Page 4 of The Jackal

I did it piece by piece, because that was the only way left to do it. I did it with my hands as gentle as I have ever made them, and the whole time, I prayed. Not loud. Not to anything I could put a name to. Just the going-home words, the only liturgy I've got. Your name is Leonard Beasley. You are a Chief Petty Officer in the United States Navy. You're going home now. People are waiting for you. You will not make this trip alone. Over and over, low, while the rain came down on the roof and the warlord cooled on the floor and I closed the bag, fold by fold, over a man I'd never met and would carry like my own.

This is the part no one understands about what I am. They see the other thing. The doorway. The knife. The men I'd left behind me in that house without a flicker of anything that resembled remorse—because there's none in me to flicker. I've looked. It isn't there. They think that's the truth of me. It isn't. The men were the cost. Leonard was the reason.

You always brought them home. Always. That was the whole of it. The entire creed, the single line everything else in me was built to serve. Most men can't do it. It takes a particular kind of broken, or a particular kind of gift, depending on who's describing me that week. I stopped caring which word they reach for a long time ago. I lifted him over my shoulder, and he weighed almost nothing, the way they never do and somehow always did. I carried him out through the house of the dead and into the rain.

There was no one left to stop me.

Six men, that night. I felt nothing for them, and I'll tell you plainly I still don't. The only thing in that whole flooded city that mattered to me was the man across my shoulders, and the long road between him and the people in Nebraska who didn't know yet that he was coming.

That's the job of the Jackal.

For that, Cash Dane was made.

3

MAGNOLIA

My father drove back to Georgia before sunup, the way he always left—early, quiet, a kiss on the top of my head while I was still half in a dream. By the time I woke, the house just felt like one person again.

He'd washed the grill grates. He'd left the burgers he hadn't cooked stacked in my fridge with a sticky note that read EAT THESE, in the all-caps of a man who had spent his life issuing orders that saved people's lives and could not stop now that the stakes were down to ground chuck.

I let myself miss him for the length of one cup of coffee. Then, I went to work.

The facility sat twenty minutes outside the city, down a road that turned from asphalt to oyster-shell and then to packed dirt, through a gate that someone had to get out and open by hand. It had been a horse farm once. You could still read it in the bones of the place—the long, low stable we'd gutted and lined with kennels, the round pen we used for desensitization work, the live oaks dripping moss over all of it like the whole property was wearing a veil. Lowcountry Working K9 didn't have a sign. People who needed us knew where we were, and people who didn't had no reason to come.

We took the ones nobody else could place. Contract dogs whose contracts had ended. Military working dogs who'd done their twelve years and washed out the back end of a war with their nervous systems rewired and no soft landing waiting. Dogs that had been bred and trained and shipped overseas to do a job most people would faint to watch, and had done it, and had come home—if they came home—carrying things in their bodies that no one had asked them whether they wanted to carry.

I understood them better than I understood most people. I'd told my father that once and he hadn't laughed.

Walt Loupe was already in the office when I got there, which meant Walt had probably slept there. He was seventy-one years old, a retired Marine who'd handled dogs in two countries he still wouldn't name, and he ran the place on coffee, ibuprofen, and a flat refusal to die. He looked up at me over his readers.

"He didn't eat again," he said.

He didn't have to tell me which he.

Max had come to us three weeks earlier. A Belgian Malinois, six years old, a multi-purpose canine who'd deployed with a special operations element and lost his handler over there—not the dog's fault, never the dog's fault, an IED on a road outside a village whose name was in a file I'd read until the letters stopped meaning anything.

The handler was gone. The dog had survived, physically, and then had set about the slow business of refusing to. He wouldn't eat for anyone. He stood at the gate of his kennel with his ears forward and his weight on his toes, looking down the long center aisle toward the door, and he waited. He had been waiting for three weeks. He was waiting for a man who was not coming back, and no one had figured out how to tell him in a language he'd believe.

I went and sat down outside his kennel. Not facing him—that's pressure, and pressure was the last thing he had room for. I sat with my back half to the chain-link, close enough that he could smell me, far enough that I wasn't asking him for anything. I opened a paper sack of cheap diner bacon I'd stopped for on the way and I started, slowly, to eat it myself.

This is the work. People think it's commands and clickers and treats arranged in a clever sequence. Sometimes, it is. But the dogs like Max are past all that. The dogs like Max have been to a place where the rules came off, and you cannot rule-book them back from it. All you can do is sit down in the dark with them and be a body that doesn't leave. You make yourself into a fixed point. You let them learn, over hours, over weeks, that there is at least one creature in the world who is going to be exactly where they last saw it. It's not training. It's a kind of vigil.

I'd been good at it long before anyone paid me for it. I'd been the kid on the curb at every base we ever lived on, the one the strays found, the one who sat very still until the spooked thing decided she was safe.

I used to think it was a soft thing about me, a weakness even. It took me most of my twenties to understand it was the opposite. It takes a hard center to sit with something in its worst hour and not flinch, not look away, not need it to get better fast so you can feel better about yourself. Most people can't. They mean well and they can't. They want the suffering to be over because the suffering makes them uncomfortable. A dog like Max can smell that on you from across a room.

I just ate my bacon and waited.

Somewhere in the second hour, he lay down. Not near me. But down, which was further than he'd come for anyone. I felt it land in my chest like a good ache. I tore off a piece of bacon and set it on the concrete inside the gate without looking at him and went on eating mine. After a while—a long while—I heard him take it. The soft click of teeth. The barest sound of an animal deciding, against the whole weight of his grief, to stay alive one more hour.

"Good boy," I said, to the air, to no one, to him. "There you go. Stay with me."

I am not going to pretend my eyes were dry.

Walt found me out there at some point and stood in the aisle with two fresh coffees and the worn-down silence of a man who'd done this longer than I'd been alive and still hadn't gotten used to it, either. He set one cup down beside me without a word and went back to the office.

That was Walt's whole love language. A cup of coffee set down where you could reach it.