DOWNTOWN DENVER, COLORADO
Peter Ash is wearing an armoured vest, has a pistol strapped to his leg, a semi-automatic rifle by his side and a large stash of drugs money behind him. It’s hot, the static is buzzing and he’s trying not to think about what happened last week.
Ash is riding shotgun in a truck leased to Heavy Metal Protection, a security firm providing exclusive services to the growers of Colorado’s newest cash crop: cannabis. Legal in the state, but illegal in many others, the industry exists in a legislative grey area — banks are unable to extend facilities to growers without breaking federal law. Which means this is an industry that runs almost entirely on cash — and an industry running on cash is an industry uniquely vulnerable to crime.
Just seven days ago, Heavy Metal lost an entire vehicle, crew and cargo. Literally, lost. As in, disappeared without trace.
Armed robbery? Double homicide?
Whatever, Ash is there to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
After eight years active duty as a marine, there is no doubt Ash has the skill set for this job. But his hard-won combat experience has come at a price: a nervous system fused on high alert. This is real damage — a crippling liability in civilian life... but a survival trait in a combat zone.
Welcome Page
About Light It Up
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About Nick Petrie
The Ash Series
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
This one’s all for Margret. She knows why.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
—Robert Frost
The chain-link fence was ten feet tall with razor wire at the top. It began at the front corner of the repurposed cement-block warehouse in North Denver, wrapped in a neat rectangle around the side parking lot and the rear loading dock, and continued to the opposite corner of the building.
Peter Ash stepped down from the back seat of Henry Nygaard’s big four-door pickup to pull open the rolling security gate. He kept his head on a swivel, eyes chasing from the street to the fence lines to the windows and flat rooftops of neighboring buildings.
He wore a decent secondhand armored vest and one of Henry’s spare pistols strapped to his leg, neither one exactly hidden under an untucked flannel shirt, but not particularly visible unless someone was looking for them. Which was more or less the goal.
He could feel the warmth of the blacktop through the soles of his boots, and the late-September sun was hot on his shoulders and the back of his neck. The waistband of his pants was damp from the sweat trickling down his back.
Peter didn’t mind. He’d been in hotter places, wearing and carrying a lot more shit.
Deacon, the driver, pulled Henry’s truck through the gate. Peter closed it behind them, waved to the camera mounted high on the warehouse wall, and waited to hear the magnetic lock clang shut. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it wasn’t bad, either.
He hopped back in the pickup for the sixty-meter run to the back of the warehouse, where it became clear to every member of the Heavy Metal Protection team that their schedule was shot.
As it turned out, it was the grow manager’s thirtieth birthday, and the cultivation workers had gotten stoned out of their gourds at lunch. Someone had brought takeout tacos and a chocolate layer cake and things had gone downhill from there. The workers sat on cheap vinyl chairs, leaning back against the white-painted block wall, eyes closed, faces raised to the afternoon sun like potted plants.
“You got to be kidding me,” Deacon said. “Nap time? Ten to one says they’re not ready for us.”
He hit the horn and the grow manager popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box, standing even before he was fully awake.
In the front passenger seat, Henry looked at his watch. It was big and sturdy and dependable, just like Henry. “We’re okay,” he said. “We’ll make up time on the freeway.”
“Y’all are dreaming,” said Banjo, the youngest. “Rush hour gonna kill us.”
The other men wore sidearms, too, and armored vests under light shirts. Each man also had an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the civilian version of the M16, magazines in place but the chambers cleared, butt-down in the footwell. They left the long guns in the truck unless absolutely necessary, because they attracted too much attention.
Peter didn’t say anything.
He had only worked for Heavy Metal Protection for a few days, doing a favor for Henry.
None of them wanted to do the job in the dark.
They were all thinking about what had happened the week before.
*
Peter was tall and rangy, muscle and bone, nothing extra. He had wide, knuckly hands and a lean, angular face, his dark hair long enough to cover the tips of his slightly pointed ears. He had the thoughtful eyes of a werewolf a week before the change.
Even out in the parking lot, he could smell the heady green funk of the growing plants.
Henry said it was bad form to call it marijuana unless you were talking about medical marijuana, which was a legal term. For many people in the industry, the word “marijuana” had racist undertones from the first attempts to regulate the plant in the 1930s, when officials tied its recreational use to Mexican immigrants.
The Latin name for the plant’s genus was Cannabis, the industry’s preferred term.
And it was definitely an industry.
Call it weed, ganja, bud, or chronic, it made billions of dollars each year.
And Heavy Metal Protection was part of it. The company provided secure facility consulting, uniformed static guards for at-risk sites, and armed mobile protection for moving cash and product from point A to point B.
The mobile protection arm was nothing like an armored-car service. An armored car was a giant rolling strongbox, painted in bright colors, and made an excellent target. Heavy Metal’s invisible, late-model civilian rides had no logos. The two-person teams were armed and wore ballistic vests but no uniforms. They looked like accountants or electricians, anyone but who they were: highly trained former military personnel with a job to do.
