Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  The office was four steps up, with frame walls and big plate-glass windows looking down onto the shop. One end of the room held an old oak desk with a laptop computer, printer, and neat stacks of paperwork. Behind it stood a tall green steel file cabinet and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves loaded with diagnostic manuals and old Chilton guides. At the other end of the room was a faded brown leather couch, two wooden chairs, and a low table made of a truck rim and a big rough slab of redwood. It looked homey. Comfortable.

  The static still didn’t like it. Neither did Peter.

  His neck felt like it was caught in a vise.

  Al walked behind the old desk, placed the jack handle gently atop the old file cabinet, and dropped himself into a modern office chair that looked like it was made for a space station. Before Peter registered the movement, the mechanic had taken a black automatic handgun out of a side drawer and set it on the desktop with a thump. His eyes were hidden behind the reflecting rounds of his glasses. “So,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Peter carefully unslung his pack and laid it on the scarred oak desk, then took several steps back. June stood a step back and to one side, closer to the door.

  “Open it,” he said. “There’s a Colt Python .357 on the top. You’re in no danger from us. We need help.”

  Al tapped his pistol with two fingers. Glanced at the pack, at June, and back to Peter. “So why the fuck are you sweating like you just ran a four-minute mile?”

  “I have a thing,” said Peter. Embarrassed, still. It felt like weakness, although he knew it was biochemical, his brain miswired by the war. But it still felt like weakness. “I can’t be inside,” he said. “I’m claustrophobic.”

  “Or what, you sweat to death?”

  Peter didn’t want to explain this, but he needed a car. No, he needed a favor. The man had a right to ask. He could feel June beside him, watching. She might as well know, too.

  “I sweat, my muscles tense up, I start to hyperventilate. It’s called a panic attack.”

  Al gave Peter a long thoughtful look, drumming his fingers on the gun. Finally he said, “I got a nephew with the opposite problem, he doesn’t like to go outside. He was in the war. Overpasses, rooftops, high windows, all the places snipers used to shoot from. They freak him out. He’s a programmer now.”

  “Is he getting better?”

  The mechanic shrugged. “I think so. He bought a motorcycle. You can’t ride that in your living room.” He watched the sweat bead on Peter’s neck and face. “You were over there, too.”

  Peter nodded. “Marines.”

  Al sighed again. Then he pushed Peter’s pack back across the desk without opening it. “Bring those chairs over, would you?”

  By the time Peter came back with the chairs, the black automatic had disappeared. He held a chair for June, then sat. June was looking at Al’s hands with their faded blue tattoos.

  “Some people tried to pull June into their car a few days ago. We don’t know who or why. They told her they were government, but she didn’t believe them. She’s an investigative reporter, writes about technology. She went to hide at a university research station, but they found her again. We just met this morning. I helped her get away, but we totaled her car, rolled it a few times, which is how we got so beat up. She needs a new one. Something very reliable, something that won’t stand out. A small SUV would be good, or a minivan. Something she could sleep in if she had to.”

  Al raised his eyebrows, his voice deadpan. He looked at June, at Peter.

  “You expect me to believe that story.”

  “You can believe it or not,” said Peter. “It’s the truth.”

  Al shook his head. “How do you plan to pay? You can understand that I’m reluctant to take a personal check. You carry that kind of cash around?”

  “I don’t carry cash, but if I can borrow your phone, I can wire money directly into your account. You can check with your bank before you give her the keys.”

  “This would be the young lady’s car, then.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. He glanced at June. She was looking directly at him now. Peter was aware of the sweat running down his face. His heart like a hammer in his chest. Soon he’d have trouble catching his breath. “I don’t know what she wants to do next. It’s her show. If she wants my help, she’s got it. But no paperwork, no records of any kind. We think they were tracking her phone.”

  “But I could give her the keys and you’d watch her drive away.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “If that was what she wanted.”

