An easygoing type. He might not be her idea of a Kevin, but that’s what he was. She said, “Kevin, how long have you been a G-man?”

See if she could find out how old he was.

“I finished my training this past summer. Before that I was in the service.”

“Where’re you from?” Honey said. “I hear someplace faintly down-home the way you speak.”

“I didn’t think I had an accent.”

She said, “It isn’t East Texas, but around there.”

He told her Tulsa, Oklahoma. He went to school there, the University of Tulsa, graduated midyear right after Pearl and joined the cavalry.

Making him no more than twenty-five, Honey at least five years older than this good-looking boy from Oklahoma. She said, “The cavalry?”

“I went to language school to learn Japanese, then spent the next year with the First Cavalry Division in Louisiana, Australia, and New Guinea, training for jungle combat, the kind they had on Guadalcanal. I made second lieutenant and was assigned to the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, the one J. E. B. Stuart commanded before the Civil War. He was always a hero of mine, the reason I joined the First Cav, not knowing we’d be dismounted in the Pacific theater. You know the Stuart I’m talking about?”

“You told me, Jeb Stuart.”

“Shot through the lungs at Yellow Tavern, the war almost over. Do you have a hero?”

“Jane Austen,” Honey said. “Where were you in the Pacific with the cavalry?”

“Los Negros in the Admiralties, two hundred miles north of New Guinea, two degrees south of the equator. Destroyers dropped us off and we went ashore twenty-nine February of this year, to draw fire and locate enemy positions. I was with a recon unit so we were the first wave. We wanted an airstrip on Momote plantation, thirteen hundred yards from the beach, sitting in there among rows and rows of palm trees, coconuts all over the ground.”