The Drifter (Peter Ash #1)(14)

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He said, “So what happened? With Jimmy, I mean.”

Dinah said, “We got married out of high school. Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea, but we just couldn’t wait. We wanted to eat each other up.” She gave Peter a sly look. “Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like that for someone, that kind of hunger?”

Peter looked at Dinah, at her cool blue eyes. He knew what she meant.

Dinah said, “Well, that’s how it was for us. James went to work as an apprentice plumber, and I went to nursing school. We had a plan. When I graduated and got a job, it would be his turn for college. Then the towers fell.”

She looked out the window. “Once they had him, they wouldn’t let him go. They said he had essential expertise. He did three tours and kept getting extended. Can you believe that?” She shook her head. “He had to get blown up to get sent home.”

Peter nodded. That’s how it was for a lot of guys. If you didn’t take the re-up bonus, they would keep you anyway. And maybe that was the story Jimmy told his wife. But Peter knew the real deal. They had talked about it. Jimmy stayed in for the same reason Peter did. He was good at war. And someone had to take care of his guys. To get them out alive.

The truck bumped along. The roads were getting worse as the neighborhood changed. More storefronts were vacant on each block. On the side streets, house after house with the shingles slipping from their roofs. Broken car windows covered with plastic sheeting and duct tape. The black Ford bounced in their wake.

“His physical injuries healed well enough,” she said. “But once he came home from the hospital, he seemed like a different person. He became angry at the slightest thing. Sometimes at nothing at all, as if he were looking for an excuse to explode. Then he was just angry all the time.”

Peter nodded. All those years of war had changed him, too. It was the white static, but also something else. He had become a vast reserve of energy kept at bay only with exercise and work. It was a physical need to keep moving, keep doing, to solve whatever problem he had set for himself. If he let his engine idle too long, the white static would rise up inside him until he stood and got back to the job at hand. Maybe it was the war. Maybe it was just who he was now.

Dinah kept talking. “He couldn’t find work because the economy had crashed. He was a Marine Corps veteran with an honorable discharge and years of service, but he only had a high school degree, and he couldn’t find a job. I tried to get him to start his own business, fixing people’s plumbing. But James just couldn’t get started. I’d nag him and he’d kick a hole in the wall.”

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.”