Chapter 1 #3
For a long moment the basin held its breath, the tide climbing in the dark, and Luka thought the man would run, and part of him — the part he'd have to answer for later, on his knees at the cold stone off Ocean Parkway — part of him wanted him to.
Wanted it simple again. Wanted the ghost gone back into the dark so Luka could keep hating a shape instead of a face that said Dato like it hurt.
Raskov looked at the water. Then he looked at Luka.
Then he walked, hurt and unhurried, toward the gate and the blue truck, a dead man going where he was pointed, and Luka stood in the yard a second longer with his brother's name and this stranger's knowledge of his own name both sitting in his chest like stones, and the tide came in over the place where, two years ago, someone had laid Dato out of the water so his brother could bring him home.
He picked up the pallet he'd folded himself onto and set it back on the stack, because he was a man who put things where they went, and then he followed the killer to the truck.
***
The cut wanted stitches. Luka wrapped it in a rag from the door pocket, one-handed, at the wheel, while Raskov sat in the passenger seat with his hands flat on his own thighs where Luka could see them and watched the wet black streets go by like a man watching a country he was leaving.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
The heater ticked. The radio was off. Luka drove the way he did everything, without hurry, hands steady, taking the long way that stayed off the avenues with cameras, and he was aware the whole time of the shape of the man beside him, the wrongness of him, the impossibility of him — the killer, breathing, in Luka's truck, in the passenger seat where Dato used to sit with his boots on the dash and his stupid movies playing on his phone, narrating the plots Luka didn't ask about.
The man's breathing had gone shallow and careful, the way you breathe around a broken thing you don't want to wake.
The side. Whatever had opened him up days ago was pulling now, with the cold and the come-down, and the part of Luka that had spent eighteen years keeping men alive in bad water — the part that knew the exact grey a face went when a body was running out of blood to spend — clocked it and started running the numbers before he could shut it off.
How far to help. How much he'd lost. Whether the rag in the door pocket would do for more than an arm.
He put it down. Hard. He killed Dato. Let him bleed.
The thought was clean and it was true and he held it the way you hold a line in a current, and it held.
Under it, smaller, was the thing he wouldn't look at straight: that he'd already decided, back in the yard, this man wasn't dying tonight.
Not of the cut. Not of anything. Not until Luka had the rest of him.
"He talked about you," Raskov said.
Quiet. To the window. Luka's hands went to stone on the wheel.
"Don't."
"You asked how I know your name." Still to the window, the streetlight sliding over the near-black eyes.
"That's the answer, and it's the only one I'll give you for free.
He talked about you. At the—" The level voice caught, once, on something, and went level again by force.
"He talked about you. That's all. You wanted to know, and now you know, and you should have killed me in the yard, because that's the part you won't be able to live with either. "
Luka drove.
He drove and the streets went by wet and black and empty and his brother's voice was suddenly everywhere in the cab, two years dead and talking, my brother the frogman, my brother who can hold his breath forever, the stupid pride of it, and here was the one man alive who'd heard it last, sitting in the seat with his boots on the floor and his hands flat and visible, waiting to be driven somewhere and made to answer or made to die.
He'd thought, if this ever came, that having the hand this close — breathing Dato's stolen air an arm's length away — would put something in him he couldn't hold, some black flood that would take the wheel and end them both against a piling.
Instead there was only the old cold clarity, the dive-clarity, the narrow bright tunnel a man goes down when a thing has gone past feeling and become only the next necessary move.
He heard him last. That was the fact at the bottom of all of it, heavy as ballast. Whatever the last of Dato had been, whatever his brother had said with his blood going out of him on the cold slip — this man had it.
Had carried it two years. And Luka wanted it back the way you want air at forty feet with the tank gone dry: wanted it enough to keep a killer breathing to get it.
Luka took the turn toward the water. Toward the one place he had that no one knew was his.
"You're right," he said. "About the part I won't be able to live with."
He didn't say which part he meant. He wasn't sure himself. He drove, and the tide came in behind them over the empty yard, and neither of them said anything else until the truck's tires went from asphalt to the gravel of a road that didn't have a name on any map Vadim Sorokin's men would have.