The 6:20 Man(16)

“You are such an asshole!” Stamos cried out.

WASP heard this and looked up from his beer. He glanced at his buddies, and seemed to be contemplating something. Devine saw all this in the mirror as well. It was easy enough to read: The man was pondering whether to retake Hamburger Hill from Devine.

“I didn’t mean it like that. But that’s the way things are at Cowl,” Devine said, easing off the gas pedal. “You know it and I know it.” His beer came and he took a healthy swallow. It felt good against the rising heat in here.

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she said in a pouty tone.

“No, you don’t.”

Devine thought quickly. He was making little progress and he had to turn that around. Campbell didn’t strike him as a patient man. His mind flitted over several possible lines of inquiry with Stamos, each fraught with complications. And then, like the soldier he had once been, he decided to cut through the bullshit and try a direct assault.

“Getting back to Sara, did you know her well?”

The answer to this query seemed harder than it should have been for Stamos. “No, not really.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes when she said it.

He decided to up the ante.

“You have any inkling she might kill herself?”

This question seemed to shake Stamos even more. Her eyes bugged out for a moment and her body tensed. However, she quickly regrouped and shook her head, with the mouthed word No tacked on.

“So, no warning signs? Nothing on the grapevine?” he persisted.

“I really didn’t see that much of her. She . . . she was working on other things.”

“Did you get an email about her death?”

“What?”

“An email with details about Sara’s suicide?”

“No. You mean from the firm?”

“I don’t know.”

Maybe it just went to me, then. But why? “Wanda Simms told me Cowl was her mentor. Did you know that?”

Her face got puffy and her manner grew subdued. She looked down at her gin like she wanted to jump into it and pass through to a fresh new world. “He mentors lots of people.”

“So is he mentoring you?”

She glowered at him, and in that look Devine knew he had blown it. “I don’t have to answer that. I don’t have to talk to you at all.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder and Devine turned to see WASP and two of his comrades in beers standing there. The other two were at least six-four and built like the college athletes they no doubt had once been.

“Is he bothering you?” WASP asked.

Stamos gave Devine a look with eyebrows raised as if to say, Should I sacrifice you or not? It’s up to you. So start begging.

But she sure as hell wasn’t going to get that from him. Her lovely face once more turned nasty when confronted with his stony, unrepentant look.

“Yes. Can you do something about it?” she said, not taking her gaze off Devine.

“Hell yes we can. Let’s go, buddy. There’s a little spot around the corner where they keep the trash. We can go there and settle things.”

“Or we can just go our separate ways, no harm, no foul,” said Devine as he made a move to do just this, until WASP clenched his shoulder harder.

“That’s what I thought as soon as I saw you—you’re a chickenshit,” said WASP. “But if you want to pussy out, feel free.”

“Don’t go there, buddy,” said Devine.

Stamos interjected, “Hey, just everybody cool it. Let him go.”

WASP ignored this and said in a louder voice, “I know what, we’ll all give a toast to the chickenshit as you walk out the door with your tail between your legs.” He pushed Devine away. “Go on, run away before you get hurt.”

Devine laid down cash for the beer, finished it in two more gulps, crushed the empty can in his hand, turned to WASP, and said in a low, menacing voice, “I’m leaving now, but consider yourself really, really lucky, prick.”

He rammed his way through the crowd and out the door.

And then the three men made a big mistake.

They followed him.





CHAPTER





12


DEVINE TURNED THE CORNER AND neared a sliver of an opening between two buildings where a Dumpster and lines of trash and recycling bins were kept. This must be the place the ass-hole had been referring to. Beyond these articles, a brick wall faced him.

He looked behind him. WASP and his two pals were moving fast.

Okay, here we go.

Devine stepped into the opening, because with the brick wall behind him no one could sneak up on him. He then turned back around as the three men caught up to him. They were shoulder to shoulder as though intending to block his escape.

They could be Iraqis or Afghans, Taliban or Al-Qaeda or ISIS. It had gotten hard to tell the difference, actually. Those desert guys were all tall, and bone and muscle and lethal and muttering shit in a language he had come to learn but never mastered. Their eyes were all the same. Crazy, fanatical, but also cagey, smart. You got plopped in a flag-draped coffin for underestimating those sons of bitches.

WASP was a bit ahead of his pals, but starting to look a little nervous because Devine wasn’t looking nervous at all.

He pointed to the man on his left. “Rick played defensive end at Cornell.” He jerked a thumb at the other guy. “And Doug was NCAA heavyweight wrestling champ from Iowa. And I was All-American in lacrosse at Princeton.”