Chapter 56
HAYDEN
“And I’m telling you, a hot dog is a sandwich!”
Sawyer pointed his beer, as if it were somehow helping his argument. Standing behind the bar, Carter scowled.
“Look, it has meat. It has bread. The meat is inside the bread, right?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Really?” he huffed, running his fingers through that beautiful blond hair I loved so much. “You don’t think so?”
“If a hot dog is a sandwich, then a burrito is a sandwich,” Carter shot back.
Sawyer scoffed. “A burrito?”
“It’s got meat surrounded by bread,” Carter reasoned. “Your definition, not mine.”
“That ain’t bread, bro.”
“It’s flour and water. Same thing.”
I laughed, kicking back from my spot on the stool I’d slid into directly from work. When it came to my boys ‘fighting’, I could watch them all night. Well, most of the night, anyway.
“BODIE!”
My third and most studious boyfriend looked up from the table he’d been working at. It was scattered with so much paperwork, the others had teased him he was causing a fire hazard.
“Settle this,” Sawyer folded his arms. “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”
Bodie pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose and looked at me. I shrugged, helplessly.
“Seriously?” he barked. “This is what you’re spending your energy on?”
“Answer the question,” Carter demanded.
Bodie rolled his eyes, causing me to giggle. For the first time in a while, I noticed my ribs didn’t hurt when I did it.
“Alright, let’s ask Grizz,” Sawyer began. “He can settle thi—“
His sentence died a quick death. All four of us had turned, and were staring at the empty seat near the end of the bar.
A seat that had been empty since that night.
“Ah shit,” Sawyer mumbled. “I forgot again.”
It had been almost two weeks now, since we’d left Cole’s crumpled form behind the bar.
In that time, Bodie’s birthday concussion had faded, and Carter’s sprained back had mostly healed.
Sawyer had gotten away with only a few bumps and bruises in our group trip to urgent care.
My cracked ribs still hurt like crazy, though.
Dawn broke the next day, cold and beautiful, and thankfully, Cole was gone. But Grizz was gone too.
“It’s not just you, man,” Bodie consoled Sawyer. “I keep forgetting too.”
Together we stared at the spot in relative silence. Grizz not coming in was like the sun not coming up every morning. Seeing his seat empty like that was beyond weird.
“Think he got freaked out by what happened?” Sawyer asked quietly.
Bodie shook his head. “You think a guy like that gets freaked out by anything?”
It was a good question. None of us really had an answer.
Carter rubbed his chin, as if deciding something. Eventually he sighed and waved Bodie over.
“I was going to wait, but I came in to a little surprise this morning,” he said. “But first, I need to show you something.”
He walked to the center of the bar, and hopped up on something. Reaching high overhead, he brought down one of the many old, dusty photos in even older frames. This one, I noticed, had the dust blown off it already.
“My uncle used to show me these photos,” Carter began, “the few times I came in here when I was little. I always figured they were soldiers he knew. Guys he’d served with. But after we saw Grizz in action, it got me thinking.”
Placing the frame face-down on the bar, he slid open the back and popped out the black and white photo.
“See this?”
He pointed. We squinted. Recognition dawned.
“HOLY SHIT!” Sawyer breathed.
I’m pretty sure we all saw the same thing at once. A group of soldiers stood huddled together, against the backdrop of lush, jungle mountains. But on the far left, kneeling in front, was a very recognizable face.
“It’s him…”
He was heartbreakingly young, but there was no mistaking those sharp, heavily-lidded eyes.
His fatigues looked well-worn, his boots caked with the mud of a thousand marches.
But it was the familiar-looking cap on his head that I most recognized.
It looked placed there almost as an afterthought, and rested at a downward angle.
“Grizz was Green Beret,” Bodie swore, his voice choked with veneration.
“Still is, apparently,” Carter corrected him. “We saw it for ourselves.”
Sawyer nodded, mechanically. “That kind of training never goes away.”
Carter handed the photo over to me. I took it with reverence.
“Look at the back.”
