The Drifter (14 page)

Boomer glared at him, all riled up again. “It’s not that goddamn easy, all right? You can’t make the real deal on a hot plate out of bleach and salt substitute. These are seriously volatile chemicals.
The batch we lost took me two goddamn months to get right. I searched that whole damn house top to bottom and didn’t come up with anything. And that fuckin’ dog about chewed my ass off as I was leaving.”

“What about the new guy?”

“That carpenter, says he’s a Marine? Turns out he’s harder to kill than the last guy. But I’ll get him.”

“You hired it out,” said Midden. “Should have done it yourself.”

“Good thing I didn’t,” said Boomer. “Motherfucker would have killed me instead.”

It was a bad plan to begin with, thought Midden. He should have told Boomer to wait. It wasn’t his skill set. Midden should have taken care of it. But it didn’t matter. As it turned out, the plan might evolve. To include the Marine.

Midden kept his eyes on the twin cones of light illuminating the road ahead. He was starting to have trouble maintaining focus on the task at hand. On the end goal. He didn’t know how much more of this he could manage.

The autumn wind roared in his ears and cut through his coat as the van picked up speed. He didn’t mind the cold. It helped him keep going.

“He has what you lost,” said Midden over the noise. “We need it. We’ll find it. And get it
back.”

T
he phone rang and rang, and finally went to voicemail. Again Peter heard the young man’s voice, quiet but confident, and was convinced it was the voice of the missing young Marine, Felix Castellano.

“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.”

Sitting in his truck, Peter held the yellow flier in his lap, looking down at the face badly reproduced there. Clean-shaven, dark hair combed down, a shy smile. But it was hard to see much more than that. Copy paper wasn’t photo paper, and it looked like it had been out in the weather awhile before Jimmy pulled it off a telephone pole. Not to mention that the young man in the neat new uniform might not bear any resemblance to the man he had become during the war. He thought of the Marines he had lost over there. He thought of Jimmy, who he had failed.

When the beep came, this time he left a message.

“Hi, my name is Peter Ash. I saw your flier about Felix, and wanted to talk with you for a few minutes.” He left his number. “Please call me back, I’d like to help.”

He got dressed and made coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich on the little backpacking stove, glad to have something warm in his stomach. The day was cold and damp. His breath made a dense fog, and the cloud cover hung low enough to hide the treetops. When he folded the gray tarp, he had to shake off a thin rime of ice that had formed overnight.

Before he left the vacant lot, he scattered the stones and broken bricks of the fire ring to the far corners, not wanting to damage the old man’s lawnmower in the spring. The wind had already taken the ashes. Other than the charred circle at the end of the driveway and the dry spot where his truck had stood, he left no sign that he was ever there.

At Best Buy, the clerk stared at the bruise on Peter’s cheek, which was evolving into an ugly greenish yellow, but he didn’t have long to look. Peter was in and out in under two minutes.

He could find free Wi-Fi outside any chain coffee shop, but it was too windy for an outdoor table, and it would be awkward to sort through the box of Jimmy’s things from the seat of his truck, even if the Wi-Fi made it to his parking spot. But the university library might work.

He parked on Kenwood near the Union, checking the street for the scarred man’s Ford, but didn’t see it. He got out of the truck and closed the door before Mingus could jump out after him. The dog cocked his head for a puzzled moment, then jumped gracefully through the empty window frame. Not an easy feat for a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog.

He really needed to get that window fixed. Especially if he was still here when it snowed. He opened the door again. “Get back up there, Mingus. I need you to guard the truck.”

Mingus jumped up on the seat. Peter closed the door. Mingus
jumped out the window again, then looked up at him with that serrated grin, tongue lolling.

Peter sighed. “Okay, buddy. But I don’t think they’re going to let you in the library. Especially not with that stink you’ve got going.”

Peter wondered if they’d keep him out, too. After four days without a shower, he didn’t smell so good himself.

He opened the back and collected the cardboard box with Jimmy’s personal effects. He added the bag of papers he’d taken from Jimmy’s apartment and went to find the library. He needed a place with decent windows to spread out and think.

Mingus ranged ahead to terrify the coeds, trailing the stench of pepper spray and dog funk like a plume of tear gas.

