Everyone in them was wearing clothes.
Chapter 3
The first sign that something was wrong came in the airport parking garage when Finn looked at my luggage and stopped walking.
“No,” he said.
“What?”
He pointed at the three suitcases I’d lined up behind the truck, the big one, the medium one, and the hard-shell one I used when I didn’t trust the contents not to get crushed.
“How many of those are yours?” he asked.
“All of them.”
“All of them?” He squinted up at me against the morning glare, blue eyes narrowed, hisonebag slung over one shoulder. His bag was a single duffel, stuffed to bursting, the zipper straining. From the shape of it, I’d have bet money there wasn’t a serious garment in the whole thing. “Mark, it’s only five days.”
“You never know.”
“I do know. I know exactly. I packed in eight minutes.” He hefted the duffel to demonstrate, and something inside shifted with the soft weightlessness of a bag containing nothing but cotton and bad decisions. “T-shirts, trunks, and the little swim briefs that got me banned from a pool in Clearwater. That’s a holiday wardrobe. That’s a man who understands the assignment.”
“You packed a bag of underwear and called it luggage.”
“I packed a bag offreedom. You packed for a siege.” He crouched and unzipped my big suitcase right there on the garage floor. I objected loudly. He ignored me completely. “Sweet mother of God, is this a first aid kit?”
“It’s the good kind with antibiotic and gauze.”
“Why do you have bug spray, sunblock, after-sun, a second sunblock, and”—he held up a small bottle and squinted at it—“calamine lotion. We’re not even leaving the country, and you’ve planned for the rash.”
“Feet get wet. Skin burns. Things happen.”
“To you, maybe. Things happen to you because you go looking for them.” He held up a folded blue polo, then another behind it, then a third. “And how many of these did you bring?”
“I—”
“They’re the same shirt, Mark. You’ve packed the same shirt three times and called two of them spares.”
“They’re a reliable shirt.”
“Reliable?” He nearly spat the word. “They’re a uniform. You’ve packed your own surrender.” He dropped the shirts with the disgust of a man who’d seen enough. He zipped the bag and stood, dusting off the knees of his jeans. “But I haven’t the time or the strength to fix you in a parking garage, so you’ll bring all three coffins and you’ll haul them yourself. Somewhere around day two, when you’re sweating through the third identical shirt, you’ll understand what I was trying to tell you.”
I did bring all three.
I hauled them myself.
And I want it on the record that at no point did Finn offer to carry so much as the small one on the principle that a man should “feel the full weight of his choices.”
“Did you bring the laptop?” he asked at the gate.
“No.”
“Look me in my Irish eyes and tell me that again. I’ll know if you’re lying. It’s a potato famine thing. It’s in my genes.”
I told him I hadn’t, which was true, because I’d spent forty minutes the night before talking myselfout of it and another twenty hiding it in the trailer so I couldn’t change my mind.
He studied my face the way airport security studies a man who claims he packed his own bags, decided I was honest, and reached up to clap me on the shoulder.
“Good lad. There may be hope for ya yet.”
