Page 122 of Gilded Saint

“I’d ask you how that happened, but…is she at least legal?” I blink. “Over eighteen?” he clarifies.

“Yes, you fuck,” I say, still grinning.

“Can I offer her a beer without getting a ticket for giving alcohol to the underaged?”

“She’s over twenty-one,” I say, suppressing a laugh. “And I love her. She’s the best thing that’s happened to me. She’s probably the reason I finally got off that assignment. So watch it.” The warning is coated with a grin, but Knox reads me. He always has.

He snaps the tops off the glass beer bottles using an opener screwed to the wall, and the tops fall neatly into the garbage can below. He hands me a beer and says, “Let’s sit outside.”

“You trust your neighbors?” I ask as we step out into the unseasonably warm fall evening.

His back yard is bigger than I would’ve expected. He’s got a brick patio with chairs around a firepit and there’s a deck that extends from the main floor. A hammock hangs on two posts from the overhead deck. And from there, the wooded area slopes downward quickly.

“Yep,” he says as he takes one of the Adirondack chairs and sits, gesturing for me to take another one. “If it gets too buggy, we’ll go inside. The neighbor to the side is out of town this week. Newly divorced, and he travels a lot. Neighbors to the other side are in their eighties and never come down into the back yard. Even if they did, they couldn’t hear us.”

A squirrel scampers through the leaves, pausing to observe us, then scurries deeper into the woods.

“This is nice back here,” I say. “Feels like your house backs up to the Appalachian Trail.”

“No, but it’s close and accessible,” he says. “House sits on two acres. It’s just a deep lot. They won’t develop past here because of the incline.”

“Nice. It’s like bordering a park.”

He chugs his beer and sets it on the rim of the fire table. “What can you tell me?”

I look him directly in the eye. “First, I hate it went down the way it did. I hate what you must’ve gone through. I won’t blame you if you can’t forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive,” he says. That’s, of course, bullshit, and we both know it. With another sigh, he leans back and rests his elbows on the chair’s arms. “Wasn’t your call. I’m a big boy. I get that. And I’m also family now. Officially. I’ll stand by you until the day I die. But, while the girls aren’t here, what can you tell me? Foremost, is whatever operation you were on over?”

“My role is,” I answer one hundred percent truthfully. “I’ll give you the official spiel when we’re all together, so I only have to repeat it once.”

“How’d you convince them to let you come home?”

“That was always the deal. It was supposed to be a short gig.”

“Extended to five years. Is that about right?”

“Yep.”

“Let me guess. You had to save the world?”

“I did some good,” I say, thinking more of the funds I diverted to charities and people in need I met along the way from time to time. When you live among thieves, and especially when you don’t want those thieves to trust each other too much, a little theft here and there is good for humankind.

He puts his hand to his mouth thoughtfully. “You still with the Navy?”

“No. We stopped by Coronado. Paperwork’s being processed. Medical discharge. No fanfare.” That’s another way of saying on the down-low.

“What’re your plans?”

“I’m on extended leave at the moment.”

“From the CIA?”

“From everything.”

He narrows his eyes. “Did you work for Arrow?”

“Officially, the operation never happened. A shell company paid me.”

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