Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  I nodded agreement. “He may want to grind a couple of my bones to make his bread, but no. He wouldn’t do this. It has to be Broch.”

  “Trying harder, after those two assholes yesterday.”

  I’d underestimated Broch. Fogh and Guerin had both warned me that the loan shark was violent beyond reason, and I’d still played defense. Dumb. Luce was right to be angry.

  My phone rang, a 253 number.

  “Mr. Shaw? Arthur Ostrander.” Maurice Haymes’s attorney.

  “It’s a bad time, Mr. Ostrander.”

  “I’m aware. You’re on the television right now.”

  The news vans. Interview or no, their cameras would have at least filmed us from a distance. Luce was too good-looking not to wind up on the live feed.

  “It’s best that we talk immediately,” he said. “I’m at my club downtown. May I send a car for you?”

  “No,” I said. I wanted to check on Leo.

  “It’s very urgent, Mr. Shaw. Or I wouldn’t be calling at such a time.”

  Luce could hear what was being said. She gave me a puzzled look. I shrugged, almost as perplexed as she was. I had to give Ostrander credit for sparking our curiosity.

  “If it’s that important,” I said. “Meet me at Swedish Hospital on First Hill in an hour. Emergency entrance.” I hung up.

  “That’s Maurice Haymes’s lawyer?” Luce said.

  “And the family fixer, from what I can tell.”

  The flames in the house were slacking. We watched the firefighters work the hoses closer and tighter on the blaze. Luce reached out and took my arm with one hand. A temporary truce. The cut on her ear had clotted.

  “Leo saved us both,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Because he was prepared.”

  Luce shook her head no. “That was just chance. Our good luck.”

  “Maybe it was good that Leo’s brain is stuck in the suck. But I should have been ready.”

  “I’d say you can’t fix this yourself,” she said, “but those words would just wave a red flag in front of you. You shouldn’t.”

  “Somebody tried to kill us tonight.”

  Luce laughed, without any mirth. “Uncle Albie used to tell me that laundering Dono’s stolen cash through the bar was just to help us make ends meet. That we wouldn’t survive without it. Maybe that was true. But Albie didn’t do it just for the money.”

  She turned back to the house. The smoke coming from the smoldering walls was a translucent white, in the glare of the searchlights.

  “He did it because he missed the thrill,” Luce said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LUCE WANTED TO GO home instead of the E.R. My protests only made her more adamant. I made sure she was safely in bed with her friend Marcie watching her before I sped to Swedish.

  The admitting clerk asked if I was family. I told him I was Leo’s brother.

  “He’s in 14C, an examining room,” the clerk said, looking at the computer screen. “I’m missing a lot of details here. Does he have insurance?”

  Leo didn’t even have his backpack anymore. “Check with the V.A.,” I said as I started down the hall.

  The room had four padded examining tables with half-drawn curtains between each. Men in hospital gowns were asleep on two of the tables. Neither of them looked like they spent many nights indoors. Leo was sitting up in one of the far beds, bare-chested, while a young female R.N. examined the back of his neck.

  “What’s to report?” I said.

  “Toasted and roasted. But nothing much else.”

  “His clothes saved him from a lot worse,” said the nurse. She nodded to where Leo’s vest and gray hoodie were thrown over one of the room’s blocky wooden chairs. Only half of the vest was still blue. The back of it was crusted with black bits of scorched Gore-Tex. Tufts of whitish cotton showed through where the outer layer had been completely seared off.

  That could have been Luce’s skin.

  “These burns on your neck and scalp are only first degree, Mr. Pak,” the nurse said. “How is your hearing now?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine like totally clear, or fine like the ringing is less than before? Barry from the ambulance said you couldn’t hear him talking to you when you were first brought in.”

  “Less,” Leo admitted.

  “Okay. The doctor will come and see you soon.”

  Leo frowned. “I’m ready to roll.” He looked to me for confirmation.

