The Drifter (11 page)

Midden, the man in the black chore coat, shook his head.
“We’re keeping a low profile, remember? We don’t want some local boy to see the light out in the woods and wonder who we are.”

The van driver took the last pull from a pint bottle of tequila, then threw the bottle on the fire, where it shattered and flared briefly as the alcohol burned. “Shit, nobody’s lookin’ for us, Mid. We’re fuckin’ ghosts, man. We’re gonna change fuckin’ history, show those fuckin’ bankers that the
people
run this country. C’mon, put on another log. It’s the last run. Might as well party, right?”

Midden looked at his watch. He was tired. And tired of this. “Sure,” he said. Then reached inside his black canvas chore coat, pulled out a target pistol, and shot the van driver twice in the chest.

The van driver fell off his stump, two dark red spots barely showing through his camouflage jacket.

He made a gurgling sound and turned his head from side to side. His hands wandered across the fallen leaves, reaching for something that wasn’t there.

Midden stood over him, pistol at his side. He wanted to tell the man to hold still, but it didn’t seem right to ask.

Then the van driver looked right up at him, eyes trying to focus. Aware or unaware that he was dying. Midden shot him once in the forehead. He stared down at the other man for a moment, watching as the light went out of him. He wondered what it was like.

Then went to get the new shovel from the back of the old Ford.

He’d burn the truck long after midnight, when the flames were least likely to be seen. The plume of black smoke would dissipate before dawn.

He’d be sorry to see the old Ford go. It had carried him many miles without complaint. But it had been seen by too many people. It had to
burn.

A
tapping sound, and Peter was fully awake in his sleeping bag, hand reaching for the new .45 Lewis had sold him. It was just starting to get light out.

“Peter?” Dinah’s voice, quiet and almost in his ear. As if he’d dreamed it.

He looked up and saw her framed like a shadow in the broken driver’s-side window. “Everything okay?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Listen, I’m working extra shifts, so I’m sleeping at the hospital tonight. The boys will spend the night at my grandmother’s. This is my work number.”

She laid a scrap of paper on the dashboard. If she saw the bruise on his face or the beer bottles, she didn’t mention them. Then she was gone.

He looked up through the windshield as the brightening sky illuminated the bare branches of the street trees. It was colder than before. It was the first day he could really taste winter in the air.

One thing about living outside, you really develop a relationship with the weather.

If he was in the mountains, up above the tree line, he’d climb out of his bag in his wool socks and his fleece and shiver while he
made coffee and watched the sunlight rise up the valley walls, seeing their color shift from black to purple to blue to green. Then he’d load his pack and lace up his boots and set out on the trail again. The movement would warm him for the rest of the day, while the snowcapped peaks kept him company in silent perfection.

When you woke on a clifftop in a granite cathedral, it was easy to think you’d chosen that life on purpose.

But when you woke in your perforated truck on a city street as autumn slid downhill toward winter, things weren’t always so clear. You tended to wonder, for example, what the fuck you were going to do with the rest of your life.

When you had a mission, Peter told himself, nothing else mattered.

He pictured Dinah in that old house, waking before first light. Before he could stop himself, he was picturing what she wore to bed.

He tried to shut it down, she was Jimmy’s wife, but she was already there in his imagination, wearing an old T-shirt, shrunk slightly from the wash, and soft and thin from years of wear. Perhaps turning translucent in places. And smelling slightly of soap.

Eight years in the Marines and another in the mountains made the smell of soap one of the sexiest things Peter could imagine.

He told himself that Jimmy was like his brother. Which made Dinah like Peter’s sister. That made it easier to put her out of his mind. But it had been a very long time since he’d spent this much time with an actual woman.

The dog whined in the back. His face hurt where Oklahoma Ray had kicked him. He sat up and checked it in the rearview. The top of his cheek was swollen and had turned purple, with a little green around the edges. Nothing broken. The ice pack lay melted
on the floor mat, and the truck smelled like stale beer. Not frozen beer, not yet. It was only November.

Would he still be sleeping in the truck when it snowed?

It was the kind of thing that might limit a guy’s female relationships.

He wondered again how long he would live like this. Or if he even minded.

—

Peter got himself dressed, which wasn’t easy in the cab of a pickup truck, then let Mingus out, amazed again at the dog’s evolving stench. The pepper spray added a certain eye-watering richness, like snorting habañero sauce deep into your sinuses. He had to do something about that. But washing the dog was further down the list.

Finding the scarred man was at the top.

If he was the one who’d sent the shooter, he’d know by now that things had not gone as planned. Peter figured he’d give the scarred man another shot at it.

And use himself as bait.