Most cannabis-related crime occurred at grow facilities, because they were usually located in neglected or industrial areas where the rent was cheap and traffic minimal, and also because you could find them with your nose.
Growers told their employees not to be heroes. Even if cured product was as good as cash, worth more than a thousand dollars a pound wholesale, two or three times that broken down for retail, nobody needed to die to protect a pound of weed.
But when security was done properly, with hardened facilities, visible security measures, and varied delivery schedules, robberies were rare.
Problems generally happened for one of several reasons. A security lapse, like a door left open at the end of the shift because somebody’s magic brownie kicked in earlier than planned. A nighttime smash-and-grab on a small new facility that assumed, incorrectly, that nobody knew where that funky smell was coming from. Or something as simple as a guy walking in like he belonged, grabbing a pound or two of vacu-packed product, tucking it under his arm like a football, and taking off like O.J. at the airport.
What had happened the week before was different, a new and much larger problem.
Heavy Metal had lost an entire vehicle, its crew and cargo.
Literally, lost.
As in, could not be found.
Two men and a Dodge Dakota. One of the men was the company’s cofounder, Henry’s son-in-law. The other was the company’s operations manager. Their cargo was three hundred thousand dollars in cash, gross profits headed for the client’s cash stash in the mountains. The vehicle’s GPS tracker had dropped off-line somewhere on I-70 headed west. The men’s phone signals had disappeared.
No sign of any of them since.
Peter had asked the question his first day on the job. “Did they get hit? Or just run with it?”
Henry didn’t comment. He glowered darkly out the windshield, as if all his suspicions about his son-in-law had been confirmed.
“They could have run with it,” said Deacon, shrugging a thick shoulder. “Maybe I got a dim view of human nature.”
Banjo shook his head. “Had to be a hijacking,” he said. “Three hundred grand isn’t enough to fuck up your life and turn yourself into a fugitive.”
With no evidence either way, what had happened was anyone’s guess. The state police had been looking into it for a week. Officially it was considered armed robbery and a possible double homicide.
But it wasn’t going to happen again.
Today, they had another big payload. Henry had brought the heavy crew, four capable men, their heads on a swivel in the Mile-High City, sweating behind razor wire under the hot September sun.
*
Henry stepped down to get the grow manager moving. Deacon stayed with the truck. Banjo jogged back to the gate, where he had a view on three sides. Peter jogged forward to the opposite corner of the building, where his own three-sided view completed the perimeter.
They’d all had duty like this before.
Peter hadn’t thought the work would be a problem for him. He’d been the tip of the spear for eight long years, a Marine lieutenant with more combat deployments than he cared to remember. He’d been done with his war for a while now, but the war wasn’t quite done with him. It had left him with a souvenir. An oddball form of post-traumatic stress that showed up as claustrophobia, an intense reaction to enclosed spaces. He called it the white static.
It hadn’t showed up until he was back home, just days from mustering out.
At first, going inside was just uncomfortable. A fine-grained sensation at the back of his neck, like electric foam, or a small battery inserted under the skin. If he stayed inside, the feeling would intensify. The foam would turn to sparks, a crackling unease in his brainstem, a profound dissonance just at the edge of hearing. His neck would tense, and his shoulders would begin to rise as the muscles tightened. He’d look for the exits as his chest clamped up, then he’d start having trouble catching his breath. After twenty minutes, he’d be in a full-blown panic attack, hyperventilating, his fight-or-flight mechanism cranked into overdrive.
He’d been working on the static pretty steadily since spring. He’d joined a veterans’ group, had been talking to a shrink. His friendship with Henry was a big part of that. He’d been making progress. He could be inside for more than an hour now.
But there was something about sweating inside the armor again, strapping on a sidearm, the familiar feel of the AR-15 in his hand. He was losing ground. He’d been having trouble sleeping since he’d gotten to Denver. He told himself it was just the noise of the city, but he knew better.
He’d told Henry he could give him a week, maybe two. No more than that.
Peter had other plans. Better plans. There was a woman he needed to see again. There was something between them, he hoped. Something real.
*
Heat floated up from the parking lot, turning the chain-link fence into a shimmering abstraction. Peter kept his eyes moving, searching the roads and driveways, the windows and rooftops of the neighboring buildings.
Out of habit, the way another man might tap his pockets for his keys and wallet and phone before leaving the house, Peter touched his fingertips to the butt of the pistol Henry had loaned him for the job.
It was a Sig Sauer .40, an older high-performance weapon unremarkable except for its pristine condition. Everything Henry owned had the patina of long use and meticulous care. His truck was from the late nineties, but it looked like new, except for the creases on the leather seats.
Henry was over seventy years old, although you’d never think it to look at him, standing tall, his shoulders broad and square, a stubby Honduran cigar unlit in the corner of his mouth. His voice was a hoarse whisper, but it just made the other men lean in closer to hear him.
By the time Henry signed the paperwork, carried ten cardboard boxes with labels and security tape out of the facility, and loaded them into the heavy steel toolbox bolted to the bed of his pickup, they were more than an hour behind schedule.
Peter saw Henry pat his chest over his shirt pocket, as if making sure his pen was still there, before waving Peter and Banjo back to the truck.
