The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)

She glared out the windshield like she was angry at the world. “He had veterans’ benefits, and they were good benefits. There was money for college. But he wouldn’t even apply. He said he didn’t want to spend his life sitting at a desk.” She shook her head. “James never had trouble with motivation in his life. There was something wrong with him. I wanted him to talk to the VA, but he wouldn’t do that, either. He definitely wouldn’t talk to a therapist. He wouldn’t do anything. He slept all the time. I’d get home after working a double shift to find James asleep on the couch, a sink full of dirty dishes, and the boys glued to the Xbox without their supper. It went on for almost a year.”

Fatigue, anger, depression. These were classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress. And a traumatic brain injury, too. Peter knew it. Dinah knew it. Jimmy probably knew it, too. But that didn’t mean she could help him, or that he could help himself.

If Peter had been there, instead of up in the mountains, could he have helped?

Maybe that was just ego, Peter thinking he would have made the crucial difference. But he wasn’t there. He’d never know. He’d let Jimmy down. And now the man was dead.

Something in Dinah had deflated. The breath just gone out of her. Peter didn’t say anything. He knew she wasn’t really talking to him. She was talking to the empty air, to the cold world outside the glass.

She took a breath and straightened up again.

“Finally, I sat him down. I told him that I loved him, but I wasn’t going to carry him. It was hard enough to live without him when he was away. But I couldn’t live without him in our own house. I just couldn’t, not like that. I told him that he had to go to school, get a job, or get out of the house. I gave him a month to develop a plan and get himself together. I thought it would work. I really did.”

Peter knew what had happened after that.

Peter wasn’t the only one living with guilt.

He waited while Dinah collected herself. “Two days later,” she said, “I came home from work and he was gone. That was four months ago.” She shook her head. “I asked him over and over to show me where he was staying, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said he’d invite me over when he got a better place. I never did see it.” She kept shaking her head as she talked, as if it would undo the past. “He found a job, tending bar. He came to the boys’ games, and to the last teacher conferences. He never missed an event. He came over for dinner once a week. I thought he was getting better.”

She took a long breath and let it carefully out.

“Then the police knocked on my door.”

She didn’t cry.

But Peter could see what it cost her not to.

Her voice like wood.

“They found him in an alley.”



Peter knew the rest. He had called the Milwaukee Police Department for the details when he came down from the mountains. The cheap street pistol that Jimmy had pressed into the soft flesh beneath his chin. The back of his head blown clean off. There was no autopsy. The city was too broke for autopsies on open-and-shut suicides.

Peter checked the mirror again. The SUV was still there, peeking out from behind a utility truck.

“Dinah,” he said, “I have to ask. How could he have come up with that kind of money?”

Dinah shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t.” She turned the paper bag in her hands. “But I can tell you it surely wasn’t from tending bar three afternoons a week.”

Following Dinah’s directions, Peter turned left, then right. She kept them off the main roads, and Peter watched while the tough neighborhood turned to true ghetto. Abandoned cars, shops boarded up, holes in the streetscape where houses had burned down or been torn down by the city. Out the side window he saw two little kids without coats, the soles falling off their laceless shoes, running around in the cold when they should have been in school. Dinah watched them, the smile fallen from her face.

“Dinah?” said Peter. “Where are we going?”

“To see a man I knew once,” she said. “A long time ago.”





7



Expensive condos lined the river two miles away, but development had stalled out at MLK Drive and hadn’t even been imagined on Center Street, where the blocks of peeling-frame storefronts leaned on one another like worn-out drunks sharing a skin disease.

Dinah pointed at a three-story corner building, maybe ninety years old but in better shape than the rest of the block with freshly painted trim and new tuckpointing on the brick. “There,” she said. “That’s Lewis’s place.”

Apartments filled the top floors. The ground floor was divided in half. The front had a tavern called Shorty’s, the name spelled out in dim neon letters over a faded Pabst Blue Ribbon logo. The big tavern windows were covered with heavy steel security grates. The rear was a storefront with a sign, black with flaking white letters, reading CENTER CITY REAL ESTATE. It looked vacant now, the storefront windows replaced with neatly painted plywood. Except for the small modern security camera mounted high with a view of the whole street.

A gleaming black Escalade was parked on the side street, ahead of a crisp silver Jeep with polished chrome trim and an older but immaculate tan GMC Yukon with a tubular steel bumper.

Nice cars for the neighborhood, he thought. Nobody was out there watching them. Just the security camera.

“This Lewis guy—do you know what he drives?” asked Peter.

“I haven’t spoken with him in years,” she said. “But I have seen him in that tan truck with the big bumper.”

Peter cruised past without slowing. The black Ford was two cars back.

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