I flipped it over. A bunch of names were scrawled in pencil, some of them so faded it was hard to make them out. One, at the bottom, stood out from the rest:
Jonathan Grizzlock.
“Damn, we’ve always wondered,” Sawyer beamed. He pointed upward. “It was here the whole time.”
“And that’s not all,” said Carter. “When I got in this afternoon, the lights were already on. I found an empty pint glass, still wet with foam, right where Grizz sits. Along with this.”
He pulled out a nondescript cardboard box. Someone had scrawled ‘Do not open until Xmas’ on it, but it was clearly unsealed.
“You already opened it?” asked Bodie.
“Hell yeah I opened it,” replied Carter. “Could’ve been a bomb, or a claymore mine, or a pile of used kitty litter. You know Grizz’s sense of humor. He holds nothing back.”
Sawyer blinked. “And?”
Carter shoved the box our way. It seemed to take a little effort.
The three of us huddled around the flimsy cardboard container. Bodie pulled the top open, and our heads came together as we peered inside.
What we saw struck us utterly and completely speechless.
“That can’t be real,” gasped Sawyer.
“Oh it’s real.”
“But… I don’t…”
“I spent almost an hour counting it,” Carter went on.
“Twenties, fifties, hundreds. Mostly older bills, too. The ones with the little Presidents on them.” He added a shrug.
“Who knows how long he had this thing shoved in the back of his closet? But I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Grizz hated banks. ”
Bodie slid the box closer and picked it up, trying to gauge its weight.
“There has to be over a hundred thousand dollars here,” he swore.
“Two hundred eighty six thousand, nine-hundred and twenty,” Carter corrected him. “No note, no sign, no anything. Just what he wrote on the box.”
“But this is Grizz’s money,” Sawyer lamented. “We can’t take this.”
“I thought the same thing at first,” said Carter.
He pointed back to the name in the photo.
“But then I did some research on Jonathan Grizzlock. Turns out he’s loaded.
He took an Agent Orange payout, decades ago, parlayed it into a not-so-small fortune.
He’s been a raging philanthropist ever since.
He even started two of his own charities; one for veterans, and one for the children of soldiers who’ve been lost.”
“Grizz?” I pointed at his empty spot in disbelief. “That guy, right there? The one who drinks your beer for free every night?”
Carter chuckled. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“How the hell did we not know this?” asked Sawyer.
Carter’s broad shoulders moved up and down. “He tries to stay off the grid, I guess. But by now he’s given too much. There are tons of articles about him, if we’d only known his name.”
We stared at the spot together, in silence, each lost on our own thoughts. In half a month, Grizz hadn’t been back, not even once. And the box on the bar seemed final. He wasn’t coming back.
“He wanted us to have this,” Carter said solemnly. “We took care of him, now he’s taking care of us.”
Sawyer stepped forward. Reaching out, he laid a hand on the box.
“So, we take it,” he reasoned. “We use it to save The Refuge.”
“No.”
All eyes fell on Carter. His expression was oddly peaceful.
“This place has run its course,” he said. “It served its purpose, providing a gathering place for men who really needed it. Grizz was the last of his kind. With him gone, it’s just another bar.”
Bodie scratched at his chin. “So then… what do we do?”
“That’s obvious,” Carter smiled. “We take the money and start over. We go somewhere and we do something else. We get a fresh start.”
He nodded to the well-loved, well-worn seat at the end of the bar.
“Even Grizz knows when it’s time to leave.”
An arm looped around me, pulling me in, just as another pair of hands slid to the small of my back. Bodie slipped forward, completing the circle. Marking their territory. Making me theirs.
I sighed, happily. It was like being wrapped in a blanket of safety and comfort.
“You in, Angel?”
My smile was so wide it could’ve cracked my face.
“With you boys? Anywhere,” I murmured softly. “Always.”
Their hands moved possessively, sending a warm rush of excitement and adrenaline through my entire body.
And then just as suddenly, that feeling was replaced with cold, dread horror…
… as Cole stepped through the front door, and into the bar.