Page 33 of The Drifter

"So, tell me."

He looked at me a second. Then, he leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and laced his fingers, and he started talking.

And inside of four sentences, I knew he was holding back.

Tommy is good—whatever he'd been doing since the service, it had polished him, and the delivery was clean. It was the shape of the thing. The story had rooms in it he steered around. A man walking a floor plan he knows in the dark will move a certain way around the furniture he isn't mentioning. My whole working life was built on watching men move around furniture.

It rubbed me wrong.

That was the part I sat with. Not that he was doing it—that it got to me. Getting told half a thing has never bothered me before. This time, something under my ribs sat up and got sour. I couldn't have said why.

"There's a man named Craine," Tommy said. "Dominic Craine. FBI. Deputy Director, or he was—it's complicated right now. He's a real piece of work, Clint. Dirty going back years, and smart about it. He’s got it out for the company."

"The company?"

Tommy blinked, and I watched him realize how far back he had to go.

"Right," he said. "Okay." He exhaled, long, like a man looking at a wall of boxes he has to carry upstairs. "Me and Cash—we work for an outfit now. Private. It's called Dominion Defense. Runs out of a place here in town, big old spread on the harbor road, they call it Dominion Hall. And before you make the face⁠—"

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making the face. It's not that." He shook his head. "It's not guns-for-hire, it's not oil companies, none of that. The work's good. It's the kind of thing we used to wish somebody had the budget and the leash to do, and now somebody does. All over the world. For the right side, every time. I've seen it up close for a while now, and I'm telling you, it's the best work I've ever done, and that includes the flag work."

That was a big statement from Tommy, who had loved the flag work.

"And Craine has it out for this company."

"Craine has a vendetta," Tommy said. "Personal. Old. Aimed right at the middle of it." His jaw worked. "He's come at us more than once. The last time cost us. He's out there right now, and he's got money and reach and people all through this town. Cops, contractors, watchers. Cronies on half the corners, maybe. So when you're out walking—and I know you, you've already been out walking—you keep your head on."

Watch your six. Cash had said it at the airstrip, quiet, with his arm around my neck. I'd thought of it as noise—it's how men like us say goodbye, the same as other people say drive safe.

It wasn't noise.

And I thought, without deciding to, of a seawall at three in the morning. Of the eye that came open and turned. Noted, not hostile. I almost said it. I didn't.

"Why am I here, Tommy?"

"Because we need you."

"For what?"

"For whatever's coming." He said it simple. "We need you. We need everyone."

The word went through the room.

"What do you mean, everyone?"

And there it went again—that hitch, that half-second where my brother's eyes did a small calculation about what to leave out. I watched him run it. Then, I watched him throw the math away, which I'll always credit him for.

"It's not just me and Cash out here," he said. "Wyatt's here. Grant's here. Brock's here."

That rocked me back.

I stood there in a hotel room in South Carolina and felt the floor of the thing drop away. Wyatt. Grant. Brock. Cash. Tommy. My brothers don't gather. We are not a family that gathers. We are a family that scattered like shot the day we were each old enough to enlist, and we have spent our lives waving at each other across oceans. The last time more than three of us stood in the same room, we buried a neighbor.

Six of us. In one city.

"And John?" I asked.