Page 39 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

beginning of the rainy season my paperwork session at home was
interrupted by an urgent call from the radio room at the embassy.
The Marine on duty, himself barely older than a teen-ager, broke
protocol by using my name instead of the code each of us was
assigned.
“Mr. Tate! Come in, please! This is Walrus!”
The crackling southern nasal twang jolted me out of my status
report. It was almost impossible to control the volume on those
military-surplus field radios.
“Raccoon here. Try not to breach security. What’s up?”
“Local police, sir. Just came by this location. They’ve got a dead
girl in the road. Looks like a traffic accident or something. She’s an
American. They gave me her name—you want me to say it on the
air?”
I put down my pen and mopped my forehead with a wrinkled
handkerchief. The humidity was still high, although the rain had
cooled things down a little. “All right. Go ahead. Did she have a code
name?”
“No. It’s a Peace Corps girl, Sally Furth.”
The name was vaguely familiar. Corps de la Paix de Jolibana, as it
called itself to avoid identification with the oft-despised American
government, had dozens of volunteers squirreled away in remote
corners of the country. But I had a list of every American in Jolibana,
and how to get to them in the event of a politically-necessitated mass
evacuation of our citizens. I found her on the PCV list, posted to
Falidougou itself. This meant she was working on a project involving
some high-status members of the ruling ethnic group, since they had
no desire to take a post far from the capital.
“Okay,” I wearily responded. “Where do I have to go?”
“They want you to go to um—Cobra’s location. Their liaison will
meet you there.”
Liaison? I thought. What the heck was that? But I really had no
experience with the Jolibanan police, a subset of the Jolibanan
military. In these cases one had to follow local law and custom as far
as possible, particularly if it involved a fatality. “Walrus, I’m on my
way. Contact Wolfhound”—the American medical officer—“and put
her in the picture. Call it a medivac for now. No point in waking up

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