  “Mr. Pak,” the nurse said. “You may have head trauma, or worse. You’re here already. Let’s make sure, okay?” She was a pretty girl, with wheat-colored hair and a dusting of freckles. She knew how to turn on the charm.

  “There’s nowhere else for us to crash right now anyway,” I said to Leo.

  He glanced quickly around at the windowless room. I asked the nurse to give us a minute. She took another glance at Leo, then nodded affirmatively and told us to stay put.

  “Let the doc check you out,” I said to Leo when it was just us and the sleeping homeless guys. “You might need an MRI. My head’s barely screwed on, and you were between us and the blast.”

  “It was some kind of water gel, right?” Leo said. He hunched his shoulders, his compact body becoming even more coiled.

  I nodded. “Not enough slam for plastic. Maybe some commercial brand.”

  That notion made the back of my brain itch. Something for me to talk to Ostrander about. He’d be arriving in a few minutes, if he kept our appointment.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Leo said.

  His eyes were doing that flickering dance. There was only one entrance to the room, which meant only one exit.

  “You saved our asses,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Luce is all right?”

  “She is. And she’s angry.”

  “I’m pretty pissed myself.” Leo reached out to grab his vest from the chair. “Fuck, look at this.”

  “She isn’t just mad at the bomber.”

  His eyes steadied on me. At least I had his attention. “At you?”

  I leaned on the wall across from him. “Luce thinks I might be some kind of war junkie. Only really myself when things are tight.” I shrugged. “Maybe she’s not all the way wrong. Life seems damn real to me right now.”

  “And that’s bad somehow.”

  “Bad or good. At least it’s not wandering around at night like a ghost. I didn’t tell you that part.”

  He picked at the charred vest, letting flakes of burnt fabric flutter to the tiled floor.

  “You ever feel like that?” I asked. “Cut off?”

  Leo shook his head no, and plucked another tiny black leaf. He rolled it between his fingers until it disintegrated to ash. “It’s too real. I hear things.”

  “Hallucinations?” Speaking quietly enough that the nurse wouldn’t hear, if she were just outside the door.

  “Nah. Memories. My last rotation, the whole company was in Paktika province. We sat on our thumbs for a week at Sharana, eating the base chow and lifting weights and waiting on a green light for whatever the fuck they weren’t telling us about. The rumor going around was that some Taliban chieftain had spilled everything under interrogation. He had told Intel about a training camp, way up in the mountains. Deserted during the winter.”

  I remembered Leo hesitantly asking me if my own bad dreams had started from a winter operation. Winter was dangerous as hell in Afghanistan. When we went out on a mission, we’d inevitably have less air support, or none at all. The weather might change from bright and clear to a full storm in minutes. Hiking through snow with seventy pounds on your back was like walking with anchors tied to each foot. And the enemy tended to dig into their shelters and fight hard, rather than retreat into the bitter cold.

  “So if it was deserted . . .” I prompted.

  “The chieftain had confessed that there were dead Americans buried at the camp. Guys that had been lost months before,” Leo said.

  I nodded. Given the opt
ion, Rangers wouldn’t go hunting in the deep of winter. But sometimes there wasn’t a choice.

  “What they paid us for,” I said. “To lead the way, and enjoy it when it sucks.”

  “Yeah. So the birds dropped our platoon off as close as the pilots could manage, but we still had a long night of up and more up. The elevation of the camp was somewhere around eleven thousand feet. Just a ghost town, really. Dry stone walls and plywood sheeting for doors and one iced-over well. No wonder the Taliban only used it in the summer.”

  “Did you find them?”

  Leo looked at the wall. I wondered if he’d ever spoken this story out loud before, even during the in-patient program back in Utah. When he started again, his voice was fast and light, his words skipping over themselves.

  “We had the K9 with us and she sniffed out the right spot fast enough. A patch about ten by ten. Obvious once we brushed the snow away. We started in at the edges with pickaxes. The sun was coming up but you could hardly tell with the fog and the cloud layer. Took us about three hours to clear the frozen top soil and the dirt underneath. It was a mass grave. Two of our infantry guys, and a bunch of locals. Families. Maybe people who’d refused to collaborate.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They were all stuck together. We had to cut them out of their clothes to pull them apart. Otherwise . . .”