  June watched him intently. Al leaned back in his chair with his fingers steepled on his chest, invisible calculations going on behind the wire-rimmed glasses.

  “My mom owns the grocery store,” he finally said. “She loves that red Mustang out there. Always borrowing it, racing around. Seventy years old, thinks she’s Danica Patrick driving the Indy 500.” He shook his head. “Anyway, she’s got a Honda minivan, forty thousand miles. Maybe that would work?” He was looking at June as he said it. She nodded. He looked back at Peter. “You buy my mom that pony car, we’ll call it an even trade. I’ll give you two weeks before I call it in stolen.”

  Peter did the math in his head. The number on the Mustang’s FOR SALE sign was double or triple the value of the Honda. He’d expected to pay a premium, but this was a little steep. He thought about the black Explorers pulling off the two-lane. They definitely needed the wheels.

  “For that kind of money, June gets legal title,” he said. “How about your mom signs it over, dates it two weeks ago, and we register it next week in another state. That protects her and you.”

  “Done,” Al said, and stood to shake hands. From the speed of his agreement, Peter could have done better on the price, but he didn’t care. It was only money, and not even his. At least not originally.

  Peter pointed to the phone on the desk. “May I?”

  Al shook his head. “Use this one.” He fished around in his desk again, came out with a basic flip phone. “It’s a prepaid,” he said apologetically. “I got some old friends who are a little paranoid. They still worry about the Man listening in.”

  A smile ghosted across June’s face.

  Peter went to the window and keyed in a phone number he’d memorized. It helped a little to look outside. He could see the highway, too. No more Explorers out there yet.

  “Who the hell is this?” The voice was like heating oil, slippery and dark and latent with combustion.

  “How are Dinah and the boys?” asked Peter. “That dog chew your ass up yet?”

  “Holy shit, it’s the jarhead.” Peter could hear the tilted grin. “Let me call you back from another number.”

  Al’s friends weren’t the only ones who were paranoid.

  The phone rang thirty seconds later. Peter flipped it open. “Who the hell is this?”

  “Motherfucker,” said Lewis. “Where you been, Jarhead?”

  “Jarhead” was a term of pride, if you were a Marine. From anyone else it was an insult. Except for Lewis, who’d earned the right.

  “Working out a few things,” said Peter. “I need some money.”

  “No money here,” said Lewis. “Sad story. All gone. Blew it at the track.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lewis was a career criminal who had put his profits into real estate and the stock market. If Lewis had grown up in Palo Alto instead of a rust belt ghetto, Peter figured he’d be piloting some venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. He’d helped Peter with a problem in Milwaukee the year before. The way it had turned out, there was quite a bit of cash in the end. In an uncharacteristic move, Lewis had refused to take most of his share. He’d gotten a windfall of other intangible benefits: reconnecting with Dinah, his childhood sweetheart, and her two boys.

  “Listen,” said Peter, “I can’t talk right now. Let me give you an account number.” He read the n
umber that Al had written on a piece of notepaper, then told him the amount he’d agreed on for the Mustang.

  “Gimme a sec,” said Lewis. Peter could hear the clicking of a keyboard. He imagined Lewis sitting at the long walnut table in his office, laptop at one end, 10-gauge shotgun broken down for cleaning at the other. “Done. Where the hell are you? You need a hand with anything?”

  “Not yet. I’ll let you know. Everybody okay on your end?”

  “We’re good. Boys are growin’ like weeds. I’m over there every day, bein’ all domestic, but Dinah don’t want me to move in just yet.”

  “She’s doing the right thing, you’re a bad influence. Hey, I need some walking-around money, too. Can you set up an account for me, put a few bucks in?”

  “Jarhead.” Lewis said it the way someone else might say dumbass or dipshit. “We got more than twenty accounts. Switzerland, Caymans, Bank of fuckin’ America. You just need to log on.”

  “A bear ate my ATM card.”

