Майкл Смит - The Lonely Dead

I quickly got between him and John. I wasn't sure that would make a difference. But John didn't shoot.

I crossed the river. I walked through the cold, flowing water to the other side. I stopped six feet short.

Raised my arm. Pointed my gun down at him.

Paul lay sprawled against the bottom of the wall. He was broken and bleeding heavily. It was hard to believe who he was.

He looked up at me.

His face was so like my own.

Cannon Beach

Four days later we took a tip from Patrice. We drove down to Portland and then struck out due west along Route 6. It rained all the way down through Washington, and it rained as we drove to the coast through the Tillamook State Forest. It's a fine forest. It has many trees. It didn't use to. It was logged for decades and then in 1933 a massive fire, the Tillamook Burn, cut a swathe right through the middle. By the end of it more than three hundred thousand acres of old-growth timber was gone, and it's said that hot ashes fell on ships five hundred miles down the coast. But the fire was put out, eventually, and more trees were planted. By some strange quirk of fate, the forest burned again in '39, '45 and '51, like a returning six-year curse. So people went out and planted a bunch more seeds: garden clubs, scouts, civic groups all spent their weekends out there doing good. Now it just looks like a regular forest. Unless you knew what had happened to it, you'd think it had always been that way. We're like that. Sometimes.

It didn't really occur to either of us to pull over and take a walk. Wouldn't have even if it hadn't been so wet. We had seen enough trees for a while.

— «» — «» — «»—

Nina wouldn't let me shoot him.

I was going to. I really was. I didn't see what else made sense. He was the man who had killed my parents and pulled apart my life. He had killed the daughter of the man who lay on the other side of the gully, his eyes burning holes in my back. He had killed people whose names I would never learn, who might always go unaccounted for. I didn't know whether John was right to hate me for not shooting him the last time. But I thought he would be right if I didn't do it now.

She came up behind me. Didn't say anything, or try to physically stay my hand. I just felt her standing there, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath on my neck. I watched the man beneath me try to move, hands slipping feebly against the rocks like two small, pale creatures near the end of their lives. I don't know what it is with the mad, but they've certainly got force of will. Maybe it's not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I'm kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Force of will wasn't enough for him now, however. He couldn't move, and he had no gun, and he wasn't going to be hurting anyone.

I could still shoot him, I knew. Nobody there would blame me for it. Connolly was watching from the top of the gully. His face looked waxy and I could hear his breathing from where I stood, but the end of his rifle was steady enough. He looked like he might take another shot if I didn't. I knew what John wanted. I didn't know Phil's position at that stage: he seemed a nice guy and not prone to hurt people, but — given that the Upright Man had shot him in the leg and held his head under the water for a spell — I suspect he'd have been with the hawks on this one.

In the end I let my arm drop.

'Useless fucker,' John muttered. Nina walked over to him, dropped to a crouch, and said something quietly in his ear. She kept talking a little while, then took the gun from his hand.

She came and stood with it trained on the Upright Man while I helped Connolly down the side of the gully. He looked dreadful but no worse than I felt. Any man who could make it alone to the gully from where we'd left him was not going to be giving up the ghost easily.

He limped down with me to where Nina said Phil was lying. He tried to help, but in the end it was mainly me who half carried his deputy up to where the others were. There was a lot of noise involved. I propped him up against the far wall, opposite Paul. Connolly sank down next to Phil, his gun firmly trained on Paul.

I didn't know what was going to happen next. It was still snowing. It had slackened off a little, but didn't look like stopping. We were stuck way out in the middle of nowhere. Neither Phil nor Connolly were going to be able to go home under their own steam, and the sheriff's radio wasn't getting anything. John looked more fit: judging by his coat, Nina's shot had not done much more than take a chunk out of his arm. He wouldn't say anything to me, though. He wouldn't even look me in the eyes.

Nina went and fetched the old lady. I hadn't even realized she was there. She looked about as cold as I can imagine anyone could look without actually being discovered in permafrost astride a woolly mammoth. They talked for a few moments, and then Nina went over to Connolly and asked him for his GPS device.

'You won't need that,' the old woman said. 'I know the way.'

Nina put it in her pocket anyway. She came over to me, rubbed my arm for a moment, then took off her coat and gave it to me.

Then she and the old woman started to walk up the river.

'I'll come with you,' John said. He hauled himself up onto his feet.

'We're fine, thanks,' Nina said.

'Maybe. But there are bears around here. I saw one earlier. Saw something, anyway.'

Nina looked at me. I shrugged. I found myself a big, flat rock a couple of yards away from Paul, and watched them go.

Two things happened in the night that I didn't understand.

The first was minor. I realized Phil and Connolly were talking to each other, voices low, and turned to listen.

I heard Phil say: 'You've always known, haven't you?'

'I was with your uncle that night,' Connolly said. He looked like he was about to say more, but then glanced my way and saw I was listening.

He winked at Phil, shook his head. They didn't talk any more after that.

After an hour or so they went to sleep. I didn't know whether that was a good idea, but they were leaning close together, as warm as they were going to get. I couldn't keep them both awake through the night. Felt so tired I couldn't guarantee I could manage it myself. Both were breathing loudly. I'd just have to keep track of that.

My head felt like a stone balanced on another stone. I felt like I had been running for three months and reached the end of the track, to find there was no tape there, just more of the same. Paul seemed to be unconscious now, but he was shivering hard. It occurred to me that I still had a gun in my hand. It also struck me as unlikely that Nina knew exactly how many holes he had in him. One more would most likely go unnoticed. Maybe the key to finding that finish line lay in my right hand. Perhaps shooting Paul was the only thing that was going to end anything for me.

I got up quietly, moved a little closer.

One shot.

The others would wake up, but I could say he moved.

I knew why Nina had stopped me. I thought she didn't want me to commit murder in cold blood. I thought also that she believed that the relatives of the people we knew the Upright Man had killed — the families of the girls who had disappeared in LA two years before, and any others he might eventually be tied to — had a right to more than hearing some backwoods execution had taken place, out of sight, miles away. I knew that this belief was a big part of what had kept her in her job down the years, kept her trying to put bad people away in face of the evidence that others just popped up to take their place. We had kept The Halls secret, admittedly, but then we'd had no captive in our hands.