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As serious as a heart attack Maybe those were Ken Kramer&039;s last words, like a final explosion of panic in hisand dropped into the abyss He was out of line, in every way there was, and he knew it He here he shouldn&039;t have been, with so he should have kept in a safer place But he was getting aith it He was playing and winning He was on top of his ga Until the sudden thu turned around Success becaht

Nobody knohat a fatal heart attack feels like There are no survivors to tell us Medics talk about necrosis, and clots, and oxygen starvation, and occluded blood vessels They predict rapid useless cardiac fluttering, or else nothing at all They use words like infarction and fibrillation, but those ter to us You just drop dead is what they should say Ken Kramer certainly did He just dropped dead, and he took his secrets with him, and the trouble he left behind nearly killed me too

I was alone in a borrowed office There was a clock on the wall It had no second hand Just an hour hand, and a minute hand It was electric It didn&039;t tick It was co the

I waited

It rees Its motion was mechanical and damped and precise It bounced once and quivered a little and came to rest

A o

SixtyThe clock stayed still for a long, long tirees, another ht, and 1989 was 1990

I pushedI figured it was so to wish me a happy new year But it wasn&039;t It was a civilian cop calling because he had a dead soldier in a motel thirty miles off-post

"I need the Military Police duty officer," he said

I sat down again, behind the desk

"You got hiot one of yours, dead"

"One of mine?"

"A soldier," he said

"Where?"

"Motel, in town"

"Dead how?" I asked

"Heart attack, uy said

I paused Turned the page on the army-issue calendar on the desk, fro suspicious?" I said

"Don&039;t see anything"

"You seen heart attacks before?"

"Lots of them"

"OK," I said "Call post headquarters"

I gave him the number

"Happy New Year," I said

"You don&039;t need to come out?" he said

"No," I said I put the phone down I didn&039;t need to go out The arer than Detroit, a little smaller than Dallas, and just as unsentith is 930,000 eneral Aet Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000 population per year, and in the absence of sustained coular people On the whole they are younger and fitter than the population at large, but they smoke more and drink erous things in training So their life expectancy coe Soldiers die at the same speed as everyone else Do the th, and you have twenty-two dead soldiers every single day of every single year, accidents, suicides, heart disease, cancer, stroke, lung disease, liver failure, kidney failure Like dead citizens in Detroit, or Dallas So I didn&039;t need to go out I&039;m a cop, not a mortician

The clock moved The hand juht The phone rang again It was soeant in the office outside of mine

"Happy New Year," she said to me

"You too," I said "You couldn&039;t stand up and put your head in the door?"

"You couldn&039;t put yours out the door?"

"I was on the phone"

"Who was it?"

"Nobody," I said "Just sorunt didn&039;t make it to the new decade"

"You want coffee?"

"Sure," I said "Why not?"

I put the phone down again At that point I had been in s that made me happy to stay in It was the best in the world, no question So were the sergeants This one was a ia I had known her two days She lived off-post in a trailer park somewhere in the North Carolina Badlands She had a baby son She had toldabout a husband She was all bone and sinew and she was as hard as woodpecker lips, but she liked htyou coffee They knife you in the back instead My door opened and she cas, one for her and one for me

"Happy New Year," I said to her

She put the coffee down on s

"Will it be?" she said

"Don&039;t see why not," I said

"The Berlin Wall is halfway down They showed it on the television They were having a big party over there"

"I&039;lad so crowds All singing and dancing"

"I didn&039;t see the news"

"This all was six hours ago The time difference"

"They&039;re probably still at it"

"They had sledgehammers"

"They&039;re allowed Their half is a free city We spent forty-five years keeping it that way"

"Pretty soon on&039;t have an enemy anymore"

I tried the coffee Hot, black, the best in the world

"We won," I said "Isn&039;t that supposed to be a good thing?"

"Not if you depend on Uncle Sam&039;s paycheck"

She was dressed like e battledress uniform Her sleeves were neatly rolled Her MP brassard was exactly horizontal I figured she had it safety-pinned in back where nobody could see Her boots were gleaot any desert camos?" I asked her

"Never been to the desert," she said

"They changed the pattern They put big brown splotches on it Five years&039; research Infantry guys are calling it chocolate chip It&039;s not a good pattern They&039;ll have to change it back But it&039;ll take theure that out"

"So?"

"If it takes theh college before they figure out force reduction So don&039;t worry about it"

"OK," she said, not believing e?"

"I never

"The are," I said "And we&039;ll always have eneain She leaned forward and answered it for me Listened for about eleven seconds and handed me the receiver

"Colonel Garber, sir," she said "He&039;s in DC"

She took herand left the rooh he was a pleasant huht minutes into New Year&039;s Day simply to be social That wasn&039;t his style So holidays, like they&039;re really just one of the boys But Leon Garber wouldn&039;t have drea that, with anyone, and least of all withto be there

"Reacher here," I said

There was a long pause

"I thought you were in Panaot orders," I said

"From Panama to Fort Bird? Why?"

"Not my place to ask"

"When was this?"

"Two days ago"

"That&039;s a kick in the teeth," he said "Isn&039;t it?"

"Is it?"

" Pana"

"It was OK," I said

"And they got you working duty officer on New Year&039;s Eve already?"

