“I am,” Spencer agreed. “But my point is this. If you want to talk to him, do it now. If you want to sleep with him, do it now. He’s exhausted, he’s grumpy, and he’s hurting, and he’ll probably just lie there with his eyes open, working himself into a lather over you, so you might as well get it over with so he can sleep and doesn’t kill us all in the morning.”
Both literally and figuratively since he’d probably be flying.
“Got it,” Cash said. He slid off the couch and headed reluctantly to the bedroom. “Good talk.”
Spencer snorted. “If you move in here, I need to tell you how to organize the refrigerator. Glen is fucking picky—I’m not even shitting around.”
“You are a fountain of fuckin’ optimism,” Cash told him. Behind him, he heard Spencer chuckle and then the low sounds of the television playing a sitcom from ten years ago. Well, everyone had their comfort TV.
Cash paused when he got to Glen’s closed door, his hand in a fist, ready to knock.
The darkness, the proximity to Glen without being able to touch—it all seemed frighteningly familiar.
As seamlessly as his next breath, he was dragged into the past.
Past
THEY woke up together, sweltering in the porch room of Enrique’s store, and Glen tumbled out of bed first to go use the john. He came back and washed his hands and rubbed his teeth on his T-shirt. He’d brought a small pack with him, and when Cash got back, he was butt-naked, rinsing his private parts with a cloth and some soap, a pair of briefs on the stand by the basin.
Cash couldn’t help laughing. “You, uh, came prepared.”
“I’ve got mouthwash,” Glen said with no irony whatsoever, nodding to the tiny bottle on the stand.
Cash took a small swallow gratefully and swished it around, then ran to the toilet and spat it out. “You’re a lifesaver,” he murmured, bringing the half-empty container back.
“That’s what it says on the plane,” Glen said lightly.
“Really? Sounds official.” Cash hadn’t seen the plane—Glen had said something about flying it to the airfield near Las Varas and leaving it with a friend.
“Yeah, well, when it was time to come up with a name for the business, I was like, Echo and Ward Search and Rescue. Damien wouldn’t do it, though. He was like, ‘Gecko you have been, and Gecko you shall be forever and ever amen.’ I shit you not, he said that in front of our financial officer. It’s a good thing Mallory liked us or we’d still be flying cargo planes back and forth from Japan.”
Cash laughed softly, letting Glen’s chatter ease some of the awkwardness from losing his shit the night before. “It’s a good thing your guy likes you—he’s about ready to go to a lot of trouble to get you back.”
Glen grunted. “Yeah, well, he owes me. He’s been a taciturn hole in my karma for the last year. Saving my ass will give him a nice warm fuzzy in the pit of his balls.”
“Why?” Cash went to the front of the store and looked for Glen’s phone, grunting. “And by the way, your phone has about a five percent charge after an entire night. I think this charge cord’s had it.”
“Crap.” Glen grabbed the phone and leaned up against the wall behind the counter, texting Damien. Cash faced him, leaning against the counter proper, watching Glen’s absolute faith in his brother and friend in real time as Glen texted them. “They must be shitting Twinkies by now.” As he was typing, Glen started to laugh. “Not that Damien has ever had a Twinkie up his tailpipe, but, you know….”
“Oh my God,” Cash groaned, but he was still smiling, right up until the ground bucked under their feet.
The lights in the end-cap refrigerator flickered, and Glen’s phone went dead, and then… then the room pitched and yawed like a tiny ship on a stormy sea.
“Kid, get under the counter!” Glen screamed it as the walls around Cash buckled. Cash was scrambling to obey, and Glen was watching him, probably waiting to see if there’d be enough room, when Cash heard a terrible cracking noise.
Oh God—“Glen!”
The wall that crashed down on Glen pinned him to the floor and blocked Cash in, and as the world stopped trying to shake them off its crust like a dog shaking fleas, Cash heard Glen’s first scream of pain and then an eerie silence.
For minutes after, all Cash could hear was the harshness of his own breathing in his ears. Then, “Glen? Oh God, Glen? Are you okay?”
Glen’s voice was muffled, and if Cash lay down on his stomach, he could see Glen’s face—but there was no room for Cash to get under the wall and take some of the weight, and no room for him to climb out and get help.
“Hey, kid,” Glen croaked. “How you doing?”
“Are you okay?” Cash asked again, and he could hear the hysteria rising in his voice.
“Been better,” Glen rasped. “Look around and tell me what you see.”
Cash had a limited view, but it was better than Glen’s. He had access to some things from under the counter, but there was too much debris—and too much of it with jagged edges and collapsed timbers overhead—to risk much movement.
The end-cap refrigerator had shattered, and plastic bottles of soda and water were rolling around the floor. When he mentioned those to Glen, Glen told him to gather as many as he could.
Cash managed three bottles of water and one of cola, but everything else was too far away. It was maddening. He could see the shelf of chocolate bars and beef jerky in almost pristine condition about five feet away, but it was propping up another wall, and if Cash knocked the counter over to get to it, he might end up like Glen, or worse.
He reported all this to Glen, who grunted, “Well done, kid. That might keep us alive.”
“What do we do now?” Cash asked, wanting mostly to panic but learning from Glen’s example.
“We wait,” Glen said, and Cash swallowed against a dry throat.
“Okay.” He closed his eyes and fought the temptation to scream. He’d spent his whole life fighting for freedom, and now he was literally in a cage of walls. The only thing that kept him from completely losing his shit in the hot, dark closeness of that wrecked little building was the fact that Glen was crushed under a wall, in considerable pain, and he’d kept his voice even and strong for Cash.
Cash needed to give back.
“If you, uh, have some way to do that,” he said, stomping ruthlessly on the tears in his voice, “I’d love to hear it.”
Glen grunted. “Tell me a story, kid. Doesn’t have to be a great one. I just need to hear a voice in the dark.”
So Cash closed his eyes and told Glen about the beagle he’d had in the first grade, how much he’d loved Smithers and how the dog had lived for ten years and had been his best friend.
Glen had told him, word by painful word, about how his brother raised dogs. “Preston’s got limited use for people—except me and Damien, and his housemates, Oscar and Belinda, I guess—but he’s like the fucking dog whisperer. Damie and I have no pets in our apartment—sometimes I think we go bother Preston just to pet the damned dogs.”
One story at a time. Cash’s freedom in Jalisco but his yearning for boundaries from his mother, as an act of love. Glen’s time in the service and how he and Damien had taken a premature honorable discharge so as not to leave a fellow soldier behind. How much Cash had loved performing—he sang several songs at this point, because Glen was getting weak. How much Glen had missed his friend Damien’s bullshitting and good humor since he’d been badly injured in a helicopter crash.