Chapter Seven
Gabriel
Gabriel pulled into his driveway.
With the porch lights off and no streetlamp out front, Gabriel’s yard was black as pitch when he turned off the engine, and the headlights faded.
His neighborhood was quiet.
Gabriel’s hands slipped from the steering wheel and landed in his lap.
He just sat there in the dark.
His body felt heavy, and though he kept thinking words like “tired” and “exhausted,” he wished he had synonyms to put in their place. “Grief-stricken” was too bulky.
Lately, Gabriel’s runs were shortened, his time at the gym was forced.
Without an appetite, he made himself eat three meals and a protein shake a day so that when he pulled himself out of this chapter, he’d be OK.
Mostly, he did it because Cathy had an eagle eye. She watched him closely for any sign of ill health.
Cathy couldn’t separate out the dangers. In her mind, Daniel and Gabriel had been in the sandbox at the same time.
Parallel lives.
Because Gabriel had been an Army Ranger, he’d rarely, and only briefly, slept in a fort with a burn pit. At the same time, Daniel worked exclusively at the forts, keeping the vehicles in tip-top shape and protecting “his soldiers” from the dangers of sand in the mechanisms.
It was the burn pits that did Daniel in.
One of the first signs of cancer for Daniel was exhaustion, and the other was unintended rapid weight loss.
Now that he and Cathy were the last in their nuclear family, Gabriel felt pressure to keep his sister from worrying.
He could force down the damned hamburger.
Selfishly, Gabriel didn’t want to consider going through what Daniel had.
He wanted to go fast—a car accident, a stray bullet, a quick drowning.
Whiskey sat patiently on the floorboard in the passenger side, her chin resting on the seat.
“You didn’t distract me even once. To be honest, your being there helped me keep my stress in check and my brain working.
It’s wild, you know, that I can find most any place anywhere in the world by just knowing what to look for and having good research tools.
But a lost dog poster of all things. A phone number.
A lady who was willing to answer her phone so late at night and let me know which area her doggo went missing.
A three-dimensional map search, and bam, a search party was en route.
” He bit at his lip before adding quietly, “I hope I was fast enough. I hope it helped.”
Cold fear ran through Gabriel’s system as he mentally put himself in the victim’s situation.
This was why he wanted to work with images of buildings rather than human faces or situations.
He’d had too many days and nights with the stench of human desperation in his nostrils.
He’d seen too much, heard too much; his nights were already filled with those desperate images.
Gabriel didn’t want to become one of those professionals who became numb to the pain. It was dehumanizing to the situation.
But at the same time, he was full.
Gabriel needed to stop thinking about it.
“Dogs are the absolute best, you know that, don’t you?”
Whiskey worked herself out from under the dash and onto the seat.
“Of course you do,” Gabriel said. “We should go in, Beautiful. You should see your new digs.”
Gabriel forced himself out of the car. He rounded around the front and opened the passenger side to jump Whiskey down.
“Welcome home,” he said with a sweep of his arm.
As soon as Whiskey’s paws were on the driveway, her nose lifted into the air, chuffing the wind moving in from the east. She glanced at Gabriel, then focused down the street.
Sliding his keys into his pocket, Gabriel focused in that direction, though none of his senses picked up anything of interest.
“I guess you haven’t been properly walked since Cathy had you this morning,” he said. “We can walk.”
He shut the door as quietly as possible not to wake his neighbor’s kids. He’d bring in Whiskey’s supplies when they got back.
As they started off, Gabriel let Whiskey go where she wanted, ambling along behind her with thoughts of the day running through his head. Who took the video? How did they know what to do with it?
Yes, those questions had bubbled up during his investigation—so many questions—but he’d set them all aside because his focus, his ability to find the guy fast, meant the potential to save a life.
Had he been on time?
Again the wash of fear swept through his body.
Like every soldier who’d been to battle, he was used to it and was trained to ride the wave.
“Don’t talk yourself out of it,” he said aloud. “Let it flow.”
Whiskey didn’t turn when he spoke. She trotted along, focusing hard on some destination, probably searching out that smell that she’d picked up—maybe some trash or a dead carcass she could roll in.
Gabriel had a boyhood fishing buddy who had a hound dog that ended up smelling like something dead every time they were out in the woods. And there were plenty of woods near his house.
As they moved toward the end of the road, Gabriel realized where Whiskey was going.
This was the neighborhood where Gabriel grew up.
He’d moved back into his childhood house after his parents died.
Up the street another block was the church he’d attended every Sunday as a boy.
