Chapter 24
brOCK
Ifroze.
I am not a man who freezes. I've had guns in my face and knives at my throat and I've kept my hands steady through all of it, because the freezing is what gets you killed and I trained the freeze out of myself a lifetime ago.
But I sat in that idling car with my dead father standing in front of the grille looking at me through the windshield, and everything in me locked up solid.
For a long handful of seconds, I could not have moved if the car had been on fire.
He didn't wait for me to come unstuck.
He walked around to the passenger side, easy as anything, opened the door, and folded himself into the seat beside me like he'd done it ten thousand times. Pulled the belt across. Clicked it home. Settled back.
"Drive," he said.
So, I drove.
God, help me, I drove. My hands found the wheel and my foot found the gas and the car rolled forward down Wentworth and I drove, because some part of me twelve years old and still waiting on that ranch heard drive in that voice and did what it was told.
The voice. That was the thing that broke something loose in my chest—it was the same. Not aged, not weathered, not wrong. The exact voice that had taught me to sit a horse and read a track and hold still in the brush, coming out of a man I'd buried in every place inside me a man can be buried.
And the thoughts came up like floodwater.
My father at the fence line at dawn, telling me predators don't announce themselves.
My father at the stove on a Sunday, that low warm voice.
My father gone—the truck in the drive and then not, the days stretching to weeks, my mother's face coming apart by degrees, seven boys learning what the world does to a house with no man standing in front of it.
And me. What I did about it. What I became to make sure nothing ever took from us again.
All of it rose at once and pressed on the backs of my eyes and it was everything I had to keep the car between the lines, because the road kept swimming and my jaw was locked so hard it ached.
A mile, maybe. That's all I had in me.
I cranked the wheel hard to the right and pulled into a cracked lot in front of a boarded-up barber shop, the old striped pole still bolted to the brick, gone gray with sun.
Threw it in park. My heart was going like a fist on a door, slamming, racing, the kind of racing I hadn't felt since I was a boy because I'd long since trained my heart to lie quiet through anything.
Not through this.
"There's a lot to explain," my father said. Gentle. That voice.
I barked out a laugh. It came out ugly, more bark than laugh, the sound of a man with too much in him and no way to let it out clean.
A lot to explain. Christ. I sat there with my hands strangling the wheel and I could not find a single word, I who'd talked my way out of rooms designed to kill me, and the silence stretched and the thing built and built behind my teeth—
—and then the words came, and they weren't the ones I'd have chosen, because they were the ones I'd never said out loud to one living soul.
"You want to know how I dealt with you leaving?" My voice came out low and shaking and I didn't look at him, I looked straight ahead at the boarded glass. "I killed three men."
The car went still.
"Three bad men. Men who'd come into Valentine and were doing things—taking things, hurting people—and the law couldn't catch them and I could.
So, I did. I found them and I killed all three.
" Now I turned and looked at him. "I was sixteen years old.
Sixteen. And those three sons of bitches deserved every bit of what they got, I have never once doubted that.
" My breath came ragged. "But that's not the question, is it?
The question is—did I deserve it? Did a sixteen-year-old boy deserve to have to become the thing that did that? Answer me that one."
He was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I heard my own pulse in my ears.
Then my father said, "No."
Just that, first. Then the rest, slow and heavy.
"No. That should never have been laid on you, son.
A boy that age—it shouldn't have been yours to carry, and I'd give about anything for it to have gone some other way.
" He looked at me, and his eyes had the old sadness in them, deeper now.
"But it went the way it went. I can't unmake it.
I'm sorry for it down to the ground." A pause.
"And I'll tell you the other half, because you've carried it alone too long.
I know what happened that night. I know exactly what you did.
And those men deserved to die, Brock. Every one of the three.
You hear me? That part of it was right."
My eyes went wide.
The words rearranged themselves and came back at me with their teeth showing.
"You know," I said. "You—you knew? You knew what I did, the whole time, and you didn't—" The floor dropped out of my voice. "You knew, and you didn't come back?"
He looked at me, and the sadness in his face was a terrible thing to see on a man I'd thought was dead.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I knew. And no. I couldn't come back."
Why. The word sat right there. Why couldn't you come back, why did you let us think you were dead, why did you let Mama come apart, why did you let me carry this alone for half my life?
