Chapter 2 #2
I left them at the first wide bend, where the water was slow and they could pick their own path. People liked it, near as I could tell, when you helped them and then got out of their way. I'd learned that early. From my mother, mostly.
The water was cold the way mountain water is cold—a clean cold that bit into your shins and woke up muscles you hadn't been asking to wake up.
The wading stick steadied me on the rocks.
I moved at a steady pace, not pushing, just walking.
There was a rhythm to it once you found it.
Eyes scanning ahead three steps. Stick testing the underwater ground.
Weight transferred. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. After a while it was meditation.
The canyon walls climbed up around me, narrowing, until the sky was a thin blue ribbon overhead. Light came in sideways and gold and broke on the water. A cliff swallow shot past my ear close enough to feel the air move.
I smiled.
I was good at enjoying my work. I always had been. It was a thing my brothers used to tease me about back home—that Tommy could find the bright side of a flat tire on a back road in August. I didn't think it was a virtue. I thought it was just a thing.
Some people were born to find the joy and some weren't, and the rest of it—your discipline, your skill, your willingness to do the hard thing—that was on you. The joy part was a gift. I tried not to waste it.
One mile became two. Two became three.
The rock I'd picked sat in a wide bend where the canyon opened up just enough to catch a long ribbon of sun.
The slab of sandstone caught the light like it had been put there for the purpose, dry and warm and big enough for a man to sit on with his pack beside him.
I'd scouted it on day three, when I'd done my first run of the Narrows on a recon walk. Knew the second I saw it.
There was nowhere to run. Sheer rock walls. The river the only way in or out. The acoustics weren't bad either—canyon ate sound, threw it up. A scream up here would land somewhere a quarter mile away as a confused echo, and most tourists would assume it was a bird.
The perfect place for lunch.
The perfect place for killing.
I climbed onto the rock, dried my hands on my pants, and unwrapped a sandwich. White bread. Smooth peanut butter. Grape jelly. I'd made them at five-thirty that morning at the kitchenette counter. They were perfect.
I waited.
Davari came around the bend fifteen minutes later, working harder than he wanted me to know he was working.
He was a fit man in the way money makes a man fit—surface fit, gym-floor fit.
The kind of body that could deadlift three plates and run out of breath chasing a cab.
He saw the rock and the sun and his face did the small unconscious thing fit men do when they can't wait to sit down.
He stumbled. The hiking stick saved him. He recovered, glanced up, saw me.
I called over, easy and friendly, the way you'd call to a man you'd seen on the trail before.
"Hey—stick to the left side coming up. The right's a knee-killer. I went face-first a minute ago. Beautiful stuff, but not great for the dignity."
He squinted. Took in my wet hair, my soaked pant legs, my bandaged dignity. Grinned.
"Yeah, I see that," he said. "Thanks for the heads up."
He came toward me, taking the left like I'd told him to, and almost slipped, anyway, on a rock I knew was angled mean. He caught himself on the stick and laughed at himself in a way that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Cleaner than my run," I called. "Better than I did."
He chuckled—the involuntary chuckle of a man who liked being told he'd done a thing well. He waded the last few feet to the edge of my slab and stopped, breathing hard, pretending he wasn't. He pulled out a water bottle—stainless steel, monogrammed—and took a long pull.
"This is some hike," he said.
"Best one in the park, in my book."
He nodded like he was conferring approval on the canyon. "I've done harder."
"Oh yeah?"
"Angels Landing. Did it Tuesday. Wasn't half what they say it is."
"The chains and all?" I asked.
"Not bad."
I tipped my chin up, gave him my most rueful smile. "Heights almost got me on that one. Don't tell anyone. Bad for the brand."
The lie cost me nothing. Heights had never bothered me. I'd jumped out of more aircraft than most men had flown on. But Davari needed to be the better man right now. Needed it like a glass of water on a hot day. I gave it to him.
He smiled. The smile of a man whose ego had been fed exactly the way his ego liked to be fed.
"It's not for everyone," he said magnanimously.
"No, sir."
He stretched—long, theatrical, the stretching of a man who'd recently learned how to stretch and wanted you to see he was doing it.
I watched him the way I'd watched men in cafés in Tbilisi and warehouses in Karachi and a bar once in Caracas where the only way out had been a window and a fire escape.
I clocked the new tightness in his core, the loose skin still holding on to the memory of the man he'd been a year ago.
He'd made progress. I'd give him that. The fitness thing was new, but he was working it.
"You hiking solo?" he asked.
"Most days. You?"
"Driver's at the lot. Said he didn’t want to get wet."
"Smart."
"He's reading a book."
"He's lucky."
