“Isn’t that how we expected him to look?” Barb said. “His antisocial tendencies are well documented.”
The stuff from Cole’s court-martial, she meant. A source had sent them a transcript, and the details were ugly. Not long after blowing up a house in the middle of nowhere, Cole and his wingman had nearly botched a recon mission, endangering an American platoon. A day after that, Cole went AWOL in a stolen Cessna Skylane, flying his kids out to Death Valley, where he made camp and proceeded to drink himself into a stupor. A park ranger found them early the next morning, the kids huddled in a tent with Cole outside, passed out in a circle of vomit, flies everywhere. The next night he was caught breaking into his CO’s office at Creech Air Force Base at three in the morning, which landed him in the stockade. He was damn lucky to have made it out after six months with a dishonorable discharge and credit for time served. He’d been released nearly eight months ago, and by that time his wife had hired a lawyer and skipped town, taking the children to her parents’ place in Saginaw, Michigan.
“It doesn’t even look like he’s got electricity,” Steve said. “He greeted us with a shotgun.”
“And you let Keira go in alone?”
“Relax, he left the gun outside. I’m here if anything happens.”
“That’s not what I meant. What if he opens up, tells her everything? You really think she’ll share?”
“We’ve been over this, Barb. Trust. Remember?”
“Trust but verify. Like those treaties with the Russians.”
“You’re comparing Keira to the Soviet Union?”
“No, but you’re too nice.”
“And you’re too mean.”
“Just saying. Ask Nick Garmon’s wife if you don’t believe me.”
“Love’s different.”
“Love had nothing to do with it.”
“Whatever. We’re in this together, and we all agreed.”
“I’m fully aboard. I just wonder sometimes if Keira is.”
“Says the woman who hid her General Dynamics source for a month.”
“That’s how he wanted it.”
Steve smiled and lightened his tone. Teamwork had its limits for all three of them.
“Whatever you say, Barb.”
They moved to safer topics, discussing what the Ravens had done the day before, the shitty weather in Baltimore, the beauty of the high desert, the weirdness of Vegas. Although maybe they should’ve stuck to love and trust. Steve would be the first to admit they were a pretty needful bunch when it came to such things. Barb and he were both divorced, and from the way they sometimes argued you might have thought it was from each other. Keira’s most recent boyfriend, the aforementioned Nick Garmon, was a married wire service photographer who’d been killed in a plane crash the year before while flying to see Keira in Paris. All three of them were reasonably fit and attractive, but their once powerful newspapers had crumbled around them just as they’d entered that range of ages — thirty-six to thirty-nine — that seemed especially calibrated for loneliness among the unattached. It hardly helped that they were consumed by their work, and by this story in particular, each for his or her own reason.
Barb asked something about “the fauna on an arid landscape.” Steve made a crack about snakes and coyotes. Then he looked up in surprise.
“The door’s opening. I think she’s done.”
“That was fast.”
“Holy shit.”
“What?”
“He’s coming with her. And he’s got a suitcase.”
“I’m sure love has nothing to do with this, either.”
“Gotta go, Barb. We’ll keep you posted.”
Truth was, Keira’s appeal had barely registered on Cole. The mere presence of another human being was overwhelming enough, and the moment she entered the trailer he realized what a wreck he must look like. He hadn’t shaved or cut his hair in months. The only bathing he did was from a bucket beside the trailer. Water from the cistern, a wafer of soap. A white washcloth hung from a sagebrush like a flag of surrender, dried stiff by the desert sun.
The trailer’s linoleum floor was scuffed raw and creaked with every step. Dirty dishes filled the kitchen sink, where a leaky faucet dripped away the supply from the cistern, every drop precious, but still he let it go. At least he’d finally burned the pile of garbage out back. But the coyotes had kept coming, scavenging among the chicken bones and charred cans. Every night he heard their snuffling through the thin walls as he lay in bed beneath wool blankets, oddly comforted by the presence of his only visitors. He was like Romulus and Remus up here, suckled by the wild on a barren hill. Now that he actually had company he was uncertain how to proceed. God, look at this place.
“You want coffee? It’s instant, but …”
She was already shaking her head. Who could blame her? He lit the burner anyway, to show this was nothing out of the ordinary.
Cole hadn’t come here intending to drink his life away. Not at first. He came for privacy, seclusion, even introspection. Zach had found the trailer for him, through some dubious connection at his apartment complex. An easy agreement with a single key and no lease. Straight-up cash, good for a year. No utilities to connect, and no official address.
In the beginning Cole lived like a biblical ascetic. Lean and sober, reading paperbacks and basking in the sun. Long walks up into the hills without compass or canteen. Every meal from a can or a box. He drank only water, supplied by the cistern. Metallic on the tongue, but it never made him sick. He slept well, and for ten hours at a stretch.
After a few weeks he began jolting awake in the middle of the night with an eerie exactitude — always at or about 3:50 a.m., the very minute when Zach and he had fired their missile. He began checking his watch as soon as he would sit up in bed, and the news was always the same: 3:50, 3:50, 3:50, with the girl’s face flashing in his memory as she ran for her life, the boys right behind her. Three fifty. The hour of death, a wake-up call for the rest of his days. An unbearable prospect.
So one morning he walked out to the highway, hitchhiked to the nearest town, and bought his first case of Jeremiah Weed. Even on his worst days he was not a binge drinker. It was a matter of slow mood maintenance. Sips and occasional swallows, paced evenly throughout the day, an IV drip of erasure and negation designed solely to ease him past his personal witching hour for as many nights running as possible.
And this was where he had landed, less a drunk than an overmedicated hermit, a tipsy slob completely unmanned by his first visitor in ages. How long since anybody had come up here? Zach was the last, and that had been months ago, a courtesy call to make sure Cole hadn’t gone and done something tragically stupid.
Cole walked past the small window over the sink and couldn’t resist another glance at the morning sky. Bright blue. Empty. Then a distant glint, a fleeting pinprick of reflected sunlight — or maybe he’d imagined it. He popped open the window and tilted his head, listening for the faint lawnmower buzz of the four-stroke engine, the same as in a snowmobile. All he heard was the tinnitus whine that had lately set up shop between his ears.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Fine.”
Fuck the coffee. He switched off the flame, watched it gutter. Then he turned to face her.
“Have a seat.”
At least there was a couch. Nothing fancy, but clean enough. She sat primly at one end in case he wanted to join her, but he pulled up a rickety barstool from the kitchen and sat astride it. He wondered how they’d found him. Through Zach, maybe, the kid talking out of school in one of those pilot bars near Nellis where he liked to pretend he was part of the brethren, just another jock.
But at least Zach had held it together. Only twenty-two then, twenty-three by now, and he rode out the storm. Probably still pulling six-day shifts in the box, switching hours in that Predator rota that seemed especially designed to deprive you of sleep and sanity — midnight to eight a.m. for three weeks running, followed by eight a.m. to four p.m. for three more, and then four p.m. to midnight. Round and round until you’d awaken from some bad dream without knowing if it was night or day. He tried to picture Zach still seated before the godawful pileup of ten-inch screens, scanning for bogeys, squinting in concentration like a kid at a spelling bee.