Page 42 of The Jackal

I stood up with my hand fisted in Banjo's scruff and looked at Cash across the run.

And then, I said the thing I hadn't let myself reach for yet because I hadn't been brave enough.

"Before we load him up," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "There's someone I need you to meet. There's someone I need to see." I looked down the long center aisle of the kennel, toward the gate at the end of it, where I knew a dog was standing with his weight on his toes, watching a door for a man who was never coming back.

"I need to see Max."

22

CASH

Icould have watched her with that dog for the rest of my life.

Banjo hit her chest like a mortar round of pure joy and took her down to one knee in the dirt. She went laughing—the first real laugh I'd heard out of her since her kitchen—and let him lick her face while Beans and Tiny orbited the reunion with their tails going like flags. She had her hand fisted in his scruff and her forehead against his blocky head, telling him he had a home now, that she'd promised. I stood a few feet off with my hands in my pockets and did the thing I do.

I witnessed.

This was her gift, and I was finally seeing it in its own country. Not the aftermath work I'd watched her survive all morning. The thing itself. Every animal on that property bent toward her like she was warm weather. The washout nobody wanted was screaming his love at her because, somewhere along the way, she'd sat down in the dark with him and made herself a fixed point, and a creature that had been handed back three times had decided she was the one thing in the world that wouldn't be.

I knew something about that.

In the back of my mind, quiet, the other thing sat waiting—her father, coming tomorrow, and the proper conversation I'd promised him. I was prepping for it the way I prep for everything, turning it over once, setting it down.

But I wasn't worried. I don't worry, and even if I did, that wouldn't have been the place for it. A man who intends to stand in front of a colonel and account for himself should be able to do it cold. And I could. There was nothing that man could ask me that I'd have to dress up. She was written on my soul now, plain as anything's ever been written there. All I had to do tomorrow was let her father read it.

Mags stood, brushed the dirt off her knees, and looked down the long, center aisle of the kennel. I watched the laugh leave her and something steadier take its place.

"Before we load him up," she said. "There's someone I need you to meet. There's someone I need to see." A breath. "I need to see Max."

"Then, let's go see him."

She'd told me about him in the dark, wrapped around me with her voice going thick. The Malinois. Multi-purpose, deployed, the real thing—a dog who'd done the work most humans couldn't watch, and lost his handler to a bomb on a road, and come home to stand at a gate watching a door for a man who was never going to walk back through it.

I'd gone still when she told it, and I'd been carrying it since.

Here's where I stand on working dogs, and I'll keep it short. They're soldiers. Full stop. They walk point into the worst rooms on earth on nothing but trust, they find the bombs before the bombs find the men, they take the bullet meant for their handler and consider it a fair trade. They serve without a contract, without a flag on their shoulder, without one word of the why—and they serve anyway, completely, the way saints are supposed to. A combat veteran dog is a special breed of soul. Any man who'd argue that with me has a problem, and the problem is me.

And there's the other thing. The private thing, the one I'd never said out loud until Mags pulled it out of me in the dark.

Dogs are like me.

They live tuned to the frequency underneath. They see what isn't showing and smell what hasn't happened yet. They know who's dying before the doctors do—every hospice has a story about the dog or the cat that comes to sit with the ones whose time is close, and every one of those stories is true. They stand in rooms and stare at corners where nothing is, and everyone laughs. I've never once laughed, because I know what's in the corner. Dogs keep company with the unseen as a condition of being dogs. It's their whole design.

I'd wondered, more than once across the years, what it would have been like to be a handler. To have that bond—a partner who lived on my frequency, who didn't need the words I don't have, who kept watch on the same dark I keep watch on. The handlers I'd known were a breed apart themselves, marked by it, half dog somewhere behind the eyes. I'd envied them the way I envy very few living men.

So, I followed Mags down that aisle.

She led, the three dogs loose around her legs. I came behind, and I came armed—of course, I came armed. My brothers had been plain about it before we left Dominion Hall: two shooters had come through her door not twelve hours ago, and a man wandering off the property alone with her was a risk, and would he like company.

I'd told them no. Not out of pride. Out of arithmetic.

If I'd had one inkling I couldn't keep her safe with what I carry and what I am, I'd never have taken her off that compound. But she'd needed this trip the way lungs need air, and there are things you don't make a grieving woman wait for.

So, the pistol rode where it rides, and my eyes did what they do. The morning stayed ordinary all around us, and I let it.

The kennel ran long and cool and smelled like dog and clean concrete. And at the end of it, at the last gate, I saw the shape she'd described—weight forward, ears up, a silhouette of pure attention aimed at the door at the end of the aisle. The vigil. Even from behind, even in outline, you could read the whole story of him. A soldier at his post long after the war ended, waiting for the one relief that was never coming.

Mags shooed the three off—they wheeled away, barking, out toward the sun to play. Then, she did the thing she does, the thing I'd have bet my life she'd do. She didn't face the gate. She sat down beside it, shoulder to the chain-link, eyes elsewhere. No pressure. No asking. Just a fixed point, arriving, the way she'd arrived for him a hundred times.