Chapter 10
CLINT
The knock came at three past seven. I was awake before the second rap.
I came up the way I come up—all at once, flat, quiet, hand already moving toward the nightstand. Then, a voice came through the door doing an accent I hadn't heard in a long time.
"Housekeeping. You want me fluff peellow?"
The hand stopped.
There is exactly one human being on this earth who does that voice. It belonged to a much-viewed DVD of Tommy Boy and a bunk bed in Valentine, Texas, and to a boy who used it on every brother he ever ambushed. It had not improved with age.
I got up and padded across the room and opened the door.
Tommy Dane stood in the hallway grinning like sunrise.
He looked good. He always looked good—Tommy came out of the womb looking like a recruiting poster and never lost it. Jeans and a plain T-shirt, and somehow, on him, it read like a man who owned the block.
"There he is," Tommy said. "Ugliest man in six states."
"Seven, now. I've been traveling."
He laughed and came in and got his arms around me, and I got mine around him.
We stood there in the doorway hammering each other on the back the way men do when the words aren't going to come out right.
He smelled like coffee and cedar. He felt solid.
My little brother, thick through the shoulders now, with sun lines at his eyes.
I let him go and checked the clock. A couple hours of sleep. I've run wars on less.
"To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Errand boy." He dropped into the armchair by the window like he'd paid for it. "That's me this morning. Chief courier of the family, on account of my oldest brother lives like it's 1875."
"It was a good year."
"You'd know." He dug in his pocket and came out with a phone, black, new, still with the little plastic film on the screen, and held it out to me. "Here."
I looked at it. I didn't take it.
"I don't need one."
"See, that's where you're wrong. This is how the human race communicates now. They send each other little messages. Sometimes, a picture of their lunch. It's a whole thing, you'd hate it."
"I would."
"There's also a backup plan," Tommy said, and pointed past me at the nightstand. "Called the hotel phone. Which works great, generally. Except somebody unplugged it."
I glanced back. The cord lay coiled on the carpet where I'd left it.
Right. Habit. First five minutes in any room—windows, exits, and the phone comes out of the wall. A phone that can ring is a phone somebody else decides when to use. I sleep better when the only thing in the room that can go off is me.
"What if I plug it back in?"
Tommy gave me a look. The look said, you're being difficult on purpose.
I gave him one back. Mine said, and?
The years fell off the room. For a second, we were two boys across a kitchen table with our mother telling us to quit it without looking up from the stove.
Then, Tommy quit smiling, and that got my attention, because Tommy not smiling is a rarer event than rain out home.
"Take the phone, Clint. It's important."
"I know it's important. Cash doesn't fly to Texas unless it’s important." I set the phone on the dresser, which was as far as I was willing to commit. "But I'm not planning on getting into any trouble."
Tommy laughed. It came out short, and there wasn't much floor under it.
"Man," he said. "You have no idea."
"So, tell me."
He looked at me a second. Then, he leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and laced his fingers, and he started talking.
And inside of four sentences, I knew he was holding back.
Tommy is good—whatever he'd been doing since the service, it had polished him, and the delivery was clean.
It was the shape of the thing. The story had rooms in it he steered around.
A man walking a floor plan he knows in the dark will move a certain way around the furniture he isn't mentioning.
My whole working life was built on watching men move around furniture.
It rubbed me wrong.
That was the part I sat with. Not that he was doing it—that it got to me. Getting told half a thing has never bothered me before. This time, something under my ribs sat up and got sour. I couldn't have said why.
"There's a man named Craine," Tommy said. "Dominic Craine. FBI. Deputy Director, or he was—it's complicated right now. He's a real piece of work, Clint. Dirty going back years, and smart about it. He’s got it out for the company."
"The company?"
Tommy blinked, and I watched him realize how far back he had to go.
"Right," he said. "Okay." He exhaled, long, like a man looking at a wall of boxes he has to carry upstairs.
"Me and Cash—we work for an outfit now. Private.
It's called Dominion Defense. Runs out of a place here in town, big old spread on the harbor road, they call it Dominion Hall. And before you make the face—"
"I'm not making a face."
"You're making the face. It's not that." He shook his head.
"It's not guns-for-hire, it's not oil companies, none of that.
The work's good. It's the kind of thing we used to wish somebody had the budget and the leash to do, and now somebody does.
All over the world. For the right side, every time.
I've seen it up close for a while now, and I'm telling you, it's the best work I've ever done, and that includes the flag work. "
That was a big statement from Tommy, who had loved the flag work.
"And Craine has it out for this company."
"Craine has a vendetta," Tommy said. "Personal.
Old. Aimed right at the middle of it." His jaw worked.
"He's come at us more than once. The last time cost us.
He's out there right now, and he's got money and reach and people all through this town.
Cops, contractors, watchers. Cronies on half the corners, maybe.
So when you're out walking—and I know you, you've already been out walking—you keep your head on. "
Watch your six. Cash had said it at the airstrip, quiet, with his arm around my neck. I'd thought of it as noise—it's how men like us say goodbye, the same as other people say drive safe.
It wasn't noise.
And I thought, without deciding to, of a seawall at three in the morning. Of the eye that came open and turned. Noted, not hostile. I almost said it. I didn't.
"Why am I here, Tommy?"
"Because we need you."
