Page 130 of Head Room
To be in front, I would have had to push Mike out of my way — did I mention he used to play for the Chicago Bears?— fight thick brush, or clamber over Tom’s truck, so I remained the caboose of this two-person train.
We passed Tom’s truck, then saw it was behind another, this one smaller and nosed into the brush on the right side, with a camouflage tarp over its roof and bed.
Mike looked over his shoulder at me as I took out my phone to take a picture of the license plate.
He stopped even with the front of that truck, still with me behind him.Not much above a conversational tone, he said, “Tom?”
“It’s okay, Mike.Keep coming.”
When Mike stopped a second time after about fifteen feet, I stepped around him and saw Tom, at his ease.
That let naggy phrases likeunder duressornot of his own free willslide away.
Those phrases hadn’t seriously disrupted my consciousness because of how he’d sounded on the phone.More like gnats flitting around the edges.Small, but annoying.
Gone now.
He was relaxed, sitting with another man in a compact campsite.
Sergeant Frank Jardos wasn’t dead.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I wasn’t shocked.
Tom’s behavior had narrowed my guesses to Jardos or, possibly, Nance.
I easily recognized Frank Jardos from photos that ran with Nola’s reports, despite several days’ growth blunting his gray buzz cut.
My first thought was that this man being alive left another man dead, wearing similar boots, burned in a fire, with a bullet hole in his skull.
My second thought was that if I’d known from the start that Jardos wasn’t dead, I could have spared myself talking to Hiram Poppinger.
Okay, okay, I still would have had to talk to Poppinger to get background on the owner of the cabin where a dead man was found.An owner who then disappeared.
Although I wouldn’t have felt as beholden to the grump.
Those thoughts dispatched, I was free to focus on the man and the setup.
A tent that resembled a camouflage igloo, a camouflage camp chair, a camouflage tarp strung high in front of the tent, another camouflage tarp over a low rectangular pile.Pretty much camouflage everything that wasn’t natural.
Under the bigger tarp and positioned well for the chair and tent a ring of rocks sheltered a fire, with stones encircling the rocks, as a fire break.
The rocks and stones appeared settled into place, reflecting the camp’s air of permanence I doubted came from the few days Jardos had been here.
The topography meant a small fire would be mostly masked, with even the smoke blending into the leafed-out trees.
Jardos sat in the camp chair.And yes, he wore camouflage fatigues, well-worn.
Tom rose from his seat on a stump and gestured for me to take it.Considering no other seats were in sight, that was gallant.
“Frank, this is Elizabeth Margaret Danniher and Mike Paycik.”
The man looked up, alert.“The football player?”
“Yeah,” Tom said.“Elizabeth, Mike, this is Sergeant Frank Jardos.”
It can be hard to judge height when someone’s sitting, but I guessed the man wasn’t a lot taller than me with a solid torso and legs.The bottom two-thirds of his face was square, almost ordinary if you weren’t paying much attention.
