Page 11 of The Jackal

I've got nothing against money. The Valentine Danes have some now—more than some, from the feel of the thing I was sitting in—and I'm glad for it the way I'm glad about most things, from a slight distance. I just don't use it. I live the way I've always lived, out of one pack with everything I own inside it. But I know beauty when I'm sitting in it.

"This is a beautiful car," I told him.

Brock laughed, low, pulling us away from the plane. "Brother," he said, "you have no idea."

He didn't explain. I didn't ask. I'm not a man who asks unless asking is the only road left, and Brock would tell me what I was doing on the wrong side of the planet when he was ready to. We both knew the rules. You don't pull a man off a job like mine and fly him eight thousand miles to admire your upholstery.

Sure enough, the second we cleared the little airport gate and the open road unrolled in front of us, he started.

"Thank you for coming, Cash. I mean it. This is—" He paused, picked the word the way our father used to, careful, like the wrong one might go off in his hand. "This is important."

"You wouldn't have sent the plane if it wasn't."

"No." Rain sheeted the windshield; the wipers swept it away. "There's trouble. Bad trouble." Another beat. "With the FBI."

I let that sit. The FBI. Not a sentence I'd expected. My work happens in countries the FBI couldn't find on a bet, against men who've never heard the name.

"The ranch?" I asked. It was the first place my mind went. Home. Valentine. The long grass and the horses and the only ground any of us ever came from. "Somebody making noise about the ranch?"

"No. Not the ranch." He glanced over. "It's us. Me. Tommy. Grant. Wyatt."

"What about the other two?"

His jaw worked once. "We're handling that. Working on it."

I let it go. The other two were the other two, and if Brock said it was being handled, it was being handled. The not-saying told me as much as the saying would have. I went to the part that mattered.

"What kind of trouble?"

"The worst kind." He said it flat, no heat in it, which is how you know a thing is true when a Dane says it. "The kind we can't figure out yet. We don't know what it is, Cash. Don't know how deep it runs. We just know it's pointed at the family, and it's federal, and it's patient." He looked at me, longer than the road should've allowed. "That's why you're here. To help us find what's hidden. You always have. We need you to find this before it finds the rest of us."

"Okay," I said.

Because, of course, it was okay. There was never going to be another answer, and we both knew it. Brock had the grace not to thank me for a thing that was never in question.

"Are we going to the others now?" I asked.

"Soon. Not yet." He took a turn smooth as poured water. "Right now, I've got to get you stowed. Quiet. Off the board, until it's time."

"Time for what?"

He huffed something that wanted to be a laugh and didn't quite make it. "Still working that out, brother. Honest answer. We're still working out what comes next." Then the grin came back, deliberate, a man choosing to lighten a load. "But until we do, it's first class all the way for you. Anything you want, it's covered. You don't reach for your wallet in this town. Food, a bed, whatever you need—you say the word."

"Anything, huh?" I looked around the cabin, at the wood and the leather and the screen glowing soft in the dash. "Maybe, I'll ask for one of these."

I meant it as a joke. It's the only way I'd ever say a thing like that—as a joke, the way you'd say you'd take the moon if they were handing it out.

Brock didn't blink.

"You want it, it's yours," he said. "Say the word."

And that—that's what got me.

Not the money. We've never been a family that flinched at money, even back when we had none. Our father raised us to treat a rich man and a poor man exactly the same, which is to say with our eyes open. The Valentine Danes having a full tank now wouldn't have moved me on its own.

It was the way he said it. The flatness of it. I'd asked for a half-million-dollar automobile the way you'd ask a man to pass the salt, and he'd handed it across the same way—no pause, no laugh, no that's-cute. Like I'd asked for a stick of gum. Like the number on the thing had stopped meaning anything to him, because something else had gotten so big, it swallowed the number whole.

You only treat money like it doesn't matter when you've found out, the hard way, exactly how little of what matters it can buy.