Page 20 of What is Lost

“Why do you make that sound like a bad thing? But, as a matter of fact, yes.”

“You ever done it?” When he nodded, she added, “Where?”

“Hiking the Hill Country.”

“Isn’t that in Texas?”

“About an hour northwest of San Antonio, yup. Big old park, something like thirty thousand acres. Anyway, my brother got hung up climbing over a bald cypress across the path, and one of the branches tore up his leg.” He stopped when her eyebrows folded in a frown. “What?”

“I didn’t know you had a brother or ever lived in Texas. Long way from Wisconsin.”

Oh, crap.He had to watch his mouth. My God, thatwouldstir up a hornet’s nest. A certain U.S. marshal would’ve metaphorically slapped himupside the head for that slip. This was precisely what had forced Stan to move him from Kansas to Wisconsin. On the other hand, the boy named Danny—not John—had been a freaked-out, depressed fourteen-year-old and could be forgiven the gaff.

“Yeah, you know, family trip,” he said then hurried on before she could ask anything else he would have to lie about. “Anyway, I washed out the gash with beer…”

“Beer?”

“Yeah, my dad’s.” Man, he was really making a mess of this. On the other hand, hadn’t Stan always said that the best lies contained a kernel of truth? “I shook it up to get, you know, the spray to clear out the dirt, and I figured the alcohol couldn’t hurt. Slapped on a couple gauze pads then used duct tape to wind it up tight. ER guy was pretty impressed. He said whenever he hiked, he packed duct tape, too. I always wrap some around my water bottle, so I never forget.”

“I wondered why you do that. Didn’t Driver make some remark about you and your duct tape? Before one of our marches, I think.”

He nodded. “One of the rare times he had something good to say about me.” He changed the subject. “I like what you did for that boy back there. Your smiley face? Nice touch.”

“He’s a little boy. I felt sorry for him. I feel sorryfor all these poor people.” She sighed. “Look, let’s head out to the flight line and get away from this for a couple minutes.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he said, tapping his bottle to hers. “Enough doom and gloom.”

“Right.” She let go a humorless laugh. “Betcha we never run out of that.”

As they ambledfor the tarmac, she said, “Tell me more about the Boy Scouts.”

“For starters,” he said, holding up his bottle of orange drink, “I can tell you that this stuff reminds me of that orangeade crap they gave us at Scout camp.”

“How far did you go?”

“High as I could. Eagle.”

She snorted. “Figures. Do a lot of good deeds?”

“I guess? We once had a couple kids come over from Russia on an exchange program. I didn’t get to go over there, but our troop hosted some guys who came here. This was after Putin but before things got tense.”

Her eyebrows arched. “There are Russian Boy Scouts?”

“Oh, yeah. Been around a long time. When it was the Soviet Union, they were called YoungPioneers. These days they’re ARSA, the All-Russian Scout Association.”

“What did you guys do together? Did they speak English?”

“Oh yeah, and way better than my Russian. We did Scout things. Played baseball. Taught a couple guys how to pitch.”

“Baseball.”

“Yes, baseball. I even played in college.”

“Get out of town. You?”

He gave her a mock scowl. “You say that as if you can’t believe I might be good at something other than surgery.”

“I can’t. Although...” She put on a thinking face then brightened. “Youdoknow more movie and television trivia than can possibly be good for a person.”

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