  I nodded. Otherwise the skin would peel off as readily as the clothing. I’d seen corpses left out in the cold, too.

  “We’d brought bags but the bodies wouldn’t fit inside. All their limbs were fixed in place, sticking out, and nobody wanted to try moving them. Too worried something would snap off. We just wrapped our boys with bags and tape as good as we could, re-buried the rest, and called for exfil.”

  Someone walked past the door, hurrying along to another room down the hall. Leo stopped.

  “You said that you hear things,” I said.

  He shivered, like he was coming out of a trance. “I was in the Chinook on the way back. You know how it is inside a chopper. You can’t hear shit, with the noise of the rotors and the wind and all of it. But I was right next to the bodies, where they were tied down to the floor, wrapped like Christmas presents. And I know I heard a sound. From under the plastic. Like teeth grinding on rocks. Every bump or drop of the bird, another something went crack in the bags. Muscle. Bones. I don’t know what. But I could picture it. Those two guys, nothing left of them but icicles. Breaking apart from the inside out.”

  God. “That would screw with anybody’s head, Leo.”

  “I didn’t think on it like that, not right then. I just thought, That’s messed up. But later on . . .” He faltered.

  “Like scary movies as a kid. It doesn’t bother you while you’re watching. It’s later, when you’re thinking about it at night.”

  “That’s right,” Leo said. “Later. In the dark.”

  I waited. He didn’t say more. He just looked at the burned remains of one of his only possessions. I knew Leo was twenty-five years old. But his face looked twice that, and his eyes in that moment were ancient.

  “You brought them home,” I said. “Whatever else, those men are where they should be because of you.”

  My leather jacket had been spared the fire, along with the few items I’d had in the truck, including one of Dono’s burner phones. I programmed my number into it and handed it and my jacket to Leo.

  “Phone’s charged. Call me when they cut you loose.”

  He nodded, turning the little silver clamshell over and over in his hands.

  “Leo.”

  I waited until he met my eyes.

  “You’re in the dark,” I said. “But you aren’t alone in it, brother. Clear?”

  His skin was taut across the bones around his eyes.

  “The dark’s where we go to work,” he said.

  I grinned, almost a snarl. “Goddamn right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IT WASN’T OSTRANDER WAITING at the entrance. It was Rudy Rusk, leaning his stout mass against a Cadillac parked in a red zone. He wore the same blue blazer and gray trousers combo as the last time I’d seen him. The blazer needed to be let out. It puckered across his folded arms.

  Rusk’s angry face deepened another shade when I approached, smiling ear to ear.

  “Rudy. How’s your credit rating?” I said.

  He reached behind him without looking to open the rear door. “Get in,” he said, like it was a squad car.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Then we can go get milkshakes together. Isn’t taxi service a little below your pay grade?”

  Rusk’s neck tensed. He wanted to swing at me. He’d probably enjoyed punching people when he was a cop, under the easy defense of resisting arrest. Retirement wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  I kept the smile in place. “Go ahead.” After a day of getting tricked and lied to and nearly blown up, it would be a whole lot of fun to break a couple of Rudy Rusk’s teeth for him.

  He was smart enough not to take the bait. He opened the door a little wider, maybe hoping he’d get the opportunity to close it on my leg.

  “I’ll follow you,” I said. “You remember my truck.”

  It might have been my imagination, but I was half sure I heard capillaries popping in Rusk’s neck.

  I shadowed his Cadillac to a building on Cherry Street, downtown. Rusk pulled into the valet stand outside. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning, but an attendant in a burgundy waistcoat popped out of the closest door immediately. I opted for the meter across the street.