But first, breakfast. He unfolded his chair on the parking strip, started the little backpacking stove, and filled his battered tin percolator. Coffee before work, whenever possible.

Halfway through his first cup, twelve-year-old Charlie and eight-year-old Miles came out the front door. They stomped around on the new porch deck for a few minutes, testing its strength against their school shoes. Then they saw the dog roaming off the leash, without the stick tied up in its mouth.

The dog grinned at them, tongue lolling to one side through the murderous gate of its teeth.

“Dang! What are you doin’?” Charlie pushed his little brother
back inside the house. Then came out with his baseball bat held at the ready, like an impossibly skinny Barry Bonds, and called out to Peter from the top of the steps. “You set that dog loose? What are you, some kinda crazy?”

“Probably,” said Peter. “Charlie, who are you named for?”

The boy straightened up. “Charlie Parker, alto sax.”

“And your brother?”

“Miles Davis. Trumpet.”

Peter nodded. “Well, yesterday I found out this dog’s name is Charles Mingus. Named after a bass player. Turns out he’s your father’s dog. Come on down, you can give him something to eat. Make friends.”

“No dang way.” Charlie caught himself. “I mean no, sir. I’ll stay right here.”

“How are you going to get your little brother to school?”

Charlie considered for a minute. He still stood on the porch steps. “Go out the back, sir, and run like heck through the alley.”

“You think I’d let that dog hurt you?” Peter took the coffeepot off the stove and put on the big frying pan, set some butter to melt.

“No offense, sir, but you’re still sitting down and that dog’s got four-wheel drive. And he looks real hungry.”

“He is hungry,” said Peter, assembling supplies from his cooler and laying them out in the pan. “I haven’t fed him anything yet. What about you? You hungry?”

“I already had my cereal this morning, sir.”

The bread sizzled in the hot butter. The dog sniffed the air and came over. Peter pushed the dog away. “You mean you don’t want a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich? Nice and hot? I might have a few doughnuts in the cooler, too.”

Charlie crept down the steps, bat held at the ready. “Sir, you are a mean bastard, sir.”

Peter grinned. “Courage, Charlie.” He flipped the sandwiches. “Courage is doing something that scares the hell out of you. But you do it anyway. Your dad taught me that.”

Mingus stuck his nose in the pan. When Peter whacked it with the spatula, Charlie’s eyes got even wider, if that was possible. The dog backed away, focused on the pan, just the tip of his tongue showing now, and the white serration of his teeth. A string of drool hung from one jowl.

Charlie choked up on the bat so he could hold it with one hand, and tiptoed closer. Mingus ignored him, his gaze locked on the food. Then Charlie glanced at Peter’s face and saw the bruise.

“Sir? What happened to you?”

“A misunderstanding,” said Peter. “Don’t worry about it.”

He wanted to say that the other two guys went to the hospital. But that probably wasn’t the right message to send to the boy.

Instead he laid out the four sandwiches on the wide cedar plank he used as a cutting board, and chopped each sandwich into quarters. Charlie stood with the chair and stove between him and the dog, still poised to flee. Peter handed him a section of sandwich. Mingus’s massive head turned as if on a swivel, following the sandwich. The string of drool hung longer.

“Hold it on the palm of your hand,” said Peter. “Like this.”

He held another section on his own hand, fingers fully open and outstretched. Mingus took it with surprising delicacy, like a little old lady nibbling a cucumber sandwich, except for the slick of saliva left behind. Mingus licked his chops, the white teeth flashing, then went over to Charlie and nosed his elbow as if to say, “You gonna eat that?”

Charlie blinked at high speed, and a slight but rapid vibration ran through his entire body. But he lowered his hand, fingers carefully spread.

Mingus took the food with just the tips of his teeth and wolfed it down without seeming to chew. Then sniffed the hand thoroughly and licked the remaining butter off with several swipes of his huge tongue.

Charlie smiled so wide Peter thought his face would split. “Can I do it again?”

“Sure,” said Peter. “But get your brother first, so he can meet Mingus, too.” Peter busied himself making more sandwiches, wishing with everything he had that Big Jimmy was there to see his boys growing up.

In the end, he wrapped up a hot sandwich and a pair of doughnuts in a paper towel for each boy to eat on the way to school.

“Sir,” said Charlie, “Mingus really smells bad.”

“I know,” said Peter. “It’s on my list.”

—

He drove back to the lumberyard, keeping one eye on his rearview, and bought new steel entry doors and locks for Dinah’s house. The work would take him a good chunk of the day, and he’d be outside where anyone could see him.

Anyone at all.

