I said I’d try. I could feel for ex-Lieutenant Jeremy Beatty. He’d signed up with the air force at twenty-one, became a drone pilot, and the air force became his family. After his discharge and after Laura left, he was alone with little to look forward to. I liked to think I’d helped him see a way through, but looking around here, I saw what vanity that idea was. Maybe it was just a way of covering my guilt at not having seen him much in the last year.
I remembered a night when he’d pulled a Glock 17 out of a drawer and stuck the barrel in his mouth before I could move. And all the middle-of-the-night text messages and alcohol-fogged despondency had worn me down, same as his friends. I tried, but I hadn’t really made any difference. That was more like the truth, or what it felt like, looking at what he’d done here.
Two bedsheets hanging from the ceiling separated his “flight trailer” from his bedroom and bath. In here, the only place left to sit was a worn tan Barcalounger, similar to what drone pilots sat in when Beatty worked in a Creech Air Force Base flight trailer. In front of the Barcalounger was a table with three computer screens. Beneath the table was a stack of white Styrofoam fast-food containers. A chair, a table, three computer screens, and a rat’s ass swamp-cooler air conditioner rattling away.
“This your work station now?”
“This is it.”
“Does it give you the feel you were after?”
He wouldn’t answer that, but he said, “Try out a program while I get the Cokes. A friend modified some software for me. Use the push pedals to fly the drone, but don’t freak out over the targeting. It’s a simulation. It’s chill. Don’t worry. We had to pick places to aim at, and with the GPS settings, these are easiest.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that, but okay.”
I sat down on the Barcalounger and reached for the mouse as Beatty went for the Cokes. A map of the US lit up, and I clicked on DC. Drone flight time to get there registered in the upper-right corner of the screen. So did distance to target. I changed the city to Las Vegas and heard a refrigerator door shut. Distance to Vegas was ninety-two miles. Not a long flight at all. Inside of an hour. Completely doable.
The bedsheets fluttered as Beatty returned and asked, “Where’s the Fourth of July party this year?”
“At Alagara, but you must know that.”
“Oh, yeah, right, the Alagara, I forgot. I like that place. Their fish tacos are killer.”
“The tacos are gone. The guy that started Alagara was going under and sold it. The new owner uses the building for party rentals.”
Beatty handed me a cold can of Diet Coke and took a long drink from his before saying, “Hard to picture Captain Kern celebrating the Fourth inside a building.”
“Two of the kids in the group had trouble with the heat last year, so they’re trying this out. And they got a great price.”
“Your sister probably negotiated that.”
“She did.”
I picked Seattle as my next target while Beatty worked around to telling me about this secret drone strike that Jim allegedly knew about and the air force had hushed up.
“Since you’re hanging around, Grale, I’ll show you some video I shot with the drone in the corner. It’ll be quick, and you can walk out the door anytime you want.”
“Okay, show me, and then tell me about this drone strike no one can talk about.”
“It made national news. It got talked about plenty for about two minutes. It’s the officers who were there who are not supposed to talk.”
I leaned back in the creaky Barcalounger as Beatty slid a flash drive into his laptop. He spun the laptop around and slid it to me. I tapped the arrow and played a three-minute black-and-white video the little drone took from three hundred feet above Wunderland Trailer Park.
The lens zoomed in on two cars sitting around the backside of the pink laundry building, a man in one car, a woman in the other. They might have been unmarked police vehicles, but it was hard to tell. The woman got into the passenger seat of the man’s car and was there a couple of minutes before she got out and drove away. There wasn’t enough there to draw any conclusions.
“I can’t tell who they are,” I said. “Maybe they were there to repair the slot machines in the laundry.”
“Those got fixed. I won twenty bucks yesterday.”
“Show me more video. Show me time stamps. Show me the same people on different days.”
“You got it.”
I watched two more, and Beatty looked expectant, but I couldn’t draw any conclusions.
After a silence, Beatty said, “I met this therapist in a bar last year. We were drinking and talking for a couple of hours. She told me the only way to get rid of things is to talk about them. If the air force wants to come down on me, they can, but I’m through being quiet. Do you remember a twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher from New York named Hakim Salter, who was killed in one of our drone strikes in Pakistan in 2013? He made it into the news, but as a bad guy.”
“Sure, I remember.”
I also remembered talking with other agents about it. The official version made you wonder what had really happened.