It wouldn’t be easy, Hollis thought. He’d seen the tall man in action. Hollis needed more men. He needed a few of the Hardcore Originals.
By the time they arrived, he’d have a new plan.
He had the beginnings of one right now.
From his parking spot down the street from the journalist’s house, he watched as the tall man hugged the girl and got into a dark SUV. Then he watched the girl and a brown man in a red jacket climb into a big pickup truck with a ladder rack and a company logo on the door.
Semper Fi Roofing.
That would give him a place to start.
22
Peter
With the cassette tape in his jacket pocket and the .357 in the console, Peter rolled north behind Manny’s pickup, eyes flicking from rearview to rearview, making sure nobody was behind them. He was looking specifically for a sleek blue car, but he’d gotten such a brief look at it, and only from the rear, that he wasn’t sure he’d know it if he saw it. Suddenly Seattle seemed to be full of sleek blue cars.
Manny led him to a strip mall on Eighty-Fifth, where he waited while Peter stepped into a phone store and picked up a half dozen cheap burners. He gave one to Manny. Peter was no tech wizard, but his adventures with Lewis had convinced him that most phones could be tapped or traced, and the best defense was to use a phone nobody knew about. If this thing went south and Peter ended up behind bars, at least he wouldn’t take his friends down with him.
When Manny headed home with Carlotta and Ellie, Peter stayed to watch their wake for any sleek blue cars entering traffic behindthem. Nothing stood out, so he spent a few moments getting his new phone set up and charging. After texting June and Lewis so they’d know how to reach him, he searched online for old-school stereo shops. The first one he called, Hawthorne Stereo, had exactly what he needed.
Including the fifteen-minute crosstown drive to Sixty-Third and Roosevelt, he was back on the road in twenty. But he still had an hour to kill before he had to pick up June and Lewis. So he swung back to Ballard, running the gauntlet of huge new condo buildings until he reached Vintage Vic’s Vehicle Repair, where the tow company had taken Peter’s wounded pickup. It was south of Leary Way, in the small remaining semi-industrial section still packed with dented sheet-metal workshops where people still made or fixed things, like cars, boats, and heavy machinery. Peter wondered how long it would be until condos took over Seattle entirely.
At the mechanic’s, Peter pulled the Tahoe close to the bay doors, got out with the .357, and took a long look around. It was still raining, so there were few pedestrians, and he saw nobody lingering in a car. It would have been easy enough for Captain Durant to find out where the Chevy had been towed. Peter considered it a mildly encouraging sign that a detective wasn’t waiting for him there, although the shortage of manpower amid the impending tech conference was a more likely explanation.
Vintage Vic was a skinny dude with watchful eyes and a non-ironic mustache, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt under his mechanic’s blues. He shook Peter’s hand and walked out to take a look at the truck. He glanced at the bullet holes, but didn’t comment.
Peter had found the old Chevy abandoned in a barn in central California when he was still a Marine. Between deployments, he distracted himself from memories of war by rebuilding the pickup from the ground up. Normally he would replace the radiator himself, but hedidn’t have the tools or the shop space or, frankly, the time. Just sourcing parts could take a week or more.
Thankfully, when Vintage Vic popped the hood to survey the damage, he seemed to know what he was looking at. He also wanted a credit card up front, which Peter didn’t mind, but he didn’t want to use his own. Instead, he borrowed a screwdriver, moved the .357 from the small of his back to the front of his pants, and slid under the truck’s chassis to open the secret compartment he’d welded to the frame.
He’d already taken out the pistol the day before, to deal with the threat against KT. That was the gun Durant had taken for the forensics techs after Reed killed himself. Now he removed a plastic bag with a rubber-banded stack of used bills in multiple denominations, totaling ten thousand dollars. He’d already returned the rest of Manny’s cash when he’d given him the burner phone.
There was also a smaller plastic bag that held a worn leather wallet with a driver’s license and credit cards in another name, the new identity that Lewis had put together a few years ago when Peter happened to be wanted by Interpol. The Red Notice had been taken down, but Peter had hung onto the wallet. Because you never knew what might happen.
When he scooted out from under the truck, Vintage Vic eyeballed the clear plastic bags, mustache twitching from side to side like an anxious mouse. “So, like, how sketchy are you, man? Like, for real.”
It was a fair question. “Not the kind of sketchy you need to worry about.” Peter pulled a Visa from the alternate wallet and held it out. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Nah.” Taking the card, Vintage Vic turned his gaze to the bullet holes in the sheet metal. “Finding a fresh quarter panel might take a while. You want me to Bondo and repaint?”
He’d have to repaint the whole truck or the panel wouldn’t match. “Don’t worry about the quarter panel,” Peter said. “Just get it roadworthy as soon as you can.”
As he climbed back into the Tahoe, Peter thought again about the question Vintage Vic had asked. The honest truth was that he had done more than his share of morally questionable things. Many had been as a commissioned officer in the service of his country, doing his best to carry out the mission and protect his guys. He had complicated feelings about those years, a potent mix of pride and shame that he knew other veterans shared.
He’d done other questionable things after his wars were over. He’d broken many laws. He’d killed men and faced no justice except in his darkest dreams. But it was always to protect someone in trouble, someone innocent. Somebody like Ellie.
About those later years, he had no regrets of any kind.
—
His breakfast Danish seemed like a long time ago, so he backtracked a few blocks and stopped at a place called Mean Sandwich for takeout, deciding on the hot pastrami with red cabbage slaw for himself and a couple of cold subs for June and Lewis, thinking they would taste better in an hour than a hot sandwich gone cold.
He planned to eat on the road, but when he saw the stacked pastrami he knew he’d need two hands and a bib or he’d end up wearing it. He ate standing up by the front window, watching the street, conscious of the .357 at the small of his back.
When he was finished, he wanted a nap. He stopped again for coffee a block away, then headed for the airport, absurdly grateful that the Tahoe, unlike his elderly pickup, had real cupholders.
Arriving early, he parked in the cell phone lot and unpacked his purchase from Hawthorne Stereo, a high-end compact portable cassette player made by a company called We Are Rewind. As he plugged it in to charge, his burner buzzed with a text from June. “Is this the limo company? My driver is late.”
