Chapter 29 — Huntress #2
The shot coughed soft and the cracked Zippo spun out of Gideon's right hand in a spray of red and silver and dropped into the black lake water without a sound I heard, the fire's god drowning a yard from the piling.
Gideon stared at his ruined hand with his mouth open, the accelerant pen still clutched in his left fist leaking shine onto the rain, and then he rushed with it, screaming, and Dante put two suppressed rounds center-mass into his chest and Gideon folded over the second piling and slid down the wet wood and lay still with the rain washing his shirt dark.
Five rounds spent total. I counted them the way I counted everything that night because counting was the only thing that kept the shaking in my legs from reaching my hands.
Then I was on my knees on the slick boards beside my sister with the stiletto, sawing at the dock-line knots with the bloody blade while the rain needled my split cheek and the brass service-corridor key swung on its neck cord and caught the light.
The knots were swollen and tight and my fingers were going numb, and I worked the key cord under the worst of them and levered and cut and cut until the line parted and Ophelia's knees came free and then her ankles.
I pulled the gag down with my left hand, gentle where everything in me wanted to tear, and pressed my forehead to hers while she gasped and chattered and cried without sound.
She smelled of rain and gasoline and the vanilla shampoo from a morning that felt a hundred years gone.
“Stay breathing, baby bat,” I said into her wet hair.
“That's an order. You hear me. That's an order.”
Dante stood over us with his coat already off, his shoulder bleeding steadily into the rain, and he wrapped the torn wool around Ophelia with announced hands and two-second warnings even here, even now, his voice steady over her chattering teeth.
“Coat coming. Two seconds. Covering you now.” The far siren washed closer and then turned aside, and the lake slapped the pilings, and the blue accelerant line thinned and died in the rain with nothing left to light it.
Felix drove us forty lakeside minutes through the thinning sleet to the county hold with the heater roaring and Ophelia bundled in the back seat shaking under Dante's coat, and Quinn Delacroix waited under the sally-port fluorescents with his ivory letter opener nowhere in sight and two uniformed deputies behind him.
I walked in with dried blood on my thermal and the white square wadded red in my pocket and Marcus's signet in a paper bag and the ledger copy in Quinn's evidence bag by five minutes later, and at four-twelve a.m. exact Iris's camera-pen transmission landed on Quinn's laptop with the burn order in oxblood ink and the signet beside it and the file numbers scrolling clean.
Julian Corvine sat at the interview table in his wet-slate three-piece with his silver mane combed and his lawyer's hush beside him like a second coat, avuncular to the last, and Quinn read the order and the ledger and the autopsy-file copies into the record while the wall clock ticked and the lawyer went pale and quiet.
They seized the accounts on the spot and the charity name came off the donor wall downstairs with a chisel while Julian watched with his hands cuffed in front of him, breathing, nameless, erased.
I laid Elias's still-ticking steel watch on his cell floor when they walked him in, the tick too loud in the small concrete-and-bleach space, and I looked at the man who signed my family away in red-brown ink and said it once. “Count what's left, godfather.”
Nolan Pierce went down at shift change on the same files, cuffed at his own precinct door with his cheap topcoat buttoned wrong.
Gideon lay dead at the second piling under a tarp awaiting the wagon.
Marcus lay dead in the pine office with my kiss on his cheek and his signet gone.
Blood and ruin both. The table's justice, not a betrayal of it, the way Dante said it had to be when we planned it with the wire live.
Dante drove the cleaned-trunk Escalade through first gray light to the lakeshore family stone with me holding the recollected watch in both hands, the tick thinning against my palms with every mile.
The sleet had eased to still cold dark and then to gray-pink at thirty degrees, the lake flat and iron-colored, sirens gone, the air clean and cold off the water after a night of char and rot and gasoline.
I knelt on the frozen grass in my blood-speckled thermal with my nose swollen and my cheek stitched by a deputy an hour earlier, and I laid the steel watch crown-first on Elias Halloway's cold stone and let it run down the way a machine runs down when nobody winds it, no smashing, no theater, rule number four paid in full.
The ticking thinned and stumbled and stopped.
Six forty-one, gray-pink light lying flat on the water like a held breath let go.
I washed Marcus's blood off my hands and face in the lake shallows until the ice-water sting took the feeling out of my fingers and the prior blood was gone under the River rule, retied Lark's ribbon from my wrist around the stone and then back on my wrist so the custody doubled, stone and skin both.
Then Dante's hand hovered beside mine. “Two seconds.” His fingers closed warm around my unbloodied hand.
“Marry me after the ashes. Thursday. Bring the deed.”