Chapter 8
Eleven Minutes
The Okafors' back door opened as they came over the wall, and Emeka Okafor stood in the light of nothing with a shotgun in his hands.
It was a short pump gun, old and well oiled, which Damen had not known the man owned. He stood on his back step in blue striped pajamas and a pair of unlaced boots, his gray hair in a wild halo, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and the barrel of the gun swung from side to side as he peered into the dark. Behind him, a silhouette in a head-tie, his wife stood with a candle.
"Who is that?" said the old man in a hoarse voice. "I have called the sheriff. I will shoot."
"Emeka," said Damen. "It's Dean."
The barrel stopped. A pause. In the faint, shaking light of the candle the retired schoolteacher's face turned toward them, and Damen saw it change: the eyes behind the lenses moved from his bare feet to the blood on his shirt, to the small bundled shape in Naomi's arms, to the pistol in his own right hand, and the old man's lips parted.
"Oh, my God," said Emeka softly.
"Go inside. Lock the door. Put out that light."
"There are men in the street. I have seen the lorry. I thought, it is the electric company, but it is eleven o'clock on a Saturday." His voice shook with a dignity he could not quite hold. "Dean. What have you done?"
"Nothing," said Naomi, clearly. "He's done nothing, Emeka."
"Then—"
"Please," said Damen. He took a step forward. "You've been the best neighbor I ever had. You gave me a plate when I didn't know how to eat in front of other people. I've never forgotten it. So I'm asking you now. Lock your door. Whatever you hear, you don't come out. Whoever knocks, you don't answer. And when the sheriff arrives, you tell him you saw nothing."
"The sheriff is coming to help."
"No," said Damen. "He isn't."
There was a very long silence. The old man's eyes went to Ivy, and rested on the small pale face over Naomi's shoulder, the tangle of brown hair, the compass on its string. His hand tightened on the shotgun. Then his wife said something sharp and low in Igbo, and the gun came slowly down, and the old man stepped aside.
"Take the path by the compost," he said. "It comes out at the rail spur. There is no light." He swallowed. "God go with you, my son."
"And with you."
"Go quickly. Go. May He keep your child."
They went.
The hill ran down toward the lake through a mile of back gardens and old fences, and in the dark every yard was a different country.
He had walked it at night a hundred times, in the first years, when he could not sleep, with a flashlight in his pocket and the town asleep. He knew every gate. He knew where the Pruitts' dog slept, and which board in the Hendersons' fence swung out, and where the path crossed the dry bed of the creek and you had to step to the left to avoid the glass. He took them through it all like a man leading the blind. Naomi ran in front, barefoot, clutching the child. He followed behind with the gun drawn, walking backwards, his shoulder burning like a coal, and every ten steps he stopped and listened.
Behind them, on the hill, the white house stood dark against the sky.
Nothing came. No lights, no shouts, no sound of pursuit. A dog barked at the rail spur. A late freight whistled, far off, down toward the junction, long and lonely, and died.
They're not following, he thought.
That's what worries me.
"Dad," said Ivy.
She was riding on Naomi's hip with her face in her mother's neck, and he could not see her expression. The whisper came out thick and muffled. "Can I open my eyes now?"
"Not yet."
"Am I allowed to say what I noticed?"
"Yes."
"Okay." A pause. "One, my feet are dry. Two, Mom's heart is going very fast. Three, there's a smell like when we burned the leaves. Four, Mrs. Okafor said a word I don't know. Five..." The small voice shook. "Five, Dad, I think you're bleeding on me."
He looked. It was true. A dark thread had run down from his sleeve, over his wrist and the back of his hand, and the girl's yellow boot, which stuck out from her mother's arm, had a smear of it along the toe.
"I'm all right," said Damen.
"That's not a thing I noticed. That's a thing you said."
"It's a thing I noticed," said Naomi in a low voice, "and it's true." She did not turn her head. "He's all right, baby. He's the strongest man in the world. Keep your eyes shut."
They came out at last at the rail spur, and crossed the tracks, and went down the cinder path to the lake.
