The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(43)

They didn’t need him that night.





21



Raindrops dotted his windshield and dampened his shirtsleeve at the broken window.

Closer to the freeway, the neighborhood was sprinkled with vacant lots, sometimes half a dozen to a block. The city had taken foreclosed and derelict homes for back taxes, sold what it could, and torn down the ones past saving. They’d filled in the foundations and planted grass, hoping the economy would change and the lots would be worth something again. Maybe they would.

He chose a lot on a relatively full block, a narrow gap in the cityscape that stood out like a missing tooth. The ground sloped uphill from the sidewalk, and from the rear of the lot he’d be able to see over the parked cars. The demolition crew had left a driveway in place, probably because it was nearly new. A sign in the middle of the grass read NO PARKING, NO DUMPING, NO DOGS, NO FIRES. BY ORDER OF THE CITY OF MILWAUKEE.

Peter backed his truck to the end of the drive, let Mingus out to wander, then walked the perimeter of the property until he’d found enough stones and broken bricks to make a decent fire ring. Once his kindling was alight, he laid on deadfall sticks and scrap lumber from Dinah’s porch to get a good base of coals. He’d picked up surprisingly little garbage. He figured some neighbor had adopted the lot, mowing the grass and cleaning up. He wondered how long he’d have before someone called the cops.

The rain was worse now, slanting down in small, hard drops, so he unfolded his silver poly tarp and stretched it from hooks at the top of the cargo box to wooden stakes he pushed into the wet ground, trying to keep his cookfire mostly dry without setting the tarp alight. He found an empty garbage bag and closed one end of it at the top of the truck door and let the other end hang down over the broken window. It might keep most of the rain out of his sleeping quarters.

He needed to get that window fixed.

Then, with his campsite otherwise in order, he unfolded his chair, snagged a beer from the cooler, and fed the fire while he thought about Dinah and Jimmy and the scarred man. Jimmy’s money and the C-4 in the suitcase. Lewis and Skinner and the missing Marine and the Riverside Veterans’ Center and Josie with the ponytail.

He thought about what he knew, which wasn’t much, and what he didn’t know, which was a lot.

Starting with why Jimmy had put the money under Dinah’s porch. He hadn’t been able to leave it at the bar where he worked. Why hadn’t he just left it under his own bed?

Then Peter thought about the shooter with the AK-47, who showed up when Peter was leaving. And the three guys passing the joint on the corner, one of them on his phone. Maybe the scarred man had been trying to find Jimmy’s place. Maybe, like Peter, he knew the block but not the house. Maybe he found the house by following Peter. It would have been easy enough to track his truck.

All that thinking made him hungry. He’d stopped for groceries earlier in the day, which included a long piece of flank steak. When he got up for his second beer, he dropped the steak into a plastic bag to marinate in some lime juice and soy sauce and garlic chunks, then set his grill grate over the flames. Camping out is no reason to eat bad food.

As always, he thought about scraping the previously burned meat off the grill and decided against it with the irrefutable logic that the heat would kill off the germs.

When the coals were orange and white and several inches thick, he dug the flank steak out of the marinade and draped it gently on the grate to char while he dug out the tortillas and salsa and a pot of black beans. The beans were genuine refrieds, meaning that he’d cooked them several days before, and now he was cooking them again. He set the pot on the grate and poured in some beer to help the beans rehydrate, thinking that there were benefits to city living. He couldn’t cook flank steak over a fire above the tree line. Not unless it was from the flank of a trout.

Maybe he could be an urban camper. Buy one of these vacant lots and sleep outside. Maybe rig up an outdoor shower. That would work, right?

Until winter came.

—

Mingus came back from his explorations, wet and stinking worse than ever. He shook himself, then came to the fire to sniff at the steak. His fur steamed in the heat as he leaned against Peter’s legs, soaking his jeans. Aside from the parked truck and the silver tarp, the flickering orange light made the modern world recede until Peter and Mingus could have been any hunting pair from the last ten thousand years.

Hungry and wet, waiting for the meat to cook.

When the flank steak was charred but still pink inside, Peter forked it off the grill onto his cedar plank and sliced it thin with his knife, elbowing the dog away with each slice. “Bad dog, Mingus. Wait your damn turn.”

He warmed the corn tortillas briefly on the grate and assembled a giant plate of world-class steak tacos. Laid on some beans and salsa and folded one into a tight roll and offered it to Mingus. He swallowed without appearing to chew, as was his right as a dog. Peter figured Mingus wouldn’t mind the salsa, given that he’d basically inhaled a whole canister of pepper spray the day before. He needed to wash the dog. With some kind of serious soap.

“Ahoy the fire.”

A voice out of the night, filtered through the rain.

Peter was so focused on dinner that he hadn’t noticed the figure approaching from the sidewalk. Some Marine. The rain on the tarp damped the sound, and the firelight wrecked his night vision. But he didn’t feel too bad. The dog hadn’t noticed, either.