‘A little, maybe,’ Summer said, on my right.
I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the ground.
‘On his gloves,’ she said. ‘Maybe on his shoes.’
‘Less than he might have expected,’ I said. ‘Unless he was a
doctor he would have expected some pretty bad bleeding.’
‘So?’
‘So he didn’t use a pool car. He expected blood and didn’t
want to risk leaving it all over a vehicle that someone else was
going to drive the next day.’
‘So like you said, with his own car, he’ll have thrown it in the
back. So we aren’t going to find anything out here.’
I nodded. Said nothing. Walked on.
We covered the whole of the middle section and found nothing.
Two thousand yards of dormant organic material and not one
single man-made item. Not a cigarette butt, not a scrap of paper,
no rusted cans, no empty bottles. It was a real tribute to the post
commander’s enthusiasm. But it was disappointing. We stopped
with the main post buildings clearly visible, three hundred
yards in front of us.
‘I want to backtrack,’ I said. ‘I want to do the middle part
again.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘About face.’
She turned and we switched positions. We decided we
would cover each three-hundred-yard section the opposite way
around from the first pass. Where I had walked inboard, I would
walk outboard, and vice versa. No real reason, except our
perspectives were different and we felt we should alternate. I
was more than a foot taller than she was, and therefore simple
trigonometry meant I could see more than a foot farther in
either direction. She was closer to the ground and she claimed
her eyes were good for detail.
We walked back, slow and steady.
182
Nothing in the first section. We swapped positions. I took up
station ten feet from the track. Scanned left and right. The wind
was in our faces, and my eyes started watering from the cold. I
put my hands in my pockets.
Nothing in the second section. We changed positions again. I
walked five feet from the track, parallel to its edge. Nothing in
the third section. We changed yet again. I did math in my head
as we walked. So far we had swept a fifteen-foot swath along a
2,340-yard length. That made 11,700 square yards, which was
a hair better than 2.4 acres. Nearly two and a half acres, out
of a hundred thousand. Odds of 40,000 to one, approximately.
Better than driving to town and spending a dollar on a lottery
ticket. But not much better.
We walked on. The wind got stronger and we got colder. We
saw nothing.
Then I saw something.
It was far to my right. Maybe twenty feet from me. Not a
yogurt container. Something else. I almost ignored it because
it was well outside the zone of possibility. No lightweight
plastic unaerodynamic item could have gone that far after being
thrown from a car on the track. So my eyes spotted it and my
brain processed it and rejected it instantly, on a purely preprogrammed
basis.
And then it hung up on it. Out of pure animal instinct.
Because it looked like a snake. The lizard part of my brain
whispered snake and I got that little primeval jolt of fright that
had kept my ancestors alive and well way back in evolution. It
was all over in a split second. It was smothered immediately. “Fhe
modern educated part of my mind stepped in and said no snakes
here in January, bud. Way too cold. I breathed out and moved on
a step and then paused to look back, purely out of curiosity.
There was a curved black shape in the dead grass. Belt?
Garden hose? But it was settled deeper down among the stiff
brown stalks than something made of leather or fabric or
rubber could have fallen. It was right down there among the
roots. Therefore it was heavy. And it had to be heavy to have
travelled so far from the track. Therefore it was metal. Solid,
not tubular. Therefore it was unfamiliar. Very little military
equipment is curved.
183
I walked over. Got close. Knelt down.