“There are a lot of narcos up north,” Vern said. “Mostly Colombians. They set up drug labs in the jungle, then move the product across the Brazilian border. Brazil is the largest consumer of coke behind the US, and there’s a much smaller chance of seizure than trying to move it up through Mexico.”

I thought back to what Paul Garret said about Vern and his involvement in the drug trade. I wondered if he was still connected.

“But they’re usually small groups,” Vern said. “Four, five guys. We’ll be able to handle them. Trust me.”

“And by handle, you mean?”

“Put a bullet through each of their skulls.”

“Good to know we’re on the same page.”

He nodded.

We had another hour and a half of flight time—plenty of time to go over the mission details—so I switched subjects. “Where did you meet Roger Garret?”

“Vietnam.”

I’d put Vern in his late fifties, but to have fought in Vietnam, he had to be in his midsixties. “How old are you?”

“Sixty-five. Enlisted in the Marines at nineteen.”

“Where were you living?”

“Carson City, not too far from Reno. I didn’t have much going for me. Working a construction job. Drinking most nights. Making bad decisions. I needed structure.”

When I was nineteen, I had flunked out of the University of Washington and was taking classes at the local community college and, much like Vern, making plenty of my own bad decisions. Two years later, searching for structure myself, I enrolled in the police academy.

“I can relate to that,” I said.

“A year later, and I’m up to my ass in snakes and spiders and black palm. Plus, I have to worry about Charlie jumping out of a hole in the ground and blowing my brains to kingdom come.”

“That sounds terrible.”

He laughed. “Yeah, it was.”

“Was Garret in your platoon?”

“Sure was. He was a riot, funnier than hell, but you could tell he was cut from a different cloth than the rest of us.”

“How so?”

“It was a chess game to him, and he was better at it than anybody else. War, I mean. He was just a grunt like the rest of us, but other lieutenants would run their battle plans through him.” He paused, then said, “He was the one who busted me.”

“Busted you? For what?”

“Hash.”

“Smoking it or smuggling it?”

“The latter.”

I waited for him to expand.

“Routine patrol,” he said. “Three of us stumbled on this hash operation. It’d been firebombed. Everybody was dead, but a lot of the hash survived. Me and another one of the guys were bugging out soon, so we loaded up. A week later, getting on the transport, Garret was on the seat next to me. All our duffels looked the same, and Garret accidentally opened mine. Saw the hash. I can still see the look of disappointment on his face.”