“Get in the car! Or I will . . . I will kick your backside.” Toby snatched Gibson’s duffel bag and made a show of putting it in the trunk, slamming it shut. Then he got back in the car and sat there waiting, both hands on the steering wheel, until Gibson slipped back into the passenger seat.
Toby said, “I apologize for my language.”
Toby and Sana Kalpar lived in a town house in Arlington. Together they owned the Nighthawk Diner, and one or both was always there. Sana wouldn’t be home until late, so Toby parked on the street, leaving the garage for his wife. Gibson stood in the entry hall while Toby turned on lights in the living room. It was a warm, lived-in home. Gibson had always harbored an ignoble jealousy for Toby’s tight-knit family, but he found it doubly painful now. Pictures in frames dotted every surface, and on the walls hung a gallery’s worth of art. The work of Toby’s only child, Maissa—a gifted artist who had attended Corcoran School of the Arts & Design. Last Gibson knew, she’d moved to San Francisco but was having trouble finding steady work. Toby doted on his daughter, and it had pained him to see her struggle.
“Maissa has a job,” Toby said with his typical clairvoyance.
“That’s so great. Doing what?”
“Graphic designer for an advertising agency.”
“Does she like it?”
“No.” Toby smiled. “But one step at a time.”
Two cats, one gray, one black, wound between Toby’s ankles and disappeared down the hall toward the kitchen. Toby apologized and followed after his hungry pets, telling Gibson to make himself at home. Gibson couldn’t decide how to do that, and when Toby came back from the kitchen, he still hadn’t moved.
“Well, you didn’t run out into the street, so I suppose that’s progress,” Toby said, but his joke couldn’t hide his unease. “So, my friend, I have a question.”
Gibson tensed. Toby had held off asking Gibson any questions, but here they came. He had no idea how he would explain the last eighteen months.
“Are you aware of how dreadful you smell?”
Not the question Gibson had expected. “I thought that was you.”
“A retort.” Toby looked relieved, as if Gibson’s feeble joke assured him that he hadn’t let a crazy person into his home. “I knew it was still you.”
Gibson wasn’t so sure, but it felt good to be recognized all the same.
Toby said, “In all seriousness, my friend, you are rank.”
He led Gibson upstairs and showed him into Maissa’s bedroom. She visited only once a year, but her parents kept the room just as she’d left it. For the most part, it was a grown woman’s room but with vestiges of her adolescent affections. In one corner, a watercolor rested on an easel as if Maissa had set down her brush for a moment and would be back any second.
If Gibson lived to be one hundred, the shower would go down as the best of his life. It took three applications of Maissa’s coconut-scented shampoo before his shoulder-length hair began to feel clean, four for the beard. He lathered in conditioner, leaned against the tiles, and let the water beat down. In a trance, he stayed there until the water ran cold.
He toweled off and watched the stranger in the mirror brush the tangles out of his hair and beard. It was slow going; patches had matted together in haphazard dreadlocks. He badly needed a shave, but it would take a barber—or a grounds crew—to make headway in this thicket. In the meantime, he borrowed one of Maissa’s hair ties and put his hair back in a ponytail. If his former commanding officer could see him now, there would be hell to pay. He’d be right at home in Saskatchewan . . . or Brooklyn. Where he didn’t feel at home was in his own skin.
“This is a good move,” Duke said. “We need a base of operations.”
“Can you just not right now?”
Duke pointed an admonishing finger at Gibson. “Toby Kalpar is on a need-to-know basis only, and he doesn’t.”
The smell of bacon frying roused Gibson from his thoughts. His last meal had been the truck-stop burgers in West Virginia, and the thought of Toby’s cooking caused his stomach to turn giddy backflips. Toby cooked at the diner only in dire emergencies, but the man knew his way around a kitchen. Gibson pulled on his jeans, his least dirty shirt, and followed the scent downstairs to its source.
“Just in time. I was about to call the Coast Guard,” Toby said, sniffing the air. “You smell like a pi?a colada.”
“Take it up with Maissa.”
Toby plated a pair of omelets and drizzled them with sriracha. He set them at a kitchen table already weighted down by a platter of bacon, sausage, and potatoes; toast; cantaloupe; and a pitcher of orange juice, fresh squeezed or Gibson would eat his musty T-shirt. Gibson and Toby shared a love of breakfast and saw the time of day as no impediment.
The two men tucked in to Toby’s impromptu feast. It beat a truck-stop burger all to hell; the man could straight-up cook. Gibson was halfway through his omelet before it occurred to him to say so. Toby reached across the table and gripped Gibson’s shoulder for a moment, said nothing. Gibson felt human for the first time in as long as he remembered and put his hand over Toby’s. Then he saw Duke lurking by the door, watching, and the feeling was gone.
“Do you think it was me?” Gibson asked when the food had gone to meet its maker.
“The man I knew could not have done it.” Toby rose to clear the plates, considering the question further. “Are you?” he asked. “The man I knew?”
A fair question. It was Gibson’s turn to pause before answering. “I don’t know. I don’t know who I am, but I didn’t do that. That much I can tell you.”
Toby nodded and shrugged his shoulders. “That is good enough for me. Now get up and help me with the dishes.”
When the kitchen was squared away, the two men moved to the living room for coffee. Toby did much of the talking, telling stories from the diner and catching Gibson up on his family. Gibson could feel his friend trying to draw him out.
“Why don’t you ask me?” Gibson asked.
“You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
“Don’t know I ever will be.”
Toby nodded over his coffee. “A risk I am willing to take.”
“I’ll leave in the morning.”
“And do what?”
Gibson got into bed, still brooding about Toby’s question. He already knew Duke’s answer and that Bear had another. He’d made promises to each of them and could feel their impatience, waiting to see whom he would disappoint. He feared the answer would be both. An unfamiliar instinct to lie down and die had coiled around his heart. He’d experienced his share of hardship: the death of his father, his arrest and trial, the end of his marriage. He’d always picked himself up and soldiered on, always found a fight to rally him: his father’s memory, his freedom, his daughter.
This felt different.
The people he wanted to fight for didn’t want him. He could track down his ex-wife and daughter, but if Nicole feared him enough to disappear with Ellie, then what good would it do? If he had lost Ellie, then he feared that his incarceration had stripped him of more than just his sanity.
“That’s why Washburn has to pay,” Duke growled.