His eyes drifted to the open Ziploc on the rock beside me. The second sandwich. The third. I'd packed five. I'd eaten one slow.
I didn't offer right away.
I let him look.
"You bring lunch?" I asked, casual.
He patted his pack. "Trail mix. Protein bars."
"Tree hugger food."
He laughed. Harder than the joke deserved. He hadn't laughed easily in a while, I could tell. The fitness kick had taken the indulgence out of his life and left him hungry in ways he didn't recognize.
I picked up a sandwich. Held it out.
"I always pack extra. PB&J. Made them this morning."
"Oh, no, I couldn't—"
"Suit yourself."
I started to bring it back.
"Actually," he said, "yeah. Yeah, sure. Thank you."
He took it. Smiled.
I did one slow scan—up the canyon, down the canyon, up the cliff. No movement. The next group I'd clocked coming in was at least fifteen minutes out, at the pace they'd been keeping.
I had my window.
Davari pulled the sandwich out of the bag, lifting it toward his mouth.
I came off the rock like a falling tree.
My knee took him square in the nose. I'd loaded my whole weight into it and dropped from my higher perch, and his face met it the way a melon meets a baseball bat.
He went down backwards into the shallows, the sandwich in one hand, the water bottle in the other, his nose flat across his face, blood already sheeting down into the river in a long red ribbon that pinked and dispersed.
Don't die yet, I thought.
He didn't. His chest was still working, ragged. His eyes were rolling but tracking. Stunned, not gone.
I knelt beside him in the water. Grabbed a fistful of his hair. Pulled his face up close to mine.
"My country doesn't like Iranian weapons dealers posing as Beverly Hills playboys," I said. "We leave that to guys like Hugh Hefner."
He tried to speak. Nothing came out except blood.
I dragged him to the deeper pool at the base of the slab. Knee-deep. Cold. His hands came up weakly, fingers scrabbling at my wrist, but his strength was gym-strength and mine was the strength of a man who'd thrown bales of hay across a Texas pasture before he was eleven. There was no contest.
I bent down close to his ear.
"America, motherfucker."
I put his face in the water and held it there.
It didn't take long. It rarely does. The ones who'd been afraid of dying their whole lives went the easiest. The ones who'd never thought about it—men like Davari, men with money, men who'd come to believe they were the kind of person things did not happen to—they panicked into it instead of through it, and panic was the fastest road to drowning a man could take.
I felt the moment he went. The small tremor, then the stillness, then the slack weight of a body returning to the river.
I let him stay under another thirty seconds to be sure.
Then, I moved.
I carried him through the shallows to a side pool I'd flagged on my recon, where two boulders met underwater at a shape I'd been thinking about for a week.
Positioned him face down between them. Wedged his right ankle hard between the rocks and gave it a twist with the heel of my boot.
The bone gave with a soft, wet crunch. From above, the geometry would read clean—a man lost his footing, fell, caught his ankle in the boulders, struck his face on the way down, drowned where he lay.
Tragic. Unfortunate. Avoidable. The kind of thing the National Park Service put a paragraph about in next year's safety brochure.
I rinsed my hands. Picked up my pack. Wrapped what was left of my lunch. I was buckling my pack when I heard them—voices coming up the canyon. Three, maybe four. Female, mostly. Cheerful.
I let my face fall into the shape I needed.
Wide eyes. Open mouth. A man who'd just seen something he hadn't been prepared to see.
I splashed off the rock and jogged toward them, cutting them off in the wide spot where the canyon broke open enough for three abreast.
"Hey—hey, do any of you know CPR?"
They stopped. Three women, late thirties, the kind of friend group that took an annual trip together and posted the photos in matching captions. The one in the middle raised her hand a little.
"I know a little—what's wrong?"
"There's a guy back there—" I pointed up the canyon, breathless, hands on my hips. "I just found him. I don't think he's breathing. I tried to call but I can't get a signal—"
"You don't get much signal in the Narrows," she said, the kind of unhelpful obvious thing scared people said.
"Shit. I'll go for help. Can you guys stay with him? Try CPR if you can?"
"Yeah. Yeah, of course. Where is he?"
"Side pool, hundred yards up, you can't miss it. He's wedged in some rocks, you'll need to roll him—" I let my voice crack a little, just enough. "Please. Please go."
"We've got it. Go."
"Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you."
I hit the trail downstream at a heavy jog, the kind that reads as panic and doesn't look like training. Made it around the first bend, out of sight, and let the jog ease into a steady wade.
One less weapons dealer in the world.
A good day's work.
I thought about my Americano with vanilla.
I thought about Hannah at King's Landing.
I thought about my mother, and the song I owed her, and the guitar leaning against the wall back at the rental.
I kept walking.