Peter had always liked big universities. He liked the young undergrads, the scruffy grad students, and the even scruffier professors. He liked the idealistic vibe, the fliers posted everywhere for meetings and talks and galleries and concerts. He liked the coffee shops and cheap restaurants at the perimeter. Maybe one of these days he’d be a student again. Maybe.

The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee wasn’t beautiful. Most of the unruly jumble of buildings seemed to date from architecture’s uglier periods. Now that the sun had come out, the sky a high, clear blue, the air crisp and cold, Peter’s legs twitched for a long run.

He found a glass-walled addition to the student union that connected to the library. He looked around for the dog, but Mingus had disappeared. Peter shrugged and pulled open the door. The dog could clearly take care of himself. He knew where the truck was.

Inside, the white static rose up, but less than Peter had
anticipated. Maybe it was all the windows, the natural light. Maybe because it was a university, it didn’t set him off like an office building or a cheap motel.

He wondered, could the static tell the difference?

He bought himself a cup of coffee and an accordion folder at the bookstore, then headed into the library.

The girl at the information desk wore red lip gloss, rectangular glasses, and a form-fitting red blouse. She had her hair up in an unraveling bun, trying for that hot-librarian look. Usually Peter went for that kind of thing, and he was sure the undergraduates were eating it up. But next to Dinah or Josie, this girl looked like a spoiled child.

She raised her eyebrows at him as he strode past, the cardboard box tucked under his arm. “May I help you?” she asked, wrinkling her nose and staring at the bruise on his cheek.

“No, thanks,” Peter said, and kept walking.

“There’s no sleeping in the library,” she called after him.

Peter looked down at his work clothes, now worn for four days running. Clearly this girl thought he was a homeless person. She wasn’t exactly wrong.

He had to find a shower, and soon.

He walked through a bright open room until he found an unoccupied table by a window with a view of a broad courtyard. His shoulders were tight, the white static making itself known, but he pushed it down as he thought about why Jimmy would have a suitcase full of hundreds and enough plastic explosive to blow up a car.

Peter couldn’t see Jimmy as a mad bomber, no matter how bad his PTSD was. Couldn’t see him as a mercenary, either, blowing shit up for money. And he couldn’t see Jimmy planning something, then killing himself from remorse before he did it. None of it made sense.

—

He opened the box of Jimmy’s things and began to lay them out on the table. It was a pitifully small collection of objects to represent a man’s life.

On the left, he set out the things from Dinah’s cardboard box of memories. Jimmy’s medals. The photos of Jimmy and Dinah, and Jimmy with his kids, Charlie and Miles looking younger in each picture.

On the right, he put the papers he took from the apartment. The yellow flier about the missing Marine. The folders with his VA paperwork and discharge papers.

In the middle, Peter laid out the things Jimmy had with him when he died. The Lake Capital pen from Jimmy’s coat pocket, and the little notebook with the front pages torn out. The belt with the hidden compartment that had held five crisp new hundreds, the same yellow flier about Felix Castellano, the missing Marine, and the business card for the Riverside Veterans’ Center with the phone number written in spidery black handwriting on the back. And Jimmy’s wallet with only a few dollars, a grocery receipt, a library card, and a driver’s license with his wife’s address.

Last was the torn scrap of paper with Jimmy’s same confident scrawl, but this one written more clearly:
worth more dead than alive
. The police told Dinah it was Jimmy’s suicide note.

Somehow, though, it didn’t look like the handwriting of a man who would kill himself.

The odd chord that had rung the first time Peter had read the note at Dinah’s house began to chime again. Something Jimmy had said. But what? Where?

Peter closed his eyes and took himself back to the battered city of Baghdad during the insurgency. He remembered standing with
Jimmy in the corner of a briefing room, while some major told them about the psychology of suicide bombers.

Jimmy had raised his hand. “Excuse me, sir? I just want to know something. What kind of motherfucker would convince these dumb bastards that they were worth more to their cause dead than they are alive? What kind of motherfucker would do that?” Jimmy was polite, but he was also profane as all hell.

The major had told Jimmy to shut up, but nobody heard him because the rest of the enlisted men were all laughing. But Jimmy was serious and genuinely pissed off. What kind of motherfucker would do something like that?

Then another memory, this time of Jimmy standing at the gunner’s post of a neighborhood outpost after a car bomb had exploded while trying to ram the blast barrier. “These poor dumb bastards. Some asshole convinced them they were worth more dead than alive.”

The slip of paper wasn’t Jimmy’s suicide note.