“Mount up,” he called, his hoarse whisper somehow still carrying across the parking lot in that thin mountain air. “We’re burning daylight.”
*
The Heavy Metal team rolled onto the streets of North Denver, Henry’s pickup looking like a hundred others around them. Their next stop was Denver’s Finest Kind, a recreational cannabis retail shop in Curtis Park.
Peter had always thought of Denver as a mountain city, but it stood on the High Plains, straddling the Platte River, nothing but dry farmland to the east for five hundred miles and more.
To the immediate west of Denver, though, was the whole of the Rocky Mountains, rising to the sky like white-tipped teeth. They gave the city a definite flavor. Peter could see the Front Range and its foothills from many parts of the city, just looking down the broad avenues. Denver had a busy, frontier feeling, a growing city constantly reinventing itself like the rest of the Mountain West.
A block out from Denver’s Finest Kind, Deacon drove a recon route, looking for trouble and finding none. He parked out front like any other customer. Peter and Henry got out while Deacon and Banjo stayed with the truck. Peter kept his hands free and his eyes on the move while Henry climbed up into the bed of the truck, removed a cardboard box from the big orange toolbox, hopped down with the box under his arm, and walked the quarter-block to the retailer’s front door.
Peter followed Henry inside. He felt the white static get louder in the back of his head.
But he’d been practicing. He was doing fine.
The security vestibule was a small room with a vase of flowers on a tiny table, a spotless bulletproof glass window, a closed-circuit camera, and a slot to pass the customer’s ID to the cheerful receptionist. There was also an ATM in the vestibule, because the cannabis industry ran almost entirely on cash. Henry had texted ahead to the Heavy Metal guard on-site, so the man was expecting them and buzzed them through immediately.
The interior of Denver’s Finest Kind was sleek and modern in glass and chrome, like an Apple store or a high-end boutique, although the verdant smell of the product was strong. Behind a long, elegant display counter stood three attentive salespeople, chatting with customers about particular cannabis strains and their effects. Did you want to be energetic and creative, or calm and relaxed?
Henry walked into the back room with the manager while Peter monitored the progress of the static, watched the exits, and glanced at the inventory. He loved the names of the various strains.
Purple Haze, Buddha Sativa, Skywalker, White Rhino, Gorilla Glue, BrainBender, Agent Orange, Green Crack, Trainwreck, Blue Lightning, Ass Hat, Chocolope.
Who came up with this stuff?
Stoners, presumably.
Or people trying to appeal to stoners.
In addition to the attractive glass containers of fat green buds, the store sold hashish, THC-infused oils, and edibles, everything from the traditional pot brownie to cookies, chocolate, and hard candy.
Peter had only been in Colorado for three days. He still couldn’t quite believe selling weed was legal. But once he started looking for them, he noticed cannabis retailers and the green cross symbol of medical marijuana everywhere. He’d stopped for gas in Aurora and found four retail stores in his line of sight from the pump.
It was like a whole different country.
Peter wasn’t particularly interested in getting high himself. He liked good scotch, and was happy to crack a cold beer on a hot day. But he’d found that more than one or two drinks made it harder to handle the static.
On the other hand, some of the veterans Peter worked with smoked weed on their time off, and they said that certain strains really helped with their post-traumatic stress. The medical in marijuana. If it worked for you, Peter figured, what was the harm?
Henry walked out of the back room with a new cardboard box, this one full of cash. He nodded to the receptionist and Peter led the way outside, white static forgotten, his eyes moving and his hands open and ready.
The cash was the whole problem.
Although recreational marijuana was legal in a few states, and medicinal marijuana was legal in many, the production, sale, and use of any kind of marijuana was still illegal on the federal level, which made commercial banking relationships problematic.
Medical dispensaries were allowed limited privileges, but a bank that knowingly provided a recreational cannabis business with anything from a basic checking account to a commercial loan to credit card processing was breaking federal law and could face serious consequences.
Which meant this industry was run almost entirely in cash. Employees, suppliers, and landlords were paid in cash. Businesses paid their state, local, and federal taxes in cash. The industry was uniquely vulnerable to crime, but also provided a very real opportunity for people with certain skills.
“How much will we end up carrying today?” asked Peter when Deacon pulled away from the curb.
“Bad question,” said Deacon, brown hands steady behind the wheel. Deacon’s father was a preacher in the Mississippi Delta country who’d had great hopes for his son’s religious calling. Deacon told Peter he’d only heard the call of the Army, one of the few ways for a black man to find his way out of the Deep South. He hadn’t looked back since. “Don’t ask that question.”
“Why not?” Although Peter already knew the answer.
“We don’t guard it because of its value,” Henry said over the seatback. “We guard it because it’s our honor to do so.”
“Plus,” Banjo said with a grin, “y’all ain’t tempted if y’all don’t know what you’re carrying.”
Banjo was the youngest of Henry’s crew, maybe twenty-five. He had a thick Appalachian drawl, and took a lot of good-natured shit for being from Kentucky. His real name was Dave, he’d told Peter when they’d met. “But all these assholes call me Banjo.” He’d smiled when he said it, not minding the nickname, glad to belong in this group of capable men working together.
