Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “I think I can rearrange,” I said.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Our offices are in Columbia Tower. Do you know where it is?”

  Everybody in Seattle knew where it was. Columbia was the tallest building north of Los Angeles. It took up most of a full block of downtown.

  “We’re on the thirty-fourth floor,” said the assistant. “The reception desk downstairs will have your name.”

  I stifled a wiseass urge to ask her if the event was white tie, and said I’d be there. She thanked me again and the line clicked off instantly. Efficient.

  “Who was that?” said Hollis.

  “I’ve been granted an audience.” I told Hollis about Kend’s family. He hummed softly.

  “Elana didn’t aim low, did she?” Then he grimaced. “Sorry. I’m speaking ill of the dead. If there’s a service for the girl, you let me know.”

  I hadn’t even thought about whether Willard would be holding a funeral for Elana. Even Hollis Brant was ahead of me when it came to social niceties.

  He slapped a hand to his forehead. “Christ, I’d nearly forgotten again. My mind these days. Here.” He handed me a small key attached to a plastic disk. “Locker twenty-four, up at the office.”

  “What is it?”

  He grinned. “Presents. Some items of your granddad’s. He asked me to hold them, years ago, and it wasn’t until I was cleaning through all my things to move aboard the new Francesca that I even remembered I had them tucked away in storage. I brought ’em here for you.”

  He wouldn’t say more.

  When I opened the door to the aft deck, Leo was looking at Kend Haymes’s bank statements, lost in thought.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said, not glancing up. “I was looking for something to read. Got distracted. These aren’t yours, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Good,” said Leo. “’Cause this guy is shit at managing his life. And that’s coming from me.”

  That was the first joke Leo had made today. I was a little pissed at him going through the messenger bag, but counted any humor as a good sign.

  Hollis peeked around my shoulder, curious. “Those are young Kend’s?”

  “Dude needs to stop partying and pay his bills,” Leo said, shuffling the papers back into a stack.

  “Partying?”

  “Yeah.” Leo picked up the first credit statement and handed it to me. “He’s taking rides everywhere he goes. See?”

  He pointed to an entry from a company called Faregame. The entries repeated, sometimes three or four times a day. The amounts were small, less than twenty bucks each. In Kend’s overcrowded credit statement, I hadn’t noticed.

  “He doesn’t have a car,” I said. “Faregame must be a taxi service, or some kind of ride-sharing deal.”

  “I figured he was drunk off his ass all day, with that many rides,” Leo said.

  Maybe he was. And I’d seen Faregame before. I pulled out my phone to look over the list of names and numbers I’d copied from Kend’s.

  There it was. Selbey Faregame. Likely it was Selbey at Faregame, instead of firstname-lastname. Selbey could be Kend’s favorite driver.

  “Leo,” I said, “you’re hired.”

  “Hired? For what?”

  “I don’t know yet, but you’re already earning your keep. Come on.”

  Leo and I bade farewell to Hollis and walked up to the marina office to use the key Hollis had given me. Locker 24 was large, big enough for sail bags or fishing rods. Inside it was a rolled-up Persian rug.

  “Your friends are strange,” Leo said.

  The rug was a lot heavier and lumpier than it should have been. We carried it out to the truck, and I opened the tailgate and canopy to lay the rug on the truck bed.

  Nobody was nearby. I unrolled the rug to reveal two long guns in soft carrying cases, three pistols wrapped in oiled cloths, and a cotton drawstring sack. The handguns turned out to be two Smith & Wesson Sigmas and a larger Glock, all with the serial numbers etched away. The long guns were a Mossberg 12-gauge pump shotgun and a very nice Merkel .30-06 rifle, with a burled wood stock and a Nikon scope. The drawstring sack was full of plastic baggies, sorted ammunition for all the guns, including a few non-lethal rubber shells for the Mossberg.

