T. Parker: Black Water

She paced the big rectangle of new concrete, knelt to examine a rough spot in the finish, thought of the woman in the bathroom with the bullet holes in her.

The driveway floodlights were tucked up under the eave of the garage. Rayborn stood under them and looked up at the sunlight/motion detector module. She got out her blue notebook and wrote CK mot det after dark.

What set off the motion detector? Jones had seen the lights on at five-eleven but Crowder had seen them off three minutes later. Neither had seen a car in the drive.

She walked back around the house to the glass door where the rock had gone through. She didn't see any rocks like it, no rocks at all, in fact, except for very large round gray stones that were set in concrete around a whirlpool. Besides that, there was a small covered patio with a cafe table and two chairs, some potted plants, a lap pool, a little section of bright green lawn, then a slope of late-season wildflowers leading down to a white post-and-rail fence. A path made of railway ties led through the flowers and Merci followed it. There was gravel between the ties, and the flowers grew right up to the edges of the wood and the stones. Bees hummed from bloom to bloom and for two seconds Merci felt like she'd entered scene from one of Tim Jr.'s Winnie-the-Pooh stories. She thought of her boy and wished she could walk with him into one of those scene and stay there for a year or two.

She went all the way down to the fence, then back to the patio without finding a rock you could throw through a window. She wondered if it had come from Wildcraft's collection of viewing stones What a view that one had, she thought.

Zamorra was sitting at the cafe table, legs crossed, staring at the hole in the glass.

"Let's walk it tomorrow," he said.

"All right."

"We'll know by then if Archie fired the gun or not."

"Yeah."

He studied her with his unsettling calm. "Stay open, Merci. He might have done it."

"I know. I will. I'm trying."

Merci thought how easy it was to be wrong. She knew how wrong she'd been about a deputy named Mike McNally, and the terrible price they had both paid. Mike was part of what had happened a year age the heart of it. So she said nothing more. Because even if she was wrong now-even if she was being fooled by her heart, as she'd bee so spectacularly fooled before-at least it was speaking to her again

Plus, and more to the point, she thought, Wildcraft was one of us

Us.

We protect and serve. We do what's required. We kick ass and take names.

We don't kill our mates, then ourselves.

"I know you are, Merci. I know."

At nine that night, Merci returned to the Wildcraft home. She had had dinner with her son and her father, played with Tim Jr., read him three of his favorite books, then tucked him in.

She was tired by then but she had to find out one thing. She wouldn't be able to sleep until she knew. She parked shy of the driveway and walked in, flashlight in hand just in case. When she got up near the garage the lights went on, big floods-one angled right and one left. It was nine-twelve and eight seconds, by her watch. She turned toward the house, following the walkway that would lead to the front porch and door, then around to the back, where Archie's blood marked the concrete.

But she stopped about halfway to the door, turned around to see if the driveway lights were still on. They were. So she backed off into the bushes and stood in the darkness under a big sycamore.

She listened to the crickets, and a far-off barking dog. From here, she couldn't see any other houses. Out in front of her, over the roof of the garage, there was a section of darkness and a few stars. It had irked Merci for almost ten years that she could only identify one star: the north. She'd promised herself to take a junior college class in basic astronomy someday, one of many such promises not yet kept. Rayborn put herself far down on the list of people for whom she'd do something pleasing.

At exactly nine-seventeen the lights went off. She stepped from the darkness and walked back to the driveway, forcing them on again. The motion zone was wide-from the middle of the drive all the way to the start of the walkway.

She tried the garage door, got resistance, didn't want to force it. Around the side was a convenience door but it was locked. She shined her light through the small window. Hard to see with the light bouncing off the glass, but there were two cars. One was an SUV of some kind, the other was small and low and hidden beneath a fabric cover.

She went back to her car, ran the beam of her flashlight along the back seats before getting in. Just a habit by now. She listened to the police radio turned down low, thought about Tim Hess and Tim Jr., dangled her arm into the darkness behind her seat.

The lights stayed on for exactly five minutes again. The timer was perfect. And the motion detector was good enough to sense human movement twenty feet away.

Just after six the next morning Archie woke up. He'd felt himself swimming upward for a long time, but he had no way of telling hours from years. All he knew was he was rising through water and stars, earth and fire, toward something necessary and far away, woman's voice told him:

Swim. Breathe. Rest. Swim. Breathe. Rest.

And that was what he did.

He broke the surface and looked up to an intensely red ceiling with bright blue lights. Quivering air, shadows forming and vanishing. Space collapsing. Space expanding. Sounds, too, punishingly loud: mechanical, electronic, pneumatic, ethereal.

"Unbelievable, " said a voice.

"Hello, Archie, " said another.

"I'll get Dr. Stebbins. "

The conversation was much too fast and complex for Archie to follow. He understood two things. One was that he was terrified.

The other was that he had lost something huge and it would never come back.

He looked and saw monsters over him: eyes, nostrils, teeth. He tried to open his mouth but his will gave way before it could happen. His lips burned and his throat burned and the ferocious colors mage him close his eyes and settle back down into where he'd been for so long, hovering just below the surface, protected, safe in his river.

Swim. Breathe. Rest.

Wildcraft's fingerprints are on the Smith nine. His right index finger, thumb and web were marked with barium, antimony, copper and lead. With corroborating evidence you can make a very strong case for him having fired the weapon. We do it all the time in court, as you know."

James Gilliam, director of the Sheriff-Coroner Forensic Services Department, looked at Merci over his glasses, then at Zamorra leaning against the back wall of Gilliam's office. He was a quiet, scholarly man until you got to know him.

It was eight the next morning. Merci had already talked to Sheriff Vince Abelera, who had talked to a neurologist at UCI Med Center. Archie Wildcraft had made it through the night. He had opened his eyes for approximately fifteen seconds. X rays had shown a small object lodged deep in his brain, smaller fragments throughout. The doctors would not let anyone interview the patient at this time. The man's life was in the balance. Merci had begged Sheriff Abelera to make the doctors tell them what caliber bullet was inside Archie's brain. But the x ray wasn't clear enough to measure fractions of millimeters, and the object, apparently, had fragmented.

"I can't tell you what he shot with that gun," Gilliam continued. "Until we finish with the bullets from his wife. And unless they retrieve the bullet from his head."

Rayborn felt her stomach sink: Gilliam was already believing that Wildcraft had done it. Plus she'd had her usual big-eaters' breakfast which her father cooked every morning for her, Tim Jr. and himself. She ate a lot, burned it off in the gym. But now it felt like she'd eaten nails and washed them down with battery acid.