The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(5)

After cutting the rebar and placing it in the bottom of the hole, Peter mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow and poured it into the forms. The dog sat watching, ears up and alert, looking ridiculous with the stick tied into its mouth. When Peter walked past, it fled to the end of its leash and growled at him, that tank engine rumbling as strong as ever. When Peter returned to work, the dog sat down to watch again.

It was like a foreman who didn’t make small talk.

But uglier than any foreman Peter had ever met.

Not as ugly as some sergeants, though. Sergeants had the ugly all over that dog.

Lunch was last night’s beef stew, reheated on the little backpacking stove and eaten with crusty wheat bread and cold coffee left over from breakfast. Peter sat in his camp chair on the sidewalk, knee bobbing unconsciously to that ceaseless interior metronome, wondering how he’d feed the dog without offering up a piece of himself. No way he was going to take out that stick.

But the animal had to be hungry. Peter left some of the thick stew broth in the pan to cool. He’d pour it past those teeth in another hour.

After lunch, with the concrete hardened but not yet cured, he started cutting out the rotten sections of the deck. When he was done, there was almost nothing left. The supporting joists were sagging, half of them rotted or cracked, and all of them undersized to begin with. It would be easier to replace everything. The only wood worth saving was the main beam and the porch roof overhead. And he might as well replace the beam with something rot-proof, anyway.

It was never simple.

But wasn’t that part of the fun?

When it was time for a trip to the lumberyard, Peter put his tools back in the truck. Valuable stuff had a way of walking away when you weren’t around, in a working-class neighborhood and every other kind.

He considered the dog for a minute, and decided to leave it where it was.

Who’d want to steal a dog that ugly?

Maybe he’d get lucky and it would escape while he was gone.

But when Peter pulled up in his truck an hour later, there was the dog, as ugly as ever, and smelling just as bad. He chased the growling animal to the end of its rope to check the knots, and found that the rope had frayed a little on one side. He found the spot on the tree where faint blue strands showed on the bark, and smiled.

“Good luck, dog,” he said. “That’s climbing rope. Kevlar core.”

When he reached out to pat the dog’s head, the dog shied away. Peter shrugged and went back to work.

He supported the porch roof with long two-by-sixes braced against the ground, then cut out the rest of the deck frame with a Sawzall and hauled the pieces to the street. The dog had taken to rubbing its rope-wrapped chin on the front walk. A pretty good strategy, actually. It kept its eyes on Peter the whole time. He could feel the weight of its stare, a hundred and fifty pounds of dog planning to tear his throat out.

It was better than all those Iraqi freedom fighters. Hell, this was just one dog.

What Peter didn’t want to admit was that he almost liked the feeling.

It kept him on his toes. Like old times.

Like the white static was there for a reason.

—

He unloaded the lumber and stacked it on sawhorses. But before he started putting things together again, he had to clear out all the crap that had accumulated under the porch. He stuffed disintegrating cardboard boxes and trash into construction-grade garbage bags. Broken bricks and scrap lumber he carried to the street. At the very back, tucked against the house, behind a stinking dog bed, was an old black hard-sided suitcase. It was heavier than it looked.

There was a little white mold growing on the side, but it didn’t look too bad. There might be some use left in it. Peter didn’t believe in throwing stuff away just because it had a little wear.

He set the suitcase by the side door and turned away to finish cleaning up. The stoop was cracked, and the suitcase fell over, then bounced down the four steps to the concrete walk. When it hit bottom, it popped open.

And money fell out.

Crisp hundred-dollar bills. In plain banded ten-thousand-dollar packets. Forty packets, each about a half-inch tall.

Four hundred thousand dollars.

Under Jimmy’s broken-down porch.

—

Peter went back to the suitcase.

It was a smaller Samsonite, about the size of a modern airline carry-on, probably expensive when it was new. But it definitely wasn’t new. They didn’t make suitcases like this anymore.

Despite its time under that porch, it was in decent shape. Hard to tell if it had been there for thirty years or was bought at Goodwill the month before. Peter picked up one of the stacks of hundreds he’d found inside and flipped through the bills. Mostly newer, with the big Ben Franklin head.

So the suitcase hadn’t been there too long.

There were no identifying marks on the Samsonite’s outside shell, nothing inside to tell where it had come from. But there were four little elastic pockets on the interior.

Inside each pocket was a small brown paper bag, wrinkled and worn with handling. Peter opened one bag and shook the contents out into his hand. A pale rectangular slab stared up at him. A bit smaller than a paperback book, soft and pliable like modeling clay, smelling slightly of chemicals, with clear plastic sheeting adhered to its faces.

Interesting.

He was pretty sure it wasn’t modeling clay.





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