"For what?"
"For whatever's coming." He said it simple. "We need you. We need everyone."
The word went through the room.
"What do you mean, everyone?"
And there it went again—that hitch, that half-second where my brother's eyes did a small calculation about what to leave out. I watched him run it. Then, I watched him throw the math away, which I'll always credit him for.
"It's not just me and Cash out here," he said. "Wyatt's here. Grant's here. Brock's here."
That rocked me back.
I stood there in a hotel room in South Carolina and felt the floor of the thing drop away.
Wyatt. Grant. Brock. Cash. Tommy. My brothers don't gather.
We are not a family that gathers. We are a family that scattered like shot the day we were each old enough to enlist, and we have spent our lives waving at each other across oceans.
The last time more than three of us stood in the same room, we buried a neighbor.
Six of us. In one city.
"And John?" I asked.
"We'll be bringing John in soon."
Soon. Not no. Not John's got his own life. We'll be bringing John in soon—like a unit filling out a roster. Like somebody, somewhere, had a list with all seven of our names on it and was checking them off.
My mind was running now, and nothing it turned up smelled right.
What had my brothers gotten into? A private outfit with the budget to fly jets into Texas scrubland, wrapped around a family that doesn't gather, gathering.
A federal man with a vendetta aimed right at the middle of it. The middle of what?
"What is this, Tommy? What have you all gotten into?"
"Nothing we can't handle."
He said it easy, with the grin coming back up under it. I looked at my brother and didn’t believe him.
I didn't believe the can't handle and I didn't believe the easy.
Something was big here. Bigger than big.
You don't call in every man of a family for a job.
A job takes hires. This took blood—somebody wanted all of us, specifically us, and Tommy was sitting in that armchair playing it like a reunion.
Why? Why be coy with me? I've held clearances that don't have names. If anybody on this earth was safe to read in, it was me. Instead, I was getting the furniture walked around.
I come out of a world where need-to-know is a religion. I have never once kicked against it. If I needed to know, I'd be told. That rule kept me alive for many years. I bit my tongue now out of respect for it.
But under the tongue-biting, something else was moving.
The pull.
The door was right there. My pack was ready in under a minute. There was a road out of this town, and a bus on it, and a seat on the bus, and nobody in the wide world who could make me stay. Whatever this was, it had lied to me, and the road has never lied to me, and the road was right there—
"Also," Tommy said, "this is for you."
He'd pulled something else out of his pocket, and he held it up between two fingers.
A credit card. Black. Heavy-looking, the kind with no numbers on the face.
I took it because he was going to make me take it, anyway. It weighed like a knife.
"What is this?"
"That," Tommy said, "is your all-expenses-paid trip to Neverland."
I made a face.
He shrugged, entirely unrepentant. Tommy's jokes are a load-bearing part of his personality. Complaining about them has never once slowed him down.
"It works everywhere, it doesn't have a limit, and nobody's watching the statement, so don't get shy. Dinner out. New boots. A haircut. A makeover, if the spirit moves you."
"A makeover."
"I'm just saying the resources exist."
And that was the first time it landed on me—really landed—that my little brother, in his plain jeans and his plain T-shirt, looked put together.
I did not. His plain clothes fit like they'd been introduced to him personally.
Mine had been washed in a lot of sinks. He had a haircut.
I had hair. There was a road-worn layer on me that I hadn't seen in years, because I hadn't stood next to anything that showed it.
"You're saying I need a makeover."
"No." Tommy stood, and the grin went all the way up into his eyes.
"I'm saying you could use a sprucing. There's a difference, and a gentleman would know it.
" He looked me over, head to boots, with the frank cruelty available only to family.
"How many T-shirts do you own, by the way? Total. On earth."
"Three."
"Three."
"One's nearly new."
We stood there grinning at each other like idiots.
Nobody else gets to do that. A stranger says one word about my clothes and it's a long day for the stranger. Tommy could audit my entire life from the doorway of a hotel room and all it did was make the room warmer. That's brothers. That's the whole contract, written before either of us could read.
"I gotta go," he said. "We’ll call for you soon. Be ready."
"How soon?"
He walked to the door and opened it. He looked back at me with his hand on the frame, and gave me the shrug he's been giving authority figures since grade school.
"Depends," he said, "on whether you plug the phone back in."
Then, he was gone.
The door clicked. The room went quiet, and the quiet had a different weight than it had an hour ago.
He'd filled the place with more questions than a man could work through in a week: a company with a headquarters here, a fed with an old grudge, six brothers gathered in one town like weather building, and a seventh on the way.
And underneath all of it, unlisted, the thing Tommy hadn't said—whatever it was he kept walking around, the furniture in the dark.
Fuck.
There was no version of this day where I sat in that room and got anything useful done. The room was all questions and good linen. I knew myself that much.
I looked at the card in my hand. Black, no numbers, heavy as a bad decision.
Maybe I'd take a stroll. Find a real breakfast somewhere—eggs, and a griddle old enough to have opinions. Walk the town in daylight and see who its merchants were, see what a man with three T-shirts and Neverland in his pocket could do about a sprucing.
Or maybe I'd hit the road.
I stood at the window a while, looking down at the street coming awake, and let both of those sit there side by side, the way I've let them sit my whole life.
Only time would tell.