  “Excuses, hell. Don’t be embarrassed, just say you lost it. Where are you?”

  “North of San Francisco.”

  “Let me know where you go to ground. Any half-ass city will do. I’ll hook you up.”

  They said their good-byes and Peter turned away from the window. June was staring at him like he’d stepped out of a flying saucer.

  Al had turned on his computer and was peering at the screen through his glasses, occasionally hitting a key or clicking the mouse. “Okay,” he said. “Money’s there.” He picked up his office phone and punched in a number. “Ma? Do me a favor and drive your van over here. I got a surprise for you. Ma, c’mon. You’re gonna like it, I promise.”

  “Tell her to meet us in the back,” Peter said, still mindful of the black Ford Explorers and capable men with expensive guns.

  In the back, they’d be out of sight from the road.

  • • •

  PETER LIMPED OUT of the shop’s rear door into low gray clouds like a ceiling overhead. It wasn’t standing on a mountaintop under clear blue skies, but it was better than being inside. The rain had started again, soft and cool, and his chest started to open up a little.

  Although June had stopped looking at him.

  Al’s mom was a round, smiling woman in a designer tracksuit with purple eye shadow and glossy black hair under an orange paisley scarf. When Al handed her the keys to the Mustang, she jumped up and down, smiling so wide they could see the lipstick on her teeth.

  The Honda van was pale green and showroom-clean, with a pine-tree air freshener hung over the rearview mirror. “She’ll do a hundred,” said Al’s mom. She stood on the gravel talking to June, who’d climbed into the driver’s seat. “Rock solid at speed on a good road. And she’s like invisible to radar, the cops don’t even see her. Either that or they think you got screaming kids inside and they don’t want to deal with it.”

  June revved the quiet engine, nodding to Al’s mom. Definitely not a muscle car, thought Peter. When Al’s mom hurried off to her new ride, Peter stepped over to the van’s open window. Was he waiting for an invitation? Maybe he was.

  “So,” he said. “What do you think?”

  She looked in the rearview mirror, at her hands on the wheel, anyplace but at Peter’s face. Her voice was ragged. “I don’t know who you are.”

  He resisted the urge to touch her. “I’m just a guy,” he said. “I went to war and came home. Like a lot of people.”

  “You’re not like other people.”

  “Maybe not,” he admitted.

  “I don’t know if I can trust you.”

  “I was a lieutenant in the Marines. Of course you can trust me. I’m like a Boy Scout, with muscles.”

  She turned to look him full in the face. “No,” she said. “You aren’t.”

  God, she was tough. “June, you don’t owe me anything,” he said. “But I can protect you. Keep you safe.”

  “Give me the gun,” she said.

  Peter shifted to let the daypack slide from his shoulder, then held it by the strap while he opened the flap to the main compartment. The .357 sat in easy reach atop the black drawstring sack. She put out a hand and touched the weapon with her splayed hand, laid her fingers across the walnut grip. He thought she’d pick up the gun, but she didn’t. She turned from the waist and grabbed the whole heavy pack with both hands and took it from him, laid it beside her on the passenger seat.

  Then she stomped on the gas, gravel spitting from her tires as she slewed the van around in a tight half circle and out to the road.

  Peter guessed she’d made her decision.

  He stood in the softly falling rain, watching her go.

  Al walked up beside him, shaking his head. “Man, you are something stupid. It was me, I’d be hanging on to that bumper with my teeth.”

  Peter nodded. “I sure thought about it.”

  But he knew it wouldn’t have worked if he’d pushed it. She’d seen something in him that scared her. And rightly so. Some days he scared himself. It had to be her choice.

  He felt something in his stomach, or just above it. An emptiness there, a dark pit. It made no sense. They’d only met that morning. He knew almost nothing about her. But he also felt like he’d known her forever.

  He hadn’t thought you could be so attached to someone in so short a time.

  They’d packed an awful lot into that day.