Peter was, too.
He didn’t miss the war, but he did miss his guys.
And part of him, although he didn’t like to admit it, really missed suiting up and rolling out with his platoon every day, armed to the teeth and looking for a fight, scared shitless and thrilled to his bones at the same time. Trusting your guys with your life, while they trusted you with theirs.
There was nothing else like it.
But he was hopeful that he’d found something different. He had an invitation to visit June Cassidy in Washington State. An invitation he’d worked hard to get.
No way in hell he was going to miss it.
*
Working their way through the metro area, Henry’s crew made ten more stops, the last in Lakewood. The delay at the grow had put them into afternoon traffic, where they’d lost even more time. Now the sun blasted directly through the windshield when Deacon pulled onto I-70 heading west, leaving Denver’s High Plains for the foothills of the Front Range.
The big orange metal toolbox on the back of Henry’s truck was now filled with boxes of cash.
Each client, Henry had explained, did something different with his money.
The lucky clients, those with a history in medical marijuana, could put their earnings in the bank, or at least in a safety-deposit box. These were straightforward deliveries, set up by the client with a phone call to the bank manager, so the tellers didn’t hit the silent alarm when a pair of armed men came walking in.
The cannabis clients didn’t have legal access to a bank, so they put their money someplace else.
Grandma’s attic, Henry called it. The company nickname for any secret stash spot.
Which might be the client’s actual grandmother’s actual attic, or a giant safe in the client’s basement, or a pair of Rubbermaid bins under a trapdoor in the floor of his cousin’s backyard shed, or just a sheltered spot out of sight of the security cameras behind the King Soopers on Evans, where the boxes of bills were transferred to someone the client trusted more than his hired security company.
This particular client’s money was going to the mountains.
The grower, who ran two big facilities and sold wholesale to dozens of retailers, also owned a legacy parcel deep in the steeps of the Arapaho National Forest. According to Henry, the small cabin was set way back in the tall pines off a long gravel road, itself turning off a narrow winding paved county highway cut into the sloped side of a creek drainage.
Henry said you could usually get there by car until sometime in October. After that it was snowshoes from the county highway.
It seemed a safe place for a cash stash, the roads empty enough that it was easy to tell if someone was tracking them, although it was more difficult at night. The county highway didn’t have guardrails, just tall rocks on one side and a long drop on the other, with a gravel turnoff for slow-moving vehicles where the mountain allowed.
The light was fading. Deacon had the pedal down, pushing the limits of the truck and the road. Henry sat in the front passenger seat, Banjo in the seat behind him, with Peter behind the driver because he was a lefty. The sun had dropped behind the serrated horizon and they were all ready to be done with this long day.
When Deacon powered through a pothole with a thump that rattled Peter’s teeth, Henry said, “Jesus, take it easy. I just got new tie rods.”
Banjo gave his high, cheerful laugh. “Dammit, Deacon, this is why we can’t have nice things.”
Henry raised a middle finger to the critic in the back seat, and Banjo laughed again. Henry had promised cheeseburgers and beer on the way home.
A half mile ahead of them on the highway, a boxy ambulance grumbled slowly up the grade. The red-and-white paint seemed dim in the fading light, or maybe the ambulance was just old. The diesel rattle of its engine got louder in the thin air as Deacon came up fast behind.
The mountain rose hard and lumpy on their left. On their right the slope fell away steeply, disappearing into treetops, the highway too narrow for passing. Deacon took his foot off the gas.
“Our turn’s up here,” said Henry. He pointed with his stubby unlit cigar. “Gravel road, just past the next switchback.”
The ambulance driver glanced in the side mirror and picked up a little speed. Mountain driving etiquette, thought Peter. Speed up or get out of the way.
He looked out at the shadowed pines, wondering what June Cassidy was doing at that moment. Maybe microwaving her dinner, he thought, or riding her bike down the trail that wound through the orchard.
He’d know soon enough. He hadn’t seen her in almost five months, but he could still picture her face, those bright, shining eyes, that wide sarcastic mouth, the brilliant constellation of freckles spread across her cheeks. He had her letters in his day pack on the floor at his feet.
He felt his momentum shift as Deacon started the truck around the tight curve. The diesel sound of the ambulance changed ahead of them, getting softer. Slowing. Coming to a stop at the wide spot just before the intersection.
“Man, get out of my way,” said Deacon. “That’s my damn turn.” He shook his head, then tapped the horn, hit the gas, and swung wide to get around the big boxy van. Peter figured the other driver had thought it was a good place to let them by.
Until the ambulance pulled forward sharply and Peter saw the red wrecker roaring toward them down the gravel road.
Too fast to stop.
Too late to miss.
He knew immediately. The impact was inevitable.
*
He didn’t have time to brace himself or call out to the others.
The wrecker’s heavy front grille was suddenly huge in the passenger-side window.
Then it T-boned them hard enough to knock Henry’s big four-door pickup across the oncoming lane and off the road into the drainage ditch.
