Every Day Above Ground

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Ten dead. Maybe eleven. I’d lost count.

  “War doesn’t work like that,” I said.

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “Having the gold didn’t make me happy,” I said. “Too much blood on those bars. Stealing it was fun. Getting O’Hasson away from Ingrid’s men was even better.”

  “And the girl? You saved her.”

  “That was best,” I said.

  “A good day.”

  “Good is the correct word.”

  “So you’re not keeping your share? It’s for Jimmy’s family?”

  “I kept some. Add the rest to Nakri’s cut. I trust you can come up with some tale.”

  “What about rebuilding your house?” Hollis said.

  “I’m giving up on the house. Selling the land.”

  Hollis had trouble swallowing his mouthful of coffee. “Wasn’t the whole point of this—” He left the obvious ending hang.

  “Money to rebuild the house was one reason. The bigger motive was giving me something to do that I could do well.”

  “Safecracking.”

  I smiled. “At the start, yeah. But mostly the planning, and the execution. The job we pulled at EverCon was the most focused I’ve felt since leaving the Rangers. And I want a little more of it.”

  Hollis scratched his cheek, contemplating. “Just what are you getting at, lad?”

  I leaned back, feeling the leaden burn of pain, the price of the fight. Enjoying it, just a little.

  “How would you feel about some pro bono work?” I said.

  Forty-Three

  I found Addy at her kitchen sink, washing the breakfast dishes. She would no more let plates sit dirty than I would have left my service rifle caked in mud. I picked up a towel decorated with sunflowers and started drying the plates in the rack.

  “Cyndra asleep?” I asked. She nodded. Addy and I had been edging around one another for two days. Sea urchins under the same rock. She hadn’t said a word about everything I’d confessed to her, not that I wanted or needed absolution. Our brief conversations had stuck to the neutral topic of Cyndra.

  “I’ve been talking to Tachelle Tyner,” she said. “Cyndra’s foster mother. I told her that Cyndra followed her father up here without his knowledge, which at least keeps me on the side of honesty.”

  “They must be ready to chew live scorpions,” I said.

  “Between summer vacation and the natural defense network of Cyndra’s fellow teenagers, Tachelle only realized she was gone a couple of days ago. I was informed that Cyndra has been a challenge.”

  “As the kid would say: Duh.”

  “Miz Tyner and I made the informal agreement that Cyndra would stay here until her father is well enough to travel south. Sparing them the trouble of fetching her.”

  “I’m sure she jumped at that.”

  “In a flat second. I don’t care for that woman at all.”

  I leaned against the counter next to the sink so I could see more of Addy’s shining, wrinkled face. “You don’t want Cyndra to leave.”

  “It’s best for her to be at home. Her friends are there. School.”

  “What if she stayed?”

  “She can’t.”

  “What if she wanted to stay near you? Would you want that?”

  “Van, please stop.”

  “No.” I took a wet serving dish out of her hands and put it aside. “Goddamn it, Addy. You were right when you called me out for being deceitful. So let’s lay it out. Mickey will need a lot of professional help. Cyndra might need even more, when her memories start flooding back. And they will. You think the Tyners can handle that? Or that they even give a shit?”

  “They wouldn’t let us—”

  “I won’t give them a choice. I don’t care if it takes bribing Tachelle or false records to prove you’re Cyndra’s great-fucking-aunt or what. I’ll make it happen. We can make it happen. If you want.”

  Addy burst into sobs. It startled the hell out of me. I’d hardly seen the tough old woman so much as get misty before. I jumped forward to hug her for a long moment and then guided her into the front room to sit in her overstuffed peach chair.

  She cried for a little while, fishing Kleenex out of the knitted cozy on the lamp table next to her. I sat on the floor and held her hand. After dabbing the last of her tears and a hearty blow of her nose, she tossed the final tissue aside.

  “I keep harping on you for your secrets,” she said.

  “Doesn’t mean you can’t have your own. Mine tend to involve felonies.”

  She laughed a little. “You’re right. We all have bits of our past we’ve kept quiet. Or set aside. That’s easier, sometimes.”

  I waited.

  “I had two babies,” Addy said. “With my first husband. One was stillborn. We never legally named her, but I always called her Lanie. My boy Dwight died of pneumonia when he was four.”

  “Addy.”

  “It was many, many years ago, Van. It startles me sometimes how much time passes when I don’t think of them.” She shook her head. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot this past week.”

  “Cyndra likes it here. She likes you.”

  “It might not be possible for long,” Addy said, maybe to herself. “I’m not young. If her father dies, Cyndra could want something else for herself. Someplace better.”

  “So we’ll just have to make it so good here that the kid never wants to leave.”

  Addy sighed and turned bloodshot green eyes on me. Her armor back up, with a chink or two. “Are you serious about bribing the State of California and all that rubbish?”

  “Damn right.”

  She huffed again, less emphatically. “Then I guess I’m serious about finally cleaning out the project room.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “Damn right indeed. I can’t lift those boxes.”

  “With everything, I meant.”

  “I know,” Addy said. “I know.”