"I volunteered," I said "I&039; to make people like me"

"That&039;s a hopeless task," he said

"A sergeant just brought me coffee"

There was another pause "Someone just call you about a dead soldier in a o," I said "I shuffled it off to headquarters"

"And they shuffled it off to soot pulled out of a party to hear all about it"

"Why?"

"Because the dead soldier in question is a two-star general"

The phone went quiet

"I didn&039;t think to ask," I said

The phone stayed quiet

"Generals are mortal," I said "Same as anyone else"

No reply

"There was nothing suspicious," I said "He croaked, is all Heart attack Probably had gout I didn&039;t see a reason to get excited"

"It&039;s a question of dignity," Garber said "We can&039;t leave a two-star lying around belly-up in public without reacting We need a presence"

"And that would be me?"

"I&039;d prefer so sober MP in the world tonight So yes, it would be you"

"It&039;ll takeanywhere He&039;s dead And they haven&039;t found a sober medical examiner yet"

"OK," I said

"Be respectful," Garber said

"OK," I said again

"And be polite Off-post, we&039;re in their hands It&039;s a civilian jurisdiction"

"I&039;m familiar with civilians I met one, once"

"But control the situation," he said "You know, if it needs controlling"

"He probably died in bed," I said "Like people do"

"Call ood party?"

"Excellent My daughter is visiting"

He clicked off and I called the civilian dispatcher back and got the name and the address of the eant as up and headed back to reens, not woodland-pattern BDUs

I took a Huh the ate I found the motel inside fifty h dark undistinguished North Carolina countryside that was equal parts strip ured were dormant sweet potato fields It was all new to me I had never served there before The roads were very quiet Everyone was still inside, partying I hoped I would be back at Bird before they all cah I really liked the Huainst a civilian ride

The motel was part of a knot of low cohway interchange There was a truck stop as a centerpiece It had a greasy spoon that was open on the holidays and a gas station big enough to take eighteen-wheelers There was a no-nae bar with lots of neon and no s It had an Exotic Dancers sign lit up in pink and a parking lot the size of a football field There were diesel spills and rainbow puddles all over it I could hear loudout of the bar There were cars parked three-deep all around it The whole area was glowing sulfurous yellow fro The as station It was a run-doaybacked affair about twenty roo paint It looked empty There was an office at the left-hand end with a token vehicle porch and a buzzing Coke eneral use a place like this? I was pretty sure there wouldn&039;t have been a DoD inquiry if he had checked into a Holiday Inn

There were tn police cruisers parked at careless angles outside the motel&039;s last-but-one room There was a small plain sedan sandwiched between them It was cold and misted over It was a base-model Ford, red, four cylinder It had skinny tires and plastic hubcaps A rental, for sure I put the Huht-hand police cruiser and slid out into the chill I heard the music frohts were off and its door was open I figured the cops were trying to keep the interior te too ripe I was anxious to take a look at hieneral before

Three cops stayed in their cars and one got out totan uniform pants and a short leather jacket zipped to his chin No hat The jacket had badges pinned to it that told me his naray, about fifty He was ht and a little soft and heavy but the way he was reading the badges on my coat told me he was probably a veteran, like a lot of cops are

"Major," he said, as a greeting

I nodded A veteran, for sure A old-colored oak leaf on the epaulette, one inch across, one on each side This guy was looking upward and sideways at le of view But he knehat they were So he was fanized his voice He was the guy who had called ht

"I&039;m Rick Stockton," he said "Deputy Chief"

He was calm He had seen heart attacks before

"I&039;ht"

He recognized my voice in turn Smiled

"You decided to come out," he said "After all"

"You didn&039;t tell me the DOA was a two-star"

"Well, he is"

"I&039;ve never seen a dead general," I said

"Not many people have," he said, and the way he said it made me think he had been an enlisted man

"Army?" I asked

"Marine Corps," he said "First sergeant"

"My oldto Marines It givesof ue I don&039;t tell them my old man had made captain Enlisted men and officers don&039;t automatically see eye to eye

"Hu at my ride

"You like it?" he asked

I nodded Hu HMMWV, which stands for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, which about says it all Like the aret

"It works as advertised," I said

"Kind of wide," he said "I wouldn&039;t like to drive it in a city"

"You&039;d have tanks in front of you," I said "They&039;d be clearing the way I think that would be the basic plan"

The

"Let&039;s look at the dead guy," I said to him

He led the way inside Flicked a switch that lit up the interior hallway Then another that lit up the whole room I saw a standard motel layout A yard-wide lobby with a closet on the left and a bathroole with a built-in counter the same depth as the closet, and a queen bed the sa Aat the far end, draped, with an integrated heater-cooler unit built through the wall underneath it Most of the things in the room were tired and shabby and colored brown The whole place looked dim and damp and miserable

There was a dead man on the bed

He was naked, facedown He hite,pro athlete Like a coach He still had decent uys do, however fit they are He had pale hairless legs He had old scars He had wiry gray hair buzzed close to his scalp and cracked weathered skin on the back of his neck He was a type Any hundred people could have looked at him and all hundred would have said army officer, for sure

"He was found like this?" I asked

"Yes," Stockton said

Second question: How? A guy takes a rooht, he expects privacy until the , at the very least

"How?" I said

"Hohat?"