Peter was on the far side of the impact, in the rear seat behind the driver. He was thrown forward and toward the wrecker, yanked by his seat belt like a dog on a leash, then bounced back hard against his seat and the door. He was trying to hang on to his rifle when the side of his head hit the window hard enough to star the glass.
The truck’s nose dug into the back side of the ditch with a rending crunch and Peter was thrown forward again. The rear of the truck bucked and slewed around until the tailgate angled toward oncoming traffic.
He blinked off the sparkles and tried to move, but was trapped by his seat belt. He fumbled for the button. He could see the white puffballs of the air bags inflated in the front seat. All the while his mind was trying to picture the geometry.
The wrecker had come at them from a side road at high speed.
It would have been hard enough to do on purpose, nearly impossible to do by accident. Especially with what they were carrying.
There would have to be another vehicle. Somebody ahead of them, or behind. Or both.
“Hey,” he called to the other men.
His voice sounded odd. He wondered how hard he’d hit his head.
“They’re coming. Get ready.”
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
The first time Henry Nygaard saw the Marine, he stood balanced on a steep slope beside a washed-out section of the Pacific Crest Trail in the Willamette National Forest, pounding long sections of heavy galvanized pipe deep into the mountain with a twelve-pound sledgehammer.
It was mid-May and the Marine had already been in the mountains for a month, working alone on the south-facing slopes where the snow had melted early. He wore expensive high-tech trail pants, but his heavy leather hiking boots looked like they’d walked ten thousand miles, and he swung that big rusty sledge like he’d done it all his life.
Their first night together as a trail crew, he was quick to smile or make a joke, but there was something going on underneath.
Henry could see it, even if the others couldn’t.
Henry didn’t know the guy was a Marine until later.
He didn’t have the tattoos, didn’t wear the T-shirt. But Henry thought he might have guessed it from the way the guy went after that galvanized pipe.
Each ruthless swing an attack.
Pounding them down like it was personal.
Henry understood something about that himself.
*
The galvanized pipes were the first part of the washout repair. Set deep into the rocky soil, they stabilized the slope and provided support for the second part of the repair, wind-fallen logs laid against the metal stubs. Then rocks and dirt to fill in the fallen trail for the next generation of hikers, and on to the next little landslide.
They were an eight-person crew, all volunteers, camping rough in the backcountry while rebuilding trails for the summer. Their primary tools were double-bladed axes, shovels, sledgehammers, and a two-man pull saw. They worked a two-week cycle, ten days on the mountain, four days in town. Two young high school teachers, four college kids, the Marine, who wasn’t much past thirty, and Henry, who was over seventy but could still hold his own.
The Marine, whose name was Peter, looked like he was made mostly of ax handles and shovelheads, bound together with thick rigger’s rope at the joints. He didn’t seem to notice that the crew’s three young women stopped work to elbow each other silently when he took off his shirt to rinse himself in a creek.
The man was also never still. Even sitting, some part of the Marine was always in motion, a leg bobbing or fingers tapping time to something only he could hear. And he didn’t sleep in the tents under the sheltering trees with the rest of them, either. Instead he hiked off the trail to one exposed rocky outcrop or another, where he slept in a hammock under the windblown stars, with only a tarp for shelter from the rain.
The man was moving even while he slept, thought Henry. That hammock swaying back and forth in the high mountain breeze.
Henry had spent his life in motion, too. He was a farm boy from southwestern Minnesota, got his growth spurt in middle school, six feet four by the ninth grade. His pop had eyeballed him like he was a new John Deere, talking about expanding the acreage, but Henry just saw a long dull future of driving the same old machines across the same old ground, every goddamned day for the rest of his life.
Which was why he’d signed up for the Army the moment he could convincingly lie to a recruiter about his age. He’d left his pop’s truck in the bus station parking lot with the keys under the seat and never looked back.
He was old enough now to see that day as the start of a pattern that would last most of his life. Any threat of boredom was enough to make him cut his tether and move on to something new. After two tours in Vietnam, he cowboyed in Wyoming until the big ranches started using dirt bikes instead of horses. He worked as a utility lineman all over the West, climbing poles and stringing wire, then built pipeline from Canada to Texas, all of it difficult, dangerous work that kept the landscape changing around him. That’s how he’d always liked it.
He’d tried to be a good man. He never pretended to be someone he wasn’t. He’d been married three times and loved them all boundlessly, until he didn’t. With a hundred girlfriends in between, it was a wonder he wasn’t dead of syphilis or an angry husband, but somehow he’d survived it all.
His third wife once told him that the West was built by men like him, working men on the move, and it seemed to Henry that she was the first one who’d really understood him. But they were standing on the courthouse steps in Durango at the time, divorce papers folded neatly in her purse, the ink still wet from her signature. So that was that.
If he could start it all over again, he liked to think he’d have done it differently. But he wasn’t sure he could have. The older he got, the more clearly he saw himself, for better or worse. Not someone who floated, he was planted where he was planted. But not rooted there, not for good.
