CHAPTER 22 #3
Boyd stepped back once as if he had been asked a question. He said, “What an inconven —” and did not finish. He went down on his back on the second step. His eyes stayed open. His right hand relaxed and the suppressed subcompact slid down the riser and stopped at the edge of the third.
I stood there with the Kimber lowered, forearm blistering, shoulder wet, ribs on fire, and heard three things at once.
Beau. Coming up the treeline at a run. Calling my real name. “Lucas. Lucas.”
The hardline pulse-tone inside the cabin ticking off the connection to dispatch — Marta's voice underneath it, low, unhurried, giving Kittredge the geometry.
Celia's boots crossing the porch behind me.
I did not turn until her hand was at my back.
“Celia.”
“I know.”
“Fuck.”
The word almost never leaves my mouth. It had come out of me twice in twelve years. This was the second.
“He's dead.”
“Come inside.” She said, “Beau's here. I've got you.”
I let her. My father's ring under my pinky bone against the Kimber Warrior's grip. Blood down the sleeve. Ozone at my ear still. Boyd on the second step with his eyes open and the sky in them.
Beau's boots hit the porch a second later. “Lucas. Look at me.” I looked. He put his hand at my jaw the way he had at fifteen after the safety failed on the Winchester on the ponderosa slope. “You alive.” “Yes.” He looked at my forearm. “You are, but you are going to lose the sleeve. Sit.”
Celia sat me on the porch bench.
Eleven at night. Beau's truck at the top of the ranch road, headlights washing the treeline.
Between eight forty-four and now I had been many things.
Sat on the porch bench while Beau irrigated the shoulder graze and Celia held my right hand the way you hold the hand of a man not because he is dying but because you have decided you will not let him do this next part alone.
Kittredge came up at eight fifty-one. Sidearm drawn, then holstered.
“Sheriff's ten minutes.” Hollister came up at nine oh three, stood over Boyd for a two-count, crossed to me on the bench.
“You alive.” “Yes.” “Then we work.” He worked for the next thirteen hours the way he did everything — measured, without adjectives, without gossip.
Boyd went in a body bag at eleven-eleven.
The doorman at eleven forty. Two federal agents came up the switchback just past two and spent the afternoon photographing a phosphorus casing and the file drawer that had almost burned.
Kittredge put on coffee. Celia sliced bread and cheese nobody could eat.
Marta stayed sealed inside the safe room.
The hardline and vent fan remained live; water, food, and sanitation were sufficient for forty-eight hours.
At ten past three I knocked once with the flat of my hand.
Through six inches of steel, muffled but level: “Se?or. ?Sí?” — a question for the man who owed his name to the woman asking.
“Sí, se?ora.” She did not open. She would open after she had heard my boot on the plank floor for longer than one exchange.
The evidence file came out of the safe at six in the evening and went into Beau's black canvas bag, USB and paper both. The unregistered Kimber Custom II went in with them. My mother's crucifix stayed. My real passport stayed. He had not asked and I had not offered a reason. He knew.
At a quarter to eleven Beau came to the porch with the bag over his shoulder and put his hand at the back of my neck the way he had once when I was ten and he was twelve.
“You did good, brother. I mean that. Ma would have liked her.” I gave him no answer.
He put his other hand on Celia's shoulder for the length of one breath, and went to the truck.
At eleven, only taillights remained.
Celia on my left. Marta still sealed behind six inches of steel inside the cabin, waiting to hear me longer.
Neither Celia nor I touched. Celia's palm was wrapped in gauze the deputy had brought up at seven in the evening.
My forearm was wrapped in gauze the sheriff had wound himself, tighter than mine would have been.
Behind the safe-room door and behind the cabin wall, low but audible in the new quiet: Marta's voice.
The Padre Nuestro in Spanish — Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos, santificado sea tu nombre.
It was not for Boyd. It was for the three of us — the two on this porch and the one on the concrete floor with her rosary.
Beau's taillights went out around the last bend.
My thumb crossed the signet once. Not out of habit.
Six years and three days ago I had put it on for the last time as a man named a name I had not spoken aloud since, and tonight — for the first time — the name had been spoken back to me by three separate mouths on this porch and I had answered to it.
I took a breath. The first slow one in six years.
The ridge was quiet in a way it had not been quiet in eighteen months. Celia's shoulder at my shoulder. Marta somewhere inside the cabin behind us, still sealed behind steel, still not asking to come out. The house behind us was a house no one was trying to enter.
Tomorrow the sheriff came back at eight. Kittredge with him. Statements. Paperwork.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow filled the whole field of thought.