  He had to admit that it wasn’t all about her. Yes, she needed help. But it felt so good, using all those parts of himself that had gone sour and rusty. That Marine inside him, who wanted—who needed—to be useful.

  Without that, he was just a guy with a bear bite out of his boot and blood in his hair.

  Sore leg, sore ribs, and still cramped up and sweating from ten minutes inside.

  No change of clothes, not a nickel in his pocket, and his truck a few hundred miles away.

  Not that he was feeling sorry for himself.

  He turned to the mechanic. “How much would you give me for a totaled Subaru, maybe thirty years old?”

  Al snorted. He was cleaning his glasses with the tail of his shirt. “Not much. Where is it?”

  “Behind that pizza place.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  They headed out toward the blacktop, Al moving slowly to accommodate Peter’s limp.

  The leg was going to be a problem. He didn’t know if it was the ankle or something more serious. He should probably give it some rest, ice it. The ribs would take time, too.

  He scanned the two-lane and saw no sign of traffic, coming or going. Nothing on the secondary road. They passed long driveways to hidden houses. He peered through the trees, looking for signs of life.

  For signs of June, or her pursuers.

  It was still possible he might be of use to her.

  • • •

  THE SUBARU LOOKED like a discarded toy, crimped and crumpled, half-hidden in the scrub with the rear hatch stuck open. Peter couldn’t believe it had gotten them here. Al walked around the car, scrutinizing the damage, making small sad sounds with each new discovery. When he got to the bullet holes, the sounds got louder.

  “You rolled it, what, a couple of times? And drove away?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Man, I’m gonna buy my mom one of these. You guys should be dead. You know that, right?”

  Peter nodded again.

  “Don’t be that way,” said Al. “She’ll be okay. That girl looked pretty fierce to me.”

  “How much for the car? I’m not promising it’ll start. And the front end is shot.”

  “Parts only? I’ll give you three hundred. And that’s only because you overpaid me for that Mustang.”

  “I overpaid by a lot more than three hundred,” said Peter.

  “Yeah you did.” Al grinned. “Okay, five hundred
. Lemme see what I got in petty cash.”

  Peter heard the sound of an approaching car. He turned to look through the gap in the trees and saw one of the black Explorers turn from the secondary road onto the two-lane, heading back the way it had come.

  “Shit,” he said. “I might need to buy another car. And that gun.”

  “Maybe not,” Al said, and nodded at his mom’s grocery store across the two-lane. A green Honda minivan rocketed from hiding behind Esmerelda’s grocery, across the road, then into the dirt parking lot at speed. It came to a sliding stop snug behind the building. The driver’s window hummed down.

  “Did you mean it, back there?” asked June. “You’ll protect me?”

  Her face was tight, her eyes deep wells.

  “Yes,” said Peter.

  “But I’m the boss,” she said. “That’s the deal. I don’t like people trying to run my life, men especially. So I make the goddamn decisions. Not you. Me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You promise me.”

  “I promise,” he said. “Cross my heart.”

  “Then I want to hire you,” she said. “Whoever they are, I don’t think they’re going to stop. So I need someone.” A tear streamed down each cheek. “To watch out for me, while I work, while I find out who’s behind this. What’s really happening.”

  The shrunken thing in his chest began to enlarge again.

  “I can do that,” he said. “You don’t need to hire me.”

  “Yeah, I do,” she said. She scrubbed at the tears with the heels of her hands. “How much do you charge?”

  “Ten dollars a week. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.”

  “And I’m in charge.” She looked fiercely at him, her face red. It was important to her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “But I don’t salute. Or wear a funny hat.”

  She lifted her head. Her eyes were puffy but he could see the blaze in them again. The slight twitch of her lips that meant the start of a smile.

  “Well,” she said. “We may have to renegotiate later.” She jerked her thumb at the Subaru. “Grab the rest of my stuff and get in the car. You’re driving.”