  Forty-Four

  The clerk at the front desk of the Olympian Heights gave me a smile that was eighty percent solicitous, and the rest uncertain. Even sporting a good suit and tie, along with my new hair and glasses, I guess I gave the impression of being out of my natural element.

  “Checking out,” I said. “Room 1401. Ms. Ekby.”

  I tilted my head a tiny fraction to indicate the lobby behind me. The slim clerk looked over my shoulder to see the statuesque woman in a silver-gray Prada jacket and skirt and large Persol sunglasses. She stood halfway across the long hall, next to a neatly stacked line of embossed leather luggage. Her brown hair shone like silk.

  “Ah,” he said, brightening, “and I hope everything went well on her side trip?”

  “Vancouver was very successful, thank you. As was her stay. Thank you for retaining the room while we were called away.”

  “Of course, of course. The Olympian is always delighted to help with unexpected needs. Leave it on the same card?”

  “Please. And we have one bag in your care.” I handed him the claim card that I had removed from Marshall’s body. I had scrubbed the blue plastic very clean, of prints and of blood. “A red metallic suitcase, quite heavy.”

  “Certainly. Shall I call a bellman?”

  He should. Two young Ethiopian men raced forward and assisted me in trundling the luggage to a minivan cab. I rolled the hundred-pound suitcase myself, and duked them each twenty dollars for their trouble. They returned to the lobby with excellent impressions of Ingrid Ekby.

  The cab took us the handful of blocks to King Street Station. If the driver thought it unusual that a woman with five thousand dollars’ worth of luggage was taking the train, he kept it to himself. A fast trip and a solid tip.

  On the pavement in front of the train station, taxi gone and suitcases back in their neat row, we waited.

  “My,” said Elana Coll, “that was positively graceful.”

  “You looked the part.”

  “Me, and a lot of padding.” She rolled her shoulders. “Don
’t stare. They’re not real, you know.”

  “You don’t need the help anyway.”

  “I may keep this wig. I’d love to hold on to the luggage, too. But I suppose monogrammed initials make that a bad idea.”

  “Very.” We had moved fast to pack Ingrid’s room and secure the suitcase. The police hadn’t yet identified the bodies found in the incinerated clinic, so complete was the destruction. As soon as the investigators and the press learned that the dead included Ingrid Ekby and the Slattery brothers, every law enforcement agency west of the Rockies would be swarming the city.

  Elana’s green eyes flashed. “You should keep your new look, though. Van Shaw as a blond. Kinky.”

  Hollis’s Cadillac turned into the loading zone, sparing me further grief. He gaped through the window at the two of us, almost sputtering while I loaded the luggage in the trunk—barely enough room, even with the wide beam of the Caddy—and opened the door for Elana.

  “Such a gentleman.” She smirked.

  The Caddy pulled a fast U-turn and proceeded without pause onto 2nd Ave. Hollis shook his head as if he’d walked into a cobweb. “Take those things off before I crash, please.”

  I removed the wig and glasses, gratefully. The makeup Elana had painted on my cheek to diminish my scars could wait. Overkill, maybe, since I’d kept my face angled away from the hotel cameras. But better safe than sentenced.

  Over two million dollars in the suitcase. Hollis had arranged with one of his many contacts, this one engaged in some sort of Balkan financial market, to take the kilobars off our hands for a small percentage of the take. The bulk of it would be converted to untraceable cash. I’d already picked the recipients. A foster aid charity, a children’s defense fund. Leo Pak had told me about a hunger program for vets that had put food in his belly when he’d been too far gone to handle such trivial things himself. No end of need out there.

  “Everything good?” Hollis said.

  Two million, funneled anonymously and tax-free. Addy had assured me that her friend Enid had the know-how to set up a shell corporation, just as capably as she could trace one. Enough money to make an impact. Let the damned gold change a few lives for the better.

  “More than good,” I said.

  Forty-Five

  Cyndra and I sat on a bench at the edge of the skate park by Seattle Center. Cyndra wrestled with her skateboard. I wrestled with Stanley, keeping him from racing into the midst of the skaters zooming up and down the terra-cotta-colored ramps. I’d offered to switch, but Cyndra knew she had the easier job.

  She held the skateboard between her knees and a socket wrench in her hand. A gallon Ziploc bag holding bolts and bearings and four new skateboard wheels in electric green waited to the side. Stanley had his jaws around one of the old black wheels she had already removed. He gnawed at his prize.

  “How long do we got?” she said.

  “Have,” I said automatically. “At least an hour.” Her dad was at Mason again for an MRI. His second this week. The doctors were gearing up for something, O’Hasson thought, and while they never said yes or no, he figured they were going to take a crack at scraping his skull. Those were the words he had used, and his grin when Addy had winced could have lit up her whole house.

  “Ouch.” Cyndra stuck her knuckle in her mouth. She’d lost some skin to the board’s rough grip tape.

  “You’ve been to skate parks in L.A.?” I asked.

  “Sure. Lotsa times.”

  “And done that?” I nodded to the teenagers catching air on the quarter-pipe.

