Page 32 of The Jackal

"He did. That old soldier vetted me harder than the FBI." A pause. "He's tired, Mags."

"I know." My throat did a thing. "The vet knows. I know. I'm just—" I pressed my face against him. "Not yet. I keep saying not yet."

He didn't tell me it would be okay. That was the thing I'd remember about him later—he never once, that whole night, told me a comfortable lie. He just tightened his arm around me and let me have the true and terrible size of it. Somehow, that was more comfort than any easy word would have been.

I told him about my parents, because he asked, and because lying in the dark makes it possible. About my father the colonel who built grills instead of saying he was lonely, and my mother who left him to save her own life and still asked after his knee. The two good people and the career that ate everything, and how I'd grown up terrified of exactly the kind of man I now had my leg thrown over.

"And here you are," he said quietly.

"And here I am." I propped my chin on his chest and looked at him. "You should know that scares me more than anything you do for work. You feeling like the thing my mother walked away from."

"I'm not going to be that thing," he said. "I've done my walking. I'm done." And there was that plainness again, that flat bedrock certainty, and I chose—consciously, the way you choose to sit down next to a frightened dog—to believe him.

I told him about Claire, then, to get us back to lighter ground. About the ambush friendship and the true-crime brain and the way she'd folded me into her life without asking. About Banjo—the too-much, too-loud wash-out nobody wanted, who'd chosen Claire off a concrete floor and lost his whole mind with joy.

"I'm taking him out to Dominion Hall in the morning," I said. "The foster. I could have somebody run him, but I want to do it myself. I want to see him settled, make sure Claire's got the right food, the right crate, that the yard's squared away, that he's got—" I stopped, aware I was doing the thing I did. "I get attached. I like to hand them off right."

"You'll be at the house in the morning," he said, and I felt something pleased move through him, low.

"I will."

"Good." His hand found my hip. "Then, I'll get to watch you walk across that courtyard one more time before I've even had breakfast." A beat. "That yard can handle a dog. I saw the setup. They've got horses out back, Mags. A stable. Whatever your Banjo needs, I promise you a family that keeps horses is more than equipped to keep one anxious shepherd in kibble."

"Horses." I filed it, another impossible detail of the impossible world he came from. "Of course, you have horses."

"Grew up with them." Something old and warm moved in his voice, a boy on a ranch a long way from here, and then it was gone.

I told him about Max last. I don't know why last. Maybe because Max was the one that lived closest to the bone.

"There's a dog I can't place," I said. "A Malinois. Multi-purpose, deployed, the real thing. His handler was killed overseas—an IED, on a road, nothing the dog could've done. And Max came home and just ... stopped. Wouldn't eat. Stood at the gate of his kennel for weeks, weight on his toes, watching the door, waiting for a man who is never walking back through it. Nobody could reach him. I sat in the dark with him for two weeks before he'd take food from my hand." My voice had gone thick without my permission. "He's the best dog I've ever known. And he's grieving something he doesn't have the words to finish, and I don't know how to give him the ending. You can't explain dead to a dog. You can't tell him his person isn't coming, that it wasn't his fault, that he's allowed to stop waiting. I've tried everything I know. He's just—stuck at the door."

Cash had gone very still beneath me.

"I'd like to meet him," was all he said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." His thumb moved over my knuckles, slow, and his eyes stayed up on the ceiling a moment longer before they came back down to me and warmed.

I fell asleep listening to his heart, wrapped around the one thing I'd been sure I'd never get to keep. I did not dream of leaving.

16

CASH

Iwoke a few hours before dawn with a dry throat and a warm woman asleep across my arm. For a moment, I just lay there in the dark and let myself have it. The weight of her. The sound of her breathing. The strange, soft, ordinary miracle of a bed that wasn't mine, in a house I didn't want to leave.

I don't take much for granted anymore, not since I was a boy at the bottom of a mine. So, I lay there and I was grateful, the way I'm grateful for most things, until my throat reminded me it was dry. I eased my arm out from under her without waking her and went to get some water.

The house was dark and quiet. I know how to move through a strange house in the dark without touching a thing—it's most of what I do—so, I went down the hall soft and into the kitchen, ran the tap, filled a glass, and drank it down in one go. I filled it again.

The dogs stirred. The two young ones, the big, dim shepherd-mix and the wound-tight Malinois, lifted their heads off their beds, found me in the dark, decided I was nothing worth waking for, and went back down—the Malinois with a put-upon sigh.

Duke didn't go back down.

The old one lay on his pillow in the corner with his head on his paws, and he didn't lift it, didn't shift, didn't do a thing a body could point to. But his eyes were open, and they were on me, and they stayed on me while I stood at that sink. Level. Unblinking. A plain, old look with a plain, old message in it, the same one from earlier, only harder now that his person was asleep down the hall and I was a big, strange man moving around her house in the dark. You screw anything up, it said, and I will do something about it, these hips be damned.

"Easy," I told him, low. "I'm just thirsty."