The Drifter

by Nick Petrie

  “It’s nothing.” He shook his head, and the simple motion made his vision blur, just for a moment. It was like sparks were coming out of his ears. Part of him was surprised they didn’t light up the room. “I should go.” He stood and took his jacket off the chairback and walked to the door.

  “Lieutenant? Is something the matter?”

  He opened the ruined door and walked down the steps as the cool night air washed over him. The stars were dim in the ambient light of the city, but still they shone overhead. His shoulders dropped and his chest began to open.

  She watched him from the doorway for a long moment. Peter was ready to leave when she said, “Stay right there.”

  She disappeared inside, but left the door open. Peter took deep breaths.

  When she returned, she wore her long wool coat and carried the two mugs steaming in the night air. “It’s decaf,” she said.

  She sat on the steps, her mug on her knee. Peter stood in the yard, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling his breath come more easily.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  For the food, for the kindness. For not asking questions.

  “You’re welcome.” She lifted her mug. “Drink up before it gets cold.”

  They drank their coffee in silence.

  “Listen,” Peter finally said. “About that suitcase.”

  “No.” She shook her head sharply. “Take it with you, or give it away. I don’t care what you do with it. But I don’t want it in this house.”

  Peter nodded. “I understand that,” he said. “But what happens if the person who left it under your porch comes back for it?”

  He didn’t mention the plastic-wrapped rectangles.

  He didn’t want to worry her more than she already was.

  She watched the steam rise from her cup. Peter could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. She was the kind of person who wore her thoughts on her face, if you paid attention.

  He said, “If that person sees the porch has been fixed, won’t he wonder about his money? And won’t you want to have it here, to return to him?”

  She warmed her hands on her mug and took a sip before looking up at him. The pale blue of her eyes was startling.

  “It must have been James’s money,” she said. “I can’t think of how else it might have gotten there.” She shook her head, looking down at her coffee. “That’s not honest money. All those crisp, new hundred-dollar bills.”

  If it truly was Jimmy’s money. But Jimmy was the most honest man Peter had ever met.

  He said, “So I should turn it over to the police?”

  Dinah didn’t say anything.

  “Why shouldn’t that money be yours?” said Peter. “Think of it like winning the lottery. Pay off your house. Pay for college for your boys. Save the rest for a rainy day.”

  “No,” she said. She took a breath and let it out. “It would be noticed.”

  Peter felt the muscles bunch involuntarily in his arms and shoulders.

  Now he understood why someone had broken into her house. The thieves hadn’t found what they were looking for. But maybe they were still looking.

  He said, “Is someone watching the house?”

  “Leave the money here tonight,” she said. “I believe I know where it came from. Tomorrow we’ll go make certain.”

  “Dinah, wait.”

  She stood with her coffee and stepped up to the badly repaired doorway. “I work an early shift tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be home about three. We’ll go then.”

  The skin around her eyes was tight, the wide and generous mouth set hard, but she stood tall and proud. No, there was nothing fragile about her. She was a military wife, a strong mother of boys. A queen in green hospital scrubs. Jimmy always said he was a lucky man.

  She said, “Thank you for all your work today. It will be so nice when I can have my morning coffee on the front porch.”

  Peter could take a hint.

  He also could tell a lost cause when he saw one. He turned to go.

  She called after him, “And will you please take that awful dog to the pound?”

  Peter smiled.

  He’d wondered when she would bring up the dog.

  5

  Peter woke at first light and checked the clock stuck to the dashboard. He put the Army .45 back under the bench seat and stretched in his sleeping bag. He could see his breath in the air, and Dinah Johnson’s half-built porch on its temporary supports, just across the parking strip.

  He found that he liked the neighborhood. It was in the heart of the city, old houses built close together, and more than a little funky. There was a bungalow on the way to the lumberyard that had planted the tail end of a pink Cadillac in its yard as sculpture. The locals were a mix of black, white, and all shades of brown. College students and working-class people, freshly minted hipsters over their heads in old fixer-uppers, and artists and hippie holdouts turning their homes into giant art projects.

  Nobody bothered a guy sleeping in his truck.

  He’d tried to rent a hotel room on his first night on the road. It was a test of the experiment. The static, not even a hum when he was on foot in the Cascades, and barely a whisper when driving on narrow back roads, began to fizz in the back of his head as he rolled into the parking lot.

  The sparks flared in the lobby, and turned to lightning bolts as he walked the long mazelike hallway to his room. It was the enclosure of the walls, but also the fluorescent lights and the chemical smell of the cheap carpet. The room’s tiny window didn’t even open. He managed a quick shower with his heart racing, his whole body clenched like a fist, somehow resisting the urge to hurl the TV out the window and burn the place down. He got outside fast, still dripping, barely dressed, head aching like it was split open.

  Maybe he was just allergic to the modern world.

  After that, he slept in the truck.

  It was the big glass of the windshield, he thought, that kept the static low. Not as good as a canopy of stars in the Cascades, but he didn’t mind it, even as autumn slid downhill toward winter. And he could roll down his window whenever he wanted.