  “Have you?” she said.

  “Nope. Too chicken.”

  She smirked and finished putting the bearings and wheels on, giving each axle nut an extra-hard yank with the wrench. I thought she was about to reach for her backpack, which was full of the helmet and other gear that Addy had insisted Mick buy for her. Or else she was going to skate off without it, just to try and prove something to me. But instead she sat and gazed out of the park, toward where the Needle pointed up at a pure azure sky.

  “Addy said she wants me to stay here,” she said. “If.”

  Mick had talked to Cyndra, leveling with her about his condition and promising to fight it. She was old enough to think ahead for herself, to what she might have to do if that fight didn’t go their way.

  “Do you want to stay?” I said.

  “I think so.”

  I nodded.

  “But I don’t know,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Both of us turned as a hoot went up from a group of skaters in the park. One of them had bitten the dust and was making comedy out of it by faking injury.

  “It’s okay not to know,” I repeated. “Addy just wants you to understand you’ve got options. You get me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We can all figure it out together.”

  “When the day comes,” she said, as if she were finishing a sentence I’d started. “Dad used to say that, when I was little. Worry about it when the day comes. Trying to, like, calm me down when I would get crazy about stuff that hadn’t happened yet.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Doubt it.” She reached for her helmet.

  I watched as she kicked off into the swirling riptide of skaters. Stanley barked encouragement. Before two minutes had passed, Cyndra was yelling and whooping right along with the rest of them. Flying across the hardscape, her wild grin back in place.

  Mattu had told me—after I’d convinced him to devote our session to something other than my own sleep habits—that kids Cyndra’s age could compartmentalize tough emotions just like adults. Distraction was a positive thing. If we were honest with her about her father’s chances, and her own trauma, that would let her engage with the ordeal—Mattu’s phrase—in her own way.

  I knew something about keeping parts of yourself in separate boxes. Even walled off completely, when the truth was too painful. I also knew, without Mattu having to say it, that cracks would form in those walls. Nightmares. Bursts of rage or fear. Cyndra was a survivor, and survivors carried wounds.

  We’d help her heal those, Addy and Mick and me. When that day came.

  Today, we were all alive, and flying.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the following people for helping me through every day of EVERY DAY:

  To my agent, Lisa Erbach Vance, of the Aaron Priest Literary Agency. An appropriate start, as Lisa was the first person outside the family to champion my work, and remains the first stop for both encouragement and reality checks on manuscripts, a balance she strikes with elegance.

  To my editor, Lyssa Keusch, at William Morrow, a wonderful collaborator and friend, without whose enthusiasm and insights both the novel and I would suffer. Liate Stehlik, Danielle Bartlett, Kaitlin Harri, Richard Aquan, Miranda Ottewell, and Priyanka Krishnan are the amazing people who whip the books into shape and help them find an audience.

  To editor Angus Cargill at Faber & Faber, with gratitude for his guidance, and to the wonderful Faber team of Daisy Radevsky, Sophie Portas, and Luke Bird. And to Caspian Dennis of the Abner Stein Agency, for representing us splendidly on the far shore.

  To Áine Kelly of Galway, for her valuable help in Irish Gaelic and invaluable friendship. To John Pullman, Martin Naborowski, and the gang at Pullman’s for their expertise and showing by example every week what a gym should be. To buddy TL Frasqueri-Molina and the one and only Jason Marsden, for their experiences and tips in navigating pop-culture conventions from large to independent-nation-sized.

  To the terrific teacher and author Jerrilyn Farmer, and the rest of our Saturday morning writing group—Beverly Graf, Eachan Holloway, Alexandra Jamison, John McMahon, and Kathy Norris—for their quick pencils and quicker minds.

  My usual disclaimer: This novel is fiction, and I reserve the right to mess with jurisdictions, geography, methods, or anything else that will keep the story moving, keep the lawyers bored, and keep potentially dangerous information where and with whom i
t belongs. Beyond those guidelines, I aim for accuracy. I am deeply indebted to the professionals, named and anonymous, who have lent their hard-won knowledge to the work. From the veterans of the United States Army, those include Christian Hockman, Bco 1/75 Ranger Regiment, and Matt Holmes, 82nd Airborne, 1st Brigade combat team. As always, the really cool stuff is theirs, and any mistakes are mine.

  Thank You, Dear Reader, for picking up this book and giving it a shot. In this world of constant distraction, a little attention is a sincere compliment.

  And finally to Amy, Mia, and Madeline, for making every one of my days a celebration.

  About the Author

  A native of Seattle, GLEN ERIK HAMILTON was raised aboard a sailboat and grew up around the marinas and commercial docks and islands of the Pacific Northwest. His debut novel, Past Crimes, won the Anthony, Macavity, and Strand Magazine Critics Awards for Best First Novel. He now lives in California with his family, and frequently returns to his hometown to soak up the rain.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Glen Erik Hamilton

  Hard Cold Winter

  Past Crimes

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  every day above ground. Copyright © 2017 by Glen Erik Hamilton. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.