Michael Koryta - Tonight I Said Goodbye

Thor turned to me and fixed his glacier-ice eyes on mine. I was still sitting on the steps of the deck.

“You were looking for them, and they were looking for me,” I said.

He nodded once.

“Good timing,” I said.

He nodded again, then walked past me and back into the cottage. I followed. He gazed around the living room and pointed at Kinkaid, who was still lying on the floor with his hands over his head. A wet stain had spread across the back of his pants.

“Do you want him?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Fine. Understand that you never saw this. You never saw us.” I nodded. “I understand.”

He looked at Kinkaid. “Make sure he understands it as well.”

“He won’t be hard to convince.”

“No, it does not appear that he will be.”

He turned on his heel and walked back out onto the deck and down the steps. Rakic was already inside the Navigator. Thor opened the driver’s door but didn’t get inside. I thought about asking where they had come from, but that was only going to be answered with a cold, empty smile, so I let it go. They must have left their car at the top of the drive so as not to tip Krashakov off to his followers.

Thor was still standing with the driver’s door open. “Dainius sends his thanks for your help in resolving this matter. If someday you should need his help, he hopes you will not hesitate to seek it.”

“All right.”

He started to get in the car, then leaned back and looked at me again. “Dainius is a good man to find favor with.”

I thought of the hunting knife sinking into Krashakov’s thigh. “I believe it,” I said.

They were gone then. I stood and watched the Navigator pull up the drive and out of sight, and I tried not to wonder where it might be headed. Kinkaid was sitting on the deck now, and he looked ill. I walked up and knelt down beside him. Ten minutes earlier, I’d wanted to beat the shit out of him. Now I didn’t think I could lift a fist to anyone if I had to. I felt weary.

“Kinkaid,” I said, “those men would have killed you. They still may. You have worked against them, and they are not men to work against.”

He was breathing in ragged gasps. I stared at him and thought about Hartwick, about the fat, pale man, and about the gun that had been pressed to my kneecap. I thought about all of it, and I tried to come up with some more rage. I couldn’t.

“Go back to Sandusky, Kinkaid.”

I stood on the deck and waited until he had started his car with trembling hands and driven away. Then I went to get Julie and Betsy.

I went down to the crawl space and started to pull the panel away, then thought better of it and yelled out my name before I took a bullet in the chest.

They crawled out and into my arms, and they were both crying. I sat on the ground and held them as Betsy buried her face in my chest and Julie wiped at her eyes and tried to compose herself.

“What happened?” she said. “Oh, Lincoln. I was so scared. Where’d they go?”

“They left,” I said. “And they won’t be back. That’s all that matters.” I stroked Betsy’s soft hair with my hand and then gently tugged her face away from my shirt. “Hey, pal, relax. Everything’s fine. You’re fine.”

We sat there for a while, sharing a hug that meant more than any embrace I could remember, and then Betsy said she was cold, so I picked her up and carried her inside.

“You’re taller than my daddy,” she said as we went up the steps, and I closed my eyes and didn’t respond.

They got what things they had left in the cottage, and I put them in the back of the truck. Then I stopped Julie in the drive.

“Put Betsy in the truck, and then I’d like a moment alone with you.”

She stared at me for a few seconds, then nodded and went up the steps. I watched her hips move as she went. Tomorrow. She was going to leave tomorrow.

I walked down to the pond and tossed rocks out onto the ice. They bounced across the surface without breaking the ice near the shore, but when I started lobbing them out into deeper water, they found pockets of broken ice and sank. The effort made the aches Krashakov had left behind flare up anew, but I ignored them.

A few minutes later, Julie walked out and joined me. She stood next to me and watched me throw the rocks. I didn’t stop throwing them until she spoke.

“Betsy’s in the backseat of your truck,” she said. “We’re ready whenever you are.”

“Okay.” I tossed a few more rocks out at the pond.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Julie said.

I dropped the rock that was in my hand. “I know.”

“You can’t come with us.”

I shook my head. “No. I can’t.”

She sighed. “But I can’t stay here anymore, Lincoln. I can’t raise my daughter here.”

“No. You can’t.”

She moved to stand in front of me, then slipped her arms under mine and wrapped them around my back. She stepped in close and pressed her body against me, and I looked down into her beautiful face and beautiful eyes and for a moment I think I forgot to breathe. She squeezed me tightly, then leaned back, still holding me, and looked up at my face and smiled.

“Were you standing this close to your husband when you shot him?” I asked.

Originally it had been one of many possibilities in an unknown situation. Then it had been an idea dismissed as absurd. It had crawled back as a nagging doubt, developed into an always-present question, and then swelled into a strong suspicion. Now, as I looked down into her face, it became the truth.

“No,” she said, and her voice was a hoarse whisper. “I wasn’t quite this close.”

She let go of me and stepped away. At least she hadn’t tried to deny it. It shouldn’t have meant much to me, but it was something.

“When did you decide that was what happened?” she asked.

“I’d wondered about it for a while. Wayne was a professional, and I had trouble believing he would have let someone get in a position to kill him with his own gun and make it look like suicide. Certainly he wouldn’t have let any of the Russians pull it off. And for a while I bought your story about Hubbard, probably because I wanted to. But that one was weak, too, because you told me you had plenty of Hubbard’s money to fund your disappearance. And if there’s one thing near and dear to Jeremiah Hubbard’s heart, it’s his money. If he was planning to kill Wayne or have him killed, he wouldn’t have paid him off first. Then when I stopped to think about how determined you are to take Betsy and leave the country, it made me even more curious.”

“I see.”

“I saw another side of you the night in the hot tub, and it didn’t make sense,” I said. “It wasn’t easy for me to put my ego away, but when I did, I began to question whether I was really attractive enough to make a grieving widow shed her clothes in the middle ofa hotel courtyard.”

She gave me cold eyes. “You think that was an act? Some attempt to distract you, keep your mind away from Wayne?”

I shrugged.

“Believe what you want,” she said. “But that wasn’t the case.”

“You settled it last night,” I said.

“I did? How?”

“When you asked me about Amy. You told me I let my guard down when I was with her and Joe, and that it was the first time you’d seen me do that. I got to thinking about it, and I realized that was probably true. You’d never seen me let my guard down before, and I wondered why not. I wondered why I kept it up when I was with you. That’s when I started coming up with the reasons. There was a pretty long list of them, things that you said that didn’t quite make sense, and…” I sighed and shook my head, then looked back out at the frozen pond.

“And what?” she asked. Her arms were folded across her chest, her eyes focused on the ground.