Just Cause

The man had called out, high-pitched with fear and pain, Help me! Please.

Ta

He was a white boy from California and had been in the platoon only a week. Brown had hovered above him, staring at the man's ravaged, hopeless chest, trying to remember his name.

He had been his last wounded man. And he had died.

A week later, Ta

He felt a tinge of guilt. He realized he'd often heard the memory cries of wounded men, but they had always been the cries of men he'd saved. They were easy voices to recall, he thought. They remind you that you were doing something right in the midst of all that wrong. This was the first time he'd thought of that last man's cry.

Did Bruce Wilcox cry for help? he wondered. I left him, too.

He realized that he would have to tell Wilcox's family. Luckily, there was no wife, no steady girlfriend. He remembered a sister, married to a career naval officer stationed in San Diego. Wilcox's mother was dead, he knew, and his father lived, alone in a retirement home. There were dozens of old-age homes in Escambia County; it was a veritable growth industry. He recalled his few meetings with Wilcox's father: a rigid, harsh old man. He hates the world already. This will simply add to it. Abrupt fury creased his thoughts: What do I say? That I lost him? That I put him on a stakeout with an inexperienced detective from Monroe County and he vanished? Presumed dead? Missing in action? It's not like he was swallowed up by some jungle.

But he realized it was.

He flicked on the car's headlights. They immediately caught the small, red pinprick eyes of an opossum, poised by the side of the road, seemingly intent on challenging the car's wheels. He held the wheel steady, watching the animal, which, at the last moment, twitched and dove back into a ditch and safety.

In that moment he wished that he, too, could dive for cover.

No chance, he told himself.

Not long after, he pulled the car into the parking lot of the Admiral Benbow I

'What're you going to do?'

'Arrange backup. You don't think we should go get him alone, do you?'

Cowart thought about what Brown had said up in Newark. It had not occurred to him that they might seek assistance. 'I guess not.'

Shaeffer interrupted. 'What time?'

'Early. I'll pick you up before dawn. Say, five-fifteen.'

'And then?'

'We'll go out to his grandmother's place. I think that's where he'll be. Maybe we'll catch him asleep. Get lucky.'

'If not?' she asked. 'Suppose he's not there. Then what?'

'Then we start looking harder. But I think that's exactly where he'll be.'

She nodded. It seemed simple and impossible at the same time.

'Where're you going now?' Cowart asked again.

'I told you. Arrange backup. Maybe file some reports. I definitely want to check on my family. I'll see you here just before the sun comes up.'

Then he put the car in gear and accelerated swiftly away, leaving the reporter and the young detective standing on the sidewalk like a pair of tourists adrift in a strange country. For a moment, he glanced in the rearview mirror, watching the two before they moved into the motel lobby. They seemed small, hesitant. He turned the car, and they dropped away from his sight. He felt an unraveling starting within him, as if something wound tight was begi

Cowart and Shaeffer checked into the motel and headed into the restaurant to get something to eat. Neither felt particularly hungry but it was the proper hour, so it seemed the natural thing to do. They ordered from a waitress who seemed uncomfortable in a starched blue-and-white outfit perhaps a size too small for her that pulled tightly across her ample chest, and who seemed only mildly interested in taking their order. As they waited, Cowart looked across at Shaeffer and realized that he knew almost nothing about her. He realized as well that it had been a long time since he'd sat across from a young woman. The detective was actually attractive behind the razor-blade personality she projected. He thought, If this were Hollywood, we would have found some intense common emotion in everything that had happened and fall into each other's arms. He wanted to smile. Instead, he thought, I'll be satisfied if she simply converses with me. He wasn't even sure she would do that.

'Not much like the Keys, huh?' he said.

'No.'

'Did you grow up down there?'

'Yes. More or less. Born in Chicago but went down there when I was young.'

'What made you become a police officer?'

'This an interview? You going to put this in a story?'

Cowart waved a hand at her dismissively but realized she was probably right. He probably would put every small detail he could into the story, when he got around to describing all that had happened.

'No. Just trying to be civil. You don't have to answer. We could sit here in silence and that would be fine with me.'

'My father was a policeman. A Chicago detective until he got shot. After his death we moved to the Keys. Like refugees, I guess. I thought I might like police work, so I signed up after college. In the blood, I suppose you might say. There you have it.'

'How long have you

'Two years in patrol cars. Six months working robbery-burglary. Three months in major crimes. There. That's the history.'

'Were the Tarpon Drive killings your first important case?'

She shook her head. 'No. And all homicides are important.'

She wasn't sure whether he'd absorbed this company lie or spotted it, for he dropped his head to his salad, a chunk of iceberg lettuce with a single quarter of tomato glued to the side with Thousand Island dressing. He speared the tomato with a fork and held it up. 'New Jersey Number Six,' he said.

'What?'

'Jersey tomatoes. Actually, it's probably too early for them, but this one feels like it could be a year old, at least. You know what they do? Harvest them green, long before they're ripe. That way they're real firm, hard as a damn rock. When you slice them, they stay together. No seeds and oozing tomato flesh falling out, which is how the restaurants want them. Of course, nobody'd eat a green tomato, so they inject them with a red dye to make them look like the real thing. Sell them by the billions to fast-food places.'