Chapter 8
Liam fired.
He did not decide to. There was no cold clear thing, no read, no working of the problem, no Tom Darcy voice saying the shot is certain and the need is real.
There was a hand raised on a rock at two hundred yards and there was a rifle already at his shoulder and his finger did the rest.
The Winchester roared.
Five.
And the fog closed over the top of the rock, and when it opened again, four seconds later, there was nothing standing there at all.
"Liam." Isaiah, at his elbow, hauling on his sleeve. "Liam, they're gone, they're breaking, the trees are empty, Liam—"
"Did I hit him."
"What?"
"Did I hit him?"
"I don't know! I don't know, I couldn't see, there's nothing up there, Liam, put the gun down—"
Liam did not put the gun down.
He stood on that beach with the rifle in his shoulder and the fog moving and Rennick's longboat drifting sideways in the channel with a dead man in the stern, and he searched the top of that rock through Tom Darcy's glass for eleven minutes.
He found nothing.
No body. No blood. No fallen rifle lying in the wet grass at the edge of the drop.
Nothing at all.
The Ballard men did not come back.
That was the thing that Liam kept turning over and could not make sit right. Six shooters in the trees, and he had killed two of them, and the other four had broken and gone back up the slope and into the fog, and they did not return.
They had come for Rennick.
They had gotten Rennick.
And they had left twenty-two fishermen and three strangers standing on a beach with the tide coming in, and had simply gone.
"They're professionals," Nell said.
She was sitting on a stone with a blanket around her shoulders and her hair plastered to her skull and her lips blue, because she had been chest deep in February water for a quarter of an hour and she was not a young woman anymore.
"They came for one man," she said. "They got him. Everything else on this beach was somebody else's problem." She looked out at the drifting longboat. "That's not mercy. That's discipline. And it's a great deal more frightening."
Liam said nothing.
He was sitting in the gravel with the Winchester across his knees and the box of cartridges open on the stones beside him, and he was counting.
He had counted three times.
"Five," Isaiah said quietly.
"I know."
"You had fifteen this morning."
"I know how many I had, Isaiah."
"You fired ten rounds in four minutes." Isaiah's voice was not accusing. It was something much worse. It was gentle. "Liam. In four months you fired twelve. This morning you fired ten."
Liam closed the box.
He shut the lid on five brass cartridges and he sat there with both hands flat on top of it, and after a moment he said, very quietly, "Nine of those saved this beach."
"Yes."
"Nine of them were the shot certain and the need real."
"Yes."
"And one of them," Liam said, "was a man raising his hand in the fog, and I put a round at him because I was frightened."
Nobody said anything.
Nell Rook watched him from her stone with an expression he could not read.
"Tom told me," Liam said. "The day he gave it to me. He said you do not fire this rifle to scare something off, and you do not fire it in anger, and you do not fire it to prove a point.
He said twenty-seven times in your whole life you get to reach out and take something out of this world and that's a sacred number and you treat it like one."
He put the box in his pack.
"And I've got five," he said. "And one of them is gone forever because a man on a rock lifted his hand."
The tide brought the longboat back.
It came drifting in over the bar an hour later, turning slow, oars trailing in the water, and Nell's people waded out and caught her and walked her up onto the gravel.
The Sawtooth crew had gone.
Every one of them. Eight surviving men had put Rennick's body in the bottom of the boat, and then, at some point out there in the fog and the panic, they had gone over the side and swum for the north shore and left him.
Liam stood and looked down into the boat.
Rennick lay in the bilge water with his eyes open and his hand still curled over the hole in his chest, and the water in the bottom of the boat was pink, and his coat had come open, and Liam could see the exit wound in the wood of the stern seat behind where he had been sitting.
A single hole. Neat. Clean. Small.
He put his finger in it.
"Two seventy," he said.
"You keep saying that." Nell was beside him. "Say it so I understand it."
"It's a cartridge." Liam took his finger out of the hole.
"It's a deer rifle. It's what a man carries when he's going to shoot something at three hundred yards and doesn't need to knock down a bear."
He looked up at the rock. "It's an old man's gun, Nell. It's a careful gun. It's a gun for a man who only ever intends to fire once."
"And you know somebody who has one."
