Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(56)

Shepard’s keffiyeh had concealed most of his face, and they’d lost him anyway, of course. Shepard was half ghost when you were standing right next to him. From five thousand feet wearing the Arabic equivalent of a baseball hat? He basically evaporated. With all that money.

As it turned out, Shepard holding Chip at gunpoint was what kept Chip out of Leavenworth. An unexpected benefit of his plan.

Chip was a talented actor. He was contrite, he’d been caught, the story spilled out of him, and some of it was almost true. He pled love of country, frustration with the bureaucracy, and hatred of corruption. He was used by an unknown local player who’d fed him information about the colonel through third parties, only to step in and take all the intel, proof of corruption, everything.

He was embarrassed and ashamed and lucky to be alive.

He fooled four interrogators and six polygraphs and submitted his resignation.

Unbelievably, the agency actually asked him to stay on.

He told them he wanted out while he still had some scrap of his soul.

And laughed all the way to the bank.





25





PETER



Peter headed toward the freeway, June’s laptop open and running on the passenger seat. He assumed the hunters had taken it over completely, so he had the Web browser open to a map of British Columbia and a half-dozen Vancouver hotel websites, and took advantage of stoplights to click from one site to the next.

Waiting at the on-ramp, he used his anonymous phone to find a number and made a call.

“Semper Fidelis Roofing, can I help you?”

“Hey, Estelle, it’s Peter Ash. How are you?”

“Peter who? I know this can’t be Ashes because he got eaten up by Bigfoot. Why else wouldn’t he have called like he promised?”

“I got sidetracked, Estelle. And I never promised you anything. Don’t bust my balls, okay?”

“Oh, I’m not,” she said. “’Cause if I were, you’d for damn sure know it.”

Estelle Martinez was thirty-five years old and managed the office for her brother Manny’s roofing business. She’d been an Army drill instructor for ten years and now ran ultramarathons on the weekends. Her last boyfriend had been hospitalized for exhaustion. All the roofers were combat veterans, and they were scared of her. Peter was scared of her, too.

“Estelle, can we do this another time? I need to see Manny.”

“Manny’s busy.”

“Estelle. Cut the shit. This is serious. Put him on.”

She sighed. “He’s not here. Don’t you got his cell?”

“I lost my old phone. I need to see him in person, I’m heading up to your office now. Where is he?”

“Out doing estimates.” He could hear the clack of a keyboard. “He’s in Mountlake Terrace right now. I’ll text you the address of his next appointment and let him know you’re coming.”

Peter found Manny standing in the driveway of a McMansion, holding a tablet computer in both meaty hands, staring into the air above the house. The tablet showed a moving view of the house from above. A high penetrating whine came from somewhere over the roof. The soft rain had stopped.

“Ashes, mi hermano. Gimme a sec, let me finish this run.”

“What, this is work?”

Manny smiled without looking away from the speck in the air. “I’m a high-tech motherfucker, mano. This thing does a programmed run over the house, the software takes all the measurements. Square footage, hips and valleys, all the flashing. The clients fucking love it. I send them the video with my proposal, they think, shit, that’s how you do estimates? Imagine how you’d do my roof.”

Manny Martinez wasn’t tall, but he had broad sloping shoulders and legs like tree trunks. He’d been one of Peter’s platoon sergeants in Iraq. Once during a firefight, Peter had seen Manny throw another sergeant, Big Jimmy Johnson, shot in the leg and bleeding out, over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry him to the MRAP a half-mile away. Big Jimmy had outweighed Manny by sixty pounds at least.

Jimmy was dead now, but it wasn’t because of Manny.

A lot of them were dead.

But Manny was clearly alive and well. He wore clean Carhartts and a crisp white button-down shirt with a fresh shave and a high fade sharp enough to cut. He had a dozen employees and drove a nearly new pickup. He had a wife and two little kids.

The tablet beeped and the video stopped moving. Manny touched the screen and the little quadcopter drone homed in like the world’s largest mosquito. When it touched down on the driveway, his grin made him look like he was eight years old.

His friend had made a life here. He was thriving. Peter couldn’t get him involved.

Manny picked up the drone and headed back toward his truck. “So what’s up? Stella said you had something serious.”

Peter said, “It’s not like that. I’m back in Seattle for a few days, and I wanted to say hey. Maybe we can grab dinner before I head out?”

Manny looked at him. It was the same solid, steady stare that could see through walls and around corners, that could find ambushes before they happened. The eight-year-old boy was gone.

“Don’t bullshit me, Ashes. What are you into?”

Peter shook his head. “Forget it, Manny. You’re doing great. You’ve got a family, people depending on you. I have no business asking you for anything.”