Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

F or a moment, I'd thought Rose was going to either make a pass or tell me to get out. She'd had an odd look in her eye, and there were those tense silences. Perhaps she was regretting the invitation to a complete stranger to be right across the hall from her and her daughter. I planned on hitting the road as soon as possible, perhaps even tonight once everyone bedded down, so . . .

If she'd been thinking about a pass, I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

That's a lie. I'd have been all for it. But it would have been problematic since Maggs and I were leaving. Although maybe all she wanted was a one-night stand . . .

But then she might want to actually go to sleep with me, and I hadn't spent a night sleeping beside anyone other than Maggs since, well, I couldn't remember. Maybe never. Plus, it would make sneaking away that much harder. And not moving made me twitchy, and twitchy wasn't good.

And I was thinking too much about something that wasn't going to happen.

It would have been helpful if she'd put on a damn bra. And stopped bending over .

I shook my head and went out into the workroom and looked at the print of the painting again. The British Army, after having lost a couple of their envoys in the capital of Kabul in 1842 during unrest, decided to retreat from there to Jalalabad, a ninety-mile journey, part of which involved going through some pretty rough mountains. Don't ask me how I know. That's a hell of a long way to conduct a retreat while in contact with the enemy, the most difficult of all military maneuvers.

Four thousand five hundred British and Indian troops along with twelve thousand camp followers, including wives and children, attempted to make the escape. It didn't go well. The man in the painting was the only one who made it after repeated ambushes and attacks along the way. There were some prisoners taken but most in the column died.

I always thought the painting was an excellent warning about Afghanistan for foreigners, but apparently no one else did. Not the Russians. Not the Americans. There was stuff on a table out front from the same place: Afghanistan. Why were this painting and those things here?

Add in Pike's AK, and it was bothersome.

The easy answer was that Pike and Oz were both veterans who'd done at least one tour there, but Pike looked a bit long in the tooth—early seventies at least—even for an early post-9/11 deployment, and from what I'd heard and seen, Ozzie had been older.

I stared at the print once more because something about it bothered me. Not just the memories of that hellhole. It wasn't quite right, but I couldn't figure out what it was. So I took out my phone and took a picture. I could stare at it later, figure it out.

Why would Ozzie hang that? He wanted the memories? It did seem to confirm that he was prior service, probably with Pike. Or, worse, he'd been a spook. There is no "prior" in that world. Once a spook, always a spook.

Ozzie was ex-something, but there was no I-love-me wall that many former military had, filled with pictures of grim-looking men, weapons in hand, usually standing in front of a helicopter as if they were about to go off and win the war or at least the next battle, along with plaques from various units and organizations given as going-away gifts during a farewell ceremony awash with alcohol. But there were no photos and definitely no plaques here. Spooks didn't do I-love-me walls. Once upon a time I'd had a bunch of I-love-me stuff, plaques and photos, but as my life had shifted trajectory, that stuff faded away to the point where I can't remember where I'd left it. And from the life after that, all I had were my scars and my nightmares.

I kept looking around the room, but nothing else stood out. I considered picking the lock to the back bedroom that Rose said she'd never entered, but that would be a breach of etiquette. I'd eaten their food and been invited to spend the night. There were places in the world where those who violated that hospitality suffered horrible deaths. I couldn't see Rose inflicting torture upon me, although I could imagine her leaving marks if . . .

I shook my head and explored the room some more, scanning the bookcases and wondering who the hell Oz had been, which was much safer than wondering anything about Rose. When I lifted the blotter on the desk, there was a picture. Three people. Two men flanking a woman. One of the men was Pike. That was clear even though time had taken its toll on him since the picture had been snapped at least forty years ago. The other must have been Ozzie. Both were dressed in OD fatigues, no markings—what we called "sterile"—with tribal scarves tied around their necks. Yeah, they'd done time over there. But well before the official invasion following 9/11.

People forget we'd played in Afghanistan a decade before 9/11, on the other side.

Ozzie and Pike were players. Like I had been. It's what we called ourselves. Answering to and racing toward the sounds of the guns in a world civilians would never understand. Players weren't official spies with a CIA ID card, 2.5 days of paid leave a month, health insurance, and a Federal retirement. Players did the dirty jobs across the spectrum of covert ops, from spying to training indigenous to providing security as needed to making under-the-table deals no one could acknowledge to gun slinging.

Standing between Pike and Ozzie in the picture was a woman who was taller than both with waist-length straight black hair and pale skin. She wore khaki, and the background was a bland, brown wall. She was gorgeous in a goth-type way. More like a vampire. I put the photo under a desk lamp and took a picture, then returned it to the spot under the blotter. The woman bothered me. I had never met her—she was someone you'd definitely remember—but, like the painting, there was something about her that tickled my memory.

