The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(36)

   PART 2





18



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 haba?ero 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.”