“They in the military?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No.”
So no jurisdiction for me, thought Puller. Other than as a concerned citizen.
He said, “They won’t stop. I just made them a lot madder, in fact. They might take it out on you.”
She grabbed her brother’s hand and they both ran off through the door. Puller could hear their footsteps for a few seconds and then they were gone.
He did a quick check of the three guys. All breathing. All pulses strong. He didn’t care if bones were broken or skulls fractured. That was the price one paid for being pieces of shit that preyed on others. Especially three grown men against a girl and her five-year-old brother.
When White moaned and moved a bit, Puller kicked him in the head, sending him back to sleep.
“Prick.”
He debated whether to call the cops or not, but without the girl’s statement he’d have nothing except his own account. And if she didn’t back him up, which she wouldn’t, Puller might be looking at being charged with assault, the lies of the three men stacked against him.
He decided just to keep on going. He’d have to deal with the fallout later. He went back to his room, grabbed his bag, and walked out to retrieve his car.
He still had a recon to do. He was here to find out what had happened to his aunt. Nothing was going to detour him from that.
He could not have been more wrong.
CHAPTER 21
As Puller walked out of the building another man was walking in. When they crossed paths Puller did something he almost never had to do to when meeting another person.
He looked up.
It was the same guy from the back of the truck he’d seen earlier while eating lunch on the waterfront.
Up close the man looked even larger and more intimidating. Puller had never before seen a more perfectly proportioned physique. He could have been a poster boy for a superhero recruiting ad. As the two men went by each other, they both did the up-down, side-side checkout of the other. Practiced, smooth, looking for things that would not be obvious to the uninformed, meaning just about every other person on the planet.
Puller came away impressed not just with the other man’s physique but also with the preciseness of the observation of those intense eyes. It was obvious to Puller that the man recognized him from earlier in the day, even though it had only been a seconds-long glance. You had to be trained to achieve that sort of recognition skill.
Puller again ran his eye up and down the man. He wore a landscaping company uniform. Dark green T-shirt soaked in sweat and dark blue pants. New-looking work shoes that must have been a size sixteen.
So the guy either had gotten a new pair of shoes, which seemed unlikely, or he had just started this job. The shirt was stretched too tight across his torso. Every muscle was revealed through the flimsy fabric. He looked like the musculature chart one saw in a doctor’s office.
They probably didn’t have a shirt to fit him, reasoned Puller. The pants too were a little short. Most companies didn’t keep in stock uniforms to fit gents who topped six and a half feet in height. As they passed by one another Puller instinctively looked back; he wasn’t completely surprised when he found the other man doing the very same thing. The look was not threatening, just watchful, curious, appraising.
Puller walked to the garage, retrieved his car, and drove off.
He took Paradise grid by grid, memorizing as many details as he could. He finally pulled into a parking lot, shut the car off, sat back, and wondered about the contents of his aunt’s letter.
People not being what they seemed.
Mysterious happenings in the night.
Something just not being right.
As he drove he broke things down logically, something the military had spent years drilling into him. It was now how he approached everything in life, even the things to which logic didn’t necessarily pertain.
Like families.
Emotions.
Relationships.
Applying logic to any of them was a recipe for a lifetime of heartache.
Pretty much the story of his life.
He thought about the first of his aunt’s observations:
People not being what they seemed.
He looked out toward the water. The tide was coming in. Had it brought the body or bodies along with it?
He couldn’t imag
ine that two bodies had been dumped on the beach and were just now being found. You didn’t dump bodies in public places in broad daylight. It was now nearing seven in the evening. He looked out toward the water again.
Tide. Had to be. He doubted the corpses were in very good shape. Prolonged time in the water did awful things to bodies.
He glanced over at the couple again. The woman was weeping, leaning in against the shoulder of the man, while Landry stood awkwardly next to them, her official notebook dangling in one hand.