  Leo looked at me, expressionless. “What kind of work did you say your grandfather did?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE RIDE-SHARING COMPANY FAREGAME had an online app. The app allowed you to request specific drivers. It showed Selbey, Kendrick Haymes’s regular guy, coming on shift in half an hour.

  I didn’t want to give Faregame my own name, so while Leo was still outside, scouting the outside of the house, I opened Dono’s hidden compartment in the pantry. He had kept his false IDs and credit cards secreted there, among other useful items. I picked one Washington State driver’s license under the name Varrick, and used it to book Selbey for a pick-up on 24th, going down to the Market. Hopefully no one would notice the thirty-year age difference between me and what the license claimed.

  Leo came in through the open front door.

  “Big place,” he said, looking around the rooms of the house he could see from the foyer. “You guys build it?”

  “Restored it. Dono was a general contractor, part of the time.” In between his less legitimate and more profitable jobs. Contracting work and owning a bar had mostly been convenient ways for Dono to launder his money.

  “I’m still getting used to being back,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” Leo didn’t show any signs of removing his pack. He’d slung it over both shoulders the moment we got out of the truck. “But you like being home?”

  The heavy cloud cover outside wasn’t allowing much daylight through the windows. I set the case of beer down and flipped all of the switches on the wall. The first floor flared to sudden color.

  “I like coming and going whenever I want,” I said. “I haven’t had time to figure out much else yet.”

  He nodded. “I looked at the calendar a hundred times a day the first week, like I was counting down to the next deployment. Gearing up, you know?”

  I knew. Some rotations, the op tempo was so high we’d break a hundred missions in ninety days. You learned to hit the ground running.

  “I keep waking up startled, thinking I’ve missed my report date,” I said, trying for a joke.

  Leo just nodded. He took his pack off, almost reluctantly, and leaned it against the wall.

  I was hungry. Hunting around the kitchen, I found a full box of pasta left in the cupboard, and an unopened jar of red sauce. I put on a pot of water to boil and the sauce on simmer, and opened the refrigerator to see if there was anything like a vegetable.

  “I used to take Prazo,” Leo said, looking out the window. “And Ambien. And some other shit I forget.”

  I looked up. “But you don’t now.”

  “No.” He turned away from his reconnaissance of the trees. “You ever?”

  “Clone.” I said. Clonazepam. Antianxiety. “And sleep aids.”

  “Man, they had me on all kinds of crap at the V.A.”

  “It wasn’t Army for me. I picked a city doctor off base, when I was on rotation back at Benning.” I had decided to keep my troubles to myself. Seeing Army shrinks couldn’t do my career any good, no matter what they decided to put on their reports. What the brass didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.

  “What’d it do for you?” Leo said

  “Cognitive therapy. It gave me some coping tools, when my heart rate would go crazy or when I had nightmares. Some of them worked.”

  “Nightmares.” It wasn’t a question. But it needed answering.

  I used the pot lid to keep the noodles from sliding into the sink while I poured out the boiling water. Steam snaked along the upturned lid, the hairs on the back of my arm catching scalding droplets from the air.

  “I was a brand-new sergeant and fireteam leader,” I said. “We were just part of two platoons sent to raid a Ta
liban village. The locals had left, and the insurgents had hunkered down in the houses during bad weather.”

  “Wintertime?” Leo said. There was something in the way he said it, something hesitant.

  I nodded. “First storm of the year. No visibility, and too much wind. Enough that our air support was cut way back. Our squad was covering one side of the village, in case any bad guys ran to hide and attack from the hills nearby.”

  Leo waited. I put the pot down. I hadn’t even told Luce this story.

  “Somebody in our group spotted a cave,” I said, “way up above the village. There was movement around the entrance. We got the signal to climb the hill and secure it, in case they had heavy weapons they could use to make it rain down on the village.”

  “I hate caves.”

  “This one wouldn’t have changed your opinion. We called inside for surrender, and threw in grenades when there was no reply. Still no sign of the enemy. The cave turned out to be a long son of a bitch. It went back into the hill and broke up into side tunnels and dead ends. The Taliban had turned it into some kind of depot for old AK-47s and other junk. So we had to go through it one yard at a time with our night optics on, checking every twist and turn in pitch-black.”

