Light It Up Page 2

  Who came up with this stuff?

  Stoners, presumably.

  Or people trying to appeal to stoners.

  In addition to the attractive glass containers of fat green buds, the store sold hashish, THC-infused oils, and edibles, everything from the traditional pot brownie to cookies, chocolate, and hard candy.

  Peter had only been in Colorado for three days. He still couldn’t quite believe selling weed was legal. But once he started looking for them, he noticed cannabis retailers and the green cross symbol of medical marijuana everywhere. He’d stopped for gas in Aurora and found four retail stores in his line of sight from the pump.

  It was like a whole different country.

  Peter wasn’t particularly interested in getting high himself. He liked good scotch, and was happy to crack a cold beer on a hot day. But he’d found that more than one or two drinks made it harder to handle the static.

  On the other hand, some of the veterans Peter worked with smoked weed on their time off, and they said that certain strains really helped with their post-traumatic stress. The medical in marijuana. If it worked for you, Peter figured, what was the harm?

  Henry walked out of the back room with a new cardboard box, this one full of cash. He nodded to the receptionist and Peter led the way outside, white static forgotten, his eyes moving and his hands open and ready.

  The cash was the whole problem.

  Although recreational marijuana was legal in a few states, and medicinal marijuana was legal in many, the production, sale, and use of any kind of marijuana was still illegal on the federal level, which made commercial banking relationships problematic.

  Medical dispensaries were allowed limited privileges, but a bank that knowingly provided a recreational cannabis business with anything from a basic checking account to a commercial loan to credit card processing was breaking federal law and could face serious consequences.

  Which meant this industry was run almost entirely in cash. Employees, suppliers, and landlords were paid in cash. Businesses paid their state, local, and federal taxes in cash. The industry was uniquely vulnerable to crime, but also provided a very real opportunity for people with certain skills.

  “How much will we end up carrying today?” asked Peter when Deacon pulled away from the curb.

  “Bad question,” said Deacon, brown hands steady behind the wheel. Deacon’s father was a preacher in the Mississippi Delta country who’d had great hopes for his son’s religious calling. Deacon told Peter he’d only heard the call of the Army, one of the few ways for a black man to find his way out of the Deep South. He hadn’t looked back since. “Don’t ask that question.”

  “Why not?” Although Peter already knew the answer.

  “We don’t guard it because of its value,” Henry said over the seatback. “We guard it because it’s our honor to do so.”

  “Plus,” Banjo said with a grin, “y’all ain’t tempted if y’all don’t know what you’re carrying.”

  Banjo was the youngest of Henry’s crew, maybe twenty-five. He had a thick Appalachian drawl, and took a lot of good-natured shit for being from Kentucky. His real name was Dave, he’d told Peter when they’d met. “But all these assholes call me Banjo.” He’d smiled when he said it, not minding the nickname, glad to belong in this group of capable men working together.

  Peter was, too.

  He didn’t miss the war, but he did miss his guys.

  And part of him, although he didn’t like to admit it, really missed suiting up and rolling out with his platoon every day, armed to the teeth and looking for a fight, scared shitless and thrilled to his bones at the same time. Trusting your guys with your life, while they trusted you with theirs.

  There was nothing else like it.

  But he was hopeful that he’d found something different. He had an invitation to visit June Cassidy in Washington State. An invitation he’d worked hard to get.

  No way in hell he was going to miss it.

  —

  Working their way through the metro area, Henry’s crew made ten more stops, the last in Lakewood. The delay at the grow had put them into afternoon traffic, where they’d lost even more time. Now the sun blasted directly through the windshield when Deacon pulled onto I-70 heading west, leaving Denver’s High Plains for the foothills of the Front Range.

  The big orange metal toolbox on the back of Henry’s truck was now filled with boxes of cash.

  Each client, Henry had explained, did something different with his money.

