Page 102 of Lone Wolf

Las Vegas was in peak darkness, the first glow of morning still more than an hour away. Tommy and Evan sat around a fire pit behind the shop. Cedar logs crackled, throwing off a heavenly smoke that brought Evan back to the part of his childhood that was easiest to remember, when he used to take school at Jack’s feet in the farmhouse study, the scent of single-barrel scotch mingling with heat of the hearth, just twelve-year-old him surrounded by an empire of books and—for the first time—a limitless future.

There were a million and a half stars overhead, and Evan sipped Kauffman Vintage he’d stashed in one of Tommy’s cupboards, and Tommy was gripping a bottle of Angel’s Envy in his blocky fist and making quick work of it. Stripped down to undershirts streaked with sweat, they were tired from carving a plot into the hard desert ground, and the alcohol was a necessity to remind them that the world still contained warmth and comfort.

They’d spoken barely a word in the past few hours. It wasn’t the kind of work to talk about. It was the kind of work to get done.

And now they basked in a different kind of silence, thawing themselves back to a version of serenity.

Tommy said, “This all start with that fuckin’ dog?”

“Loco,” Evan said.

“You go searching for crazy, you find crazy. That’s why generally? I search for bourbon and women who got a liberated relationship with their sexuality.”

“Yeah. It started small and telescoped on me.”

“Mission creep.” Tommy rubbed the back of his neck, his face screwed up with pain. “I talked to Your Girl Friday earlier.”

Joey.

“That damn school has her off her fighting base.” Tommy took a swig. “College is for dummies. Makes people get stuck up in their brains too much.”

“She’s trying to fit in,” Evan said. “But she’s not built to fit in.”

“That’s what I told her. She said next to all them regular girls she feels weird. I said, ‘Guess what? Everyone’s fucking weird. Get rid of the weird parts that don’t suit you. And keep the weird parts that make you you. Then see where the chips fall. That’s it.’ Ya don’t need Tony Robbins to spit slogans in yer face to know what’s what.”

“What’d she say?”

“That my brusqueness was exceeded only by my ignorance.” Tommy didn’t smile, but his cheeks bunched and his eyes gleamed with amusement. “‘Brusqueness.’ See what I mean? Not that I can’t keep up. I’ve read a book before. But ‘rude’ woulda done just fine.” He shook his head. “College.”

Tommy’s stretched T-shirt was one of those commemorative custom jobs the spec-ops guys were always throwing into production. In overly masculine type, someone’s initials floated above the crest for the Green Berets: DE OPPRESSO LIBER. And beneath, the date of birth and a date of death bookending a shorter span than any parent would’ve hoped for.

Tommy fussed with a familiar trinket, a jagged half-moon of metal the size of a poker chip. It was one half of a broken challenge coin, a service-member medallion generally exchanged as a show of respect. As he shuttled the broken half across his knuckles, the stamped words glinted in the firelight: NO GREATER FRIEND.

A damn fine description of Tommy himself.

In all their years, they’d rarely talked about more than guns and matériel, but that subject matter had proven to be a kernel around which they’d grown an understanding of each other.

The flies were buzzing, getting bold at the edge of the fire, and as Tommy rose creakily, he waved a four-and-a-half-fingered hand at them. “Goddamned sky raisins.” He stood a minute so his warhorse joints, degraded from countless parachute landings and blood-letting clashes, could find equilibrium. “Gotta take a squirt. See if you can not kill anyone else while I’m inside.”

He lumbered off.

Evan sat alone with the sparking logs and the brilliant desert sky, his thoughts with Jack. And then his mind moved to Jacob Baridon, the man who fathered him, the vacuous nothingness of him, his eyes like inward-facing mirrors that only reflected him back to himself. What had he said when confronted with a person he’d contributed to creating? I have a girl coming over. Gotta get the tail while the gettin’s good. The obliteration of Evan’s imagined father had obliterated a contrast point to anything else. A contrast point he’d never known he’d carried inside him.

His OCD was up.

Everything hurt his eyes, every spot of dirt on his pants, every asymmetrical ridge of sand at his feet, every lopsided log in the imperfect pyre.

Jack used to make him jog in a blizzard. Face chapped, lips cracked, boots chafing, the moistness of his sweat trapped against his skin beneath the claustrophobic shell of a winter coat, marinating him in discomfort. It was awful.

Back then there hadn’t been room to think, Is this too much? Is this too far? Not when he was being drownproofed or beaten on a training mat or nicked with a Gurkha knife when he parried wrong. And his blood seethed now at the thought of that … grooming?

But it hadn’t been safe then to question, not for him, not for Jack, and Jack had saved him. And he thought through another filter of reality: him doing that to someone else, someone younger, to Joey. The thought was dizzying, telescoping like the camera in Vertigo.

His OCD was up.

It turned the volume high on the dried sweat across his ribs, the wrinkle of his sock in his boot. The strand of hair tickling his forehead no matter how many times he shoved it back. Every little thing assailing him.

Jack had been flawed and human. Jack had loved him and put him through the nearly unimaginable. And yet he loved Jack now as much as ever. Confusing.