He was trying now, though. At this late stage in his life, he was trying to do right by his grown daughter, born from a woman he’d kept company with for just a few months, twenty-five years before. Eleanor was his chance to break the pattern, to dig in and root himself in that relationship, if he could.
When she started this new protection business, Henry saw his chance. Ellie’s idiot husband, Randy, was supposed to provide the combat expertise that clients would pay for, but it was Henry who walked sites and drove routes with Randy to find the weak points, Henry who took out a loan on his Denver house to help buy the first round of weapons and armor, Henry who helped find and interview the experienced veterans who would become the first real employees.
It wasn’t exactly what he thought he’d be doing in his retirement.
The wartime skills came back almost without conscious thought, as he’d somehow known they would, but he wasn’t crazy about the baggage that came with them. The dreams came back, too. But it wasn’t about him. It was about his daughter.
Ellie didn’t make it any easier, she was a rose with some thorns. No surprise, given at least one of her parents.
He’d hoped she might call him Dad, but she didn’t. Henry didn’t blame her. He wasn’t there when she was small, when she needed him. To be fair, he didn’t even know she existed until she was already married.
But it all turned out okay. After fifteen months in operation with the business turning an actual profit, Ellie hired Randy’s recently retired sergeant, a twenty-year veteran with a shitload of combat experience, to carry the tactical weight. Leonard was the real deal, Ellie said. She could take it from here. Henry was free to keep his volunteer gig in Oregon.
Henry was ashamed to admit that he jumped at the chance for some new scenery.
Maybe he was too old to change, he thought.
Maybe it was the war that had made him this way, had ruined him for a regular life.
Everyone who’d died, everyone who’d come back ruined in one way or another, they’d given up everything they had for nothing at all. Even those like Henry, who’d made it home with only a little shrapnel, occasional nightmares, and a lifetime of regrets, were changed forever. War never left you, not really.
So there was something about that younger guy, the Marine, that Henry recognized. The restless motion, the way he carried himself. The thoughtful, deliberate ferocity of his work. The way he’d stare, for a long moment, at something in the distance only he could see.
And maybe Peter the Marine saw something in Henry. On the crew’s third day, they came to a giant downed spruce lying across the trail. With an easy smile, Peter handed one end of the six-foot pull saw across the trunk to Henry. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Henry took hold of the wooden handle and set his feet in the dirt. “Don’t kill me, okay? I’m old.”
Peter the Marine caught Henry’s eye. “Like hell,” he said.
That big spruce didn’t stand a goddamned chance.
Peter had adjusted to the claustrophobic white static by moving his life outside. Trying to reset his fight-or-flight reflex, he’d spent more than two years in the mountains, sleeping out in the open, or in a tent, or in the cab of his truck, where the big windshield kept the static at bay.
Part of Peter loved living out in the weather, free to go wherever he chose. The stars for his rooftop.
Another part knew the static was only making it harder for him to get back to something like a normal life. He just hadn’t cared enough to really try, or so he told himself.
Until he met June Cassidy.
Smart, profane, hilarious, bossy, delicious.
They’d met in a redwood tree, and the rest of their time together had been just as strange. Some bad guys had been bothering her, and he’d helped her with that. She’d helped him, too. He’d never felt about anyone the way he felt about June Cassidy.
She’d told Peter to get it out of his system, whatever it was that kept him outside. She’d told him to come back when he could sleep inside, in a real bed.
When he put it to himself like that, it sounded like June had just told him to get over it.
He didn’t think that was really what she meant.
It wasn’t that easy, for one thing.
He wasn’t over it. He’d probably never get over it.
But he was working on it.
He was making progress.
Which was, he figured, what June had really wanted.
For Peter to make the effort.
For her.
*
His cheap phone had died before the other volunteers arrived, fell out of his pocket and the casing cracked wide open. He didn’t mind. Cell service was lousy in the mountains. He didn’t even bother replacing it. Peter had never really liked the telephone anyway.
Instead, he’d started a letter to June his first night on the trail, had added to it every night after that, and put it in the mail when they got down to Eugene.
You could write a pretty long letter in ten days.
He told her how the mountains looked in the first light of day, and about the deep dark blue of the evening sky, and how the stars appeared, one by one at first, then in clusters, then somehow all at once.
He told her about the people he worked with. The college kids on their Oregon adventure, passing a joint between them when the workday was done, and the schoolteachers on summer break, having a beard-growing contest. But he found himself writing most about Henry, the Vietnam vet, who was becoming a real friend.
You’d never know how old the man was, watching him clean a log of its branches with the double-bladed ax, then use the adze to flatten the round to make a walking surface for a simple footbridge. He’d stop every few minutes to sharpen the tool with the file he carried in his back pocket, then relight his big Honduran cigar.
Henry was old-school in some ways. In other ways he was more modern than most. When he found Peter doing yoga one morning—Peter’s shrink had told him that yoga’s focus on mindfulness was supposed to help with post-traumatic stress—Henry had asked Peter to show him some poses. He’d confessed that he was a little worried about keeping up with his new girlfriend in Eugene, a tech consultant twenty years his junior, who’d put herself through business school working as an exotic dancer.
