The Enemy

beach. I would have liked to see Summer on the beach. In a bikini. A very small one, for preference.
    “We have to work,” she said.
    I looked south and west, beyond the post buildings. I could see the trees, cold and dead against the horizon. I could see a tall pine, dull and dormant, a little nearer. I figured it was close to where we had found Carbone.
    Carbone.
    “Let’s go to Green Valley,” I said. “Let’s visit with Detective Clark. We could ask him for his crowbar notes. He made a start for us. So maybe we could finish up. A four-hour drive might be a good investment at this point.”
    “And four hours back.”
    “We could have lunch. Maybe dinner. We could go AWOL.”
    “They’d find us.”
    I shook my head.
    “Nobody would find me,” I said. “Not ever.”

    I stayed there on the sidewalk and Summer went away and came back five minutes later in the green Chevy we had used before. She pulled in tight to the curb and buzzed her window down before I could move.
    “Is this smart?” she said.
    “It’s all we’ve got,” I said.
    “No, I mean you’re going to be on the gate log. Time out, ten-thirty. Willard could check it.”
    I said nothing. She smiled.
    “You could hide in the trunk,” she said. “You could get out again when we’re through the gate.”
    I shook my head. “I’m not going to hide. Not because of an asshole like Willard. If he checks the log I’ll tell him the hunt for the gum-wrapper guy suddenly went interstate. Or global, even. We could go to Tahiti.”
    I got in beside her and racked the seat all the way back and started thinking about bikinis again. She took her foot off the brake and accelerated down the main drag. Slowed and stopped at the gate. An MP private came out with a clipboard. He noted our plate number and we showed him ID. He wrote our names down. Glanced into the car, checked the empty rear seat. Then he nodded to his partner in the guard shack and the barrier went up in front of us, very slowly. It was a thick pole with a counterweight, red and white stripes. Summer waited until it was exactly vertical and then she dropped the hammer and we took off in a cloud of blue government-funded smoke from the Chevy’s rear tires.

    The weather got better as we drove north. We slid out from under a shelf of low gray cloud into bright winter sunshine. It was an army car so there was no radio in it. Just a blank panel where the civilian model would have had AM and FM and a cassette slot. So we talked from time to time and whiled the rest away riding in aimless silence. It was a curious feeling, to be free. I had spent just about my whole life being where the military told me to be, every minute of every day. Now I felt like a truant. There was a world out there. It was going about its business, chaotic and untidy and undisciplined, and I was a part of it, just briefly. I lay back in the seat and watched it spool by, bright and stroboscopic, random images flashing past like sunlight on a running river.
    “Do you wear a bikini or a one-piece?” I asked.
    “Why?”
    “Just checking,” I said. “I was thinking about the beach.”
    “Too cold.”
    “Won’t be in August.”
    “Think you’ll be here in August?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Pity,” she said. “You’ll never know what I wear.”
    “You could mail me a picture.”
    “Where to?”
    “Fort Leavenworth, probably,” I said. “The maximum security wing.”
    “No, where will you be? Seriously.”
    “I have no idea,” I said. “August is eight months away.”
    “Where’s the best place you ever served?”
    I smiled. Gave her the same answer I give anyone who asks that question.
    “Right here,” I said. “Right now.”
    “Even with Willard on your back?”
    “Willard’s nothing. He’ll be gone before I am.”
    “Why is he here at all?”
    “My brother figures they’re copying what corporations do. Know-nothings aren’t invested in the status quo.”
    “So a guy trained to write fuel consumption algorithms winds up with two dead soldiers in his first week. And he doesn’t want to investigate either one of them.”
    “Because that would be old-fashioned thinking. We have to move on. We have to see the big picture.”
    She smiled and drove on. Took the Green Valley ramp, going way too fast.

    The Green Valley Police Department had a building north of town. It was a bigger place than I had expected, because Green Valley itself was bigger than I had expected. It encompassed the