  He was used to waking up cold and hungry in the mountains.

  In fact, he liked it.

  It made him feel strong, ready. Like his motor was running.

  Like he could do almost anything.

  —

  The big dog whined softly in the back. When it changed position the whole vehicle rocked on its springs. Even after Peter had poured the cooled broth into its mouth the night before, it hadn’t wanted to get into that dark, unfamiliar box full of strange smells. He had to knock it over and climb inside carrying the damn thing in his arms like a giant growling baby.

  What would it cost to feed a dog like that?

  When he bought the truck in California on an early stateside rotation, the pickup bed was rusted out. He’d replaced it with a mahogany cargo box, five feet wide, nine feet long, with a marine plywood roof high enough for Peter to walk under, as long as he hunched over a little. It was also, Peter had to admit, sort of an art project. There were windows on both sides of the cargo box, and a skylight in the roof, all salvaged from a wrecked sailboat. The interior was finished with custom maple cabinets, neatly organized. Places for his tools, a cooler for groceries, a hook for a lantern, room to roll out his sleeping bag if he had to. Home for a wandering jack-of-all-trades.

  Of course, as it turned out, he couldn’t actually sleep back there. The walls were too close.

  The dog whined again.

  His jeans were stuffed into the bottom of his sleeping bag to keep them warm. He pulled them up before shucking the sleeping bag. The last thing he needed was a neighbor calling the police because of the naked guy. With bare feet stuffed into his unlaced combat boots, he got out of the truck and walked around back in a cold November wind.


  He opened the cargo-box door carefully, in case the dog had gotten loose. It shied away from him, but at least it wasn’t growling. Peter stepped up and checked the rope holding the stick in its jaws. The rope was fine, but the dog had chewed the shit out of the stick. White oak, one of the hardest woods out there. Almost two inches thick yesterday, there was a lot less of it today where those teeth had done their work.

  It was hard to tie the leash to a tree while the hundred-fifty-pound animal was trying like hell to get away from him.

  He was going to have to do something about the dog, and soon.

  But first, coffee.

  He pulled out the backpacking stove, set it on the parking strip with his camp chair, and fired up the old tin percolator. With real cream from his cooler, it tasted pretty good. Real cream was a luxury he didn’t have in the mountains, where he’d stirred instant cocoa into instant Folgers, although he’d learned to love the sugary rush. Anything would be better than battlefield coffee, made by pouring a single-serve packet of instant in your mouth dry, then chasing it with plastic-tasting water from a sun-heated bottle. He wasn’t ever going to drink that again.

  He wasn’t going to eat another MRE, either. Only real food.

  After cooking up eggs scrambled with sausage and sliced jalapeños and leftover rice in his battered frypan, he set aside half the food to cool and wrapped the rest in a tortilla. Then sat and ate and watched Dinah’s house and thought about the four hundred thousand dollars and pale pliable rectangles found in a suitcase.

  It wasn’t modeling clay. It was plastic explosive. Peter could tell by the chemical smell. His platoon had used it for everything from breaching doors to blowing up enemy ordnance. Four bricks wasn’t a huge amount. But he was hard-pressed to think of a good reason for having it in Milwaukee. When it got dark, he’d hide it under the frame of the truck.

  When the coffee was gone, he cleaned up his temporary kitchen, then cornered the dog with the pan of cooled eggs and sausage. He’d picked out the jalapeños. The animal calmed down when Peter started pushing the food past the stick and those outrageous teeth into the side of the dog’s mouth with his finger. The dog worked its tongue to swallow, not really resisting, and not growling at all.

  Hard to growl while you’re eating, Peter figured.

  Then he took the dog for a walk, trying not to feel too silly as the dog pulled him down the sidewalk, sniffing at every tree and bush. He was a little worried that someone would confront him and complain about the stick in the dog’s mouth, but everyone they approached crossed the street to avoid them. The dog hadn’t gotten any better looking overnight. It hadn’t gotten any smaller, either. And it still stank.

  Maybe Dinah had a hose.

  Maybe later. It was seven thirty and time for work.

  —

  The wood posts went in quickly on the concrete footings he’d poured the day before. Charlie and Miles left for school, waving cautiously but giving the dog a wide berth. Dinah went out the side door toward the garage on the back alley, avoiding conversation. She waved, then lifted her wrist to tap her watch, reminding him of their afternoon appointment.

  By late morning the new beam and floor joists were in and the frame was pleasingly square and straight and true. Peter stopped to reheat the coffee. He was sitting on a sawhorse with the cup warming his hands when a black SUV drove past. It was a Ford, one of the big ones, and fairly new.

  A few minutes later it drove past again, this time more slowly, the driver peering out the window. He paused a few houses down, then backed up and stopped in front of the house. The window rolled down. A wide-shouldered black guy peered out at Peter, the porch, and the dog, tied again to the tree in the yard.

  Peter waited.

  The driver got out, left his door open and the SUV still running, and sauntered over. He wore a gleaming hip-length black leather coat and a black Kangol cap backward on his bald head. In his late thirties or early forties, he was a big guy and he thought that meant something, walking with a distinct strut. A starburst of scars marked the right side of his face, and his right earlobe was missing.

