by Lena Pierce
Dirk
I ride quietly around the roads surrounding the motel, checking all the alleyways and the hidden places with my army senses turned up to the max. I feel like I’m overseas again as I climb off my bike and search the inaccessible alleyways, like any second somebody could spring up with a gun in their hand. I should’ve made friends in the club. I’m pissed at myself for being so detached. A lone wolf is all well and good until the cold rises and he’s left outside, alone, to freeze to death. But no, that won’t happen to us …
Even if she wants me to help her friend, I reflect ruefully. She won’t let me take her, not with her friend still at the club, and I’m not sure if I have the stomach to kidnap her. Funny, ’cause I wouldn’t have questioned it before. I suppose life moves in mysterious fuckin’ ways and all that.
Once I’ve scouted out the surrounding area and I’m certain they don’t know where she is, I got to a nearby diner to get some food. I’ll take it back to the motel and we’ll eat; that will be a start, at least. The rest, the planning and the arguing and the fighting, that’ll come later.
“Hello, handsome,” an old gray-haired matron says from behind the counter. “How can I help you today?”
“Can I get …” I glance up at the over-counter menu. There’s a wide selection, but that’s not what causes me to laugh and clasps my hands behind my head, laughing all the harder when the thought hits me: I don’t even know what kind of food she likes. Here I am thinking I might care about her, wondering why I like her so much, and I don’t even know if she likes ketchup! “Just give me a second,” I say. I go to a nearby table and pick up a menu as the lady looks at me sideways.
I sit in the corner booth and wave the waitress over. “Black coffee,” I say. “I’ll be ordering some food boxed up after.”
“Okay, doll.”
I look over the menu, wondering. I can always call the motel phone, but then I realize that the idea makes me nervous—nervous! I don’t know what the fuck has gotten into me, but suddenly talking to a woman makes me feel the same way I did when I was standing outside a hot zone overseas, getting ready for the blood and the sand and chaos. Maybe not the same, but close: a residue swirling around my head.
“Are you gonna stare at that thing all day?”
My gaze snaps up at the voice, familiar but impossible. I just spoke to him in North Carolina …
But there he is, Kenny, Ghost, with his barrel chest and his fire-red ponytail and his oddly childlike eyes. He’s grown a bushy red-black beard since I last saw him.
“The fuck?” I say, raising an eyebrow. “How the fuck …”
“Rerouted the call,” he says, smiling and sitting down. “Had a feeling you might call up again, so I taught Angie how to use this clever piece of tech. You should’ve seen her face. In the end I had to get her nephew to do it.” He waves over the waitress and gets himself a coffee all while I sit there, dumbfounded. “Aren’t you gonna say anything, Dirk?”
“Kenny,” I whisper. Then it hits me and I lean across the table and pat him on the back so heavily that he almost spills his coffee. “Kenny the goddamn ghost!”
“The not-so-friendly ghost if you keep hitting me like that.”
“Ha,” I say, hitting him again. “You came out of fuckin’ nowhere.”
“Maybe I’m dead. Ain’t that how ghosts come out of nowhere?”
“What are you doing down here, man?” I ask, sitting back and taking a sip of my black coffee.
“I’ve got some business in LA,” he says. “I thought it’d make sense to drop by here first. It’s a strange thing, Dirk, ’cause I had to leave about an hour after you called. I just about had time to show Angie’s nephew how to work the tech and then I had to kiss the wife and the kids and hightail it outta there.”
“Why do you keep calling him Angie’s nephew? Ain’t he related to you in some way since she’s your auntie?”
He rubs his forehead, scowling. “I hope you’re joking. She ain’t my aunt. She’s my aunt’s high school friend.”
“Ah,” I say. “So a kid, a wife … I never would’ve dreamed of that, Kenny.”
“No,” he agrees. “Me neither. But a man can get lonely up in the woods.” His eyes settle on me. “I’d wager a man can get lonely even when he’s surrounded by people, too, or maybe it’s even easier to get lonely that way.”
“Now who’s a woman?” I laugh. “So what about the apartment, then? I guess you didn’t have time to sort that.”
“No,” Kenny says. “I’ll do it when I get back. In the meantime, just head for Angie’s place. She’s got a spare room she’ll let you stay in. But Dirk … you know I like to know what I’m walking into before I take the first step. And you probably know that I’ve got contacts all over.”
“You’ve always had the knack,” I agree.
He leans forward, resting his forearms on the table, and looks at me seriously. “Your boss is an animal,” he says. “He’s a goddamn beast. A fuckin’ savage. I got these.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a sheaf of photos, sliding them across the table to me the same way he used to slide intel back in the day.
I take it and leaf through them. Image after image of hell, bloody hell, red hell: a woman, mutilated and ruined, her face a bloody wreck. The only way I know she’s a woman is because one of her breasts is partially undamaged.