  The entrance to the white stone building was bookended by ornamental columns. Similar columns braced each fifteen-foot window on the first floor. Rusk waited for me in the doorway, at the top of a short flight of steps. A large calligraphic letter A was painted on the pebbled glass of the door. As I walked up, the door opened. The man behind it wore a suit coat in the same burgundy color as the valet’s vest.

  “Good evening, Mr. Rusk,” the doorman said, and nodded to me. “Sir.”

  “What’s the A stand for?” I asked him.

  “The name of the club, sir. Aerie.”

  Of course it was. I could scoff at rich men naming their playhouse after the home of eagles. But my grandfather’s bar had been named for a legend about a wicked woman and the Devil, so I supposed I shouldn’t judge.

  I let Rusk lead the way. The club’s lobby was floored in marble and topped with a huge glass chandelier, and a small desk where the doorman sat. There was no other furniture. Each broad wooden door off the lobby was closed.

  “Mr. Ostrander is in the lounge,” the doorman said, leading us to the first door on the right. He knocked twice and slid the door open.

  If the lobby was severe, the lounge was made to contrast it. Low leather chairs arranged in circles, a tawny wall-to-wall carpet and long bar at the far end. The décor looked early ’60s, either as a retro nod to Seattle’s jet-era boom times, or because it made the members feel young again. Most of the lights were dimmed and the room was cool. Ostrander occupied the brightest corner, near a hissing gas fireplace.

  “Thank you for coming at such a difficult time,” he said to me. “Please sit down. Can I offer you something?” He didn’t acknowledge Rusk.

  I shook my head no. There were two chairs, one opposite him and one closer to the fire. I’d had more than enough of flames for the night, but I chose that seat anyway. I didn’t want my back to the open room. Rusk eased himself into one of the chairs in the next circle over.

  “Let me start by apologizing for what must have seemed some odd behavior the other day,” said Ostrander. He wore another three-piece, this one a glen plaid in muted brown. He looked tired, like gravity was pulling extra hard on his gaunt frame. “Rudy was acting in our interests, you must understand.”

  “I must.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You were apologizing for your man,” I prompted.

  “Yes. Rudy explained to me what transpired in the Columbia parking garage,
after our meeting. He overstepped his authority. I never asked him to search your vehicle, nor implied that he should do so.” It was amazing how Ostrander could make any conversation sound like he was reading from a contract.

  I looked at Rusk. “So what did plant the idea in your head?”

  Ostrander leaned forward. “You’ve had a terrible night. From the newscast, I understand your home may be destroyed? Thank goodness you and your friend are unharmed.”

  I inhaled to speak and Ostrander held up a hand to stop me.

  “I’m saying this because things may seem at their lowest,” he said. “But there is opportunity here. Our offer still stands, if you allow Maurice and I to overcome the bad first impression we made.”

  I looked around at the lounge. A rosy glow from the dimmed overhead lamps caught facets on cut crystal glasses behind the bar. The bar itself looked like real walnut, and so did the wall paneling.

  “Depends on the offer,” I said.

  Ostrander smiled his mortician’s smile, the one that mimicked kindness without providing any warmth. “Before we go further, I must make something clear. I am not officially representing Haymes Development in this conversation. Everything we discuss is strictly hypothetical.”

  “Except the money.”

  “Excepting that, yes.”

  “Go on. If I think I can help you out, we’ll talk price.”

  He nodded. “About two weeks ago, one of the sites under HDC suffered a burglary.”

  “Water gel explosives,” I said.

  Ostrander stared at me for an instant before firing an angry glance at Rusk.

  “Rudy didn’t tell me,” I said. “You’re looking for boxes, which you’ve already told me Kend had. HDC is a construction company, among other things. And tonight you called my number less than an hour after someone threw a bomb through my window. The bomb was made from a commercial explosive, very stable, like a building company would use for blasting rock or controlled demolitions.”

  Ostrander took a sip from his glass. Scotch neat, from the look of it. His knobby wristbones extended from sleeves closed with cufflinks shaped like Roman coins, with an emperor’s laureled head in profile.

  “I misjudged you, Mr. Shaw,” he said.