  He stopped on the sidewalk, well away from the dog, which was suddenly growling again. “What’s with that crazy-looking dog, mouth all tied up?”

  Dinah had thought her house was being watched. She hadn’t said it, but she was scared.

  “You must be from the pound,” said Peter, “come for the dog. It was living under the old porch. Hang on a minute and let me get that rope.”

  “Naw, man, that’s not me,” said the scarred man, taking a step back. “I’m just a friend of the lady lives here.”

  Peter kept talking as he stood and walked to the tree. “I’ll tell you, that dog’s been nothing but trouble. I’ll be glad when it’s gone.” The dog still shied away from him but no longer ran to the end of its leash. “Creeps me out,” said Peter, “that animal staring at me all day.” He untied the rope and held it out to the man. “You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get that stick in there.” The dog stood behind the protection of Peter’s legs, peering out at the man and growling louder.

  It hadn’t growled at young Charlie or his brother when they left for school.

  It hadn’t growled when Peter took it for a walk.

  All morning, it had watched people walking down the street, and it hadn’t growled at any of them.

  The scarred man took another step back, unbuttoning his leather coat, saying, “I told you, that’s not my fuckin’ dog.” The scars flushed pink on his face as he pulled his coat open and put his hand on the butt of the shiny chrome automatic pistol tucked into the front of his pants. “Now tie that ugly motherfucker up again before I got to do something.”

  The pistol was smaller, maybe a .32, and sized for concealment. Big Jimmy Johnson, artist of the swivel-mounted .50, would have called it a girlie gun. But it would still put a hole in you.

  Clearly this guy was not worried about the cops. The newer gun laws sometimes made it hard to distinguish between armed thugs and citizens exercising their rights, but Peter had some idea which of the two he was talking to.

  “Okay, sure,” said Peter, nodding. “Hey, it’s not your dog.” He went to tie it up again.

  The scarred man made a show of closing his coat and adjusting it on his shoulders. Not what Peter would have done. It just made the gun harder for the man to get at.

  “So. Where’d you find that dog, Mister Fixit Man?”

  The tone always changed when someone showed a weapon, thought Peter. This was no longer a friendly conversation. The Army .45 was inside Peter’s tool bag, three steps away. But taking it out wouldn’t get him any new information.

  “It was under the old porch,” said Peter, watching the scarred man from the corner of his eye. “I’m just doing some work on the house. I guess the husband died.”

  The man shook his head. “Damn shame,” he said without any feeling at all. He pointed at the porch with his chin. “How much you charge for this? Must be expensive, huh?”

  Now we’re getting to it, thought Peter. “No charge,” he said. “U.S. Marine Corps is picking up the tab. Death benefit.”

  “No shit?” said the man. “I always thought the lady was rich.”

  “Can’t tell by me,” Peter said. “She didn’t even offer me a glass of water.”

  “You find anything else under there?” asked the man.

  “Sure,” said Peter. “Scrap lumber, garbage, old carpet. It’s all on the curb.”

  “That all? Nothing worth anything?”

  “In this neighborhood?” Peter laughed. “Most of these people are just trying to stay ahead of their bills. They’re not hiding gold bars under the front porch. Especially not with this ugly dog living there.”

  “No shit?” said the man. “Dog was living there? Under the porch? Not no owner?”

  “Yeah,
” said Peter. “Eating all the neighborhood cats. They were afraid it was going to start on the kids. What’d you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” said the man. “And I wasn’t here. You never saw me. Understand?” He patted the coat at his waistband, where the chrome .32 menaced his nuts.

  “Sure,” said Peter. “I have to get back to work. I need to get on to my next project.”

  “You just fuckin’ do that,” said the scarred man.

  And he climbed into the big black SUV and left.

  The man hadn’t told Peter much. But Peter had learned a few things anyway.

  A man with a gun was watching the house.

  A man who knew about the money. Probably knew about the plastic explosive. But didn’t know where they might be.

  And the dog didn’t like him.

  It would be interesting to see where this thing went next.

  6

  The porch floor was laid and Peter was packing up his tools when Dinah came home from work, right on time.

  Peter got the feeling she was the kind of woman who was always on time. Had her bills in a little accordion folder, kept her checkbook balanced, and flossed her teeth every night. But not uptight about it. Just organized. Knew what she wanted. Working to make it happen.

  She parked her old Toyota on the street and went up the front steps with her enormous handbag, bouncing a little on her toes, testing the strength of the deck. She peered at the skirting, at the dog-proof padlock on the sturdy new hatch cover.

  She looked at Peter. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Please,” he said. “Call me Peter. Have you changed your mind about the money?”

  She sighed. “No. But I’ll need a few minutes to change. I won’t be long.”

  When she came out, she wore tailored black pants and a severe, elegant cream-colored blouse under a gorgeous long black wool coat. The nurse’s scrubs had made her seem capable and strong. The change of clothes made her look entirely different. Full of authority, but also slightly removed. Like the VP at Goldman Sachs who had met the interns on their first day.