It was a kind of invocation. Kept in the man’s wallet to remind himself.

A refusal to believe that a single life had no other use than to be wasted.

And a reminder of the reasons to live.

Because nobody was worth more dead than alive.

Peter looked at the slip of paper again. It was torn on two sides. Someone had torn off the first part of that note, whatever it was.

To make it look like suicide.

Son of a bitch.

—

Peter thought back through what he’d learned.

Jimmy had paid his rent in advance and told his landlady he was traveling.

He’d cleaned his apartment, even emptied the fridge.

He’d covered his shifts at work and told the bartender he would be out of town.

Jimmy got a damn dog, for chrissake. Would a man contemplating suicide go out and get a dog?

Peter had thought Jimmy had killed himself because the man was
polite
?

It was just another way Peter had failed his friend. Failed to keep him safe in the war. Failed to support him at home. And failed to believe in him after he was dead.

He said it aloud.

“Jimmy didn’t kill himself.”

Which meant somebody else did.

—

Now Peter looked back at Jimmy’s things with new eyes.

These weren’t keys to understanding a suicide.

They were clues to a killer.

A killer Peter was going to find.

Peter swept his eyes across the table. What stood out?

The yellow fliers, obviously. Peter needed to talk to the missing Marine’s grandmother.

The business card for the veterans’ center. He needed to go back there again.

He picked up the pen. It was heavy in his hand.
Lake Capital Funds.

Dinah told him they didn’t have any investments. They were barely holding on to their house, so why would Jimmy be talking to an investment adviser?

That suitcase full of money.

Although if he was going to invest it, why was it hidden in a
Samsonite suitcase under a rotting porch? And why was the dog there?

He thought now about what else was under that porch when he’d cleaned it out, aside from a few decades’ worth of trash. The money, the dog. And an old dog bed—wasn’t there an old dog bed under there?

When he put it together like that, the answer was clear.

Jimmy had hidden the suitcase full of money and explosives under the porch and left his dog there to guard it. With the dog’s bed, so Mingus would know where home was.

Which was why the dog had stayed so long.

After his master was dead.

Peter needed to talk to the hedge-fund guy, Jonathan Skinner.

—

He brought out the accordion file he’d bought at the bookstore. It had divided sections to keep things organized, and a cover flap that tied in place. It was more compact than the box, and felt somehow more respectful. He put Jimmy’s things away, then opened up his new laptop and got online.

Lake Capital wasn’t a financial-planning outfit, a place for normal people to put their retirement money. Lake Capital was a hedge fund, an investment vehicle for the very wealthy, or for large financial institutions like employee pension funds, looking to balance the risk in their portfolios. Hedge fund, as in
hedge your bets
.

Hedge funds were a great racket. The fund manager—in this case, Jonathan Skinner—got paid twice. He was paid a small percentage of the base value of the fund, usually two percent each year. He also took a percentage of the profits, usually twenty percent. Hedge funds were considered risky but could be highly
profitable. Especially for the hedge-fund managers, who always made something, even if their clients lost a lot. And in the big market crash, most funds had lost a huge amount of their value. But a few had made billions.

The Lake Capital website was clean and elegantly designed, but thin on details. The main page featured a beautiful photo of a big luxury sailboat moving fast in high winds, and another of attractive people arranged in a family group. Crisp graphics showed the hedge fund’s performance at more than three times the rate of the market as a whole for six years running. But not much detail about how that was achieved. And no data from the last three years. So either they hadn’t updated their website or they hadn’t done so well since the crash.

He searched the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
’s site and found many articles featuring Lake Capital, a prominent corporate citizen. Skinner and his wife, Martha, were mentioned often in connection with local charities, with Martha a particular favorite of the paper, even after her death. When she was killed in a home invasion in 2007, there was a long and glowing obituary. But after the market collapse in late 2008, Lake Capital went downhill.

Returns were in the negatives, and many Lake Capital investors had pulled out their money. The Securities and Exchange Commission was also investigating. Lake Capital was down to bare bones, with only a few employees left. And although Skinner had built up a great deal of personal wealth, he had invested much of his own and his wife’s money in the fund, so when Lake Capital closed its doors—and a recent newspaper article speculated that it was only a matter of time—Skinner would be reduced from extravagantly wealthy to merely rich.

Which made $400K in hard cash much more relevant to the conversation.