CHAPTER 22 #2
We were out of the mudroom in seventy seconds. Marta on Copper with the rosary looped around her wrist. Celia on Judy behind. I on foot with Copper's reins in my left hand, Winchester slung, Kimber Custom II back in the jacket, Kimber Warrior on the belt.
The dead man stayed on the great-room floor with the elk beside him. I would deal with him after Boyd.
Just after seven, we started up the ridge trail toward the cabin.
Copper at a fast walk. Judy behind. My father's rifle on my back, the fresh sutures under the taped gauze on my forearm beginning to itch.
I walked at Copper's shoulder with Marta's boot near my hand. Marta did not ask what had happened to the man in the great room. That was Marta.
“You did that well,” I said, to Celia's boot as she rode up beside me.
She did not look at me. She looked straight ahead up the switchback.
“Index the porch line.”
The urban planner in her still worked in memo language when the memo was the only thing that would carry. She meant: what is next.
“Safe room for Marta. You take the woodpile. Hardline to dispatch. Do not open the safe room for anyone but me or Beau.”
“Beau.”
“Yes. He's a beat away.”
We were on the cabin porch by eight ten.
Marta went into the safe room with a Motorola clipped to her rosary hand and a wool blanket over her arm.
Celia's left palm was wrapped tight in a strip of the same blanket she had torn off at the porch step.
The six-inch door sealed — the thud, the two-tone latch, the dry give of the pneumatic assist. Then, through six inches of steel and concrete: the pulse-tone of the hardline dialing dispatch.
Celia stayed outside the safe room.
The woodpile was where I had put her, and she held it.
She took the woodpile at the far end of the porch, Warren's Marlin across her forearm, her left palm wrapped tight, back to the western wall of the cabin, sightline down the trail. She sat once against the pile the way I had shown her to shoot from a rest, and did not sit again. She stood.
At ten past eight on the fiftieth day of a marriage that is a piece of paper, the interior said, she stands behind a woodpile with her grandfather's rifle and her burned hand and she does not look at me for a check.
Near nine, the waiting ended.
I was on the top step of the front porch with the Winchester leaned against the rail and the Kimber Warrior on my belt and the Kimber Custom II in my jacket for a last resort.
And there Boyd was.
Walking up out of the treeline a hundred and forty yards down the trail like he had come to look at a horse.
Wool trousers. Navy blazer, single-vent, tailored. Cufflinks I could not see at that distance but would have known anywhere. Silver hair. Fifty-eight years old. He was not sweating.
His hands were empty; a rifle was unnecessary. The suppressed subcompact sat inside the blazer in a shoulder rig I knew because I had gone shooting with him a hundred times on a private Long Island range.
Alone. Beau's teams had cleared the switchback and the north ridge.
The door man was on the great-room floor with an elk.
Roe was on a tarp somewhere north of the fire lookout.
Karn was under six feet of tarp on the ridge above the creek.
Grady and one more were on the switchback, dying or dead by Beau's people.
Boyd's voice carried up the trail the way old-money voices carry.
“Lucas.”
Lucas Cabot Whitfield IV, the interior said, and for the first time in six years I let it.
“Boyd.”
“It's been six years. You look older. The mountain has been unkind.”
I gave him nothing.
He came up the trail. Slow. Hands at his sides. The pace of a man walking to a boardroom he thought he still owned.
“I want to talk. Put the rifle down and I'll come up alone.”
The rifle was already down. Leaned against the porch rail. Kimber Warrior on my belt.
“Empty-handed,” I said.
Boyd smiled a small tight smile. He lifted his hands — palms outward, empty, the blazer buttoned.
He came up the last twelve yards empty-handed, which meant the suppressed subcompact was in the shoulder rig and clearing on the draw would take him three-quarters of a second because that had been his old drill and he had never seen a reason to change one that had worked once.
He hit the top step.
“You brought a wife into this. That's remarkable. I would not have thought you had it in you.”
“Boyd.”
“The evidence you copied. It's in the cabin somewhere. I could ask politely one more time or we can save each other the time and I can take it after.”
“No.”
His hand went to the blazer.
A little before nine.
Behind me, Warren's Marlin lever clicked once against the woodpile rest.
“Drop it,” Celia said.
Boyd's eyes cut toward her burned hand and the rifle sighted on his chest. His draw widened by a fraction. It was the only opening he gave me.
I moved before his hand cleared. Two long strides closed the arc so the suppressor could not get a clean line at my sternum — his draw hand had to lift and turn — and the pop of the round leaving the suppressor came at the same instant the dry electrical burn of the fired suppressor sang past my left ear.
Ozone. Scorched metal. A note nothing else on this mountain makes.
The suppressor's kiss caught the meat of my right forearm as my arm came up to deflect.
Cotton scorched. Blister. Blood. His round grazed my left shoulder — heat, wet, no bone.
His other elbow caught the ribs on my left, hard, and one popped inside the muscle sheath the way a green branch pops in the fire.
My Kimber Warrior was already out.
Center-sternum.