In that first letter, Peter asked June to write him back, care of General Delivery at the Eugene post office.
By the end of his next ten-day rotation, he’d written a second letter, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to send it.
He mentioned his reluctance to Henry, who had already volunteered himself to drive Peter back to town. Henry just shook his head in disappointment at Peter’s general character, then drove directly to the post office.
June had sent him a picture of the little teardrop-shaped valley where she lived, taken from the top of the waterfall, along with a nicely designed lightweight backpacker’s hammock and rain fly that Peter never would have bought for himself. On the back of the picture, she’d written: “Tell me more!”
He thought the hammock was a good sign.
He bought a stamp and mailed the second letter.
And over each ten-day rotation, he wrote another one.
Slowly, he began to tell her about his time in the Marines. Officer Candidate School, the challenge of making Recon. His first platoon, most of them as green as he was, hungry to get into the fight, few of them with any idea what they were getting into. The sergeants who’d taught him all the things he hadn’t learned in OCS, which was almost everything.
He told her about Afghanistan and Iraq. The sounds and smells, the stifling heat of summer, the bitter cold of the winter nights.
He told her about Big Jimmy and Manny Martinez, about Spook and Tony and Cho, Bad Bob and Jamal and Smitty and the rest. The ones who lived, the ones who died.
He told her about their interpreter, Asif, who wanted to be called Andy, who loved Simon & Garfunkel, who knew all the words to the song “America.” He’d sing it if you asked, and also if you didn’t. “Let us be lovers and marry our fortunes together...”
Asif had been a pediatrician in Baghdad until his clinic was destroyed by a suicide bomber. He’d asked Peter to write him a letter of recommendation so he could get to the States after the war. He had family in Indiana. Instead he got killed in an ambush in the tall corn along the Euphrates.
Peter tried to tell these stories lightly. He didn’t want to put his burden on her.
Over time, he told her everything.
Almost everything.
He hoped, maybe, she’d understand him better, knowing.
He was afraid that she might understand him too well.
He was a trained killer. There was no way around it.
His time in the Marines had changed him profoundly, had turned him into himself. He’d been like red-hot steel in those years, with the war as the hammer and the Corps as the anvil. He couldn’t unlive those years, nor did he want to.
Most days, he was proud of what he’d done.
Most days.
He and his platoon had done their job, done it well. Gotten some bad guys, looked out for each other. He could have done better, he knew.
He didn’t like to think about the dead, but he did it anyway. Not that he had any choice. It was part of his duty, to carry them with him. Part of his mission. These honored dead.
He didn’t know if he could explain that to June.
But he was trying.
*
It was a strange conversation, because of the gaps in time. He’d mail a letter he spent two weeks writing, get her response to a letter he’d written two weeks before, and start a new letter to send two weeks later.
But somehow it was easier, too, because he could write it down without having someone else there, without having to see the response in her face. He wrote this to her, told her that she didn’t even have to read the letters, that maybe what was important was for him to write them.
Her response made him laugh out loud. “Don’t be such an asshole,” she wrote. “Of course I’m reading your fucking letters.”
June’s language was as bad as the carpenters Peter had spent summers working with. Worse than some Marines.
She didn’t try to tell him she understood his experience. She couldn’t, not really. She hadn’t been there. But she said the letters helped her understand him better, knowing more about his war.
She wrote that she rode her bike the length of the teardrop-shaped valley every day, all the way down to the mailbox on the state highway, hoping there was another letter.
She wrote that she liked the slow pace of their correspondence.
She wrote that it was like living in the Old West, their letters wrapped in oilskin and carried in strangers’ saddlebags across the high passes. Like an old-fashioned courtship, although she hadn’t put it in quite those terms.
The idea had occurred to Peter, too. He’d started tucking a wildflower into his letters, pressed flat from days between the pages of whatever book he had on the trail.
He’d learned that tactic from the Marines. Use the terrain to your advantage.
It wasn’t a war, nothing like it. But definitely a kind of campaign.
And his heart was captured, hopelessly, irrevocably.
Had been since the first time he’d seen her.
Her eyes so bright, so full of humor and ferocity.
Those arms strong enough to carry him home.
*
He didn’t know what their correspondence might lead to. But he knew his campaign was making progress when June’s letters began to weave him into her life in the valley.
“You could help in the orchard at picking time,” she wrote at the end of July. “If you’re interested.”
In mid-August, she wrote: “The guest cottages could use some repairs, when you’re back this way.”
Most promising of all was her last letter at the end of August. Several pages were taken up by rough pencil sketches of a modest farmhouse, with a wide porch off the back bedroom. She’d drawn an arrow to it, marked Sleeping Porch in her messy scrawl.
“Maybe a fall project,” she’d written. “See you late September?”
So that was the plan.
Until their last day, coming down from the mountain. Cell service was better there, and Henry stepped away to check his messages.
When he came back, his face was grave.
His daughter had called.
Her husband had gone missing, along with a senior employee and a shipment of client cash.
“I could really use your help,” Henry told Peter. “Maybe a week, two at the most. Just until I get things squared away.”
Peter didn’t have to think before he answered.