  Leo’s eyes flickered. As a sniper, he might not have dealt with as many holes in the ground as other Rangers. But we all knew that clearing a cave of hostiles was like chasing a cobra down its den. “Was there another exit? Did they rabbit?”

  “We thought maybe. Our team just kept going deeper into the mountain, tossing a grenade around every blind corner and clearing more ground. Then we came around one bend and everything went to hell on a rocket.”

  “How many were there?” His voice sounded tight.

  “Five. One of them fired a burst in the dark.”

  Three shots. The same three flashes that I saw every time I had the dream.

  “Then the rest of them just panicked. They were shooting anywhere, and the whole place lit up like it was noon. Bullets and rock pieces off the walls and I was sure the whole damn cave was coming down around us. We took them all out in thirty seconds, but—”

  I stopped.

  “You thought you were done,” Leo said.

  I’d had close calls before that day, wounded and knocked unconscious, shocked when I woke up alive. This firefight hadn’t been like that. It had its own surprises, especially when our team checked ourselves for casualties after, and were astounded to find only a few deep cuts and one guy with rock fragments in his leg.

  During the fight, I had felt aware of everything. The way the dirt crunched underfoot. The blurred ghost of my rifle’s reticule dot in the green night vision, as I moved it across targets. The thud of a ricochet hit on the armor plating of the guy next to me.

  I hadn’t believed I was dead in those moments, like Leo assumed. I had felt more alive than I ever had before.

  It was what came after that night which had seemed so unreal.

  My phone buzzed with a message. It was an automated text from Faregame, telling me that Selbey would be at the top of the block to pick me up in five minutes.

  “Look,” I said, “my offer still stands. Hang with me for a while.”

  “I don’t need watching.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just like it better outside.”

  “So camp in the backyard if you want. I gotta go. There’s a lady down the street named Addy. Tougher than stale jerky. I’ll write down her number. If you need to find something and I’m not around, you call her. Understood?”

  It was my command voice, back again. Leo grinned for the first time I’d seen since Kandahar.

  “Roger that,” he said.

  I jogged up the street to the corner, wishing Selbey had been a little slower to reply to my ride request. Leo had been ready to talk. Maybe not about everything that was weighing him down, but it was a start.

  Then again, I hadn’t been completely truthful with the former Specialist Pak myself.

  It wasn’t really the gunfight in the cave that still lurked in the back of my brain, after so many years. It was how I had felt in the days after the fight.

  Separate. Insensate. Going through all the motions of walking and talking and even thinking as an outside observer.

  The feeling of distance had faded eventually, buried under the constant pressure of new missions, new dangers. Then one night in a dream, months later and back stateside, I saw the three muzzle flashes at the right edge of my peripheral vision, and somehow all the fear I hadn’t felt on that day came in like a howling banshee. I woke in a panic. And for the rest of the next day, I felt that same disconnection again, shrouded from reality.

  Like I wasn’t meant to be on the Earth anymore.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I WALKED UP THE HILL to catch my ride. The rain had finally abated after a long final drizzle, but the tree leaves and gutters were still dripping.

  A metallic blue Forester wagon pulled up to the curb, so new that the chrome trim gleamed even under the gray sky. The driver rolled down his window halfway. He was a college-age white guy, with a long face and even longer neck with a pointed Adam’s apple. Tufts of dirty-blond hair poked out from under his bright red wool cap.

  “Selbey?” I said.

  “And you’re Mr. Varrick. Cool,” he nodded. “Pike Place, yeah?”

  I climbed into the backseat. The Forester had that leather-cleaner smell of showroom cars, along with just a hint of sativa smoke.

