Chapter 9
Reckoning
Luka went into the water.
It was the one thing the finder hadn't planned for, because it was the one thing no sane man does — you don't go over the side of a dock in December in your clothes with a broken arm to chase an outboard you can't outswim.
Except Luka wasn't chasing the boat. He'd spent eighteen years learning that you never chase a boat; you go where the boat has to slow down, and you meet it there.
The creek narrowed at its mouth, choked with the old fish-trap pilings nobody had pulled in forty years, and a man running an outboard through that gap in the half-light had to throttle down to a crawl or tear his lower unit off, and Luka knew that gap the way he knew his own hands, and he went into the black cold with one good arm and let the water do what the water did for him and no one else: it made him weightless, it made him fast, it took his broken body and made it, for ninety seconds, a thing that belonged.
He'd stopped being too late. That was the whole of it, the thing that had turned in him in the doorway watching Pavel walk to the boat — that he'd spent his life surfacing a second after he should have, arriving a doorway too far, choosing the right thing with his body two beats behind his mouth, and that he was not, this once, going to be late for the one that counted.
There was no plan in it a sane man would have signed.
There was only the creek, and the gap he knew, and the certainty that the water would keep faith with him the way it never kept faith with anyone the machine sent into it.
He came up under the pilings as the boat nosed through, exactly as he'd known it would, slow, the finder's attention forward on the channel, Pavel a dark shape cuffed in the bow — and Luka reached up out of the water with his good hand and took hold of the gunwale and pulled.
He didn't try to board. He didn't have the arm for it.
He just put all of his weight, all of the diver's mass the sea had built into him over eighteen years, onto one side of a small boat moving slow through a tight place, and small boats are not built for that, and the gunwale went down and the cold creek came over it, and the finder — who was very good, who did everything right, who came around with the gun already up — made the one mistake a land creature makes on the water, which is to trust his feet, and his feet were standing in a boat that was no longer level.
***
Later Luka would not be able to give anyone the order of the next thirty seconds, because it happened in the medium that was his and not theirs, the cold dark churn where he'd spent his life and where the two Bratva-made men, for all their lethal patience, were only drowning animals.
He got a hand in the finder's coat as the boy went into the water.
He did not drown him. He would think about that a great deal, afterward — that he'd had the boy in the black under the pilings, his own territory, one squeeze of his one good hand from making a Beridze-shaped end of the thing that killed Dato's memory of peace, and that he hadn't; that somewhere in six days a man who'd built himself into a weapon of grief had quietly stopped being willing to be one.
He'd have done it a week ago without a thought — would have called it justice, would have held the boy under and watched the bubbles stop and felt, for about an hour, like he'd paid something down on Dato.
Now he only thought: this one's twenty-two, and somebody made him, and if I drown him I've done the machine's recruiting for it and left the world one more grief to raise the next one on.
The thought was Pavel's, or had become Pavel's and Luka's both, the way things did when you slept six nights against a man's back.
He got the boy by the coat and he ran him up into a piling, hard, the barnacles doing what barnacles do, and he took the gun out of the stunned hand and let the current take the boy coughing and clawing toward the mud bank where he'd live, ruined and freezing and no longer anyone's problem for the length of an hour, and Luka turned in the water to the dark shape gone over the side, the cuffed shape, the one that couldn't swim, already under, already sinking, already doing the thing Pavel Raskov had been most afraid of his whole life.
Luka went down after him.
Found him by feel in the black — you always find them by feel, the water gives you nothing else — got the cuffed wrists, got an arm across the heaving chest, and kicked for the grey.
Pavel fought him. Of course he fought him; a drowning man fights, it's the body, it's not the man, Pavel had said that himself about Dato and here it was, the animal panic, the thing that has no penance in it and no plan, just the raw refusal of the end — and Luka held him through it the way he'd held him on the boat, arms locked, I've got you, I've got you, saying it into the water where it couldn't be heard, and hauled his brother's killer up out of the cold that had swallowed the family's dead for generations, and put him — living, choking, retching creek water onto the rotten planks — up into the air.
Out of the water. The way Pavel had once put Dato.
Luka understood it even as he did it, the awful rhyme of it, and he understood something else with it, something that went through him colder than the creek: that this was the thing Dato had asked for, exactly this, my brother works the water, let him find me, get me up into the air — and that Pavel had honored it for a dead boy two years ago and Luka was honoring it for the living killer now, the two of them passing the same mercy back and forth across a grave, and that maybe this was all any of them had ever been trying to do, the whole doomed family of them: get each other up out of the cold before it closed over their heads.
***
He got them both up onto the fish-house dock, and he lay there with his broken arm screaming and Pavel heaving beside him, and for a moment there was nothing in the world but two wrecked men breathing, which was, Luka was coming to understand, the only victory this life ever actually handed you: two people, still breathing, at the same time, in the same place.
Then Irakli's shadow fell across them both.
He was up. He'd gotten himself up off the gutting-room floor and out onto the dock, and he stood over them with the finder's dropped pipe in his hand — no, Luka saw, not the pipe, the gun, the finder's second gun, the one off the boy's ankle that had washed up in the churn — and for one long freezing second Luka did not know what his cousin was going to do, because Irakli's face was a ruin of two years and ten minutes, and the man he'd sworn to kill was lying disarmed and half-drowned and helpless at his feet, the easiest death in the world, the account right there to close, the thing they'd hunted together for two years lying broken and gasping and gift-wrapped at Irakli's feet.
And Luka, flat on the planks with his arm on fire and no way to reach either of them in time, understood that whatever his cousin did in the next five seconds was going to be the true shape of the family from here on — that Irakli had the same choice in his hands now that Pavel had had on the slip and Luka had had in the black water, the choice the whole rotten world was built to make for you, and that a Beridze was about to answer it out loud.
"Irakli," Luka said. Couldn't get up. Could only say it. "Irakli, don't—"
"He gave himself up." Irakli's voice was strange, flat, a man reading something he couldn't believe off the inside of his own skull.
"I watched him. He had you — he had both of you, he could have run, he could have used you and run, that's what they do, and he — he walked to the boat.
For you. Asking nothing." The gun hung in his hand, not raised, not lowered.
"A finder doesn't do that, Luka. I've spent two years learning what they do.
They don't do that." His eyes came down to Pavel, coughing on the planks, and something broke in his face, something that had been held rigid for two years and longer.
"Is it true. What Luka said Dato told you.
Is it true. Swear it to me. Swear it on him. "
And Pavel — soaked, shaking, retching, at the absolute bottom of everything — lifted his head and looked at Irakli Beridze, and did the thing that Luka finally, fully understood was the truest measure of him.
"No," Pavel said. "I won't swear it."
"Pavel—" Luka started.