“No problem.” He’d send June a postcard. Maybe leave out a few details. He didn’t want to worry her. “Sign me up.”
Later, he’d wish he’d answered differently.
He’d have plenty of reasons.
But he knew he’d have answered exactly the same way.
Henry’s pickup was nose-down in the ditch, and Peter’s head was killing him.
He remembered the red wrecker smashing hard into the passenger side, knocking the big truck off the road.
He reached for the door handle but couldn’t get a grip, something wrong with his coordination.
Then his door opened. A man reached inside, hooked his fingers inside the neck of Peter’s body armor, and pulled him out and down, headfirst, banging his shoulder against the ground.
Releasing Peter’s armor, the man twisted Peter’s rifle from his useless grip while his legs were still up in the truck, then took another grip on the armor and hauled him bodily to the embankment.
The man switched the rifle from safe to fire, chambered a round, and pointed it at Peter with his finger on the trigger, all without having to look at the weapon. He wore combat boots and greasy blue mechanic’s pants with black body armor over a black long-sleeved T-shirt. A black ski mask covered his face and neck. With his black combat gloves, not a single square inch of skin was exposed. He had a matte-black sidearm in a black nylon leg holster.
“Hands behind your head, fingers laced together,” he said. “Do it now or I’ll blow your knee apart.”
Peter still wasn’t moving right, he could feel it. His head hurt. He wouldn’t have a chance to get to the pistol on his own belt.
He didn’t like it, but he did as he was told.
All this while a second man with a shotgun, identically dressed, was pulling Deacon out of the driver’s seat. Protected by the air bag, Deacon had managed to keep hold of his own rifle and tried to bring it to bear, but the second man just cracked him on the head with the butt of his shotgun, a very businesslike maneuver that put Deacon on the ground without his rifle.
Peter looked for the ambulance but couldn’t see it from his position in the ditch. The red wrecker was parked on the near shoulder past Henry’s truck, red lights flashing. Hiding the armed men from the view of any oncoming traffic, but looking like they were there to help.
The hijackers had put some thought into this. It wasn’t their first rodeo.
Deacon crawled onto the embankment beside Peter, his dark face shining with sweat, blood matting in his hair. He put his trembling hands behind his head. Peter couldn’t tell if the shaking was from fear or rage or the adrenaline burning like gasoline in his veins.
The second man covered them both with the shotgun, a black combat model with what looked like a five-round tube and almost certainly one in the chamber.
“One move, I blow your legs off,” he said. “Don’t even think about reaching for your pistols. Got me?”
The first man put Deacon’s rifle on safe, pitched it out of reach under Henry’s truck, and did the same with Peter’s weapon. Then without ceremony, he put his knee on the rear driver’s-side seat, reached in, and dragged Banjo across the wide bench and out of the truck by the neck-hole of his vest, spilling his rifle to the ground.
Banjo’s face was bloody and his arm hung wrong and he was barely moving. Not resisting. Hit hard by the wrecker.
The first man lugged Banjo down the ditch to the embankment and dropped him beside Peter. He landed on his hurt arm and let out a yelp like a kicked dog.
The hijacker quickly turned to the driver’s seat and climbed in to get to the passenger side. It occurred late to Peter that the passenger-side doors wouldn’t open because of the impact with the wrecker. He still wasn’t thinking quite right. He heard the first man grunting as he hauled Henry over the center console and out of the truck to the ground.
Henry wasn’t moving at all.
He’d taken the brunt of the side impact. His body was limp and his face and head were covered with blood. But his hands were still clamped onto that rifle. Henry was a big man. The hijacker had to pry his hands free, finger by finger. Henry showed no other sign of resistance. Peter looked for the rise and fall of his chest, but he couldn’t see that, either.
Don’t be dead, Henry. Please don’t be dead.
The attackers were fast and efficient. Peter figured maybe ninety seconds had passed, certainly no more than two minutes.
This was no ordinary carjacking. This was a two-man assault on four armed, trained men.
The hijackers had hit them in motion as a force multiplier. The surprise impact had knocked Banjo and Henry out of commission completely, and banged up Peter and Deacon enough to disorient them, make them take longer to react. Which gave the hijackers a distinct advantage.
Like a roadside bomb, only mobile.
Peter was familiar with the tactics.
He just hadn’t expected them in the mountains of Colorado.
*
The second man stood guard with the shotgun while the first man looked at Peter, Deacon, and Banjo in turn, his eyes dark and empty in the holes of the black ski mask.
The sun was gone behind the mountains, but there was still light enough to see.
“I’m taking your pistols now,” said the first man. “Hands stay behind your heads, fingers stay laced. If one of you resists, he’ll kill all of you. If you cooperate, you’ll live until tomorrow. Understand?” He pointed at Peter. “I’m starting with you.”
Peter didn’t like it, but he didn’t see that he had a choice.
Still, it was the first mistake he’d seen. The shotgun wasn’t a precision weapon. If Peter made a move and the second man fired his shotgun, he might kill Peter, but he might also hit his partner.
Peter would bide his time. His head still hurt, but he was improving.