis Malloy was a private in the U.S. Navy; the next day he wasn’t. It had been as simple as that.
With the ship leaving Kingston after his three days of leave, Malloy just didn’t get back on. He didn’t have a choice: get back on and they’d have busted him, Malloy getting word they’d found him out. And who cared? Malloy didn’t need the navy anyway, the whole deal a sausage fest, thousands of homos sleeping side by side in bunks a regular guy like Malloy wouldn’t even share with a woman.
Now he could share his bed with any woman he pleased.
Travis Malloy had strange, pale freckled skin and short, shockingly red hair. Technically, Malloy was of African-American descent, but aside from a slightly blunted nose and the thick texture of his hair, Malloy was an albino. He fit no single previously defined ethnic category.
Light-complected though he happened to be, Malloy preferred women with skin so dark it gleamed. Get a whore like that, and he’d ball her all night. Yeah, he could sure ball ’em all night, Malloy banging away like the girl was lifeless, which made sense, since by the time he had the girl in bed, she usually was. Malloy mostly asphyxiated them, though sometimes broke their necks, generally doing it as he pulled them through the doorway of whatever room he’d procured for the night-paying in cash to keep his identity a secret. Having performed this morbid act in nearly a dozen ports of call, Malloy figured somebody would eventually make him, so when he finally got word they’d caught on it didn’t surprise him at all. Malloy overheard some idle talk from a couple of the navy fags during leave in Jamaica and bolted immediately.
Kingston was his favorite city in the world anyway, a town overflowing with dark-skinned prostitutes, Malloy finding they were a dime a dozen here, about all Malloy was looking to pay, anyway. He could get all he wanted, pick hookers up everywhere he went-lost souls, wanderers, enough of them here that Malloy had to be careful not to kill too many, since he found he wanted to stay. He met one girl, just the kind he wanted, her mind blown to kingdom come from so much weed Malloy got high just sucking on her lips. She was into some sort of freaked-out religion, a form of voodoo. Initially, the only reason this mattered to Malloy was that she and her religious practices represented an easy way for him to score weed-some good shit in fact. He found the dope was a part of the religion. They smoked it during the ceremonies.
During the time he was balling the voodoo girl, Malloy did pick-up day labor to pay the bills, using a fake name so the navy wouldn’t send the marines after his AWOL ass. He found plenty of jobs, Malloy discovering that labor laws weren’t quite as stringent in Jamaica as in the States; he was, however, getting a little tired of the day-to-day grind, waiting around before the crack of dawn, hoping the labor truck would cruise by with enough empty seats for him to squeeze in. Get work, and you had enough money for drugs and parties; get passed over, and you starved.
From this desperation was born in Travis Malloy an idea, an entrepreneurial scheme that occurred to him mainly because he misunderstood something at work.
Malloy overheard his foreman saying something about the good old days of slavery, a time when you could buy your labor and the labor wouldn’t talk back. The foreman had been telling a joke, his way of complaining about some local hooligans who were trying to form a labor syndicate, but to Malloy the man’s comment contained a different and deeper meaning.