“Well?” he said. “Are you completely sure of these numbers? You’ve run ‘em more than once? You’ve checked them?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” she said patiently. “Even had Spec Three Luper run them.” Luper was the clerk who was supposed to do this audit. “There’s a discrepancy.”
Mccallister stared down at the report as his face got red. “Where’s a discrepancy, for Chrissakes? This is the destruction inventory match audit, goddamn it. There can not be a discrepancy in the destruction inventory match audit. You know that I know that. The whole fucking Army knows that. This thing has to match up. If there’s a discrepancy, it has to be in your paperwork, not in this report.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” she said in a “if you say so” tone of voice.
“Damn right, yes, Sergeant,” he said. “All right Tell Henderson I want to see him. Don’t tell him why.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Mayfield replied, and went out to find Spec-5 Henderson. It took her a few minutes because Henderson, getting a little jump on four-thirty secure, had been in the men’s locker room changing into civvies.
“It’s sixteen-ten, Mayfield. What is this shit, anyway?” “Man said for me to tell you to go see him,” she said. “Said he’d tell you when you got there.”
“Aw, man! Shit!” He looked at his watch. “All right I gotta get back in the bag first.” He went back into the locker room.
Mayfield went back to her cubicle, wondering what to do next. Henderson was a weapons safety specialist, not a clerk. He would be seriously pissed when he found out that he had to do the destruction inventory match audit. She had to decide in the next five minutes whether to hit the road, Jack, or stay to help him. She thought about it. Henderson was an okay guy for a white man, but he’d hate her forever if he thought he was having to pick up after her. On the other hand, she had discovered the discrepancy; for a clean audit, he would have to do it by himself to catch her mistake.
Fifteen minutes later, Henderson solved it for her. He came by her desk with the report in his hands and gave her a black look. “Thanks a fucking heap, Mayfield.”
“I’ll stay and help you with it, you want,” she offered.
He shook’his head. “Man said I had to do it by myself. Said you’d fucked it up. Shit, I’ve never done a goddamn audit. This’ll take fucking hours.”
“I didn’t mess it up,” she said. “I found a discrepancy. That’s why he’s pissed. I’D show you how it’s done. Maybe you can find it.”
“You serious? There really is a discrepancy?”
“I think there is. Spec Three Luper says there is, but he couldn’t find it, either.”
Henderson’s anger evaporated. He looked back across the room, but Mccallister’s door was closed
“Okay,” he said. “But don’t let old Shit for Brains see us.”
Carson sat as his desk and considered the word that had reached him thirty minutes earlier.
That the Washington guy had been seen talking to people out in the warehouse.’ That the DRMO’s pet rock, Corey Dillard, had said something to Stafford about Bud Lambry. What, or in what context, had not been overheard. Or the blue-collar guys weren’t willing to say.
Great, he thought. Just fucking great. Dillard had been Bud Lambry’s helper from time to time, but Bud had assured Carson that Dillard knew nothing about the scam. But what might genius Lambry have told genius Dillard about the magical cylinder and all the money that might be coming Bud’s way? He got up and looked out into the flea-market warehouse. The auction had been today, and the bidders had been carting out the spoils to the loading dock all day.
He turned away from the window and walked slowly around his office, feeling uneasy as he relived what had happened to Lambry. He repeated to himself his new mantra: It was an accident. Wendell Carson is not a murderer. But there was no getting around the enormity of what he had gotten himself into: stealing the cylinder in the first place, and now the death of Bud Lambry. He went over to the bookcase and put his hands between the binders. He felt with his fingers the smooth steel, cold and deadly to the touch.
Before Stafford had begun nosing around, it would have been sufficient for him simply to announce that Lambry had quit and disappeared. Now he might have to think of something more elaborate. And then a scary thought occurred to him: If Stafford really started looking into Lam bry’s disappearance, what loose ends had Lambry left?
8
Spec-5 Henderson threw his pencil across the darkened office. Mayfield, sitting in a chair at another desk, watched him with a small smile of satisfaction on her face. She had gone into the women’s locker room at 4:30, until one of the other girls told her that Mccallister had left for the day. Then she’d rejoined Henderson and helped him crunch the numbers. He’d gotten the hang of it during the first hour and then run the report audit himself.
“I give up,” he said. “I get the same thing you did. One number off. One fucking number.” She nodded. “Now what?” she asked.
“We tell Mccallister, that’s what. He’s the sergeant”
“He gonna go hermantile.”
He looked over at her. “Lenime get this straight: This discrepancy means one of three things, right? More shit went out of here than got there, or more shit got there than went out of here, or something’s missing, right?”
“That’s it.”
He shuffled back through the fifty-seven page destruction report and frowned.
She really wanted to go home, although this might get interesting very soon. “What?” she asked.
“I’m looking to see what was shipped.”
“Buncha alfa-bravo-charlie gobbledygook,” she said.
Henderson didn’t say anything while he studied the report. He’d been focusing on numbers. Now he was looking at the alpha-numeric ammunition designator codes down the left side of the printouts. He rubbed his eyes. Then he stopped.
“Whoa,” he said softly.
“What?”
“At first I couldn’t recognize this designator code. But now I remember what this shipment was. This is fucking Wet Eye.”
“Wet Eye. Now that sounds like some lovely shit.”
He looked back over at her, and something in his eyes made her straighten up.
“We need to call Mccallister,” he said, “Like right fucking now.” ‘
After a half hour of trying unsuccessfully to find Sergeant Mccallister, and then Lieutenant Biers, Mccallister’s boss, Henderson had taken it upon himself to call the depot’s command duty officer. He explained that he had a problem and couldn’t find either the sergeant or the platoon’s lieutenant, then asked if the CDO could come over to the control office.
The CDO, a first lieutenant who was an instructor at the Chemical Warfare School, wanted to know why Spec-5 Henderson wouldn’t come over to the duty office. Lieutenants did not go to see E-5s.
“Sir, it’s complicated. And it may turn into a really, really big deal.
That’s all I can say over an unsecure phone, sir.”
“We need MPs here, Henderson? This isn’t some sexual harassment shit, is it?”
“No, sir. Nothing like that. You just need to come over here. Please?”
Although he was just a first lieutenant, the CDO had been in the Army long enough to recognize what that “please” meant: An enlisted man thought he was looking at some serious trouble and now wanted an officer folded into it before whatever it was got worse.
“Okay, I’m on my way, Henderson. Tell me again where that office is.”
Ten minutes later, a green Ford sedan pulled up in front of the control office. Specialist Mayfield escorted the CDO in. She was pleased to see that he was black and, a Chemical Corps officer. Once they were hi the office, Henderson explained what he’d been doing, with Mayfield’s assistance. At first the CDO did not understand what the problem was.