His father would inspect the shine on his shoes; his mom would adjust his clip-on tie, and after spitting on her hand, she’d tamp down the strands of hair that wanted to float on static electricity.
Then they’d walk to the church to sit with his grandparents.
Those scenes had been varnished with nostalgia over the years.
Gabriel certainly didn’t have a perfect family, but they loved each other deeply, and that was as good a base as any.
Whiskey with her super-nose would recognize the scents of that churchyard. She’d been up there two weeks ago at Daniel’s funeral when Daniel joined the rest with the family living in the graveyard: Mom, Dad, Grams, Gramps, Aunt Bess, Aunt Camilla, and Uncle Bart.
After a day like today, it was only fair that Gabriel let Whiskey run up and say hi.
Gabriel had a few choice things to say to his Daniel, too.
Whiskey should be with Cath and her kids.
It made so much more sense. But Cathy, ever-headstrong, had made up her mind, and moving her off that X would take a battalion.
Better that Gabriel give it a go living with Whiskey, prove that he was the lesser parent, and let her change her mind out of pity that Whiskey spent her days alone.
Suddenly, Whiskey stopped, her mouth chomping at the wind, not making it as far as Daniel’s grave.
Oh, she was looking straight at it, alright.
But under the streetlamp, Whiskey sat her bottom down in the gravel, lifted her nose, and started howling.
It was loud, and the tone had a quality that shifted Gabriel’s cells out of the way so the notes could oscillate their way into his bloodstream.
He hated the sensation.
Hated the sound.
Hated standing here staring at his damned brother’s grave.
And then he remembered the discomfort between Cathy and Dave at the lawyer’s office and how Dave had alluded to a pinky swear.
Gabriel looked down at Whiskey, vaguely pulling up a camping trip when he and Daniel were boys.
He let the pictures form and the memory become a video in his mind’s eye.
They were kids curled up in sleeping bags, lying there listening to the ghost stories the adults were telling around the campfire after the boys were supposed to be asleep.
Daniel had asked whether Gabriel wanted to be a ghost walking the Earth, going where he wanted. Gabriel had never considered that being a ghost was an option.
But Daniel, he had it all worked out. “I wanna be a ghost. I don't want to go on right away. Think about all the things you’d learn if you walked around spying on people, seeing what they do when they don't know anyone's looking.
I want to be the one that makes them feel the cold and look over their shoulder, and I'm gonna laugh and laugh.”
Gabriel had lain there considering all the possibilities that would be open to him if he were a ghost.
“If I die first, I'll stick around and haunt you. And if you die first, you need to haunt me. Now, I'm not saying you have to walk the Earth for the rest of eternity as a ghost. We’ll wait until the other one dies too, and then we could go off to Heaven together.”
“And in the meantime?” Gabriel asked.
“We’ll let the other one know we’re around by banging the door every now and then, or turning on the TV or the radio, or flicking the lights and stuff.”
Gabriel laughed at the absurdity.
“Maybe you can have extra fun if I did it when your friends were around,” Daniel had said. “You could tell everyone, ‘Oh, that's my brother saying hello, wondering if he could pull up a chair and play the game too.”
“All right, here,” Gabriel said, sticking his pinky finger in his mouth and pulling it out dripping wet, and stretching it toward Daniel.
Daniel had done the same, and they twisted their fingers together. “I swear that when I die, I’ll haunt you until you die too, then we’ll go up to Heaven.”
Gabriel had forgotten all about that. The memory was a punch in the gut.
Was that what Daniel was thinking about on his deathbed?
And there was Whiskey with her head tipped back, howling like her heart was broken.
Gabriel wasn't sure he could handle all the sadness that Whiskey had on her face.
If Whiskey could understand that Daniel was dead, she might be glad. Everyone was relieved that Daniel was out of pain.
But glad didn’t mean without grief.
The pressure built in Gabriel’s chest, and he found himself panting. His eyes squinted tight, trapping the tears and holding them there to blur his vision.
The pain went on for long minutes as Whiskey howled.
He wasn’t going to stand on the side of the damned road as cars rolled past, losing his shit. He just wasn’t.
And he wasn’t going to collapse under the weight of his grief in public.
A car started to slow, and Gabriel thought they were going to pull over to check on him.
He wasn’t going to make it through a kind gesture.
So Gabriel pulled his phone from his pocket and sent Cathy a video of Whiskey howling.
“Guess where Whiskey dragged me on our walk tonight?” He slowly panned around to the graveyard, illuminated by the full moon, then focused back on Whiskey. “What the hell is she doing? I’ve never heard her make a peep before. Did she do this at your house? Is there an off switch?”