“Shit,” I say. “Jackson did this?”
“Two months ago,” Kenny says. “A dog like that needs to be put down, Dirk. I don’t know if running’s the best move.”
“With all due respect,” I say, “I’m one man, and we both know that no matter how tough a man is, one man is one man.”
“And we both know that walking away from a job like this leaves a mark on a man he just might not be able to live with.”
I slide the photos back across the table and drain the rest of my coffee. “She doesn’t want to leave anyway,” I mutter. “She has a friend in the club.”
“Who is she?” Kenny asks.
“I only met her recently, damn recently. But I saved her life, Kenny, I saved her life and … I don’t know. I came here to grab us some food and I got myself all fucked up ’cause I don’t know what kind she likes, and how can a man say he cares about a woman when he hasn’t even known her long enough to know what food to get her?” I wave the waitress over for more coffee. I feel comfortable saying all this to Kenny where I’d feel defensive otherwise, even with the brothers, maybe especially with the brothers. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, truth be told.”
“Love,” Kenny says with a wicked grin. “Love don’t make much sense, Dirk. I know that firsthand. I fell in love with my wife the first time I laid eyes on her at Angie’s bar. I didn’t even know her goddamn name and I loved her. That’s how it works sometimes. I wouldn’t fight it so much, but I guess that’s like telling a bear not to hibernate, eh?”
“I need to keep her safe,” I say, and my voice is grave all of a sudden. “I have to. I can’t let him get to her.”
“But how do you keep somebody safe? By running away from the danger, or by making sure the danger can never catch up to you?”
“And those two ain’t the same thing,” I mutter.
“No,” Kenny says. “We both know that.”
Then he abruptly stands up, drains the last of his coffee, and stands at the side of the table ready to walk away. “I’ve got business to sort out,” he says. “If I don’t see you again, take this.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out a small silver medal: my medal, the one I gave him when we came home because looking at it just made me remember. “I think it’s time you had it back.” He places it on the table. “Maybe it’ll remind you what courage is.”
I look long at him, and then at the medal. Finally, I take it. It’s cold. Unfamiliar. I look down at it, running my thumb around the edge, feeling every groove and bump. When I look up, Ghost is gone, the door flapping in the light breeze. I pocket the medal and go to the counter.
“Two pie
ces of pie,” I say. “Some large fries, two burgers, two diet colas, and a big bottle of water.”
I take out my roll of cash, lay the notes on the counter, and then carry the boxes out to my bike. I put the boxes in the back of my bike and then ride back toward the motel with the sense that something vital has changed. Maybe that’s what happens when you see a ghost.
I walk into the motel room to find Meghan sat with her back to the wall, her legs spread out on the bed, staring into space as though thinking. I’m not sure what to say to her, and anyway the silence is not uncomfortable, so I pull up a chair and sit next to the bed. I spread the food out in front of us, placing hers where she can reach it, and then lean back in the chair and take a giant bite out of my burger. She glances at me out of the corner of her eye and smiles. It’s a small smile, almost a secret smile.
Then she picks up her burger and takes a giant bite, too, and right away I know what she’s doing: trying to beat me.
I swallow, wash it down with some diet cola, and then take an even bigger bite, far bigger than hers.
She giggles almost silently. We eat the rest of our meal in this silence, the sort of silence that would normally make me uncomfortable, the sort of silence that would normally make me run far, far away. But this is the type of silence I could get used to. A man might forget he’s nothing but a war dog in silence like this.
Chapter Nineteen
Dirk
“You were in the army, right?” she says after about fifteen minutes of the unbroken silence. Unbroken, that is, except for chewing and laughing.
“Yes,” I say, nodding.
“Why?” she asks. Food wrappers lay all around her. As she talks she cleans them away neatly, folding them up and putting them in the paper bag. I immediately see her in her store, cleaning and sorting with the same neatness. I remember the stacked receipts, the neat notepad.
“Because I wanted to serve my country, ma’am,” I say. “I wanted to be all I could be and make Uncle Sam proud.”
“Hmm,” Meghan says. “Maybe that’s it, or part of it. And I think that’s a very good answer. I just don’t think it’s the total truth.”
“No, maybe not. But why do you give a damn?”
“Can’t a lady want to know a little more about her kidnapper?” she retorts.
“Kidnapper,” I mutter. “Is that what you see me as—still?”
“No,” she says softly. “I was only joking. Don’t be such a baby.”
I let out a booming laugh before I can stop myself. “Goddamn. The fucked-up thing is, I don’t even disagree with you. Yeah, me being the baby … that’s what you do to me, Meghan, you goddamn witch.”
She blushes, flutters her eyelashes at me, all in all looking like the sexiest damn thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on. “It is strange,” she admits. “I mean, how we … I don’t want to get all soppy and weird but—”
“I know what you mean,” I assure her, stunned by the admission. “I—you’re not crazy or anything. Or maybe you are; maybe we both are. Goddamn, maybe the whole world is.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she says. “Why did you join the army?”
