Chapter 18
Liam had the Winchester up before he thought.
Four rounds.
He put the Leupold on the bow of that longboat and found the man's face, and he found it fast, and his finger was on the trigger before he had made one single decision.
The man was not aiming.
His rifle was across his chest, held in both hands, muzzle down, and he was standing in the bow of a moving boat with eight men rowing under him and he was looking straight into Liam's scope.
He knew he was being looked at.
"Cully," Liam said. "Can we outrun him?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"There's no wind, Liam." The boy's voice was flat and scared. "Look at the water. It's glass. We've got two knots of drift and they've got eight men on oars, and they'll be alongside in six minutes."
"Then get everyone down."
"There's twenty-six of us on five boats—"
"Then get them down."
Liam lay on the cabin roof and waited.
Four rounds. Eight men at the oars and one in the bow. He could kill four of them. He could kill four of them in about ten seconds and then he would have a rifle that was a very expensive club, and there would be five men left and they would board him.
"Liam." James Wilford had come up beside him. "How many can you take?"
"Four."
"And then?"
"And then it's the Beretta and the Desert Eagle and a fifteen-year-old with a shotgun," Liam said. "And they take us."
"Then don't shoot," James said.
Liam's jaw locked.
"Pastor—"
"He hasn't fired." James's voice was perfectly calm. "Son, he had you in his sights at four hundred yards a week ago and he didn't fire, and he's got you at two hundred now and he isn't firing, and he is standing up in the open where you can kill him."
Liam did not move.
"He's showing you he isn't going to shoot," James said. "That's what standing up is. It's the only language there is out here and he's speaking it as loudly as he can."
Liam looked through the glass.
The man stood in the bow.
He was Liam's age, or close to it. That was the first thing, and it went through Liam like cold water, because he had been carrying a picture in his head for a week and the picture was wrong.
Twenty-five, maybe. Lean and dark and unshaven.
A gray wool coat. And a rifle held muzzle-down across his chest in a way that Liam recognized, because he had seen an eighty-eight-year-old man hold a rifle exactly that way for two years.
"He's young," Liam said.
"What?"
"He's my age."
Liam lowered the rifle.
"Cully," he said. "Heave to."
"What?"
"Take the way off her. Let him come alongside."
"Liam, that's eight armed—"
"Do it."
The longboat came in slow.
They shipped oars at thirty feet and drifted the last of it, and nobody in that boat raised a weapon, and Liam stood in the cockpit of a stolen sailboat with the Winchester across his chest and watched them come.
The young man in the bow put his rifle down on the thwart.
He did it deliberately, where everyone could see, and then he straightened up and put his hands on the gunwale and looked across ten feet of flat gray water at Liam Perry.
And he said, "Is that a Model 70?"
Liam did not answer.
"Winchester Model 70," the young man said. ".338 Win Mag, with a Leupold on it, and the stock's worn light on the fore-end where somebody's carried it a lot of miles." His voice was very careful and very tight. "I've been watching it through my glass for eight days."
"So?"
"So I need you to tell me where you got it."
Liam's mouth went dry.
"An old man gave it to me," he said.
The young man's hands went white on the gunwale.
"Say his name," he said.
"You say it first," Liam said.
The two of them stood there on the flat water in the dawn, ten feet apart, and neither of them said anything, and Liam could hear his own heart.
"Darcy," the young man said. "Thomas Darcy. Eighty-eight years old. Guided in Alaska thirty-one years and came south when his wife got sick and never went back."
Liam sat down on the cabin roof.
He sat down because his legs stopped working, and he did not care who saw it.
"Who are you," he said.
"My name's Aaron Darcy," the young man said. "He was my grandfather."
They came aboard.
Two of them. Aaron and one other, and they left their rifles in the longboat, and Liam did not put his down and nobody asked him to.
Aaron Darcy stood in the cockpit of that sailboat and looked at the rifle in Liam's hands and could not stop looking at it.
"May I," he said.
Liam did not move.
"I'm not asking for it," Aaron said quickly. "I don't want it. I'm not, that's not what this is." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I just haven't seen it in ten years and I would like to put my hand on it."
Liam held it out.
Aaron Darcy took the rifle from him and turned it over and ran his thumb along the worn place on the fore-end, and his face came apart.
"He kept it," he said.
"He kept everything."
"He used to let me carry it," Aaron said.
