When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash

Author:Wiley Cash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN WINSTON PULLED up to the near-empty arrivals area at the Wilmington airport, he didn’t even have a chance to put the cruiser in park before a man stepped off the curb, opened the passenger door, and leaned inside.

“Hey,” the man said, extending his hand across the seat toward Winston. “Agent Tom Groom. Your pilot.”

Winston reached out and shook the man’s hand. The man wore a navy blue polo shirt tucked into khaki pants. He wore the standard-issue SIG holstered at his side, and he had the same standard-issue bearing of the other agents Winston had met over time, the same rigidity, the same distance and withdrawn air about him.

“Nice to meet you, Agent Groom. I’m Sheriff Winston Barnes,” he said. “I hope you didn’t wait too long.”

“Not at all,” Groom said. He lifted up an army-green duffel bag so that Winston could see it. “Mind if I toss this in the back?”

“Go ahead,” Winston said.

Groom opened the back door and set the bag on the floorboard, and then he slid onto the passenger’s seat and closed the door. He was medium height with a slender build and a full head of thick auburn hair. Something about him seemed vaguely familiar to Winston, and he considered that Groom could easily pass for one of the Kennedy brothers if not for his accent, which Winston was already trying to place.

“I just deplaned,” Groom said. He raked his fingers through his hair in an attempt to get it off his forehead, just like Winston remembered Jack Kennedy doing in the old newsreels. “Perfect timing.”

“Good,” Winston said. He pulled away from the curb. “We’ve got about an hour drive down to Oak Island.”

Tom Groom told Winston he was forty-three years old, was born outside Ames, Iowa, and joined the air force at eighteen just in time to be sent to Vietnam. During the war, he would eventually fly the military version of the same aircraft that now sat sideways on the runway at the airport in Brunswick County. “It was a C-47,” Groom said, “outfitted with mini guns. Flew ground support, dug them out when the Viet Cong came in.” Groom said that after the war, he went to college back in Iowa, and when that was over, the FBI came calling.

Winston felt Groom turn and look at him as if he were sizing him up, taking the measure of him in some way.

“Did you serve?” Groom finally asked.

“Yeah,” Winston said. “Navy in Korea.”

“I figured. You can always spot a veteran.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“I bet it doesn’t seem like it,” Groom said. “Vietnam won’t ever seem like a long time ago to me.”

“It sticks with you,” Winston said, but Winston didn’t want to talk about the past, his or Groom’s. He didn’t want to talk about war any more than anyone else who’d ever been through it.

“Are you the FBI’s aircraft specialist?” Winston asked, only half-joking.

“It seems like it sometimes,” Groom said. “Once you find your niche, it’s hard to get out of it.

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