Chapter 4
TOMMY
Amateurs run. Pros stick around.
That was the first thing my unit ever drilled into me about wet work in the open—that the man who clears town the day of the body is the man who shows up on every camera, every traffic stop, every gas station receipt the locals start pulling six hours later.
The clean way home is the boring way home. You finish your hike. You wash your gear. You sit down at the same diner where the same waitress already knows you take your coffee black, and you let her tell you about the awful thing that happened up at the Narrows.
That's what I did.
The body had been found by sundown. The three women I'd sent up the canyon must have done their best with him for fifteen, twenty minutes before one of them peeled off downstream to flag a ranger, and by the time the chopper got there, the man face down in the side pool was the man I'd left, except colder.
The local news ran a thirty-second segment that night and a longer one the next morning. Tragic accident in Zion National Park. Hiker drowned in the Narrows after suspected fall. Authorities urge caution. Conditions can change without warning.
No name. No photo. No description of the helpful Texan who'd jogged downstream looking for a signal. Just a thirty-seven-year-old man from California who'd come out alone and gone home in a bag.
The park put up new signs at the trailhead the next morning. Hike at your own risk. Slippery rocks. Strong currents. Cold water exposure. Same warnings they'd had up since 1972, just printed on fresh paper to make the locals feel like something had been done.
I drank my Americano with vanilla and read the paper.
A coded confirmation came through that afternoon from a number that wouldn't exist by sundown. Subject's network active. Movements consistent with elevated alert posture. That was the line. Translated out of the careful language: the Iranians knew.
They'd lost a man in a place they'd believed was safe, in the middle of a country they'd been moving around in for years like tourists at a museum.
Their man hadn't been killed in a shadow city in a country that ended in -stan.
He'd been killed at one of America's most photographed national parks, in waist-deep water, in broad daylight, by someone who'd left him a sandwich.
That was the message.
We don't care where you go. We don't care who you pretend to be.
We don't care if your passport says you sell mid-century paintings or if your girlfriend in Malibu thinks you're finding yourself.
You move our enemy's weapons into our enemy's hands, and we will find you in your favorite slot canyon and leave you there.
It wasn't subtle.
It wasn't supposed to be.
I stayed two more days.
I went to Feel Love in the morning and let the girl with the sunburned nose tell me how awful it was, that poor man, his family, can you imagine. I told her I couldn't. I tipped extra.
I rode my e-bike up the canyon and did the lower Emerald Pools trail because I'd been meaning to, and I sat for an hour on a flat rock above the pool with my pack open beside me and let the sound of the falls do whatever the sound of falls does to a man's nervous system.
I had dinner at King's Landing both nights.
Hannah brought my water before I asked. I tipped her extra, too.
On the last morning, I loaded the e-bike onto the rack at the rental, packed my duffel by the door, and walked four blocks to the riverside park to kill the last hour before my flight.
That's where I was when the shadow fell.
I'd taken off my left boot to dump out a stone—one of those flat little river stones that wedges itself sideways under your arch and turns half a mile of walking into purgatory.
I had the boot upside down in one hand and was shaking it over the grass when the shadow came across me, longer than a tree's, square at the shoulders.
"Hello, Tommy."
I looked up.
I didn't put the boot on.
I just stood up barefoot in the grass and grabbed my brother by both shoulders and pulled him into me and held him there for a long second before I let go.
"Holy shit," I said. "Holy shit, Grant."
"Tommy."
"What in the actual hell are you doing here?"
He'd thickened out a little since I'd seen him last. He was always the most solid of us—built like our daddy, the same square jaw, the same eyes that didn't waste motion. He looked good. Tan. Tired around the edges, but tan.
I tried to do the math on how long it had been and came up with a number I didn't like.
Eighteen months. Maybe two years. Last time we'd been in the same room, we'd been in Valentine for forty-eight hours over Christmas, and we'd both been on the next flights out before the new year.
That was how the Dane boys did Christmas now. Hello, goodbye, drive safe.
