“Thank you, ma’am. I won’t keep him more than half an hour.”
“All right…”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Taylor hung up.
Brodie said, “You told two lies. We’re not from Fort Dix, and we’ll keep him as long as we need to.” He added, “Also, you forgot to mention me.”
“Women are perceived as nonthreatening.”
“You threatened to bust into his place of employment.”
“Simpson is a voluntary witness, but he could decide to stop talking at any time.”
“His personnel file shows he served honorably.”
“And now he’s a civilian.”
“Old soldiers never die, and they do the right thing when the Army calls.”
“We’ll see.”
They rode in silence for a while. Brodie had learned early that Taylor wasn’t the sort for idle conversation, which was fine by him. She took out her tablet and started reading through articles about Venezuela that she had bookmarked. At some point she put on a playlist from her smartphone. An old fiddle scratched out an up-tempo folk tune as a man sang in a distant, high-pitched wail. Something about farm hogs and a deal with the devil.
“I discovered this on vinyl while cleaning out my grandpa’s basement,” said Taylor. “Some of these recordings date back to the Twenties.”
Throughout his military career, Brodie had met his share of hillbillies and country kids who had risen far above their station. The Army was good for that. But never had he met anyone like Maggie Taylor. She’d grown up in the hill country of eastern Tennessee, raised by her grandmother after her mother discovered her father with another woman and took care of them both with a double-barreled shotgun.
“Didn’t even need to reload,” Taylor had boasted during a disturbingly dispassionate recounting at the O Club after not nearly enough drinks. Either Taylor had buried it deep, or she was crazy. Probably both.
Mama went to prison, but Grandma taught her well, kept her away from the drunks and the crooks. Taylor had nurtured her natural intellect into a full ride at Georgetown, where she gained fluency in Arabic and became an Army Civil Affairs Specialist. She, like Brodie, had turned down Officer Candidate School. It was unusual for college grads to reject OCS, but Taylor, like Brodie, did not want the responsibilities or the privileges of commissioned officers; they both wanted to serve in the enlisted ranks, and to work their way up the promotion ladder. They were both promoted to Sergeant E-5, a three-striper, in their respective tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now as CID investigators, they were both Warrant Officers. This hybrid rank apparently suited Taylor as much as it suited Brodie:decent pay and a few privileges with none of the stress or command expectations of a commissioned officer. But, as Brodie had quickly learned, there were other stresses on this job.
Taylor had spent two years crisscrossing the tribal lands of Afghanistan in armored convoys, assessing construction projects, negotiating with village elders, and hoping the smiling warlords treating her to tea and kebabs didn’t sell her out to the Taliban up the road.
One time, they did. Her convoy got hit by IEDs, followed by an ambush. Her unit fought their way out, and Sergeant Taylor tended to some wounded along the way, all with a leg full of shrapnel. Half of her unit didn’t make it. She was awarded the Silver Star for her valor, and the Purple Heart for her bad luck, though Brodie only knew about that because someone else told him. Unlike her mother’s hillbilly justice, this was not a subject Maggie Taylor cared much to talk about.
The fiddler picked up the pace. The farmer, it seemed, had traded his wife’s soul to the devil in exchange for more hogs, which sounded like a bad deal regardless of what the man thought of his wife.
Brodie was sure this music sounded better while winding through the foothills of the Smoky Mountains than driving along the New Jersey Turnpike. Actually, this music was made for drinking corn likker.
“What do you think?” asked Taylor.
“He should have held out for more hogs.”
“The case, Brodie.”
Brodie thought on that. They were flying blind if Simpson didn’t give them more information. Shoe-leather detective work was fine in some places. But Caracas was probably not one of them.
Brodie hadn’t worked a case in South America in years, but he knew that the current situation in Venezuela was bad. While Venezuela was technically a democracy, the current President, Nicolás Maduro, had been taking increasingly authoritarian measures to marginalize political opponents and crack down on civil unrest. He had royally screwed up his nation’s economy, following in the fine tradition of his predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chávez, but Maduro lacked both Chávez’ intellect and his charisma. Most crucially, the price of oil had plummeted soon after Maduro took over, and oil production was the entire basis of Venezuela’s shaky economy.The state treasury emptied, putting an end to government goodies and exposing Chávez’ socialist revolution for the house of cards it was. Inflation skyrocketed, basic goods became scarce, and people were starving. In 2017 the Venezuelan people had taken to the streets demanding greater political freedom, but the movement was violently suppressed, and the opposition fractured.
These days, instead of demanding freedom, people were just trying to scrounge for bread and toilet paper. Despite all this, Maduro had recently won a second term in a highly suspect election with record low voter turnout in which he had either jailed or banned from the ballot all viable opposition candidates. The scary thing was that millions of people actually had voted for more of the same shit from this incompetent, autocratic asshole.
“What thrives in chaos?” asked Brodie.
“Crime,” replied Taylor. “Criminals and fugitives.”
“Is that why Mercer went to Venezuela?”
“That could be one reason. But not a good one.”
