Chapter 13
He took narrow side streets, weaving north and west through Fremont and Phinney Ridge into the sleepy neighborhood of Ballard. Ellie leaned her seat back and looked out the window at the passing houses. The Tahoe was a boat, but more agile than Peter’s old pickup.
It was almost ten p.m. when they got to Stella Martinez’s sage-green bungalow on Twenty-Fifth NW.
The front yard was a riot of plantings. Peter reversed the Tahoe into the side drive and eased it all the way to the rear of the lot beside the oversized garage, assessing his surroundings for security risks.
There were houses close on both sides, each with plenty of exterior lights brightening the night.
Six-foot wooden fences kept the back yards private.
Past the garage was a four-foot retaining wall with another six-foot fence on top, this one designed to be difficult to climb.
Behind that was an apartment building with a gated sidewalk entrance.
Any intruder would have to go through Stella’s front door or walk up the driveway toward the back. So not bad, for a single-family house.
The key was exactly where Manny had said it would be.
Peter had met Stella several times, but had never been to the house.
In fact, it was his personal policy to stay as far from Stella Martinez as possible.
She’d been a drill sergeant in the Army, teaching unarmed combat for ten years before leaving to supervise Manny’s office.
Now she ran triathlons and hundred-mile ultramarathons to keep herself in shape.
Her last serious boyfriend had been hospitalized for exhaustion.
All Manny’s guys were scared of her. Peter was, too.
He unlocked the door, then went back for Ellie.
She was asleep on her feet. With her overnight bag under his arm, he got her into the kitchen and up the stairs to the single bedroom.
He kept the lights off, not wanting to alert the neighbors in case Stella had told them she was out of town.
He drew the curtains, then pointed Ellie toward the bed. “Sit.”
She sat. He bent and untied her Doc Martens, slipped them off. Her socks were white with yellow smiley faces on them. “The bathroom is through that door. I’ll be downstairs if you need me. Okay?”
She nodded, her eyelids sinking. He stood and backed out of the room, closed the door silently behind him, and crept down the steep, narrow stairs.
What in hell was he going to do with a thirteen-year-old girl?
He couldn’t stop thinking about that letter made from cut-up magazine pages.
It had just the right amount of goofball for a note from a crackpot.
Reed had that vibe in person, for sure. But when you added a second shooter into the mix, someone a lot more capable, it felt like something else.
Something bigger. A deliberate strategy. A calculation.
He wandered the darkened house, looking for a landline and finding nothing. He needed to talk with June but didn’t trust his cell outside the tinfoil. His hand itched for a weapon. He should have asked Lewis to arrange for one in the Tahoe.
He went back to the spare bedroom, set up as an office. With a slab-glass desktop over matching blue file cabinets and a crisp wall of bookshelves filled with exercise manuals and fitness guru memoirs, everything was extremely squared away.
Knowing Stella was right-handed, he opened the top right-hand file drawer.
A nickel-plated 9-mil SIG Sauer automatic lay on an oil-stained dishtowel.
An excellent weapon, fully loaded with a round in the chamber.
He carried it into the living room and stretched out on the couch.
He could have made a pot of coffee to keep him on watch for the night, but he knew he’d need rest to be useful tomorrow.
So he found a blanket in a chest, put the SIG on the floor beside him where his hand would find it naturally, then laid his head down.
He knew what was coming.
He hadn’t felt like this since losing four members of his platoon to an ambush along the Tigris.
Despite the lack of coffee, he wouldn’t sleep, not yet.
Instead he closed his eyes and watched helplessly as Geoffrey Reed put his pistol to the underside of his chin and blew his own head off.
Then he was at the motel, with KT crumpled on the floor, the back of her head missing.
Then he had the screaming girl under his arm, racing past her mother’s dead body and out to the pizza car while Scott Enderby fired at them with purpose and deliberation.
He felt the first thump of the little hatchback making contact, then the double thump as he ran the man over, going forward and again in reverse.
Then he was in the tall corn beside the Tigris, looking at four dead Marines.
He took slow, deep breaths and let the memories cycle, again and again, with all their fear and anger and pain.
Acknowledging it all, doing his best to accept it.
He felt the wave of guilt wash across him, his responsibility for KT’s death and Ellie’s loss of her mother, and accepted that, too.
From his years of dealing with his wars and their aftermath, he knew that pushing away emotions and memories only made them worse.
When they finally began to fade, he called up a mental picture of the long sandy beach where he and June had gone camping the summer before, walking barefoot in the warm, shallow water, hand in hand. He held that image in his mind’s eye as his breath filled his chest, again and again.
Eventually, he slept.
—
He startled awake in the dark, the pistol ready in his hand. A slim form stood swaying by his feet, backlit by the streetlight shining through the sheer curtains. He put the gun down and sat up. “Bad dream?”
Ellie nodded, her voice thick with sleep. “Can I stay down here?”
“Of course.” He looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. He stood. “You take the couch.”
She sank into the cushions and curled up on her side. “Where are you going to be?”
“I’ll be right here.” He draped the blanket over her shoulders, then sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, the gun in his lap.
She reached out and grabbed his arm with both hands. Then her breathing softened and she was asleep.
When he woke again, it was just beginning to get light. He lay on his back on the carpet with the pistol at his side. Above him, Ellie was snoring, tangled in the blanket, one arm hanging down with his shirtsleeve bunched in her small fist.
Gently, Peter detached her grip, then climbed to his feet and stared down at her.
Blinking in the new day, he realized he was entirely unequipped to give her what she really needed.
He was no kind of parent. He was an uncle of sorts to Lewis’s two boys, but Ellie was a girl and she’d just lost her mother.
Clearly, she needed more than Peter could provide.
Especially if he was going to keep chasing this thing, whatever it was.