Despite all this — and not because of it — the second he appeared in the living room the whole atmosphere in the house changed. People stood up and turned to face him. The dog stopped pawing at Julia’s face and came to attention.
Top smiled at the wounded veterans gathered in the living room. “Well, if isn’t another damned beautiful morning in Pennsylvania,” he announced.
“Sir, yes, sir!” the vets said in chorus.
Top turned to look at Julia, still down on the floor next to the dog, and then at Angel, who was sitting in a corner making herself very small in an armchair.
“An especially beautiful morning,” Top said, with a wide, amiable grin.
“I heard that!” Dolores shouted from the kitchen.
“If you were gonna divorce me for looking at pretty girls, I’d already be the unhappiest man in the world, baby,” Top called back.
It was enough to make Angel blush. Julia laughed.
“I figure at some point, somebody’s gonna actually introduce me to our new friends here. So I won’t bother to ask,” Top said. “And who’s that in the kitchen?”
Chapel stepped out into the living room. He threw Top a salute. “Reporting for duty, sir,” he said.
“Captain Chapel,” Top said, looking him up and down. “I’d call you a disgrace to your uniform if you were wearing one. Your hair’s out of place, soldier, and you look like you haven’t shaved this morning. Look like you didn’t sleep last night, either.”
“Yes, sir,” Chapel said. He outranked Top, as such things were normally measured. But in this house it was clear who gave the orders.
“Frankly, your appearance is an insult to me, my lady wife, and every soldier in this house. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”
“No, sir,” Chapel replied. He was still holding his salute, since he hadn’t been told to be at ease.
“You’ll come over here and face me when I chew you out, soldier.”
Chapel marched over to Top until they were standing face-to-face. At which point he just couldn’t hold it together anymore. He exploded with laughter and Top did too, and the two of them embraced in a very warm hug. It had been way too long.
“Damn, Cap’n, it’s so good to see you I think I might cry a little,” Top said. “How’ve you been keeping? You still swimming with one arm like a crazy fish?”
“Every chance I can get,” Chapel said. “Listen, I—”
“The redhead out there is Julia, right? The one you said you were going to marry?”
“That’s right, although it didn’t quite work out. We—”
“And the brunette? What’s her story?”
“She’s a… a work friend,” Chapel said.
“Well, she’s welcome here, then. Any friend of yours at least rates breakfast on me.” He nodded at the roller bag Angel had set down next to her chair. “A clean bed, too, if she wants one. You just dropping her off, or are you staying tonight, too?”
“I don’t know,” Chapel said. He felt his shoulders sag. “Maybe this is just a quick pop-in. I was hoping… well, I was hoping we could stay here for a bit. I didn’t realize you already had a full house, though. It’s damned good to see you, but maybe we should just be on our way.”
“Let me tell you a little something,” Top said, as if Chapel hadn’t spoken at all. “Every veteran of an American war is welcome in this house. No questions asked. Even that flea-bitten mutt, you know where he came from? He was working K-9 teams in Iraq. They trained him to sniff out IEDs. You believe that? When I was over there, they would send us some new gizmo every week. A magno-thermo-dynamic sniffer spotter wide-spectrum doodad that was supposed to tell you where the roadside bombs were without fail, so fresh out of the lab they still had that new car smell. We tried every one of them, ran through the manuals and all the checklists, and you know how well they worked?” He stuck out one finger in the air and then he pointed at his missing eye, arm, and leg. “But Angus there, that dog. They spent maybe one percent of the budget of one of those gizmos on training him. He even volunteered to take a lousy pay grade — one little biscuit for every bomb he found. But damn if he didn’t have a one hundred percent success rate.”
“You’re telling me your dog is a veteran,” Chapel said.
“Honorably discharged with a Purple Heart,” Top said, beaming with pride. It was the same look that crossed his face when one of his patients managed to stand on his or her own feet for the first time in six months. “He came home and they put him with some nice family and six months later he had fleas and kennel cough and the family wanted to put him down. They said he refused to eat, and he kept waking ’em up at three in the morning barking like the whole house was full of insurgents. In short, because I know you army types have trouble paying attention during briefings, my dog is a veteran with P-T-S-D.” He pronounced each letter as if he were saying the dog had received a doctorate in particle physics from Harvard. “You know how hard it is to work with a dog with PTSD? They can’t tell you when they’re flashing back, or that nobody gets what they’re feeling. You can’t tell them they’re home and they’re safe.”
“If anybody could help a dog like that, it’s you,” Chapel said.
Top nodded, just accepting that without comment. “Now. Tell me what you’re looking for here.”
Chapel bit his lip. He looked around at the veterans gathered in the room. They were all staring at him. He couldn’t afford to speak plainly, but he owed Top an explanation, definitely. “The three of us — Angel and Julia and me — we’re in trouble.”
Top leaned back in his chair and scratched at the burnt skin around his false eye. “Trouble, like cops? Or worse?”
“Worse,” Chapel admitted.
Top nodded. “You have any idea why I jawed on and on about my flea-bitten dog?”
“I think I might,” Chapel said.
“That dog is one of my boys. When he came here, it was so bad Dolores and me, we wore flea collars our own selves. That dog bit me three times, and I ain’t got a lot of flesh left to get bitten off. You know why that dog is still here?”
“He’s one of your boys,” Chapel said.
Top nodded. “And so are you. You just wasted ten minutes of my life asking a question you already knew the answer to. That’s all right, gave me a chance to talk about my dog. I love talking about my dog. Now let’s talk about what we’re going to do to get you and those ladies out of the shit.”
Wilkes’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
He picked it up and looked at the screen. The call was coming from a number listed as (000) 000-0000, which he knew meant it had to be Moulton. Only the intelligence community had the tech to truly mask a number but still let it connect.
He glanced out through the side hatch of the helicopter at the New Jersey landscape, at the turnpike and its feeder roads, at the trees down there just starting to turn blue as the sun thought about maybe getting around to rising above the horizon.
He considered just tossing the phone out there.
Instead he swiped the screen and put it to his ear. “What?” he said.
Moulton sounded pissed. “I’ve been trying to reach you for twenty minutes,” the analyst sputtered. “You need to put in your earpiece. We need to be in constant contact.”
Wilkes reached in his pocket and pulled out the hands-free unit they’d given him. “I was trying to get some sleep,” he said.
“You can sleep when this is over. Look, when Angel and Chapel are on a mission, he never takes his earpiece out. The two of them are always working together, talking things out, figuring out their next move—”