Chapter 7 #2
He came across ten feet of open gravel at a dead run with rounds kicking up the stones around his boots, and he threw himself down behind the crate next to Liam and lay there breathing like a bellows.
"You're the best rifle I've ever seen," he said.
"I'm the only rifle you've ever seen."
"That too." Rennick spat blood. The splinter above his eye had opened up and half his face was red with it.
"Listen to me. Listen. They're not going to charge. They can't, not into that, not now. They're going to sit in those trees and shoot at us all day until we run out of whatever you've got, and you are going to run out."
"I know."
"How many?"
Liam looked at him.
"Ten," he said.
Rennick closed his eyes for a second.
"That's not enough."
"No."
"Then we go." Rennick got up on one elbow and pointed down the beach with his chin. "The longboat. She's bow-on and she's loaded and there's ten feet of water past the bar. My men push her off, we go over the side, and we're out of that channel in ninety seconds and out of range in three minutes."
"And Nell's people?"
"Nell's people are lying in the water behind a gravel bar, and Ballard doesn't want them."
Rennick's eyes were hard. "They want me. They always wanted me. The second my boat clears that channel, those six men in the trees will get up and follow, and this beach will be quiet, and every fisherman on it will still be breathing."
Liam stared at him.
"You're drawing them off."
"I'm leaving," Rennick said. "There's a difference and I'll thank you to remember which one it was."
But something in his face said otherwise.
"Get on the boat," Rennick said. "You and the girl and the fat one. Right now."
"What?"
"You've got the code, boy. You've got the code and I've got sixty men and forty guns and a place to keep you, and there is a barge coming north with enough powder to bury that door forever."
Rennick grabbed a fistful of Liam's coat and pulled him close and his voice was raw.
"You want to get to that door alive? Get on my boat. Both of us want the same thing for once in our lives. Get on the boat."
Liam looked past him.
At Chloe, unconscious under Isaiah's arms.
At Nell Rook, chest deep in freezing water behind a gravel bar with her people, with a boy she had just gotten back, with twenty-two lives she had spent eight months keeping alive.
And he made the read.
"No," he said.
Rennick's jaw dropped.
"No?"
"I'm not getting on a boat with a man who takes people." Liam pulled his coat out of Rennick's fist. "But I'll cover you out of that channel. Every round I've got left. And when you're clear, you'll owe me, and I'll come north on my own hull and find you, and we'll talk then."
Rennick stared at him.
And then he laughed, one bark of it, blood on his teeth.
"Minnesota," he said.
"Go."
"You know they'll come back for you."
"Then I'll be gone." Liam brought the rifle up. "GO."
Rennick went.
He came up off the gravel and he ran for the longboat shouting his men into it, and they went, all of them, into the surf and over the gunwales and their oars were in the water before the boat was off the stones.
And Liam Perry fired.
He fired at the tree line, and he fired again, and every time he fired something in those willows got small and got behind something, and the longboat's bow came around and her oars bit and she started to move.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
He was standing now. He had come up onto one knee behind the crate and then all the way up, because he could not see the north end of the trees lying down, and he was standing on an open beach in the gray morning with the wind off the water and Tom Darcy's rifle at his shoulder,
and he was hitting them.
"LIAM!" Isaiah, screaming. "GET DOWN!"
Six.
The longboat cleared the bar.
She came out into the deep channel on the north side, tight against the rock, oars flashing, ten men pulling for their lives, and Liam swung the glass onto the trees one last time and found nothing but empty fog, and he let out his breath.
They were breaking. The men in the willows were breaking, going back up the slope, and it was over, it was actually over, and Liam felt the whole world sway around him.
And Rennick stood up in the stern of his boat.
He stood up in the stern of a boat forty yards out in the channel and he turned back toward the beach and he raised one hand, and it was not a wave. It was a lifting. The way a man raises his hand when he wants your attention.
And he shouted something across the water that Liam never heard.
Because a rifle cracked, once, from somewhere high up in the willows on the rock above the channel, a thin flat crack, a small sound, nothing like the .338, a little sharp report like a stick breaking.
And Rennick's chest opened.
Liam saw it through the glass. He saw all of it and he would see it for the rest of his life.
He saw the coat jump. He saw a fine red mist come out of the man's back and hang in the cold air above the water, a bright pink cloud, held there for one long moment by the fog and the stillness, and then begin, slowly, to drift.
Rennick looked down at himself.
He looked down at his own chest with an expression of mild, patient surprise, and he put one hand over it, and the hand filled.
He sat down in the stern of his boat.
His men were screaming. Two of them dropped their oars and grabbed him, and the boat yawed hard in the channel, and Rennick sat there in the arms of his crew with his mouth working.
He looked up.
Across forty yards of gray water, through the Leupold, through the fog, Rennick found Liam's face.
"I," he said.
The blood came out with it.
"I."
Isaiah was screaming something. Nell was screaming something. Liam heard none of it.
"I tried," Rennick said.
And he died.
It took fifteen seconds. Liam counted them, because he could not stop counting, because he had been counting his whole life.
Rennick's head went back against the shoulder of the man holding him, and his eyes stayed open, looking up at the gray ceiling of the sky, and his boots pushed once against the bottom boards and then did not push again.
The pink mist was still hanging over the water.
It hung there, drifting, thinning, refusing to go, and then a breath of wind came down the channel and took it, and it was gone.
Liam did not move.
He stood on the beach with the rifle at his shoulder, and he swung the glass up to the rock above the channel, up the wet black face of it, up to the top where the willows leaned out over the drop.
And he found the shooter.
A man was standing there in the fog. Not lying, not crouched, not hidden. Standing, upright, at the top of the rock, forty feet above the water, perfectly exposed, with a rifle in his hands.
He was not looking at the boat.
He was looking at the beach.
He was looking through his own scope, directly down the channel, directly across the water, directly into Liam's face, and Liam looked back at him and their crosshairs met.
The man lowered his rifle.
And Liam saw the gun clearly then, saw it in the glass at two hundred yards, saw the shape of the stock and the length of the barrel and the small neat bolt and the thin blued scope on top of it.
A .270.
He knew that rifle.
He had seen it hanging on two pegs on a wall in a cabin that smelled of woodsmoke and pipe tobacco, and he had never seen anyone take it down, and he had never asked who owned it,
because there was only one man in the world it could belong to and that man was two thousand miles away with a walking stick and a bad chest.
Marcus.
The man on the rock raised one hand.
Not a wave.
A lifting.