He let me hold his shoulders a beat longer than I expected, then took a half step back and looked at me. The way an older brother looks at a younger brother. Reading him.
His face changed.
"I need you in Charleston, Tommy."
"Charleston?"
"Today."
The word landed like a hand on my chest. I knew that face. I'd grown up with that face. That was the face Grant had worn the morning our daddy didn't come home, the morning we all sat at the breakfast table looking at Mama's hands and waiting for her to tell us what we already knew.
"Mama," I said.
"Not Mama."
"You sure?"
"She's fine, Tommy. Same place. Same room. I called this morning."
I felt the air come back into me a little. Not all the way. Just enough to ask the next question.
"Then what?"
"It's about us. The brothers."
"Which ones?"
"All of us."
I stood there in the grass with one boot on and one boot off, and the river behind him moving the way mountain rivers move, and I tried to put the words all of us into a shape I could carry.
"Everybody's safe," he said, before I could ask. "For now. I'm not standing here because somebody's hurt. I'm standing here because there are people I need you to meet. People who've been helping me and Wyatt figure things out."
"Wyatt."
"Yeah."
"Wyatt's in Charleston?"
"Wyatt's in Charleston."
I let that sit a second. Wyatt didn't go anywhere except where the Army told him to go and the ranch called him home. Charleston wasn't on either list. Charleston was old money and tourists and shrimp and grits. Wyatt didn't eat shrimp and grits.
"And the rest?" I asked.
He shook his head once. "Don't know yet. Still scattered. One's deep into something east of Mosul that the Army won't put words to over a phone. One's running an op the Navy doesn't put on paper. The others are wherever the others are. Working on it. One at a time."
"Why Charleston?"
His mouth did that thing it did when he was holding back, where one side of it pulled tighter than the other.
"You'll see."
I'd known him too long to push.
"You're going to get a text in about ten minutes," he said. "Small airstrip ten miles outside town. Plane'll be waiting. You take it to Charleston. You'll get more answers there than I can give you here."
"You coming with me?"
That same pained look.
"Not yet. Got loose ends I need to tend to."
I nodded. Once. He nodded back. Once.
"Tommy."
"Yeah?"
"It's good to see you."
"Yeah."
I pulled him back in. Held him a second time, longer than the first. He held me back.
"Stay out of trouble," he said into my shoulder.
I gave him my best grin when I let go. The one that had gotten me out of more bar fights than it had gotten me into, which was saying something.
"Big brother, you must have me confused with one of the others."
"Tommy."
"I'll behave."
"You won't."
"I'll try."
"You won't."
He clapped me once on the side of the neck, hard, the way he'd been clapping me on the side of the neck since we were teenagers and he'd needed to remind me he could still take me.
He walked off without looking back. I watched him go until he was around the bend in the path, and then I sat down on the bench again and put my boot on.
I had a thousand questions.
If Grant had been able to answer them, he would have.
That wasn't his way—holding cards. He'd never been built for it.
So, whatever he wasn't telling me, he wasn't telling me because somebody else had asked him not to, or because the answer was bigger than what would fit in a riverside park at nine in the morning.
The other thing was harder to set down.
Only my unit knew I was in Zion.
Not my brothers. Not my mama's nurse. Not the IRS, not the bank, not the woman in Tucson I'd been sleeping with on and off for the better part of a year. Nobody. The unit's whole point was that nobody knew where I was unless they were the ones who'd sent me.
If Grant had walked up to me in that park, somebody had told him where to walk. Somebody with the kind of reach that punched through the kind of compartment I lived inside. That meant whatever was waiting for me in Charleston wasn't loud, wasn't local, and wasn't small.
Deep shit, indeed.
The text came in seven minutes.
It took me three to pack. I'd packed light to begin with—duffel, guitar case, rental keys on the kitchen table, a fifty-dollar bill weighted down with the saltshaker for the cleaning lady.
The truck started clean. The drive to the airstrip was a straight shot of two-lane through scrub and red rock that I barely saw.