  The lucky clients, those with a history in medical marijuana, could put their earnings in the bank, or at least in a safety-deposit box. These were straightforward deliveries, set up by the client with a phone call to the bank manager, so the tellers didn’t hit the silent alarm when a pair of armed men came walking in.

  The cannabis clients didn’t have legal access to a bank, so they put their money someplace else.

  Grandma’s attic, Henry called it. The company nickname for any secret stash spot.

  Which might be the client’s actual grandmother’s actual attic, or a giant safe in the client’s basement, or a pair of Rubbermaid bins under a trapdoor in the floor of his cousin’s backyard shed, or just a sheltered spot out of sight of the security cameras behind the King Soopers on Evans, where the boxes of bills were transferred to someone the client trusted more than his hired security company.

  This particular client’s money was going to the mountains.

  The grower, who ran two big facilities and sold wholesale to dozens of retailers, also owned a legacy parcel deep in the steeps of the Arapaho National Forest. According to Henry, the small cabin was set way back in the tall pines off a long gravel road, itself turning off a narrow winding paved county highway cut into the sloped side of a creek drainage.

  Henry said you could usually get there by car until sometime in October. After that it was snowshoes from the county highway.

  It seemed a safe place for a cash stash, the roads empty enough that it was easy to tell if someone was tracking them, although it was more difficult at night. The county highway didn’t have guardrails, just tall rocks on one side and a long drop on the other, with a gravel turnoff for slow-moving vehicles where the mountain allowed.

  The light was fading. Deacon had the pedal down, pushing the limits of the truck and the road. Henry sat in the front passenger seat, Banjo in the seat behind him, with Peter behind the driver because he was a lefty. The sun had dropped behind the serrated horizon and they were all ready to be done with this long day.

  When Deacon powered through a pothole with a thump that rattled Peter’s teeth, Henry said, “Jesus, take it easy. I just got new tie rods.”

  Banjo gave his high, cheerful laugh. “Dammit, Deacon, this is why we can’t have nice things.”

  Henry raised a middle finger to the critic in the back seat, and Banjo laughed again. Henry had promised cheeseburgers and beer on the way home.

  A half mile ahead of them on the highway, a boxy ambulance grumbled slowly up the grade. The red-and-white paint seemed dim in the fading light, or maybe the ambulance was just old. The diesel rattle of its engine got louder in the thin air as Deacon came up fast behind.

  The mountain rose hard and lumpy on their left. On their right the slope fell away steeply, disappearing into treetops, the highway too narrow for passing. Deacon took his foot off the gas.

  “Our turn’s up here,” said Henry. He pointed with his stubby unlit cigar. “Gravel road, just past the next switchback.”

  The ambulance driver glanced in the side mirror and picked up a little speed. Mountain driving etiquette, thought Peter. Speed up or get out of the way.

  He looked out at the shadowed pines, wondering what June Cassidy was doing at that moment. Maybe microwaving her dinner, he thought, or riding her bike down the trail that wound through the orchard.

  He’d know soon enough. He hadn’t seen her in almost five months, but he could still picture her face, those bright, shining eyes, tha
t wide sarcastic mouth, the brilliant constellation of freckles spread across her cheeks. He had her letters in his day pack on the floor at his feet.

  He felt his momentum shift as Deacon started the truck around the tight curve. The diesel sound of the ambulance changed ahead of them, getting softer. Slowing. Coming to a stop at the wide spot just before the intersection.

  “Man, get out of my way,” said Deacon. “That’s my damn turn.” He shook his head, then tapped the horn, hit the gas, and swung wide to get around the big boxy van. Peter figured the other driver had thought it was a good place to let them by.

  Until the ambulance pulled forward sharply and Peter saw the red wrecker roaring toward them down the gravel road.

  Too fast to stop.

  Too late to miss.

  He knew immediately. The impact was inevitable.

  —

  He didn’t have time to brace himself or call out to the others.

