Chapter 3
Ballast
"Don't slow down." Raskov hadn't moved, hadn't turned his head, but his voice had changed — flattened, gone operational.
"Two back. Silver something, four-door. He picked us up at the light on Emmons and he's matched every turn since.
Keep your hands where they are. Take the next right like you mean it and don't look at him. "
Luka took the next right like he meant it.
He didn't ask how the man knew. He'd spent an hour watching Raskov count exits he didn't intend to use, and it was clear enough by now that the counting never stopped, that some part of the man ran a threat board every waking second the way Luka's own body ran a decompression clock without being asked.
He wanted to distrust it. He'd have given a great deal to distrust it.
But the silver four-door made the right behind them a beat too smooth, casual in the exact way a thing is casual when it's working hard at it, and Luka's gut — the old animal that kept him alive at forty feet — agreed with the killer in the passenger seat.
"How long," Luka said.
"Since Emmons. So he's not the finder himself; the finder wouldn't let you make him.
This is someone Irakli's people would call a face — local, cheap, told to sit on the yard and follow whatever came off it.
" A pause, the man's dark eyes tracking the mirror on his side without seeming to.
"Which means the finder has the yard now, and the plate, and he's paying faces to widen the net while he does the careful part.
We have maybe an hour before that face makes a call that turns into three cars.
" The voice stayed level, almost bored, and only a man who'd spent the night learning it would have caught the thread of iron under it.
"You need to lose him in the next four minutes and then you need to lose your truck. "
The truck. Luka's hands went tight on the wheel.
It was Dato's seat the man was sitting in.
It was the truck he'd hauled his brother's whole life around in, the couch and the bad futon and the boxes of stupid DVDs, the truck that still had a scorch on the dash from the summer Dato left a lighter in the sun, and losing it felt, absurdly, like another burial.
Luka drove and did the arithmetic and hated that the arithmetic came out the way the killer said it would.
"Where," Luka said.
"Your country, not mine." Raskov looked at him then, and there was something in it that might, on a face that remembered how, have been the ghost of respect. "You said nobody watches the water. So go to the water. I can't hunt you a boat and I can't hide one. You can."
***
He lost the silver car in the tangle under the Belt, where the service roads knotted up and a man who knew them could put three blind turns between himself and a tail inside a quarter mile, and then he put the truck in the long-term lot behind a body shop that owed him a favor and would forget it had ever been there, and he took the plate off with a driver from the door pocket and put it in his jacket, and he stood for one second with his hand flat on the cold hood the way he'd stood with his hand flat on the granite, and then he stopped doing that, because the killer was watching and there were some things Luka would not do in front of him.
He left the keys in it. That was the part that caught him, walking away — that he was leaving Dato's truck unlocked in a lot behind a body shop for a favor-owed to make disappear, and would never see it again, and it was one more thing those men had taken from him without once touching it, at a remove, the way they took everything.
He made himself not look back. He was getting good at not looking back at things. He'd had the practice.
They went the last mile on foot, through the reeds, down to the little stone quay at the mouth of the back channel where Luka kept the skiff chained under a tarp with the outboard tilted up out of the salt.
The tide was making. The marsh smelled the way it always smelled, cold mud and diesel and the green rot of the reeds, and the smell put something back in Luka's chest that had been missing since the yard — not peace, he was past peace, but the old certainty of his own competence, the knowledge that here, at least, in the wet cold edge of things, he knew where every hazard was.
Raskov got into the skiff badly.
It was the first thing Luka had seen the man do badly.
He came down off the quay stiff with the wound and put his weight wrong on the gunwale and the skiff shied under him the way small boats do, and for a half-second the deadly, economical creature who'd counted a tail off a light at forty feet was just a hurt man on unfamiliar water, arms out, graceless, mortal.
Luka got a fist in the back of his jacket and set him down on the center thwart without thinking about it, the way he'd have steadied any greenhand, and Raskov sat there breathing carefully around his stitches and looked at the black water sliding past the hull like it was something that might reach up.
"You can't swim," Luka said. It wasn't a question. He'd read it off the man in a second — the stillness gone brittle, the hands too careful on the wood.
"Not well. Not in this." A muscle worked in the man's throat. "It's a bad way to die. Slow. I've—" He stopped. Filed it, the way he filed everything. "It's a bad way."
You've watched men go that way, Luka finished, silently, and didn't say it, because he knew exactly which men, and knew one of them had almost gone into this same cold, and only hadn't because the man in front of him had carried a body up out of a yard and laid it in the air.
The family put people in the water. Luka had learned that in his two years of learning terrible things — that the harbor and the bay and the cold green deep he'd worked his whole life doubled as a graveyard for the people those men erased.
When he went down on a job now, he sometimes wondered whose disappeared son he was moving through.
The water gave nothing back. It kept its dead the way it had kept his father.
And here was a man afraid of it who had, one time, refused to feed it — refused to give it Dato.
Luka told himself that a monster refusing once to be a monster was still a monster.
The telling didn't take. Luka pushed the skiff off the quay and swung the outboard down and pulled it to life on the second haul, and took them out into the channel, into his country, with his brother's killer sitting rigid and afraid of the water in the bow.
He should have felt something like power.
He'd hunted this man for two years and here the man was, wounded and out of his element and dependent on Luka's hands for everything, for the boat and the stitches and the next breath.
Instead Luka found he was throttling back so the wake wouldn't slap over the low gunwale and soak a man who couldn't swim, and he was angry about it, and the anger had no purchase on anything, and the marsh took them in among the reeds where no car could go and no face could follow, and the city noise fell away behind them until there was only the outboard and the water and the two of them.
***
The boat was an old thirty-foot work-hull Luka had bought half-sunk and brought back over three winters, moored in a dead-end creek off the back channel where the chart just said MARSH and meant it.
Cramped cabin, a diesel heater, a berth he'd built himself, tools, a locker of tinned food and water for exactly this — for the version of his life where he needed to not exist for a while.
He'd fitted her out for grief, if he was honest. A place to go and be no one.
He'd never once thought he'd bring anyone here, least of all this.
The irony wasn't lost on him — that the one place he'd built to be no one in was the place he'd hidden a man whose whole trade was making people into no one, whose only future, if he had one, was a set of papers with a stranger's name over a dead man's.
Two of them, ticking over on a mooring in a creek the charts couldn't be bothered to name, both wanting out of their own existence by different doors.
If Dato were here he'd have made something of that.
Some joke Luka wouldn't have laughed at and would have remembered for a week.
He got the heater going and the cabin came up to something survivable, and he cut the stitches' worth of dried blood off his own forearm and rewrapped it, and he opened two tins and put one in front of Raskov without a word, and they ate in the small yellow light with the hull ticking and the tide turning the boat slow on her mooring, and for a long time neither of them said anything, and the not-saying was almost bearable.
Luka watched him eat. The man ate the way he did everything — economically, without pleasure, cleaning the tin because wasting food was a thing his body simply wouldn't do — and Luka thought about how you get made into a person like that, who counts exits and doesn't waste a scrap and offers his own throat like it's only manners.
Then he made himself stop, because thinking about how Raskov got made was a current that pulled toward sympathy, and Luka wasn't ready to be in that water yet.
"Ask," Raskov said finally, into the quiet. "You've been holding it since the shop. Ask, and I'll tell you what I can, and we'll both hate it."
Luka set his tin down.
He'd rehearsed a hundred versions of this in two years, standing at the stone. In none of them had it happened in the yellow light of his own hidden boat with the killer eating tinned fish across a plank table. In none of them had he been so tired.