The marina lay under a pall of mist.
It was nearly eleven. The moon had gone down; the water was black and without a ripple; and from the dark mass of the boat sheds a faint, familiar smell came across the shallows, of creosote, and rust, and cold weed. The docks ran out into the fog like fingers. Along the middle one, in the gloom, he could see the tall humped silhouette of his own shed, and past it, at the end, the pale shape of the skiff.
He stopped under the willow and stood a full minute without moving.
He looked at the lot. Empty. He looked at the road. Empty. The Blue Moose, the bait shop, the fuel pumps, shut. No lights anywhere, not even the usual bulb over the harbormaster's hut. The whole shore was dark; the entire town, apparently, had lost power at nine-forty, and gone obediently to bed.
Too clean, he thought. Far too clean.
They want you here.
He turned his head and looked at the woman beside him. She stood against the trunk of the willow with the girl in her arms, bareheaded, barefoot, her yellow dress black with water and torn at the hem, and her eyes were fixed on his face. They were quite steady. There was a smear of blood across her cheekbone. She looked, he thought, like a woman standing at the edge of a river at night, deciding whether it can be crossed.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"I don't like it."
"Is there another way?"
"There's the road. It's worse."
"Then we go to the boat."
"If I'm right, there's someone on the dock."
"Then you deal with them," said Naomi. It was not a plea. It was a statement of fact, flat and low, the way she'd tell a family the time of death. "You do it quietly. You do it fast. And you come back for us. I will count to two hundred, and if you haven't come, I'll walk to the diner and wake up Josie and I'll scream."
"Naomi—"
"I'm not asking, Damen."
He heard the name. He heard it in the dark, in the mist, in her voice, for the first time in nine years: not Dean, but the other one, the one he had told her on the porch in the rain. It went through him like a blade. He looked into her face, and saw she knew it, had known it all along, and had chosen this moment because she wanted him to remember that she knew.
"Two hundred," he said.
"Two hundred."
He bent and kissed her, quickly, and put his hand briefly on the back of his daughter's head. Then he went down the bank into the fog.
The first man was lying in the shed.
He found him at once. He did not need the goggles. The door of the shed was ajar, which it never was; a thin smell hung in the air, sweet and coppery; and in the pale light from the lake, just inside, a body lay curled on the concrete beside the workbench with one arm flung out. It was Cody Bell.
For a moment Damen did not understand what he was looking at.
The boy was on his side. He wore his clean shirt, the one from the party, with a stain on the breast. His glasses lay a yard from his face. One hand was still clenched round the shaft of the push broom he had been using to sweep the floor, because he'd come back, of course he had, to lock up the shed after the party; he was a boy who believed that a man's tools should be put away. A single neat hole had been drilled in his temple. He looked surprised.
He was seventeen. He had told Damen on Monday that he wanted to learn to sail.
Oh, said a voice, very small and from a great distance. Oh, no.
Damen knelt. He laid two fingers on the cold neck, though he knew, and he stayed there for exactly as long as it took to understand that the thing he was feeling was not grief but a kind of vast, silent, absolute anger, so total that it seemed to have no heat in it at all. It went through him like frost through a window. It settled. When he rose, his face had changed.
He opened the drawer under the vise. He took out the yellow cloth, and the gun it held. It was a heavy, matte-black Sig, old and clean and perfectly balanced. His hand closed on it and the weight went into his palm like a name he'd forgotten.
He checked the chamber. He thumbed the safety.
Now, said the dry voice, with something that was almost satisfaction. Now you're home.
The second man was on the dock, and the third was in the skiff, and neither saw him.
They were crouched at the end of the middle dock, forty yards from the shed, in the full darkness of the fog, with their heads together over a handheld radio. One wore a black watch cap. The other had a rifle across his knees. Damen came down the dock on the balls of his feet, along the edge of the planking where the boards were nailed, with the pistol low. Each step took him two seconds. He counted. At twelve yards, the man with the radio lifted his head.
"Say again—"
Damen shot him in the chest.