  The wrecker’s heavy front grille was suddenly huge in the passenger-side window.

  Then it T-boned them hard enough to knock Henry’s big four-door pickup across the oncoming lane and off the road into the drainage ditch.

  Peter was on the far side of the impact, in the rear seat behind the driver. He was thrown forward and toward the wrecker, yanked by his seat belt like a dog on a leash, then bounced back hard against his seat and the door. He was trying to hang on to his rifle when the side of his head hit the window hard enough to star the glass.

  The truck’s nose dug into the back side of the ditch with a rending crunch and Peter was thrown forward again. The rear of the truck bucked and slewed around until the tailgate angled toward oncoming traffic.

  He blinked off the sparkles and tried to move, but was trapped by his seat belt. He fumbled for the button. He could see the white puffballs of the air bags inflated in the front seat. All the while his mind was trying to picture the geometry.

  The wrecker had come at them from a side road at high speed.

  It would have been hard enough to do on purpose, nearly impossible to do by accident. Especially with what they were carrying.

  There would have to be another vehicle. Somebody ahead of them, or behind. Or both.

  “Hey,” he called to the other men.

  His voice sounded odd. He wondered how hard he’d hit his head.

  “They’re coming. Get ready.”

  2

  FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

  The first time Henry Nygaard saw the Marine, he stood balanced on a steep slope beside a washed-out section of the Pacific Crest Trail in the Willamette National Forest, pounding long sections of heavy galvanized pipe deep into the mountain with a twelve-pound sledgehammer.

  It was mid-May and the Marine had already been in the mountains for a month, working alone on the south-facing slopes where the snow had melted early. He wore expensive high-tech trail pants, but his heavy leather hiking boots looked like they’d walked ten thousand miles, and he swung that big rusty sledge like he’d done it all his life.

  Their first night together as a trail crew, he was quick to smile or make a joke, but there was something going on underneath.

  Henry could see it, even if the others couldn’t.

  Henry didn’t know the guy was a Marine until later.

  He didn’t have the tattoos, didn’t wear the T-shirt. But Henry thought he might have guessed it from the way the guy went after that galvanized pipe.

  Each ruthless swing an attack.

  Pounding them down like it was personal.

  Henry understood something about that himself.

  —

  The galvanized pipes were the first part of the washout repair. Set deep into the rocky soil, they stabilized the slope and provided support for the second part of the repair, wind-fallen logs laid against the metal stubs. Then rocks and dirt to fill in the fallen trail for the next generation of hikers, and on to the next little landslide.

  They were an eight-person crew, all volunteers, camping rough in the backcountry while rebuilding trails for the summer. Their primary tools were double-bladed axes, shovels, sledgehammers, and a two-man pull saw. They worked a two-week cycle, ten days on the mountain, four days in town. Two young high school teachers, four college kids, the Marine, who wasn’t much past thirty, and Henry, who was over seventy but could still hold his own.

  The Marine, whose name was Peter, looked like he was made mostly of ax handles and shovelheads, bound together with thick rigger’s rope at the joints. He didn’t seem to notice that the crew’s three young women stopped work to elbow each other silently when he took off his shirt to rinse himself in a creek.

  The man was also never still. Even sitting, some part of the Marine was always in motion, a leg bobbing or fingers tapping time to something only he could hear. And he didn’t sleep in the tents under the sheltering trees with the rest of them, either. Instead he hiked off the trail to one exposed rocky outcrop or another, where he slept in a hammock under the windblown stars, with only a tarp for shelter from the rain.

  The man was moving even while he slept, thought Henry. That hammock swaying back and forth in the high mountain breeze.

  Henry had spent his life in motion, too. He was a farm boy from southwestern Minnesota, got his growth spurt in middle school, six feet four by the ninth grade. His pop had eyeballed him like he was a new John Deere, talking about expanding the acreage, but Henry just saw a long dull future of driving the same old machines across the same old ground, every goddamned day for the rest of his life.

