Tana French - The Searcher - A Novel

“Get outa my way or I’ll shoot you too!”

All around Cal things are rocking and rippling, but her silhouette in the doorway is steady as a monument; the heavy rifle at her shoulder doesn’t even shake. If these men refuse her, or if they lie to her, or maybe even if they tell her the truth, she’ll blow them all to kingdom come.

“Kid,” he shouts. His voice comes out frayed by dust and blood. “Kid. Send them away.”

“ Where’s Brendan? ”

“Please, kid,” Cal shouts. His voice cracks open. “Please. Just send them away. I’m begging you.”

There are three breaths’ worth of pure, cold nighttime silence. Then the Henry goes off again. The rooks explode from their tree in a vast black firework of wings and panic. Cal’s head goes back and he roars like an animal up at the night sky.

When he gasps for air, paralyzed between lunging for the rifle and lurching around to see the damage, he hears Trey’s voice shout, “Now get ta fuck!”

“We’re going!” a man shouts back, behind him.

It takes another second for Cal’s jolted brain to catch up. Trey aimed high, into the treetops.

“Get ta fuck offa this land!”

“I’m bleeding, God almighty, look—”

“Come on, come on, come on—”

Rough panting, jumbled voices that Cal can’t make into sense, feet hurrying through grass. When he turns to get a look at the men, his knee gives out and he collapses, gradually and ungracefully, into a sitting position. The men are already vanishing into the dark, three swift black shapes huddled together with their heads ducked down low.

Cal sits where he is and presses his coat sleeve to his streaming nose. Trey stays in the doorway, with the rifle to her shoulder. The rooks whirl, screaming abuse, and then gradually calm down and settle back into their tree to bitch in comfort.

When the muffled voices have faded up the lane, Trey lowers the gun and comes loping down the beam of light to Cal. He takes his sleeve off his nose long enough to say, “The safety. Put the safety on.”

“I did,” Trey says. She hunkers down to peer at him in the darkness. “How bad are you?”

“I’ll live,” Cal says. He starts trying to reorganize his limbs into some arrangement that will let him stand up. “We need to get inside. Before they come back.”

“They won’t come back,” Trey says with satisfaction. “I got one fella goodo.”

“OK,” Cal says. He can’t articulate the fact that, if they do come back, they’ll come with guns of their own. He manages to get to his feet and stands there, wobbling gently and trying to work out whether his knee will carry him.

“Here,” Trey says. She loops her free arm across his back, taking his weight on one skinny shoulder. “Come on.”

“No,” Cal says. He’s thinking of her injuries, which at the moment he can’t picture exactly but which he recalls as horrifying. Trey ignores him and starts towards the house, and Cal finds himself moving with her. They shamble across the grass, weaving in and out of the light, propping each other up like a pair of drunks. Both of them are panting. Cal can feel every inch of the darkness spread out around them, and every inch of their bodies that would make a perfect target. He tries to limp faster.

By the time he slams the door behind them and double-locks it, every muscle in his body is juddering. The sudden brightness smashes him right in the eyes. “Get me a towel,” he says, dropping into a chair at the table. “And that mirror.”

Trey leaves the Henry on the counter and brings him both, and then a bowl of water and his first-aid kit, and stands there hovering while he presses the towel to his nose. “How bad are you?” she asks again.

The tautness in her voice reaches Cal. He takes a long breath and tries to steady himself. “ ’Bout the same as you were the other night,” he says, through the towel. “Pretty banged up, but I’ve taken worse.”

The kid hovers for another minute, watching him and fingering her lip. Then she heads abruptly to the freezer and starts rummaging. While Cal waits for the bleeding to stop, he pulls up his pants leg and checks out his knee. It’s purple and inflating, with a darker purple line scored right across it, but after some experimenting he’s pretty sure it’s not broken. His collarbone is at least cracked: it shoots out pain whenever he moves his shoulder. When he probes very carefully along it, though, the line is straight. It shouldn’t need setting, which is good. Cal would much prefer not to explain any of this to a doctor.

Trey dumps two plastic bags of ice cubes on the table in front of him. “What else?” she asks.

“I’m gonna need a sling,” Cal says. “That sheet over the bathroom window, that’s long enough that we can cut off a strip at the bottom. Scissors in that drawer there.”

Trey goes into the bathroom and comes back with a length of cloth, which she fashions into a dirty but serviceable sling. Once they have Cal’s coat eased off him and the sling fixed on, she pulls herself up to sit on the countertop, where she can keep an eye out the kitchen window.

Cal’s nose has stopped bleeding. He tests it, trying not to let the kid see him flinching at each touch. It’s swollen to twice its size, but the line of it feels much the same as it ever did. His shaking has ebbed enough that he can clean up his face, give or take, with a corner of the towel dipped in the bowl of water. In the mirror, he looks just about how he expected: his nose is the shape of a tomato and he has two black eyes coming, although his are nowhere near as impressive as the kid’s.

Trey is watching him. “Look at us,” Cal says. His voice sounds just as muffled and blurred as it did through the towel. “Pair of beat-up stray mutts.”

Trey nods. Cal can’t tell how much this has shaken her. Her face still has the hard, intent focus that he heard in her voice across the yard and the gun. It seems wrong on a child. Cal feels like he ought to do something about it, but right this moment he can’t work out what.

He leans back in the chair, settles one ice pack on his knee and the other one on his nose, and concentrates on slowing his body and his mind so they can work right. He goes back over previous beatings he’s taken, in order to put this one into perspective. There were kids in school, a few times. There was the idiot who came after him with a piece of pipe outside a party Cal and Donna were at in their wild days, because he thought Cal had looked funny at his girlfriend—Cal still has a dent in his thigh where the end of that pipe dug in. That guy was aiming to kill him, and so was the guy jacked up on something or other who charged out of a back alley when Cal was on patrol and wouldn’t quit till Cal broke his arm. And yet, somehow, here Cal still is, sitting halfway across the world in a back corner of Ireland, with yet another bloody nose. He finds this strangely comforting.

“We had a beat-up stray mutt one time,” Trey says, from the counter. “Me and Brendan and my dad, we were going to the village, and we found him on the road. All scraped up and bleeding, and a bad leg. My dad said he was dying. He was gonna drown him so he wouldn’t suffer. But Brendan, yeah? He wanted to fix the dog up, and in the end my dad said he could try. We had that dog six more years. He always had a limp, but he was grand. He usedta sleep on Bren’s bed. He died of being old, in the end.”

Cal has never heard her talk this much, especially for no apparent purpose. At first he thinks it’s tension coming out as babble, but then he looks at her looking at him, and realizes what she’s doing. She’s using what she’s learned from him: talking about whatever comes into her head, in order to soothe him down.