It was better than all those Iraqi freedom fighters. Hell, this was just one dog.
What Peter didn’t want to admit was that he almost liked the feeling.
It kept him on his toes. Like old times.
Like the white static was there for a reason.
—
He unloaded the lumber and stacked it on sawhorses. But before he started putting things together again, he had to clear out all the crap that had accumulated under the porch. He stuffed disintegrating cardboard boxes and trash into construction-grade garbage bags. Broken bricks and scrap lumber he carried to the street. At the very back, tucked against the house, behind a stinking dog bed, was an old black hard-sided suitcase. It was heavier than it looked.
There was a little white mold growing on the side, but it didn’t look too bad. There might be some use left in it. Peter didn’t believe in throwing stuff away just because it had a little wear.
He set the suitcase by the side door and turned away to finish cleaning up. The stoop was cracked, and the suitcase fell over, then bounced down the four steps to the concrete walk. When it hit bottom, it popped open.
And money fell out.
Crisp hundred-dollar bills. In plain banded ten-thousand-dollar packets. Forty packets, each about a half-inch tall.
Four hundred thousand dollars.
Under Jimmy’s broken-down porch.
—
Peter went back to the suitcase.
It was a smaller Samsonite, about the size of a modern airline carry-on, probably expensive when it was new. But it definitely wasn’t new. They didn’t make suitcases like this anymore.
Despite its time under that porch, it was in decent shape. Hard to tell if it had been there for thirty years or was bought at Goodwill the month before. Peter picked up one of the stacks of hundreds he’d found inside and flipped through the bills. Mostly newer, with the big Ben Franklin head.
So the suitcase hadn’t been there too long.
There were no identifying marks on the Samsonite’s outside shell, nothing inside to tell where it had come from. But there were four little elastic pockets on the interior.
Inside each pocket was a small brown paper bag, wrinkled and worn with handling. Peter opened one bag and shook the contents out into his hand. A pale rectangular slab stared up at him. A bit smaller than a paperback book, soft and pliable like modeling clay, smelling slightly of chemicals, with clear plastic sheeting adhered to its faces.
Interesting.
He was pretty sure it wasn’t modeling clay.
3
Peter sat on Dinah Johnson’s back stoop, waiting for her to come home from work. The suitcase stood closed in the shadow of the steps. On his leg, his restless fingertips kept time to that endless interior metronome. Charlie and his little brother, Miles, were inside, doing whatever boys did in the odd, lonely freedom before their mothers came home from work.
The wind blew hard, another big autumn storm system moving across the continent. No rain, not yet. Early November in Wisconsin, Veterans Day next week. It was dark before suppertime, and getting colder. Frost on the windshield at night. Charlie had already offered Peter hot chocolate twice. He was a good kid. Both concerned and maybe a little relieved that Lieutenant Ash the crazy dog tamer wouldn’t come inside.
Peter preferred the outdoors.
After mustering out at Pendleton sixteen months before, he drove north to Washington, where Manny Martinez, another of his former sergeants, was roofing houses outside of Seattle. He left his truck in Manny’s driveway, dropped the keys and a note into his mailbox, then hitched a ride northeast, past Marblemount, into the North Cascades. Shouldered the heavy pack and headed uphill alone into the open. Staying off the main trails, above the tree line, away from people, away from everything. He planned to be out for twelve months.
It was an experiment.
—
He was fine overseas. No, not fine. The war sucked, especially for the infantry. A lot of people were trying to kill him and most of his friends. But it was also exhilarating, a series of challenges to overcome, and Peter was very good at it. Did his job, did it well, took care of his people. Even if it cost. And it did.
Leaving aside the dead, the injured. There were plenty of those. Peter’s friends among them.
But the guys still walking around, the guys still in the fight—it wasn’t easy for them, either. Some of them had trouble falling asleep, or had nightmares when they did. Overwhelming emotion, fits of tears or fury. A few guys really went off their nut, wanted to kill everyone. Peter had his ups and downs, but stayed pretty steady. His captain called him a natural war fighter. He spent eight years at it, two tours with very little time between deployments. The unit had essential skills, that’s what the brass had said.
So, the war aside, he was fine until he got off the plane at Camp Pendleton for the last time.