  Which was why he’d signed up for the Army the moment he could convincingly lie to a recruiter about his age. He’d left his pop’s truck in the bus station parking lot with the keys under the seat and never looked back.

  He was old enough now to see that day as the start of a pattern that would last most of his life. Any threat of boredom was enough to make him cut his tether and move on to something new. After two tours in Vietnam, he cowboyed in Wyoming until the big ranches started using dirt bikes instead of horses. He worked as a utility lineman all over the West, climbing poles and stringing wire, then built pipeline from Canada to Texas, all of it difficult, dangerous work that kept the landscape changing around him. That’s how he’d always liked it.

  He’d tried to be a good man. He never pretended to be someone he wasn’t. He’d been married three times and loved them all boundlessly, until he didn’t. With a hundred girlfriends in between, it was a wonder he wasn’t dead of syphilis or an angry husband, but somehow he’d survived it all.

  His third wife once told him that the West was built by men like him, working men on the move, and it seemed to Henry that she was the first one who’d really understood him. But they were standing on the courthouse steps in Durango at the time, divorce papers folded neatly in her purse, the ink still wet from her signature. So that was that.

  If he could start it all over again, he liked to think he’d have done it differently. But he wasn’t sure he could have. The older he got, the more clearly he saw himself, for better or worse. Not someone who floated, he was planted where he was planted. But not rooted there, not for good.

  He was trying now, though. At this late stage in his life, he was trying to do right by his grown daughter, born from a woman he’d kept company with for just a few months, twenty-five years before. Eleanor was his chance to break the pattern, to dig in and root himself in that relationship, if he could.

  When she started this new protection business, Henry saw his chance. Ellie’s idiot husband, Randy, was supposed to provide the combat expertise that clients would pay for, but it was Henry who walked sites and drove routes with Randy to find the weak points, Henry who took out a loan on his Denver house to help buy the first round of weapons and armor, Henry who helped find and interview the experienced veterans who would become the first real employees.

  It wasn’t exactly what he thought he’d be doing in his retirement.

  The wartime skills came back almost without conscious th
ought, as he’d somehow known they would, but he wasn’t crazy about the baggage that came with them. The dreams came back, too. But it wasn’t about him. It was about his daughter.

  Ellie didn’t make it any easier, she was a rose with some thorns. No surprise, given at least one of her parents.

  He’d hoped she might call him Dad, but she didn’t. Henry didn’t blame her. He wasn’t there when she was small, when she needed him. To be fair, he didn’t even know she existed until she was already married.

  But it all turned out okay. After fifteen months in operation with the business turning an actual profit, Ellie hired Randy’s recently retired sergeant, a twenty-year veteran with a shitload of combat experience, to carry the tactical weight. Leonard was the real deal, Ellie said. She could take it from here. Henry was free to keep his volunteer gig in Oregon.

  Henry was ashamed to admit that he jumped at the chance for some new scenery.

  Maybe he was too old to change, he thought.

  Maybe it was the war that had made him this way, had ruined him for a regular life.

  Everyone who’d died, everyone who’d come back ruined in one way or another, they’d given up everything they had for nothing at all. Even those like Henry, who’d made it home with only a little shrapnel, occasional nightmares, and a lifetime of regrets, were changed forever. War never left you, not really.

  So there was something about that younger guy, the Marine, that Henry recognized. The restless motion, the way he carried himself. The thoughtful, deliberate ferocity of his work. The way he’d stare, for a long moment, at something in the distance only he could see.

  And maybe Peter the Marine saw something in Henry. On the crew’s third day, they came to a giant downed spruce lying across the trail. With an easy smile, Peter handed one end of the six-foot pull saw across the trunk to Henry. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Henry took hold of the wooden handle and set his feet in the dirt. “Don’t kill me, okay? I’m old.”

  Peter the Marine caught Henry’s eye. “Like hell,” he said.