The Killing Machine by Ed Gorman Page A

the eight typedpages. There was nothing remarkable about any of them as far as occupations went. The international arms cartel is made up of freelancers working for countries they won’t name, men who work for a handful of foreign embassies in New York and Washington, and even for senators who are secretly working for one branch of service or the other. The competition between the Army and the Marines, for example, is almost equal to that between fighting countries. Senator Caine was a West Point graduate; there was no doubt about his sympathies. The rest of the information Wickham had given me was just as interesting and just as useless. At least on the surface.
    You have to wonder about people who deal in arms, wonder if they’ve ever been in a war, ever seen what guns do to people. Big guns, small guns, it doesn’t matter. There were battles on both sides where the dead had been piled up like cordwood. You never smelled anything like it before. Or saw anything like it, either, after the crows had bloodied their beaks with the eyes of the dead men.
    Countries always claimed to detest war. If one somehow got started, they claimed it wasn’t them who started it, it was that other country. And if they took the blame for starting it, why, they only did so because, they claimed, the other country would have invaded them anyhow at some point in the future.
    Even the countries that claimed neutrality were rarely neutral. They made dirty secret money on wars, either banking millions for tyrants who planned to flee if the war went badly, or being middlemen for the arms merchants.
    Jane came in just before six o’clock.
    She’d been laying out pills on my nightstand. Shedidn’t look up. In the lamplight her features were soft and sentimental, like one of those idealized sweet women on magazine covers.
    â€œI should’ve said something. About David and me.”
    â€œYeah. I guess you should’ve.”
    â€œI just didn’t know how to bring it up. Given—your relationship with him.”
    When our glances met, she said, “Marshal Wickham told me that they went through his things and found that he was married.”
    So she hadn’t known.
    â€œI don’t like to think of myself that way.” Then: “As an adulteress.”
    The word sounded pretty severe on her tongue.
    â€œYou weren’t an adulteress. You didn’t know he was married.”
    She was near enough to touch my good shoulder. “I appreciate you saying that. But it still makes me feel dirty. He had a wife waiting for him.”
    â€œNot much of a wife, from what he said.”
    We went through the process of her changing my sheets again. “Your temperature’s back to where it should be. The pills took care of the infection.”
    â€œI feel better. Not great. But better.”
    â€œWe’re going to try you in a wheelchair. This company wants to sell us two of them so they gave us one to try out.”
    When we finished with the sheets, I lay back. She stood next to my bed and washed my face and hands with a damp cloth.
    â€œHe talked about you sometimes.”
    My laugh was as harsh as my words had been. “I can imagine.”
    â€œHe cared about you, actually.”
    For the first time—probably because I was getting stronger and more aware of things—I detected a faint British accent in her voice.
    â€œHow long have you been in the States?”
    She smiled. “The accent? I came here when I was seven. I’ve still got traces of it. Now let’s deal with the pills. You’ve got eight of them this morning.”
    We didn’t talk while she set one pill after another on my tongue. One of them gagged me and I had to sit up abruptly. All the pain came back. So did an instant headache.
    I lay back. She put a cool, damp cloth on my head. “I imagine that hurt.”
    I closed my eyes, rested a moment. “You know who killed him?”
    â€œNo.