“Not that I know,” said Dalton. “But it’s possible the feds were talking to her behind my back. The goal of the charges is to keep me from being reelected. As you know.”
Proetto leaned forward. “We went back through the navigation memory and saw Natalie made three other trips there in the last six weeks.”
“You’ll have to ask them why,” said Dalton. “Odds are, they were trying to get some dirt on me.”
“Dirt?” asked Hazzard.
“Read the papers, Lew,” said Dalton. “How thick are you?”
A glare from big Hazzard.
“Mr. Strait,” said Proetto, “in one of our earlier talks here, we established that you were in Sacramento the day your wife went missing. Am I remembering that right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“And what time did you fly out of Lindbergh?”
“Early morning. I don’t remember the exact time. I already told you that.”
“Just checking the timeline,” said Proetto. “Because this witness who put Natalie with the two men out in Pala, getting her from one car to another, he said one of them looked like you.”
“You showed him a picture?”
“Routine, in a case like this, Mr. Strait,” said Hazzard.
“Well, he might have looked like me but he wasn’t me,” said Dalton. “Jesus, you guys…”
“Do you have a record of that travel? An airline or hotel receipt?”
“Of course I do — it was assembly business.”
“We’re just nailing down the details,” said Proetto. “Get me a copy of that receipt and we can move on to the things that matter. No hurry, Mr. Strait. I know you’ve got an awful lot on your mind these days.”
Dalton stood. “I hope you sonsofbitches know I didn’t have anything to do with Natalie’s disappearance. You’re smarter than that, right?”
Dalton sat in heavy silence as I drove us toward Borrego Springs and our Fallujah reunion with Harris Broadman. Stared out the window for most of the way.
As we dropped down into the valley he checked his phone, returned a call and some text messages.
“I’m looking forward to seeing Harris,” he said. “Kind of nervous, too.”
“It was his idea,” I said.
“It’s the right thing. Sometimes, you have to go back.”
Twenty-Four
The parking lot of the Bighorn Motel wasn’t as busy as before. The bungalows around the pool sat patiently in the mounting May heat. According to the Bighorn website, the wildflower bloom was all but over.
Standing at the locked front door, I pressed the intercom button and waited.
“Good morning,” a young woman said, her voice familiar.
I told her we were here to see Mr. Broadman.
“I can see if he’s available.”
“Open the damned door, honey,” said Dalton. “It’s hot out here.”
We stepped inside to the same cramped, poorly lit, slightly dusty office I remembered. The counter with the bowl of mints and the things-to-do pamphlets organized and upright in the rack.
And Cassy, the pale girl with the thinning hair and the mini-mic clipped to her plain smock dress. Today’s was baby blue. Behind her was the taxidermy cabinet and the closed door to her room.
I introduced myself and Dalton. Dalton shook her hand and said he was running for reelection in the 82nd California Assembly District.
Cassy’s soft gaze drifted to me. “I remember you, Mr. Ford.”
“It’s nice to see you again.”
“It’s nice of you to say so.”
I heard a hint of Texas in her voice that I hadn’t heard before. She stepped back into the shadow of the preserved desert animals and let the shoulder mic pick up her voice. Told an invisible someone that Misters Ford and Strait were here.
A moment later, Harris’s soft, calm voice came through the wall speaker. “Bring them around to nineteen, Cass.”
“Yes, Mr. Broadman.”
Cassy led us from the cool lobby and back into the midday heat. Along the covered walkway, past bungalow six where Broadman and I had first talked. Past the clean, empty swimming pool then left down the second leg of the horseshoe, and left again to bungalow nineteen, the last unit of the third wing. Cass had led us the long way around but kept us, and her own delicate skin, out of the ferocious desert sun.
As before, the door was cracked and Broadman told us to come in.
Broadman had given up his all-white wardrobe for conventional jeans and desert camo boots, a tan San Diego Veterans Writers Group T-shirt, and what looked like his everyday service cap from Fallujah, faded and frayed by the war. Like we were, I thought.
He unbent from the couch, slowly crossed the room and gave Dalton a brief hug. Shook my hand. It was the first time I’d touched him and I was surprised by his grip, cold and strong.
The living room was much different from the sparse, mid-century modern look of bungalow six. I wondered why Broadman occupied two units in the same motel. This unit was warmer in spirit, homier. Better light. It reminded me of the Midwest — with knockoff colonial rockers and a wood-framed sofa that could have come from a Sears catalogue in 1965, a braided oval rug, a dated entertainment cabinet anchored by a portly TV and shelves of vinyl record albums. I remembered that he was born and raised in Kenton, Ohio. Broadman was roughly my age, just old enough to have grown up with things like these around him. If these furnishings weren’t Broadman’s from boyhood, some effort had gone into re-creating that time. The walls were lined with wooden bookshelves and cabinets brimming with framed family photographs, award ribbons, trophies, and war memorabilia.
Broadman took up the center of the couch again, and Dalton and I sat facing him across a low maple-finished coffee table with scalloped edges and cloth doilies. A bottle of Rebel Yell bourbon sat unopened on an American Rifleman magazine from 1989 and the three glasses sat perfectly centered on their doilies.
“You still drink that shit?” asked Dalton, smiling.
“Not anymore,” said Broadman. “It’s for you guys.”
“God knows we put some of that away,” said Dalton.
I remembered that quality spirits were hard to come by in Iraq. One of our sergeants had a stateside supply line of budget vodka and that was as good as it got. Beer was better anyway, if you could keep it cold. Sleep was best of all, if and when you could get it.
Dalton considered the fresh bottle for a short beat. Opened it and poured himself a shot. Broadman and I declined his offer.
I sat quietly as they caught up on family and careers, knowing that the pull of their combat is what had brought them here. Though I had fought the same war, my battleground was different and they could have been talking about a world apart. My world was the Jolan, in the oldest part of the city, thought by the Iraqis to be insurmountable by U.S. troops. Dalton and Harris met their fates in East Manhattan, insurgent-heavy, difficult to get in and out of, often not even patrolled by the Fallujah police.
So they fell into their war stories, first an informal roll call of their combat brethren living and dead, then on to specific patrols and firefights that, like most war stories, they delivered in one-two punches of the gruesome and the comic.
I lapsed into a semiprivate reverie of my own, peopled by men I’d fought with and laughed at and overheard talking loudly into their phones to loved ones back home. Jason and the guitar his pet rat lived in. Amin, the terp nobody fully trusted. And of course I thought of the ones who had died. They still occupy my dreams.
As do my memories of the Five. My unfortunate Five, whom I’ve never mentioned to any civilian, even Justine.
I thought of the door-to-door searches that had me juiced with adrenaline, trained to kill and amped on the idea I was about to die. We entered a home or a business in what they called a three-stack: first the corporal, then a sergeant or sergeant-major, then a private. The corporal was me — too big to be ideal for the job, but fast and good enough with a gun. And good to hide behind, as we liked to joke.