The Enemy Read Free Page A

up.”
    I nodded. “Sure I do. Wouldn’t you?”
    “Probably,” he said.
    I let go of the dog tags and moved away from the bed and checked the nightstands and the built-in counter. Nothing there. There was no phone in the room. A place like this, I figured there would be a pay phone in the office. I moved past Stockton and checked the bathroom. There was a privately purchased black leather Dopp kit next to the sink, zipped closed. It had the initials
KRK
embossed on it. I opened it up and found a toothbrush and a razor and travel-sized tubes of toothpaste and shaving soap. Nothing else. No medications. No heart prescription. No pack of condoms.
    I checked the closet. There was a Class A uniform in there, neatly squared away on three separate hangers, with the pants folded on the bar of the first and the coat next to it on the second and the shirt on a third. The tie was still inside the shirt collar. Centered above the hangers on the shelf was a field grade officer’s service cap. Gold braid all over it. On one side of the cap was a folded white undershirt and on the other side was a pair of folded white boxers.
    There were two shoes side by side on the closet floor next to a faded green canvas suit carrier which was propped neatly against the back wall. The shoes were gleaming black and had socks rolled tight inside them. The suit carrier was a privately purchased item and had battered leather reinforcements at the stress points. It wasn’t very full.
    “You’d get the results,” I said. “Our pathologist would give you a copy of the report with nothing added and nothing deleted. You see anything you’re not happy about, we could put the ball right back in your court, no questions asked.”
    Stockton said nothing, but I wasn’t feeling any hostility coming off him. Some town cops are OK. A big base like Bird puts a lot of ripples into the surrounding civilian world. Therefore MPs spend a lot of time with their civilian counterparts, and sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, and sometimes it isn’t. I had a feeling Stockton wasn’t going to be a huge problem. He was relaxed. Bottom line, he seemed a little lazy to me, and lazy people are always happy to pass their burdens on to someone else.
    “How much?” I said.
    “How much what?”
    “How much would a whore cost here?”
    “Twenty bucks would do it,” he said. “There’s nothing very exotic available in this neck of the woods.”
    “And the room?”
    “Fifteen, probably.”
    I rolled the corpse back onto its front. Wasn’t easy. It weighed two hundred pounds, at least.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    “About what?”
    “About Walter Reed doing the autopsy.”
    There was silence for a moment. Stockton looked at the wall.
    “That might be acceptable,” he said.
    There was a knock at the open door. One of the cops from the cars.
    “Medical examiner just called in,” he said. “He can’t get here for another two hours at least. It’s New Year’s Eve.”
    I smiled.
Acceptable
was about to change to
highly desirable.
Two hours from now Stockton would need to be somewhere else. A whole bunch of parties would be breaking up and the roads would be mayhem. Two hours from now he would be begging me to haul the old guy away. I said nothing and the cop went back to wait in his car and Stockton moved all the way into the room and stood facing the draped window with his back to the corpse. I took the hanger with the uniform coat on it and lifted it out of the closet and hung it on the bathroom door frame where the hallway light fell on it.
    Looking at a Class A coat is like reading a book or sitting next to a guy in a bar and hearing his whole life story. This one was the right size for the body on the bed and it had
Kramer
on the nameplate, which matched the dog tags. It had a Purple Heart ribbon with two bronze oak leaf clusters to denote a second and third award of the medal, which matched the scars. It had two silver stars on the epaulettes, which