There was a knock at the door and I opened it.

Poppy stood there with Maggs at her feet, now all combed out and glossy with a pink bow on her collar. "Here's your puppy, all washed and fed," she said. "Keep that cone on and I'll check the bandage tomorrow. Have a good night."

"Thank you." I nodded at the instructions, wondering why I felt grateful to get my own dog back and marveling at how easily Poppy gave orders. Maggs looked longingly at the door as I shut it.

"Traitor," I whispered to her. "And really? A bow?"

Maggs didn't seem bothered by it.

Then I heard a door across the hall open and Rose's voice, low and musical, and I stopped to listen.

"You've got a jar of overnight oats in the fridge for breakfast," I heard her tell Poppy. "There's still a banana left. And throw some nuts in there for protein when you stir it up. I'll make up more oats tomorrow."

"I know how to handle overnight oats," Poppy said in that tone of voice that rolls its eyes.

"I thought you were going to take Max this comforter," Rose said.

"You should do that," Poppy said.

"Stop throwing me at him," Rose said. Her voice was lower, but it still carried.

"I'm not throwing you at him," Poppy said. "It's just that you've been alone for?— "

"I have not been alone. I have you and Ozzie—had Ozzie—and this is just some stranger showing up."

That was fair, I thought, but it seemed a little cold for somebody who had been eyeing me across a bed a few minutes before.

"He's a good guy," Poppy said.

I raised an eyebrow.

"And how do you know that?" Rose asked.

"He's got a good dog. A good dog would never be with a bad man."

I looked over at Maggs standing next to me, looking like an idiot with the bow. Poppy had some things to learn about life. And men. But Maggs was a good dog, she had that right. As far as me? I realized it depended on who you asked. There were many who might not judge me to be a good man, although, truth be told, a number of them were dead. My own jury on myself was still out and I tried not to think about it, although at night the demons would come calling.

"Well, stop it," Rose said, and then I heard a door close and somebody knocked on mine. I waited a moment so it didn't seem like I'd been by the door eavesdropping, and then I opened it.

Rose was standing there, her arms full of something that looked like a giant marshmallow. "You need a comforter," she said and handed it to me. "It's getting chilly at night this time of year, and Ozzie hadn't turned on the furnace yet. Can I do anything else for you?"

"I'm going to take a hot shower," I said, for lack of any other answer. Plus, if there was one thing I had absolutely lusted for on the trail, it was a hot shower.

Her eyebrows went up and I realized she might have taken that as a request for help. I quickly indicated my grubby outfit. "I've been on the trail a while. I'm pretty rank."

"Right," Rose said.

"There is hot water?" I checked, noting her comment about the furnace being off.

"Oh, yes. You need hot water all year. Ozzie wasn't that cheap. He just thought you should throw another blanket on the bed in the fall and spring and only turned on the heat when there was frost on the ground."

"Right."

We stood there awkwardly for a moment and then she said, "You can toss your dirty clothes outside your door and I'll throw them in the washer tonight."

I didn't have many clothes. What I wore and an extra pair of pants and two shirts in the ruck. "Right."

But if I did that, she'd be holding part of my wardrobe captive. Civilization was hard.

"And your sleeping bag," she said. "I can take that now, if you like."

I didn't like, but the bag was pretty nasty, ripped in places and stained from the trail. I'd hit a laundromat just off the trail somewhere in Virginia, but that had been a while ago. I put the comforter down and reluctantly went to my ruck and pulled out the stuff sack holding the bag, or what we affectionally called a "fart sack."

I handed that over. "It's a bit odiferous. Sorry."

"No problem," Rose paused for a second and then nodded. "Enjoy your shower. Ozzie had an extra-large tank put in, one of the few things he splurged on, so take as long as you need."

"Right."

She nodded again and went back across the state line to her own door.

I did not need a big marshmallow-y comforter. I was a man's man. I slept in the woods. In a fart sack. But the comforter was really soft and it smelled faintly of roses, so I took it into the bedroom and spread it out on the bed, which was more difficult without Rose on the other side to catch it.

I spared a thought for Rose on that comforter, but then Maggs padded in behind me and leapt onto the bed, easily clearing the cone from the edge, and settled into the softness with a contented sigh. She was cleaner than I was, so it was okay. She wasn't happy about the cone, but she was bearing with it. I could tell she liked the bed and the comforter. She didn't seem bothered by the bow. But she'd chewed off my bandage. Go figure .

No more thoughts of Rose naked on a marshmallow.

"Don't get too comfortable," I warned Maggs. "We really have to get out of here tonight."

She closed her eyes. I went to the bathroom to get clean for a really comfortable bed I wasn't going to be spending much time in.