I speak before Finn can answer. “Modular Lightweight Load-Carrying Equipment. Army-speak for backpack.” Ethan just looks at me. “What?” I say. “I read it in a military supply catalog.” I turn to Finn. “How’d you know he stole a brick?”

“Because I knew he’d do one of two things when I confronted him,” Finn says. “He’d either be scared and do what I said, or he’d be scared at first and later get mad and think he deserved some of that money himself. I bet that Perkins would do the second thing. I was right.”

“What did you do?”

“I beat him to death with a tire iron.”

No one says anything. Finn looks calmly at me. I don’t see either guilt or pride in his face, just a blank look. I don’t know if this is worse.

“A tire iron,” I say.

“We were in a garage in the Green Zone at the time. I’d taken the brick out of his Molly and hid it in the garage while I was replacing batteries in Humvees. Perkins came storming in and got in my face. He knew I’d taken the money. I thought he wouldn’t find out until later, when I could talk to him one-on-one about it. Instead he started shouting about the money. I punched him in the mouth just to shut him up—his left arm was all bandaged up and in a sling, so I felt bad about it. But Perkins was a big dude and he went nuts after I hit him. Ran at me and grabbed me with his right hand and plowed me into a workbench, knocked the wind out of me. Then he just started punching and kicking. He completely lost it, shouting and cussing at me. I grabbed the nearest thing I could find, which was a tire iron. Laid him out with one swing, pow, over his left eye. And I kept swinging. A pair of grunts pulled me off of him, but by that time I’d opened his head up like a rotten pumpkin.

“They put me in Leavenworth for twenty years on a manslaughter charge. Probably would have been less except for Perkins’s arm being in a sling. They thought we fought over that brick, that I beat a crippled man to death over a hundred grand. They assumed one of us took the brick from the bag we were taking to Ahmed. I didn’t say a word about the rest of the cash, not the entire time I sat in a cell. Just kept thinking about the money sitting in that pipe. I got out six years early for good behavior, even though I got a dishonorable discharge. I went looking for your dad. Found out what happened to him. The money, of course, was gone. I even went back to Iraq to be sure.”