Read Online The Affair by Lee Child - Free Book Online Page B

coffee, which I thought was generous, so I left the tip, which made the waitress smile again. We stepped out to the sidewalk together and stood for a moment next to the old Caprice. The moon had gotten brighter. A thin layer of high cloud had moved away. There were stars out.
    I said, “Can I ask you another question?”
    Deveraux was immediately guarded. She said, “About what?”
    “Hair,” I said. “Ours is supposed to conform to the shape of our heads. Tapered, they call it. Curving inward to a natural termination point at the base of the neck. What about yours?”
    “I wore a buzz cut for fifteen years,” she said. “I started growing it out when I knew I was going to quit.”
    I looked at her in the moonlight and the spill from the diner window. I pictured her with a buzz cut. She must have looked sensational. I said, “Good to know. Thanks.”
    She said, “I had no chance, right from the beginning. The regulation for women in the Corps required what they called a non-eccentric style. Your hair could touch your collar, but it couldn’t fall below the bottom edge. You were allowed to pin it up, but then I couldn’t get my hat on.”
    “Sacrifices,” I said.
    “It was worth it,” she said. “I loved being a Marine.”
    “You still are,” I said. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
    “Is that what your daddy said?”
    “He never got the chance. He died in harness.”
    She asked, “Is your mom still alive?”
    “She died a few years later.”
    “Mine died when I was in boot camp. Cancer.”
    “Really? Mine too. Cancer, I mean. Not boot camp.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Not your fault,” I said, automatically. “She was in Paris.”
    “So was I. Parris Island, anyway. Did she emigrate?”
    “She was French.”
    “Do you speak French?”
    I said, “Un peu, mais doucement.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “A little, and slowly.”
    She nodded and put her hand on the Caprice’s door. I took the hint and said, “OK, goodnight, Chief Deveraux. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
    She just smiled.
    I turned left and walked down toward the hotel. I heard the big Chevy motor start up, and I heard the tires start to roll, and then the car passed me, going slow, and then it pulled a wide U-turn across the width of the street and stopped again, just ahead of me, facing me, at the curb right next to the Toussaint’s hotel. I walked on and got there just as Deveraux opened her door and got out again. Naturally I assumed she had something more to say to me, so I stopped walking and waited politely.
    “I live here,” she said. “Goodnight.”
    She had already gone upstairs before I got into the lobby. The old guy I had seen in the diner was behind the reception counter. He was open for business. I could tell he was disconcerted by my lack of luggage, but cash money is cash money, and he took eighteen dollars of mine and in return he gave me the key to room twenty-one. He told me it was on the second floor, at the front of the building, overlooking the street, which he said was quieter than the back, which made no sense at all until I remembered the railroad track.
    On the second floor the staircase came up in the center of a long north–south corridor, which was uncarpeted and dimly lit by four mean and ungenerous bulbs. It had eight doors off the back side and nine off the street side. There was a slim bar of brighter yellow light showing through the crack under room seventeen’s door, which was on the street side. Deveraux, presumably, getting ready for bed. My room was four doors further north. I unlocked it and went in and turned on the light and found the kind of still air and dusty chill that indicates long disuse. It was a rectangular space with a high ceiling and what would have been pleasant proportions, except that at some point in the last decade an attached bathroom had been shoehorned into one corner. The window was a pair of glazed doors that gave out on the iron balcony I had seen from