  “If you need a ride back from the Market, I can hang,” Selbey said. He banged the gas and the Forester lurched into a gap in the traffic. Selbey didn’t match his pristine suburbanite ride. He wore a dull gray wool sweater over a T-shirt I could tell was paper-thin just by the collar. His jeans were frayed at the knees and a two-inch split showed at the thigh seam.

  “Nice car, man,” I said.

  “Bought it for this gig. Gotta spend to make, you know?” His head nodded along with unheard music.

  “I know,” I said. “Kend told me you were his go-to wheels right now.”

  “Hey, you know Kend?” Selbey’s face fell. “I heard on the news. He was a cool guy.”

  “He said you were solid, too. That’s why I called.” I found myself imitating Selbey’s parrot-like head bob.

  “Yeah? That’s all right. I liked him.”

  “I’m trying to let people know. Like maybe have a gathering or something. For his tribe.”

  Selbey gave me a big grin in the rearview mirror. The Forester drifted a little out of its lane. “That’s very cool of you, man.”

  “Problem is, some of his friends, I just know their first names or nicknames from Kend. No phone numbers. It would help me out if you could tell me where he’d been going. So I can get in touch with them.”

  “Uh. Hey, I’m just allowed to drive people where they send me, you know. I can’t just go anywhere.”

  “It’s cool.” I laid two bills, a twenty and a hundred, across the shoulder of the passenger seat. Held them there with my hand. “So you take me to the Market, and Faregame gets the twenty bucks and we’re done with them. Then you can do whatever you want. Free country, man.”

  Selbey’s eyes were working triple-time, between me in the rearview and the money and the traffic down Olive. “I suppose it’s okay to drive you someplace myself.”

  “Car payments are steep. You show me the list of the places he went. I pick one, and we’ll go there.”

  He couldn’t hand me his phone fast enough. “Under the spreadsheet app. That logs all my rides.”

  It was easy enough to sort by Kend’s name. He had taken forty or fifty rides during the past month with Selbey. I scrolled through and used my phone to photograph the whole list. A lot of the destinations were obvious—his apartment, downtown at the Columbia Center and the HDC offices, his neighborhood in Lower Queen Anne.

  One location stood out, in the southwest part of the city, almost to Burien. Kend had made at least ten visits to it. Two during t
he daytime, the rest in early evening.

  “What’s this one?” I said, showing it to Selbey. He was busy running the yellow light through Pine Street and waited until traffic had stopped us to look.

  “Yeah, that’s the long trip. Twenty-five bucks from his house. It’s just a building, man. I figured he worked at the place part-time. Here we are.” He stopped the car in the middle of the brick road at the Market, and took back the phone to press a couple of buttons. I signed off on the ride. A car pulled up behind us and honked.

  “Take me there,” I said.

  “You sure you know Kend, man?” Frowning wasn’t a natural expression for Selbey, but he gave it a shot. The car behind us backed him up by laying on the horn.

  “You ever meet Elana? How hot was she?” I said.

  “So hot,” Selbey said, unable to keep from laughing.

  “Help us out,” I said.

  Selbey popped the Forester into gear and we zoomed off as the car behind us stalled, still honking.

  THE ADDRESS FROM KEND’S phone turned out to be a brown brick-and-cinder office building. It had seen better decades. The front wall showed as many FOR LEASE signs as iron-barred windows. Selbey dropped me at what he said was the same spot where Kend had gotten out of the car on every visit. We exchanged fist bumps and the two bills and he zoomed away, probably happy to be out of the neighborhood.

  I was the only person visible on the street. The eroded brickwork showed a lot of very old graffiti. The four-story building wasn’t even interesting enough to be tagged anymore. Besides a couple of homeless guys sitting across the road from the back half, the block was just as lonesome all the way around. What the hell was Kend Haymes doing here?

  Then the dreary anonymity of the office building struck a familiar note. I’d never been there before. But I had visited another location a whole lot like it, and recently.

  On my way back to the front entrance I spotted the satellite dishes. Two of them, up near the roof on the south corner. Brand-spanking-new, with cables leading down into a rough hole in one of the top floor windows.