Liam did not answer.
"You went white when you saw it," Nell said. "You went white and you fired at a man standing in the open who was not shooting at you. And you've been holding your face still for an hour, which I've noticed is the thing you do instead of screaming."
Liam looked at her.
"There was a rifle on the wall in Tom Darcy's cabin," he said.
"Above his bed. Two pegs. He gave me the Winchester off those pegs and I never once asked what else he owned, because I was twenty-two years old and I had just been handed the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen and I did not think to look around the room."
"And?"
"And there was a second rifle," Liam said. "There was always a second rifle. I've been sitting here for an hour trying to see it in my head and I can't, Nell, I can't see it, because I never looked at it. It was just a shape on the wall. But it was there."
"So?"
"So there is a man on this coast," Liam said, "shooting a rifle I think I've seen before, in a place where a thing in the trees wears the faces of my dead."
Nell Rook was quiet a long moment.
"Boy," she said. "That's two things, and you're trying to make them one thing, and I've watched people do that in these willows for eight months and it is the exact road that ends with the door open."
Liam turned on her.
"He saved us," he said.
"What?"
"The shooter. On the rock." Liam's voice was rising and he could not stop it. "Nell, listen. The Ballard men were in the trees and they were pinning us down and they had six guns and they were winning. And then Rennick dropped, and they left."
Nell's face changed.
"They left because they got what they came for," she said.
"Did they?" Liam pointed up at the rock.
"Because that shot did not come from the tree line. It came from a hundred and eighty degrees the other way. That shot came from the rock above the channel, out on the point, on the far side of the water from every single Ballard man on this beach. Nobody in those trees fired it."
Nell went very still.
"They didn't kill him," Liam said. "Somebody else did. And whoever it was killed the man that the Ballard crew came here to kill, and the Ballard crew walked away, because their job was done and it cost them nothing and they never knew they hadn't done it."
"That's—"
"It's a third party," Liam said. "There's somebody else on this coast, Nell, and he was on that rock this morning, and he was looking at me."
He picked up the rifle.
"And he had a scope," he said. "And he found my face at two hundred yards through fog before I found his. Which means he was hunting me, and I was not hunting him, and that has never once happened to me in my life."
They buried Rennick on the beach.
It was not a decision anybody argued about. Nell simply looked into the boat, and looked at the hole in his chest, and looked at the boy standing at her shoulder in a coat two sizes too big, and she said, "Get the shovels."
Petyr stared at her.
"He took Cully."
"Yes."
"He broke Bern's arm."
"Yes." Nell handed him a shovel. "And he brought the boy back, and he stood between my people and a rifle line, and he died in a channel two hundred yards from a door he was never going to open. And I have buried nine of my own out there in those trees with no bodies to put in the ground,
and I am not going to leave a man to rot on my beach because he was hard."
She looked around at all of them.
"That's the thing that's been eating us," she said. "That's the real haunting. Not the trees. It's that we've been so afraid, for so long, that we've stopped doing the things that make us worth saving." She pushed the shovel into Petyr's hands. "So dig. And do it properly."
They dug.
It took four hours in the frozen gravel and Liam dug with them, and Isaiah dug, and Cully dug, and when it was done they put Rennick in the ground above the tide line with his coat buttoned and his hands folded.
Quentin Oldman would have said words.
Liam thought about that as he stood there with the wind off the water.
He thought about a thin old priest standing up alone at a fire against a woman with a carved cold face, and he wondered whether Quentin was alive, and whether anyone in Minnesota was alive, and whether the fires on the west shore of that lake had all gone cold.
"I don't know how to do this part," Nell said.
Liam stepped forward.
"He said he tried," he said.
He looked down at the raw gravel.
"That's all I've got. I met him twice and he took a boy off this beach and he gave him back, and the last thing he said in this world was I tried, and he said it to me, and I didn't earn it." Liam's throat was thick. "But he said it. So somebody ought to say it back."
He crouched and put his hand flat on the cold stones.
"You tried," he said.
And then he stood up and walked away, because the light was going, and the light going meant something now.
They did not go back to the blockhouse.
That was Nell's call, and it was made fast, and Liam did not argue with her, because he had seen her face when she made it.