“Because I was nineteen,” I say.
“And that’s the whole story?” She raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t usually share stuff like this. Come to think of it, I never have. Maybe with Ghost, but he was there.”
“Ghost?”
“A friend of mine.”
“Ah, so you do have friends.”
“Two friends in the whole goddamn world. Ghost …”
“Who’s the other?”
I grin at her, and she blushes again.
“Oh, how lucky I am!” she exclaims. “Are you ever going to tell me, Dirk, or are we going to do this dance all evening?” She looks to the curtain as though to draw my attention to the fading sunlight.
“If you really want to know …”
“I do,” she assures me, folding the edge of the paper bag once she’s packed all the mess away. She places it on the bedside table, facedown so that the fold doesn’t unravel, and then places her hands in her lap, cross-legged.
“Okay, then. I guess I could tell you.”
***
Cancer is a wicked thing. I think most people know that. I think most people are scared of it, too. It lurks in the background like Death itself and just waits, leisurely, for its time to strike. And when its time comes, it is never sympathetic. It is never kind. It strikes seemingly randomly. What’s a father, a brother, a hard-working man, a husband? It doesn’t mean a thing to cancer; it just takes.
I stood at the edge of my father’s new grave on my nineteenth birthday wondering how a man like him could be brought so low so fast by something that didn’t even give a warning. My old man was a sturdy man who worked as a laborer for a building company. He didn’t smoke and he only drank every few weeks. He liked to make little models out of bits and pieces he’d find around the building site, stick them together with hot glue and hang them around the apartment. They comforted Mom, he said, and Mom needing comforting since she was always teetering on the edge of another mental breakdown.
I turned at the sound of her footsteps: a pale wraith of a woman, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked. “Can we go?” she said, not daring to look down at the grave. She hovered at the fringe of the ceremony like a shadow. “I don’t like it here, Dirk.”
“Okay, Mom,” I said, taking her hand. “I’ll drive us home.”
“Thank you.”
In the car, she said, “What are we going to do about money?”
I had thought of that myself. Dad was the breadwinner but he hadn’t left us much bread. I was working at a garage and a takeout place, bussing tables, but Mom had decided to revamp half the apartment as a way to distract herself from her grief.
“We could cancel the kitchen work, Mom,” I said.
She almost lost her mind at that. She leaned back in her chair and clawed her hands down her face.
“Relax,” I said, pulling over. “I’ll think of something.”
The next day I was walking from the garage to the restaurant when I saw the army officer, a tall, gray-haired lion who looked like the sort of fella who never had to worry about a goddamn thing. I walked over to him and said, “Are you recruiting?”
He looked me up and down. I worked out and I fought with people if there was fighting to be had, which there was plenty of since Dad had died. He nodded, waved toward a booth where another older man was sitting, and that was that. Training, decent wage, possibility for advancement.
I went into the army and sent the money back home to my mom, and then one day, just before I entered the intelligence service, I got a letter from home telling me that Mom had hanged herself from the ceiling fan of her new kitchen. I sat in the mess hall staring down at the letter with my hands shaking until Ghost led me back to our bunks, and that night I just lay there, staring up at the ceiling, both my parents dead.
“Are you gonna stay?” Ghost asked me a couple of days later.
I looked at him sideways, confused by the question. “Of course I’m gonna fuckin’ stay,” I said. “The fuck you think I am? I’m not quitting just because she did. I’m not bailing out just because she decided it was the best goddamn thing to do.” I thumped myself in the chest. “We keep on, ’cause that’s all we can do.”
I joined the intelligence service and I led double lives, tricking people and making people trust me and always, in the back of my mind, wondering what life would’ve been like had that bastard cancer not picked Dad and that bitch madness had not picked Mom. But soon the grief faded, healed over, scarred, and didn’t hurt so much anymore. After three years I stopped going by the graves and after four I sold the old apartment and became a nomad anytime I was home on leave. And then, once I had had enough of the army, I joined the club because it was there and the idea of doing anything else seemed ridiculous to me.
I’d been waging war for so long, it was all I
knew how to do.
***
I stop, taking a deep breath. The words just spilled out of me and now I feel exhausted. Drawn-out. I finish the last of my fries and place the trash on the bed, which she cleans away absentmindedly. Then she reaches across and places her hand on mine, running her finger along my knuckles. “Thanks for sharing that with me,” she says.
“What about you?” I ask.
“My dad was shot and killed in front of me.” She shrugs as though it’s not a big deal. I get the sense that she’s talked about it many times before, probably with her friend from the club. “My mom left early. I can’t really remember her.” She shrugs again. “Tragedy is a part of life, isn’t it?”