It was one syllable and I could not push it out, because if he answered it—if he gave me a reason, any reason, good or bad—I was going to come apart right there in a barber shop parking lot, and I had not come apart in front of another human being since before that night. I was not going to start now.
I shut my eyes. Opened them.
"Get out," I said.
He didn't argue. Didn't push. That, at least, was the same, too. He just nodded, slow, like he'd expected no better and didn't blame me for it. He reached down and unbuckled the belt and opened his door and got out into the gray afternoon.
He was about to close it when the last thing rose up in me, and I leaned across the seat.
"Dad."
He stopped. Bent back down into the open door so we were level, eye to eye, his face in the frame of it the way it used to fill the doorway of my childhood.
"Yes, son?"
I spat it out before I could think better of it.
"I'm going to burn Dominion Hall to the ground," I said. "Whatever it is. I'm going to burn it down to the dirt, and then I'm taking the one good thing this city gave me and I am leaving, and I am never coming back."
I watched his face fall. The sadness, deepening, sagging the lines of him.
And then—I watched it change. Watched it firm up and go hard and resolved, the old look, the one that ended arguments at the dinner table before they started, the face of a man who has decided a thing and will not be moved off it for love or money or God.
"You can't do that, son," he said. Quiet.
Iron under it. "I built Dominion Hall. With my own two hands, out of nothing, for reasons you don't know yet.
" He held my eyes. "And it's yours now. You hear me?
It's yours. You can't burn it down. A man doesn't burn down his own home. His own blood. His own family."
My mind went white.
What? What in the everliving hell did that mean—it's yours, I built it, your home, your family—what was that house, what was any of this, what had my brother walked into and my father risen from the dead to hand me—
I didn't have a single word for it.
So, I didn't give him one. I sat back, dropped it into reverse, and peeled out of that lot hard enough to leave rubber on the cracked concrete.
I left my father standing alone in front of a boarded barber shop in the rearview, getting smaller, not chasing, just watching me go the way I'd spent years imagining he never had.
I drove.
I drove with no destination, the way you do when the thing in your head is too big to sit still under.
Worked the mirrors out of pure habit, checked for tails I half hoped to find because a tail I could deal with, a tail was a problem I had tools for.
There wasn't one. Just me and an armored car and a poison spreading through my chest that no road was long enough to outrun.
I tried to empty my head. Tried to put it all in the box and shut the lid the way I've shut a thousand bad things.
The box wouldn't hold it. Every time I got the lid down it blew open again—it's yours, you can't come back, those men deserved to die, drive.
I'd had it figured. An hour ago I'd had the whole thing mapped clean—fix it, pay the Donovans, pull Tommy out, take her, gone. Simple. And now the map was ash and I was driving in circles in a city I hated with a dead man's voice in my ears and no plan left at all.
And then, after a while, somewhere in all that noise, one clear thing surfaced.
There was exactly one place in the world I'd felt sane in the last twenty-four hours. One room. One person. The only thing on this earth that had ever quieted the noise without blood in it.
Her.
I hauled the wheel around in a U-turn that laid the tires screaming across two lanes and I pointed the nose back at Wentworth Street. I drove like the devil was on me, because maybe he was, and the only shelter from him I'd ever found was a dark-haired woman in a room over a frame shop.
I took the stairs three at a time and hammered the door.
She opened it, and I saw it all over her in an instant—the anger, banked and ready, the hurt under it, the whole speech she'd been building since she drove away from me, loaded and aimed and about to fire.
Where were you? Why didn't you call? Because of you, my father— All of it, right there in her eyes.
I did not care.
I could not have cared less if the building was burning. I'd just sat in a car with my dead father and had the bottom torn out of everything I knew, and I had one need left in the whole wrecked world and it was standing in front of me in the doorway with fire in her eyes.
I reached out and pulled her into me and crushed her against my chest, and she stiffened—startled, a sound of surprise muffled against me, her hands coming up to push—
—and then I kissed her. Desperate, no finesse in it, a drowning man's kiss, everything I couldn't say poured into it because I had no words left and this was the only language I had.
And she kissed me back.
The stiffness went out of her. Her hands quit pushing and grabbed instead, fisted in my shirt and pulled, and the anger turned into something else without ever losing its heat.
I walked her backward across that room full of her secret work toward the sofa with my heart cracked wide open and aching in my chest.
Her. Only her. The one clean thing. The only shelter I had left.
I needed her, and nothing else in this poisoned world, and I let myself need it.