The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(10)

“It must have been James’s money,” she said. “I can’t think of how else it might have gotten there.” She shook her head, looking down at her coffee. “That’s not honest money. All those crisp, new hundred-dollar bills.”

If it truly was Jimmy’s money. But Jimmy was the most honest man Peter had ever met.

He said, “So I should turn it over to the police?”

Dinah didn’t say anything.

“Why shouldn’t that money be yours?” said Peter. “Think of it like winning the lottery. Pay off your house. Pay for college for your boys. Save the rest for a rainy day.”

“No,” she said. She took a breath and let it out. “It would be noticed.”

Peter felt the muscles bunch involuntarily in his arms and shoulders.

Now he understood why someone had broken into her house. The thieves hadn’t found what they were looking for. But maybe they were still looking.

He said, “Is someone watching the house?”

“Leave the money here tonight,” she said. “I believe I know where it came from. Tomorrow we’ll go make certain.”

“Dinah, wait.”

She stood with her coffee and stepped up to the badly repaired doorway. “I work an early shift tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be home about three. We’ll go then.”

The skin around her eyes was tight, the wide and generous mouth set hard, but she stood tall and proud. No, there was nothing fragile about her. She was a military wife, a strong mother of boys. A queen in green hospital scrubs. Jimmy always said he was a lucky man.

She said, “Thank you for all your work today. It will be so nice when I can have my morning coffee on the front porch.”

Peter could take a hint.

He also could tell a lost cause when he saw one. He turned to go.

She called after him, “And will you please take that awful dog to the pound?”

Peter smiled.

He’d wondered when she would bring up the dog.





5



Peter woke at first light and checked the clock stuck to the dashboard. He put the Army .45 back under the bench seat and stretched in his sleeping bag. He could see his breath in the air, and Dinah Johnson’s half-built porch on its temporary supports, just across the parking strip.

He found that he liked the neighborhood. It was in the heart of the city, old houses built close together, and more than a little funky. There was a bungalow on the way to the lumberyard that had planted the tail end of a pink Cadillac in its yard as sculpture. The locals were a mix of black, white, and all shades of brown. College students and working-class people, freshly minted hipsters over their heads in old fixer-uppers, and artists and hippie holdouts turning their homes into giant art projects.

Nobody bothered a guy sleeping in his truck.

He’d tried to rent a hotel room on his first night on the road. It was a test of the experiment. The static, not even a hum when he was on foot in the Cascades, and barely a whisper when driving on narrow back roads, began to fizz in the back of his head as he rolled into the parking lot.

The sparks flared in the lobby, and turned to lightning bolts as he walked the long mazelike hallway to his room. It was the enclosure of the walls, but also the fluorescent lights and the chemical smell of the cheap carpet. The room’s tiny window didn’t even open. He managed a quick shower with his heart racing, his whole body clenched like a fist, somehow resisting the urge to hurl the TV out the window and burn the place down. He got outside fast, still dripping, barely dressed, head aching like it was split open.

Maybe he was just allergic to the modern world.

After that, he slept in the truck.

It was the big glass of the windshield, he thought, that kept the static low. Not as good as a canopy of stars in the Cascades, but he didn’t mind it, even as autumn slid downhill toward winter. And he could roll down his window whenever he wanted.

He was used to waking up cold and hungry in the mountains.

In fact, he liked it.

It made him feel strong, ready. Like his motor was running.

Like he could do almost anything.

—

The big dog whined softly in the back. When it changed position the whole vehicle rocked on its springs. Even after Peter had poured the cooled broth into its mouth the night before, it hadn’t wanted to get into that dark, unfamiliar box full of strange smells. He had to knock it over and climb inside carrying the damn thing in his arms like a giant growling baby.

What would it cost to feed a dog like that?

When he bought the truck in California on an early stateside rotation, the pickup bed was rusted out. He’d replaced it with a mahogany cargo box, five feet wide, nine feet long, with a marine plywood roof high enough for Peter to walk under, as long as he hunched over a little. It was also, Peter had to admit, sort of an art project. There were windows on both sides of the cargo box, and a skylight in the roof, all salvaged from a wrecked sailboat. The interior was finished with custom maple cabinets, neatly organized. Places for his tools, a cooler for groceries, a hook for a lantern, room to roll out his sleeping bag if he had to. Home for a wandering jack-of-all-trades.

Of course, as it turned out, he couldn’t actually sleep back there. The walls were too close.

The dog whined again.

His jeans were stuffed into the bottom of his sleeping bag to keep them warm. He pulled them up before shucking the sleeping bag. The last thing he needed was a neighbor calling the police because of the naked guy. With bare feet stuffed into his unlaced combat boots, he got out of the truck and walked around back in a cold November wind.