The plane was sitting on the tarmac when I rolled up. Sleek. Black. The kind of black that looked deeper than other blacks, the kind I'd only ever seen on aircraft I wasn't supposed to know about. The engines were already turning over. Whoever owned it didn't believe in waiting.
A man in a clean white shirt and a navy windbreaker stood at the bottom of the airstairs. Mid-fifties, military bearing, the kind of pilot who'd flown things you could see and things you couldn't.
"Mr. Dane."
"That's me."
"I'm one of two pilots flying you tonight, sir. Come on aboard. Make yourself at home. Galley's stocked—help yourself to anything you want. We'll have you in Charleston as quick as the jetstream will allow."
"Appreciate it."
"Pleasure's ours."
I went up the steps.
The cabin smelled like leather and money.
Six wide seats, two facing two facing two, in a tan that looked hand-stitched by people who knew what hand-stitching was.
Recessed lights along the ceiling. A galley toward the front with a marble countertop that had no business being in something that flew.
I set my duffel down. Set the guitar case beside it, carefully, the way I always did.
I went to the galley.
A row of bottles sat in a wood-lined shelf.
Whiskey mostly, some clear liquor I didn't recognize, a single bottle of red.
I picked up a heavy crystal glass from the rack above and pulled a bourbon I didn't know off the shelf and read the label.
Four Branches. Never heard of it. The cap came off with a satisfying click.
I poured myself a couple of fingers, set the bottle back, and walked it to a window seat near the rear of the cabin. The leather sighed when I sat down. I took a sip.
It was good. Better than good. The kind of bourbon a man saved for nights he wanted to remember and couldn't afford to drink for nights he wanted to forget. It tasted like char and caramel and something darker underneath, like a campfire that had been burning a long time.
The engines spooled up. The pilots said something muffled through the cabin speaker and the plane rolled, then turned, then ran. The desert peeled back under the wing. The red rock got smaller and smaller and then disappeared into the kind of blue that only exists at altitude.
I let myself stop thinking about Davari.
He was a pebble in the boot. Already shaken out. I'd dump the rest of him out at altitude, and by the time we were over Kansas he'd be the way every dead man eventually was for me, which was nobody.
I let my mind go where it wanted to go.
It wanted to go home.
Not to Bragg. Not to the apartment in Fayetteville with the bad shower and the shotgun shells in the kitchen drawer. Not to any of the cities I'd put my passport stamp in.
Home meant Valentine. It meant the ranch outside town and the cottonwoods that lined the south fence and the little tin-roofed bunkhouse our daddy had built with his own hands the summer before I was born.
It meant horses. It meant the sound seven boys made coming through a screen door at the same time.
It meant ropes coiled on saddle horns and dust working its way into every fold of every shirt I owned and our daddy's voice from the porch saying boys, supper.
It meant Mama at the kitchen table, sun coming in low through the window, humming something with no words while she rolled out a pie crust.
We'd been a family.
We'd been the kind of family people pointed at in town.
Look, the Dane boys. Seven of us, stair-stepped, all of us with the same square jaw and the same loud laugh and the same instinct to wrestle whatever happiness we could out of a day before the day shut down.
We'd been good at it. I'd been the best at it.
Tommy Dane could find a reason to grin in a hailstorm.
Then, it had all gone away.
Daddy walked out the door one morning and didn't come back.
The boys scattered. The Army got me. The rest went where they went.
Mama held the ranch together as long as she could, and then her brain started doing what brains sometimes do when they've been holding too much for too long, and the ranch went to a manager and Mama went to a place in Marfa where the staff wore name badges and the carpet was the kind of beige that didn't show stains.
That was the family.
That was what was left of it.
If this trip across the country meant somebody was coming for what was left—if it meant some piece of what we'd had needed defending, or if there was even a chance, however small, of getting some sliver of it back—then I didn't need to know any more than I already knew.
I'd move heaven. I'd move earth. I'd move whatever was in between.
That was the whole calculation.
The bourbon was good.
The plane flew east.