"When I was nine. He'd take me out and he'd let me carry it back to the truck, unloaded, and he'd walk behind me the whole way telling me everything I was doing wrong."
He laughed, wetly. "I dropped it once. In a creek. He didn't say a word to me for two hours."
He handed it back.
Liam took it.
"He gave it to me in December," Liam said.
"In a camp in Minnesota. Two thousand miles east. He took it down off two pegs over his bed and he laid it on the mattress and he said it was mine, in front of witnesses, because he was eighty-eight and he wasn't going to leave it lying around for the vultures."
Aaron closed his eyes.
"Twenty-seven rounds," he said.
Liam stopped breathing.
"He'd have told you about the rounds," Aaron said. "He told everybody about the rounds. Twenty-seven and there's no more and every one of them's sacred and if you fire one to scare something off he'll come back from the dead and skin you."
"I've got four," Liam said.
Aaron opened his eyes.
"Four," he said.
"Four."
"In four months."
"Twenty-three shots in four months," Liam said, "and I can tell you what every single one of them was for, and I have thought about the one I wasted every day since I wasted it, and it was at you."
Aaron Darcy looked at him for a long moment.
"On the rock," he said.
"On the rock."
"You missed."
"I know I missed."
"I heard it go past," Aaron said. "About two feet over my head. I sat down in the grass and I put my hands on my face and I laughed until I threw up, because I'd just been shot at by a man carrying my grandfather's rifle and I could not think of one single thing to do about it."
Liam sat down.
Aaron sat down across from him.
And for a while neither of them said anything at all, and the sailboat rocked on the flat gray water, and twenty-six people watched from five boats and did not make a sound.
"Tell me about Rennick," Liam said.
Aaron's face closed.
"He had it coming."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's what you're getting."
"He was dying in a boat forty yards from me," Liam said. "And he looked at me, and he said I tried, and I buried him above the tide line and I have not been able to put him down since."
Aaron looked at the water.
"He took my sister," he said.
Liam went very still.
"Four years ago there wasn't any of this," Aaron said. "There was a town and a school and my dad ran a hardware store and my grandfather lived with us because he was eighty-four and he'd been alone for six years." His hands were flat on his knees. "And then the sky went green."
"And Rennick came."
"Not then. Later. Second summer." Aaron's voice was completely flat. "He came up the road with eleven men and he took the seed corn and he took two horses and he took my sister, because she was nineteen and she could cook and he said she'd be fed, and he said it like he was doing us a kindness."
He looked up.
"And my grandfather," he said, "who was eighty-six years old and could not walk a mile without sitting down, took the .270 off the wall and went after them on foot."
Liam's chest closed.
"Did he get her back?"
"No," Aaron said. "He got as far as the county line and his heart went and he sat down against a fence post and my father found him there the next morning, alive, and carried him home on his back."
"And your sister?"
"Died in the winter," Aaron said. "Somebody came out of Rennick's camp a year later and told us. Fever. She was buried up there somewhere and nobody knows where, and I have never once been able to make my grandfather stop apologizing for it."
Liam looked at the deck.
"So you took the .270," he said.
"He gave me the .270." Aaron's jaw worked. "Four years ago. Off the same two pegs, I expect. He put it in my hands and he said, this is not for hunting anymore, and he told me the same thing he must have told you. Make them count."
"And you counted Rennick."
"I have been counting Rennick for two years," Aaron Darcy said, "and it took me eight months to find him and eleven days to follow him and one round to finish it, and I would do it again tomorrow, and I have not slept properly since."
The water lapped at the hull.
"He gave the boy back," Liam said.
"I know."
"He stood between twenty-two people and a rifle line and he got shot doing it."
"I know," Aaron said, and it came out of him raw.
"I was watching through the glass. I watched him do it. I watched him stand up in that boat and turn around, and I have been trying for eight days to work out whether I killed a man who was about to become something else, and I cannot get it out of my head and I don't think I ever will."
He wiped his face.
"But my sister's still dead," he said.
Nobody spoke.
And then James Wilford said, quietly, from the rail:
"Both things are true."
Aaron looked up at him.
"They're both true," James said. "That's the whole horror of it, son, and there is no arrangement of words that will make one of them cancel the other. He took your sister. And he tried, at the end, and he died trying,
and both of those are facts and you will carry them both for the rest of your life."
"That's not comfort," Aaron said.
"No," James agreed. "It isn't."
"Then what good are you?"
James Wilford smiled, and it was a terrible smile, and there was nothing in it but exhaustion.
