Free Hard Cold Winter by Glen Erik Hamilton Page B

hard use.
    A couple of street people made a habit of coming by the Morgen before opening, looking for food or spare change or whatever Luce could offer. If they weren’t drunk or high, Luce usually found something to wrap up for them.
    I’d never known her to invite one of them into the bar. Where was she?
    “Anybody home?” I called. No answer from the back rooms.
    I walked toward the bar counter, a lengthy stretch of pale birch. On the wall behind the bar hung a tapestry. A medieval image of a nude woman riding a horse into the sea, which gave the Morgen its name. I watched the man in the hood as I walked, and he watched me in continued silence.
    “You got a name?” I said.
    He nodded. Hands still under the table.
    “That’s a start,” I said, moving behind the bar. Luce kept a collapsible police baton taped under the lip of the counter. Albie had kept a Louisville Slugger in the same spot for decades. The steel baton was both a nod to his legacy, and an improvement. The eight-inch handle would telescope out to triple its length with a flick of the wrist, a lot quicker and just as effective as a baseball bat. I reached underneath for it.
    The baton was gone. The loose ends of masking tape where it had been stuck to my fingertips.
    The beard moved in a smile. His left hand came out and picked up a chicken wing, and dipped it in the plastic cup of blue cheese dressing.
    “Lemme finish these,” he said around a mouthful, “’fore you shoot me.”
    I knew that voice. And saw his combat boots, scuffed from their original tan to a patchy gray.
    “Pak?” I asked.
    “Hey, Sergeant.”
    Leonard Pak had been a specialist in the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, serving in Afghanistan. On his second deployment, he’d been assigned to the platoon I had led. Leo got into the rhythm of working with his new fire team faster than most. He was smart and quickly proved his rep as a hell of a shot with a sniper rifle. As happy as I was whenever any of my guys went home safe, I’d been sorry to lose Leo from the unit.
    “Goddamn,” I said, and walked down the bar. He wiped his hand on his pants before shaking mine.
    “Sorry to yank your chain,” he said, “but the look on your face when you walked in and saw me . . .”
    Leo tugged the hood all the way off. His ink-black hair had grown long enough to touch his shoulders. He had the same broad, square face as I remembered, with a few extra creases framing his eyes. Handsome enough that at least two girls on post at Benning had labored through killer crushes on him. The way his facial bones pressed at his skin, I didn’t think Leo had been eating a lot of home-cooked meals.
    I sat down on the bench across from him. Up close, spots on his wool coat shone bright with wear. “Luce let you in?”
    “The hot blonde? I told her how I knew you. She made me prove it. I dug my Ranger tabs out of my pack.” He grinned. “And I told her about when our team extracted that HVT in Kabul, and you had to cold-cock one of his wives when she jumped you.”
    Jesus. “I apologized to her.”
    “That’s what I told the blonde girl. The woman was unconscious, but you said ‘Sorry’ to her just the same while we hauled ass out of there.” He shrugged. “Saved us from having to shoot the crazy bitch.”
    Of all the stories, Leo had picked that one.
    “Nice beard, Pak.”
    “Huh. Still better than you can do.”
    He wasn’t wrong. Ever since the left side of my face was stitched back together, any attempt I made to grow facial hair looked ridiculous.
    “How’d you find me here?” I said.
    “You told me and Johnny Hargreaves one night about a bar near Pike Place that your dad owned. I thought, what the hell, I’d knock on a few doors, see if you were around.”
    “Granddad,” I corrected automatically. “You could have just asked the battalion office to pass along a message. They’ve got my e-mail.”
    The lines around Leo’s eyes crunched together. “I’m done with all that,