The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(47)

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?