"None whatsoever," he said. "I have buried forty-two people in nine days and I have not been able to save one of them, and a woman I knew for eleven hours died pushing me out of the way of a bullet I had walked into on purpose."
He looked at Aaron.
"But I sat with Rennick's killer's grandfather's rifle in a boat this morning," he said, "and I am going to sit here as long as you want to talk, and I will not tell you that you did the right thing, and I will not tell you that you didn't. And that is all I have got."
Aaron Darcy stared at him.
And then, slowly, he began to cry.
"Why did you follow us," Liam said.
They had given him an hour. It was becoming a thing they did.
Aaron sat in the cockpit with a bowl of something in his hands and his eyes red, and around him five boats and twenty-six people waited on a flat gray sea.
"Because of the rifle," he said.
"That's it?"
"That's everything." Aaron looked up. "I saw that Model 70 through my scope on a beach in a willow cove and I thought I'd lost my mind. My grandfather is two thousand miles east in a camp on a lake and that rifle does not leave his cabin, and there it was,
in the hands of a boy on a beach in Washington."
"So you followed me to find out how I got it."
"I followed you to find out if he was dead," Aaron said.
Liam's stomach turned to water.
"I've been trying to work out how to ask you that for eight days," Aaron said. "I've had the words in my mouth since the marina. And I couldn't, because there is only one reason a man ends up carrying another man's rifle two thousand miles from home."
He looked at Liam.
"So ask me the thing you've been chewing on," he said. "Because you've been chewing on it since I said his name and you're a very bad liar."
Liam set down the rifle.
"There's a thing in the willows," he said.
"I know."
"You know?"
"Everybody on this coast knows," Aaron said. "Nobody says it out loud. My crew won't go near that cove and they wouldn't tell you why." His face was grim. "I sat in those trees for two nights waiting for Rennick and I did not sleep and I do not want to talk about it."
"It wears your dead," Liam said.
Aaron went very still.
"On the path," Liam said. "The first night. I saw an old man standing in the trees in a wool coat with a walking stick he carved himself and a pistol on his hip, and I have known ever since, in my bones, that Tom Darcy is dead.
And I have been carrying that for eight days and I have not been able to say it to a single living soul."
Aaron Darcy looked at him.
And then he said, "What was he wearing on his head?"
Liam blinked.
"What?"
"His head. What was on it?"
"A hat," Liam said slowly. "A wool hat with earflaps."
Aaron shook his head.
"He hated that hat," he said.
"What?"
"He wore it for one winter and my grandmother made him and he hated it and he threw it in a stove the day after she died."
Aaron's voice was rising. "He wore a watch cap. Navy blue. For ten years. He wore it every day of his life and he was buried in it, or he would have been, and there is no version of my grandfather that puts on a hat with earflaps."
The whole boat had gone silent.
"You didn't see him," Aaron said.
"I saw—"
"You saw a hat with earflaps and a wool coat and a stick and a pistol." Aaron leaned forward. "You saw everything you knew about him. Everything you'd have put in a list if somebody asked you to describe him. And you filled in the rest yourself, because that's what a mind does."
Liam could not breathe.
"It doesn't know what he looks like," Aaron said. "It's never seen him. It only knows what's in your head, and what's in your head is a description, and it built you a description and stood it in the fog and let you do the rest."
"But it only wears the dead," Liam whispered. "That's the rule. Nell said in eight months it never once—"
"It only wears the dead they knew were dead," Aaron said.
And Liam Perry sat down on the deck of a sailboat in the middle of the Sound and put his hands over his face and made a sound that nobody aboard would ever describe to anyone.
"He's alive," he said.
"I don't know that," Aaron said. "Nobody knows that. He was alive in December and it's February and he's eighty-eight and there's a sickness in that camp, and I would give anything in this world to tell you he's alive and I can't."
"But it doesn't know."
"It doesn't know," Aaron said. "It never knew. It looked in your head and it saw a man you loved and it saw that you were afraid he was dead, and that was all it needed."
Liam looked up.
And from the bow of the boat, tied at the wrists and the ankles and across the chest, Chloe Buck began to laugh.
It went on for a long time.
And then she said, in a voice that was not hers, delighted, and terrible, and enormously satisfied:
"That's right. And now you're going to sail two thousand miles east to find out."
She turned her head.
And she looked at Liam with dead eyes and smiled.
"And I'm coming with you," she said.