Mr. Downey looked at Eloise and smiled disarmingly. “Eloise?”

Eloise almost rose from her chair, but directed an indicating finger toward the Hispanic lady.

“She’s waiting for her husband,” said Pamela. “You can go first.”

The chair in front of Mr. Downey’s desk was far more comfortable.

“So,” said Mr. Downey, slipping behind his desk like a cool dude slipping into a sports car, “Pam tells me you’re quite the magician.”

Nice opening.“I’m glad she thinks so.”

“And she tells me you can’t get a driver’s license.”

Okay, she was up to the edge of another cliff. He looked legit enough. He had a nice car parked outside, and Pamela’s car smelled new and had one of those talking GPS things in it. He had degrees hanging on the wall and a tennis racket propped in the corner. No family pictures. She took one step. “No.”

He smiled and nodded as if he understood everything already. “Well, I’m a bit of a magician myself. I make problems like yours disappear.” He smiled and raised his eyebrows at her.

She didn’t get it. “How’s that exactly?”

He leaned back in his chair and touched his fingertips together like the old spider doing push-ups on a mirror. “I do estate planning mostly, but on the side I do pro bono work with documents because I see a real need there. This country is one huge bureaucracy, and decent people like yourself can’t make a living or live a normal life without the right paperwork. You want to make a decent, honest living, don’t you?”

It sure would be nice if this guy was legit. “I sure do.”

“And you’d like to be able to buy and drive a car?”

“Right on.”

“So. Why can’t you get a driver’s license?”

She hesitated.

“Let me guess. You can’t establish your identity. You don’t have an acceptable ID, you don’t have a Social Security number, you can’t find your birth certificate, you can’t even prove you’re a citizen who belongs in this country.”

She shied a bit but finally admitted, “That’s about it.”

“So how do you manage to make a living?”

“I’m an independent contractor, but—”

“But one of these days the tax man’s going to come calling and he’s going to ask why you haven’t filed.”

She nodded. “Render unto Caesar, you know?”

“I would if I were you.” He took a pen from his shirt pocket and started scribbling on a legal pad. “Okay. The first thing you need is a birth certificate. It looks to me like you were born, am I right?”

Well, that much was certain. “Uh-huh.”

“So that’s not so hard to figure out. It’s just that some people need a piece of paper or they don’t believe it. What’s your full name?”

“Uh … Eloise Kramer.”

“Do you have a middle name?”

“Uh … Elizabeth.”

He recited it as he wrote it down. “Parents’ names?”

Wow. Some of this she hadn’t figured out yet. “Uh … Arthur and Eloise. Kramer.” Close enough to the truth.

“Where were you born?”

“I … I don’t remember the name of the hospital …” Actually, the hospital where she was born wasn’t there anymore.

“Kootenai Medical Center, I imagine.”

“Uh, Spokane CountyMedical Center.” In a way, Eloise was born there.

“Date of birth?”

“January fifteenth, 1991.”

“That makes you nineteen. That might be a little young, but we’ll see.”

“There … there might be a problem.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“If you check into all this I might not be in the system.”

“Oh, don’t worry, you will be.” He winked at her.

This little cliff was growing. Her conscience was making her insides ache. “Well, I’m trying to say—”

“You don’t have to.”

“Are you—you’re not, you know, are you … is all this legit? I mean, we’re not doing something wrong, are we?”

He was unruffled. “That’s a fair question and here’s the honest truth: our government is one big inefficient mess, full of red tape, redundancy, and contradiction. Call one office, they’ll tell you one thing, call another office with the same question and you’ll get a completely different answer. I’ve made it my job to comb through the maze and learn where to get the right answers from the right people in the right order so we can get what we need while still using the system, and in an acceptable amount of time.

“It might be a revelation to you, but our government doesn’t care if you’re here illegally. That’s just paper, politics, and PR. All they care about is whether you’re their kind of people, and me, I don’t care at all. I just want you to be able to make a living and contribute to this country because I think it’s a great country.

“So yes, I’m a little slippery. I have to be clever and a little deceptive, but I make the machine work for you, and incidentally, it’s pro bono. That means I do it for free because it makes me feel good.”

Then he gave her a moment to think about it.

She sighed. She even got a little teary-eyed. It was funny how right and wrong could get so messed up for a person who was crazy, especially when doing the “right” thing would mean starving or landing in jail or the nuthouse. She sure wished she knew what God was thinking because she didn’t have a clue.

“Want to keep going?” he asked.

Her insides still ached a little, but she nodded.

“Okay then. You’re going to need some other documents besides your birth certificate. Social Security card for one, that’s a biggie. And photo ID: U.S. passport and … we might try for a military ID.” He tapped a button on his phone. “Pam? Let’s do a photo shoot, passport and military.”

Click! Click! She stood in front of a blue background looking as groomed as she and Pamela could make her.

Click! Click! She stood in front of a white background wearing a camouflage shirt and with her hair pinned back.

“That’ll do it,” said Pam.

chapter

18

Corporal James Dose was a good soldier, so even though getting shot through the shoulder in a restaurant in Bremerton, Washington, had to be the most unlikely of events, he didn’t ask a lot of questions.

He marveled at how a team of paramedics just happened to be dining in the restaurant at the time of the shooting and had all their emergency medical gear in their cars parked right outside, but he just said thanks, not, What are you guys doing here?

He felt rather important when a tight-lipped trio of army brass met him the moment he was wheeled into the hospital and, in terse, secretive phrases, advised him it was a matter of national security and therefore he couldn’t discuss it with anyone, so he just said Understood, and not, Who in the heck shot me?

He was miffed that his family, particularly his fiancée, was barred from seeing him even when he was out of danger until a colonel let him know, off the record and under wraps, that he might have been shot by a terrorist cell group connected with the Taliban in Afghanistan, now operating in the vicinity of the naval shipyards and trying to send a message. Obviously such information couldn’t get out, as it would hamper containment efforts, risk lives, and, who could say for sure, even endanger his loved ones. He made no objections after that.

He even got out of bed in the middle of the night so army medics could load him into an ambulance and whisk him away for a secret debriefing in an undisclosed location. He didn’t ask if they would be bringing him back to the hospital in Bremerton or his company at Fort Lewis afterward, and they didn’t tell him.

They didn’t tell his family either.

And they never brought him back.

The team that conducted the crime scene investigation at the Quay were tight-lipped but pleasantly efficient. They were so thorough in gathering up anything bloodied, spilled, or broken that, after they left, one could never guess there’d been a shooting. As for the bullet that everyone thought had passed through James Dose—the exit wound was quite dramatic, to say the least—there was no bullet hole in the walls or woodwork, none in the furniture, simply no sign of a bullet anywhere. The official word from the hospital cleared that up: the bullet was lodged in the shoulder of the victim and was successfully removed in surgery. The victim would recover.