Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(42)

I lifted the ring to the light sifting through the blinds and studied the carved head. The lion was noble. Protective. I’d felt safe wearing it.

Defiantly, I raised the chain, intending to drop it around my neck. But then I lowered my hands and returned the ring to the suitcase. No matter what happened to me, I didn’t want the Alpha having Dougie’s ring.

“It didn’t save Dougie,” the Sir pointed out.

“And yet, you were the one who put it aside for me.”

The Sir nodded in acknowledgment.

“You want to tell me why?” I asked.

But on this, the Sir remained silent. My dead never had anything practical to offer. Their comments ran more to warnings and philosophical musings. My therapist likened the Sir to Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket—he was my goad, my whip, my conscience. Hayes advised me to tell the Sir that it was all right for him to leave. That my conscience was, if anything, a bit overdeveloped.

But I found his presence comforting, even if it suggested an alarming degree of instability on my part.

I touched the ring again. It seemed incapable of hiding so much as secret fairy dust, so I moved on.

Next was the Kurdish dagger Dougie had purchased from a bedouin tribesman. The handle was camel bone with silver, the sheath fashioned of carved silver and brass, the blade curved steel. I pulled the knife free of the sheath and stared at the pitted blade. You could do a lot of damage with one of these. But my careful examination of the hilt and the sheath proved, as with the ring, there was no place to hide anything.

The last things in the suitcase were the memorial flyer from Dougie’s funeral, which I put aside without looking at, and copies of the photographs I’d taken from Sarge’s apartment, including the one that had been stolen from Cohen’s home: a picture of Malik with Sarge and the man my CIA friend had identified as Richard “Rick” Dalton.

The other photo showed Dougie and Rick together. Both of them wore beards and native dress. Dougie had the dagger on thin, braided rope slung across his chest. I wondered what the two men had been up to together, and if Rick had been present on the mission that killed Dougie.

I laced my fingers across one knee as I leaned back, staring at the meager belongings.

That was it. No deep, dark secrets. Nothing that would destroy a man’s life or give him cause for murder.

Maybe the Alpha thought that Malik’s video had ended up in Dougie’s hands, and from there had come to me. I was sad to disappoint.

I picked up the compass again. Shook it. Over the gentle tick of the needle, I thought I caught the faintest click of metal on metal.

Nik’s voice came to me from a years-old memory. I want you to see a few things.

I stood abruptly, startling Clyde. I grabbed Dougie’s compass and went out into the hall and down to the room that Nik had shared with Ellen Ann before his death.

Nik had been dead for six months, but his box still sat on their dresser. I opened it and searched through his war-related treasures for his compass. Not the one that had been issued to him before he left for Vietnam. Rather, the older one his father had carried.

I found the compass, an almost identical match to Dougie’s with its nicked casing and the letters US stamped on the outside. When I popped open the lid, the inside was also a near-duplicate of Dougie’s. But when I eased my fingernails beneath the mechanism, it readily separated from the casing and dropped into my hand.

A smooth hollow lay beneath.

I set aside Nik’s compass and opened Dougie’s again.

Maybe I’d been too tentative before, afraid to destroy what little I had left of him. Now I went to the garage for the smallest flat-head screwdriver I could find, and when I returned, I pushed the end into the narrow gap and pressed.

With a pop and a sprinkle of fine desert sand, the mechanism fell free.

I stared.

In the hollow space was a cloud of cotton, and inside that, a small key. The top of the key had been sawed off so that it would fit. I knew a few things about keys, a gift from my railroad career. This key had XL7 stamped on the face, which meant it was originally a blank made by Ilco. Heart pounding, I returned to Gentry’s room and grabbed my personal laptop from my duffel. I did a quick search. The XL7 blanks were primarily used for mailboxes manufactured by four companies. I could exclude US Postal Service keys, which would be designated as such. But that still meant that this key went to one of roughly a million mailboxes in the United States.

Assuming the mailbox was even in the United States.

Assuming it went to a mailbox.

I looked at my watch, calculating.

I had thirty-nine hours remaining. More or less.





CHAPTER 11

We were the Marines the other Marines avoided. The pariahs, the bad-luck charms. The ones no one wanted to risk being near. As if we didn’t just process death. As if we brought it.

—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

Back in the truck, Clyde watched squirrels through the open window while I checked my phone for messages—none—and tried once more to call Hal. Straight to voice mail.

I adjusted my rearview, checking the street behind. Two houses down, a little girl rode a tricycle along the sidewalk, feet pumping, braids flying. Her mother watched from the driveway, coffee cup in hand, her powder-blue waitress uniform wrinkled and baggy, as if she’d just gotten off work.

I returned my attention to the view out the windshield. Next door to Gram’s, a teenage boy stood on the concrete stoop, texting madly. Beyond that, the street baked quietly in the rising heat, lawns brown and half-choked with weeds, paint peeling like a bad sunburn. Royer was a dual-or even triple-income kind of place, and by now most people would be at their first job. Around five, they’d knock off and go on to toil at the next minimum-wage sweatshop.