Peter wasn’t quite sure what to think of the scarred man. The confident swagger was real enough, but he didn’t set off Peter’s radar like Lewis did, or Nino, or Oklahoma Ray. Still, Peter didn’t fool himself into thinking the scarred man wasn’t dangerous.

He set up his tools in Dinah’s narrow side yard. The nearby houses protected his flank, and the tall wooden fence at the alley shielded him somewhat from the rear. If they came from the front and back, he could always duck through the house.

He wondered how many there would be. Probably more than one.

The yard was a few steps above the street, so he could see over the parked cars up and down the block. High ground, somewhat protected. He’d had worse positions. And the dog was on sentry duty, pacing the sidewalk, trailing a plume of stink so powerful you could practically see it coming off him. A walking gas grenade with four legs and a tail.

A car came down the street. A red Kia. It didn’t stop.

Now a blue pickup. It didn’t stop, either. This could take all day.

He kept the new Sig Sauer in his jacket pocket, spare clip on the other side. He’d paid Lewis twice what it would have cost in any gun shop, but the serial number was ground down, and the gun was clearly otherwise unused, with traces of the heavy packing oil still in the checkered handgrip.

Peter didn’t mind the cost. He thought of it as health insurance.

Another car, a silver Toyota sedan. A big old Buick. A woman pushing a stroller, who crossed the street to avoid the dog. His awareness was raised to a watchful hum. Then a tan GMC Yukon with an elaborate tubular bumper. He couldn’t see the driver, but he figured it was Lewis, keeping his word to keep an eye out for Dinah.

He bounced on his toes. He might as well get some work done.

He started with the back door, the worst one, damaged in the break-in. The hundred-year-old glue had basically given up, and the jamb stops were so flimsy that little Miles could have kicked his way through. Peter pulled off the trim with a flat bar, used the Sawzall to cut the nails holding the jamb in place, and the whole assembly came out in one piece. It was a challenge getting the new door into the crooked old opening, especially with one eye on the dog and one hand on the .45, stopping to eyeball the street whenever a car drove by. A white minivan. A rusted-out Mustang.

He’d done harder work under more difficult conditions.

When he had the new doorknob and deadbolt in place, it was time for lunch. Cheese and crackers, a blueberry yogurt, and cold coffee.

Six cars drove by while he ate. No scarred man. No assault rifles.

Then the tan Yukon swung by again, and Peter was off the steps and into the street.

Lewis wore his suede jacket and starched white shirt and tilted smile.

Peter walked to the driver’s side. The window hummed down and a puff of heated air escaped. He said, “See anything?”

Lewis shook his head. “No guy with scars, no black Ford SUV. But I’ll keep driving. Give you another day, maybe two. After that I got paid work.”

“Thanks,” said Peter.

“Not doin’ it for you, jarhead.”

Peter nodded. “I know. But thanks, anyway.”

The window hummed back up and the Yukon rumbled away.

Peter gulped down his coffee and moved his tools to the new porch and took out the old front door. This one was a sixties retrofit with a rotten sill and a funky glass insert patched with tape. This replacement door went in more quickly than the last, and with no shots fired.

The last part a disappointment, really.

He put away his tools and went to buy a phone.

—

He’d gotten rid of all electronics when he went to the mountains. Cut up his credit card, too. It seemed symbolic at the time. But now it was just a pain in the ass.

He found a Best Buy store, where he broke the world’s record for fastest purchase of a prepaid phone and a cheap laptop, making it out before the white sparks flared too badly.

He didn’t have much cash left. Not after the Sig Sauer and Best Buy. He didn’t want to dip into Jimmy’s money unless he had to.

Best Buy needed a few hours to configure the laptop, so he sat in the suburban parking lot with the uncharged phone plugged into the cigarette lighter and called Dinah at work. The woman he spoke to at the nursing station told him Dinah was with a patient and she’d call him back, but it would probably be a while.

The wind blew cold through the broken window of his truck. He went into the cargo box and brought out the box of Jimmy’s things he’d gotten from Dinah. He found the yellow flier for the missing Marine, tapped in the grandmother’s number, and took out the stainless-steel Lake Capital Funds pen to take notes.

The phone rang six times before voicemail picked up.

A young man’s voice.

“Hello, you’ve reached Mrs. Aurelia Castellano, but she’s not home at the moment. Please leave a message and she will call you back.”

It was a good voice, quiet but confident. Peter looked at the flier, wondering if that was Felix Castellano’s voice. It probably was.

He wondered if the grandmother called her own number just to hear his voice. If she thought of her grandson every time she played her messages.

Peter thought of his own mother. He hadn’t spoken to her or his dad since he’d gotten off the plane.

At the beep, Peter opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.