The second man came up fast, swinging the rifle, and Damen was already on him; he hit the muzzle aside with his forearm and put the Sig against the man's ear and fired, and the watch cap flew from the shattered head. Both bodies fell. One rolled off the planks into the lake with a heavy, oily splash. The other lay across the boards, jerking, and was still.
He stood over them, breathing quietly, his shoulder streaming, with the black water lapping at the pilings.
Six.
That's enough, said the voice. Get them in the boat.
He turned.
And the floodlights came on.
They came on all at once, from every direction, with a deep blunt thud like a door closing in a very large room.
Eight of them. Perhaps ten. Great white arc lamps on tripods, set up in a ring along the shore, on the roof of the bait shop, on the cab of a truck at the end of the lot. The marina leaped out of the dark in a savage white glare: the sheds, the docks, the black glittering water, every board and rope and rivet hard-edged as if cut from tin. He threw up his arm against it. The light struck his eyes like a blow. He turned, blindly, with the pistol swinging, and found nothing to shoot at but light.
"Drop it, Damen."
The voice came from everywhere at once, through a loudspeaker, amplified and unhurried. It was a pleasant baritone, educated, a little warm. "Drop it, please. I'd hate to have to do this the loud way."
He did not drop it.
He spun slowly on the dock, squinting, until he made out a shape beyond the glare: a figure at the head of the ramp, in a charcoal peacoat, standing very still with his hands in his pockets. Tall. Slim. Short dark hair. A handsome, tidy, regular face, with nothing in it at all. He was perhaps forty. He looked like a man waiting for a ferry.
Mercer.
"I don't want you to think this is personal," said Cassian Mercer, and the voice no longer came from the speaker but from his own mouth, across thirty yards of water, quiet and clear. "I've heard the stories. I'd like to say I'm not afraid of you, but it would be a lie. You're the only man in the Group I've never beaten at anything." A smile. "So I've brought a few friends. Look to your left."
He did not want to look. He looked.
At the end of the middle dock, on a spit of gray planking over the water, three men in dark tactical gear stood in a row. Between them, held at arm's length, as one holds a ewe at a fair, was a slight figure in a yellow dress.
Naomi.
She was standing very upright. Her feet were bare. Her hair was loose. A man had her by the arm, and another had a hand on the back of her neck, and the third held in his fist, by the strap, with a casualness that was somehow the worst thing of all, a little compass on a string. Her chin was up. She looked into the lights. She was not crying.
And in her arms, wrapped in a blanket, with her small face turned to her mother's collarbone, was a child.
"They came from behind," said Naomi, in a voice that carried across the water. "I'm sorry. I counted. I only got to a hundred and sixty."
"It's all right," said Damen.
"Don't," said Mercer pleasantly. "Don't talk to her. She's very brave. I'd hate to spoil it."
There was a sound at the head of the ramp: a car door. Damen's eyes went to it, and in the white glare he saw a tan cruiser parked across the road with its engine running and its lights off. A tall sandy man stood beside it with his hat in his hand. He wasn't looking at the lake. He was looking at his boots.
Tobin.
Of course.
"I'm afraid he's with us," said Mercer. "I'm sorry about that. He's a decent man. Mr. Strand has a way of finding those." His voice dropped. "Put the weapon on the planks, Damen. I won't ask again. I have a clean shot on your wife, on your child, and on you, and it's the easiest arithmetic I've done all day."
Damen stood quite still.
He thought about it. For one cold, crystalline second, in the white light, with the water lapping at the edge of the dock, he did the thing that he had been trained to do and had done for eleven years: he counted. Three men with the woman. Two on the bait shop roof, with rifles. One at the cruiser. Two at the head of the ramp. A man in the truck. Mercer. Ten. He had eleven rounds. He could drop four before the first of them fired. He might drop six.
And then, whatever the number was, the child would be dead.
There it is, said the voice, almost kindly. There's the arithmetic. You've done it a thousand times. This is the first time you ever lost.
He opened his fingers.
