SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

“Excellent. I want you to meet me in there at seven pm on Friday night. The place will be crowded, but I’ve arranged for a very large table. You’ll find several of your hunting buddies waiting for you there. Like you, they have family members to consider. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” His heart felt like it was going to explode, but he made himself as calm as he could manage.

“Do I have to explain what happens if you’re late? Or if you bring reinforcements with you? I know what you do for a living. I know you’ve been out of country, dealing with a few problems in the Middle East, and I have to be honest here, I’m sorry it’s had to come to this.”

“I won’t be bringing anyone with me.”

“Excellent.” The voice was pleasant enough, but there was a sarcastic tone that grated on his nerves. “We all want this resolved, Captain. One serviceman to another, I hope we can bring about a painless resolution to the problem at hand.”

“What is this all about?”

“Murder, Captain. It’s about the people you and your friends murdered.”

The phone cut off before he could respond.

He’d had to drive most of the last day to get here, but he’d managed it, juiced on more coffee than he ever thought it possible for one man to drink and enough roadside burgers to feed his full battalion.

Now the only problem was getting motivated enough to leave the relative safety of his car. The diner was a brick affair, with chrome around the widows and doors and enough neon to light up a city block in Las Vegas. He could see through the windows, and he knew several of the men sitting at three tables that had been put together. Of course he knew them; they were his buds from all the way back in high school and, in a couple of cases, even earlier.

He saw Mark and Scott and Cullie and George. The only person who wasn’t there yet besides himself was Tony, and Tony hadn’t been with them when everything went down.

So maybe they were just waiting for him. Maybe Tony wasn’t a part of it.

“Let’s just get this done. I can’t sit here all night.” Eric climbed out of his Ford and locked the doors before heading into the diner. He walked slowly, despite his own admonitions. Fear can do that to a person.

* * *

The three tables were joined in a larger block, a chunk of the room that dwarfed everything else. When Eric sat down the total number of people became an even dozen. He didn’t nod or do anything but sit. Cullie was next to him, his eyes blackened and his nose swollen to the point where he barely looked like himself.

The strangers at the table were, as a whole, quiet, giving off a calm that was unsettling under the circumstances.

One of the strangers, a large man who had his longish hair pulled back into an efficient ponytail, tossed a menu toward Eric. Eric took it.

“Order something to eat. You’ll need your strength.” Eric recognized the voice from the phone.

“Do you want to tell me what the hell is going in here?” He’d been as calm as he could, but the time for patiently waiting was done with.

The man nodded and gestured for the waitress. The woman wore her nametag and blouse over jeans that looked almost painted on, but she wasn’t even remotely attractive to Eric. She could have been dancing around naked and she wouldn’t have even caught his eye for more than a second.

“He’ll have a steak dinner, make it rare, and a large coffee.” The woman nodded and turned away. “You looked awfully cold out there, Captain.”

The man cleared his throat. “Now then, you’re all here for a reason. You’re here to deal with a matter of bloodshed and how it will be paid for.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” It was Scott that spoke up, confused. He was, as always, the most naïve among them.

The leader of the group around them shook his head and stared at Scott. Scott, the go-getter salesman, dressed in his jeans and his thick preppy sweater and his perfect hair, facing off against a man who looked like he would probably be at home leading a Viking raid on another village. Oh to be sure the clothes were modern, but the man still looked like a savage trying to hide among civilized people.

There was something about all of the strangers that felt the same way. It wasn’t the style of clothing they wore — which spoke more of rural common sense than fashion — it wasn’t that they were unclean or bore a thousand tattoos, but there was something about them, about the way that they carried themselves that drew the soldier’s eye in Eric. They were, for lack of a better way to put it, seasoned warriors. He had no doubt in his mind they had fought together before and maybe even killed together.

“Not this last November, gentlemen, but the year before that, you were out hunting together, do you remember that?”

Eric and the others nodded their assent to the question.

“While you were hunting, you did what almost everyone does. You camped out, you had a good time, and you maybe drank a few too many beers. Nothing out of the ordinary there.” The man took his time and fixed each and every one of them with his stare.