The Sig struck the planks with a clatter that seemed to ring across the entire lake. It lay there in the light, black and bright, and a long way off, in the mist, a loon began to call.
"Thank you," said Mercer.
They did not shoot him. That was the strangest part.
They took him down very carefully, in a way that suggested instructions. Two men came along the dock with their weapons raised and put the muzzles against his neck. Another kicked the gun into the water. A fourth went through his pockets, rapidly, professionally, and found the prepaid phone, the passport, and a folded paper, and handed them to Mercer. He did not resist. He stood with his hands open at his sides and his eyes on the woman at the end of the pier.
She was looking at him.
It was a long look. Across the light, across the water, across the three men and the lamps and the small blanketed shape in her arms, Naomi Whitlock looked at her husband, and in her face there was no reproach, no blame, no fear. There was only a sort of terrible, tender, attentive calm, as though she were taking his pulse from a distance.
You said not where she can see, her eyes said. I saw. It's all right. I'm still here.
Then they took her away.
They took her down the dock toward a black launch that had slipped in out of the mist, riding low, with its engines muttering; he hadn't heard it come. A man took the child. For one moment Ivy's face turned, in the light, and he saw her eyes open, wide and gray and absolutely steady, fixed on him over the shoulder of a stranger. She did not scream. She lifted her small hand, with the five fingers spread, and held it up.
Five things, it said. I'm noticing.
"Naomi!"
He did not know he had moved. He had taken two strides along the planks before the butt of a rifle caught him behind the knee, and he went down hard on one hand, and a boot came down on his wrist. He heard the bone crack. He reared up, roaring, and a second blow took him in the side of the head, and the world became a bright spinning wheel, and the planks came up and struck his face.
When he could see again, the launch was a long way out.
Its wake spread behind it in two pale lines, widening, glimmering. It was only a smear against the mist now, a darker shape on the dark, with a single white light at the stern. He crawled to the edge of the dock. He got his hand over the lip. He tried to rise and could not. And above him a pair of polished shoes came down the boards, and stopped.
"They'll be treated well," said Cassian Mercer. He crouched, his coat falling about him, and looked into Damen's face, regretfully, with clear interest. "Mr. Strand has strong feelings about that. No one will lay a hand on them. They'll have beds and food, and a nurse, I'm told, for the little one's nightmares. I'm only the delivery boy, Damen. I'd rather you didn't think of this as a kidnapping. It's an invitation."
Damen got his mouth to move. It came out in a gravelly whisper. "Where's Sofia?"
Mercer's brows drew together, politely. "Who? Ah. The elder one." He glanced at his watch. "A man of Rourke's is collecting her from the lake road. She'll be along before morning." He smiled. "You mustn't think I overlook anyone."
"I'll kill you."
"I expect you'll try."
"I'll find you."
"Oh, I'm counting on it." Mercer rose. He dusted the knees of his trousers, very precisely. "Sunday was a polite fiction. I want you to know that I told him so. He's a sentimental man, and he thought we should honor the birthday." A shrug. "I decided you'd had enough days."
"What does he want?"
"He'll tell you himself. He's very particular about that." The pleasant eyes crinkled. "You'll have a phone call. Keep your other phone close, won't you? The one your wife rings."
He turned and walked away along the dock. The lamps went out one by one. The trucks started. The tan cruiser pulled out of the road and slid off into the dark, and the last that Damen saw of it was a hand, a man's hand, thrown up over a face.
Then the marina was silent, and black, and the lake went on lapping at the pilings. In the shed, a boy lay on the cold concrete holding a broom. On the dock, two dead men grew cold. And at the edge of the water, on his face, with his left wrist broken, his shoulder streaming, and the taste of iron in his mouth, Damen Knox lay alone in the mist and listened to the engine of the launch fade out across the dark water until he could no longer tell whether it was gone or whether he was only hearing his own blood.
Eleven minutes.
It was, he thought, as the dark came up around him, exactly how long it had taken. He had done the arithmetic himself.
Somewhere in the pocket of his torn trousers, against his thigh, the phone began to ring.