Shadow Season (28 page)

The kid’s got delicate fingers, Finn notices, as he watches Freddy’s index begin to squeeze the trigger.

None of this should be happening. Finn has the overwhelming sense that he’s standing at the crossroads and has just made a wrong turn. He grabs Freddy’s wrist and tightens his hold, feels the small bones grinding together. He has the feeling that he’s done this before and will do it again.

The kid screams and Finn yanks hard, turning the barrel away from himself.

He thinks, No, wait, I shouldn’t, Dani—

The popgun goes off.

It’s one of those magic bullet shots. Finn watches as a small wound appears in Danielle’s left side, immediately followed by another tiny spurt of blood as the slug exits her collarbone. The stink of burnt flesh makes him draw his head back.

Finn wrenches the .22 free from Freddy and brutally backhands him into the refrigerator. The kid lets out a contented sigh and slides to the floor, leaving a smear the whole ride down.

Dani is still on her feet.

She takes two steps toward Finn and drops into his arms.

She throws up a wad of blood and her eyes roll and then focus again. Her gaze is warm and everlasting, in its own way, even as it hardens and her body goes slack. He sees his future laid out before him in absolute clarity. The loneliness, the darkness, the hot and eternal nights of guilt and madness. Finn’s rage is thoroughly honed
and precisely directed. He’s alive and his wife is dead in his embrace. It’s his fault. Finn hasn’t looked out for his own house. He draws her more tightly to him. His silence fills his mind, and the room, and their home, and retreats across the surface of the earth. He is perhaps more calm now than he’s ever been. He angles the .22 to face him. A breeze stirs the yellow curtains. The morning light is immense. He’ll never remember pulling the trigger.

WITH THE PATIENCE OF THE AGES
, Finn sets about killing and dying. Rack is wiry and powerful the way men who’ve spent their lives in the steps of their ancestors are. Finn knows this is a man who chops his own firewood, catches his own dinner, poaches animals in the wilderness in order to make his own clothing. This isn’t a guy who’s learned from the classroom or even the street. They’re raised differently in the deep woods. What was Rack before Three Rivers began to die? The same?

Finn’s hands go deeper into the meat of Rack’s throat, searching for an answer. Rack’s hands fasten on his windpipe just as securely.

This is a different kind of dying from the others he’s tried before. Just as soothing in its own way. Finn’s thoughts turn red, then blue.

He screams without sound. In his silence, Rack is probably screaming too. Why the fuck not.

Jesse sobs off to Finn’s right, where she’s shrunk against the wall. He thinks, They don’t run away, they never run away. He tells them to go and they stay. If only they had more teenage girls on the force none of this mess ever would’ve happened. Her wails fill the entire
building. It proves Rack didn’t do any serious damage to her anyway.

Finn hisses at her to run but there’s not enough breath for him to form words. He lashes out with his leg in her direction, trying to motion her to get going, but it doesn’t help. She’s here until the end of this thing.

Adrift, he’s in many places and he’s many people. It’s not exactly his whole life flashing before his eyes, but he’s getting a good number of the highlights. He takes stock. It’s been an all-right run. He also remains here on the floor, throttling and being strangled, his arms locked. He and Rack are face-to-face, nose to nose, lips to lips. They could kiss or bite each other’s tongues off. Maybe they will yet.

He’s a good cop, maybe too good in some ways, and not nearly good enough in others. He’s someone not to be trusted. He’s on the roof and can’t take the shot, and he should’ve been let go on the spot. He’s a lecher who’s put his hands on a teenage student, and he should’ve been arrested on the spot. He’s a husband who couldn’t protect the woman he loved, and he should’ve died on the spot. When you get down to it, he’s a carnival freak on the midway, luring the rubes in to see the show.

He’s eternal vigilance, dedicated and steadfast. He doesn’t do enough, he’s never done enough, but at least he’s always had an honest purpose. Right now, it’s to kill. You can’t get any more honest than that. His shoulder cracks again, and the pain rides up into his blue thoughts, turning them a sweet shade of indigo. The steel plate in his skull is covered with engravings in languages unspoken for ten thousand years.

There’s a sound of animal fear. It comes from one of
them, perhaps both of them. He wonders which of them wants to live more, and for what reason. Finn tries to create a list but he is stumped by the time he reaches number two.

He wonders if Rack Moon, this knife-wielding rapist, has tender dreams for his family. If he has any true loves. If his regrets are any more heartfelt. If somewhere in the hills he has a wife and children worried about him, waiting at the window. He sees a boy and a girl, six or seven years old, a fire burning behind them but the firewood getting low. One of them will have to hike out to the shed and get more.

Finn thinks, This prick likes hiding bodies in the shed. What are his kids going to find? Who else has gone missing? Who else hasn’t paid?

There’s a sound of human fear. It has a subtext that is almost musical.

Rack’s hold loosens and Finn’s tightens further. Even shadows want to survive between the moments when clouds pass overhead.

I am stone in the night, Finn thinks. I will not break.

Rack’s hands withdraw. Finn gasps and chokes but doesn’t let go. Rack tries to yank Finn’s fingers from his own neck, but it’s too late, he’s too weak to do anything about it now.

Finn sees his silhouette, flat against brick, performing a burlesque of panic.

A few seconds more and Rack’s actions slow, then stop, and then he’s nothing but deadweight on top of Finn. They lie there cheek to cheek, sucking air. Finn doesn’t have enough strength to shove his shadow aside.
The two of them remain like that, Finn breathing deeply, Rack’s breaths coming slow and shallow.

Moments shift to minutes and eventually Finn is able to crawl out from under Rack Moon. He tries to call for Jesse but he’s got no voice. She’s not crying anymore, he doesn’t know where she is. Maybe she’s run away at last.

He reaches with his good arm, but he’s got no idea in which direction he’s stretching.

Then there’s a knife at his throat.

“YOU STILL OWE,” HARLEY WHISPERS IN
his ear. She holds her brother’s enormous blade steadily, with confidence. He guesses that she’s greatly skilled with it. She’s probably the one who skinned the animals and sewed the hides together to make her brothers’ clothing. “I didn’t want none of this, but I need that money.”

“I promise … you’ll get it … next … business … day…” he rasps in a voice he’s never heard before. Blood pools at his nostrils so he has to turn his chin or drown, as he falls into a blackness that’s still not nearly so deep or endless as blindness.

DANIELLE’S BEEN IN THE GROUND FOR
three weeks by the time Finn finally comes around in the hospital.

The doctors ask him what his name is and who’s the president. He says, I’m not a goddamn idiot.

He asks about Dani and everyone ignores him. He keeps asking. They give him motor-skills tests, have him try to pass a ball back and forth between hands. They’re impressed as hell that he can hold a conversation. They want to know what the last thing he remembers is.

Finn asks about Dani again and when they continue to ignore him Finn reaches out wildly and grabs the nearest asshole and begins to throttle him. Security is called. Three muscular jerk-offs start wrestling with him right there in the hospital bed, a guy who just woke up from a coma, punching him in the stomach and face. It’s not for another fifteen or twenty minutes that Finn realizes there aren’t any bandages over his eyes. He’s blind.

The investigating team asks Finn a lot of questions too. They take it in rotation, asking about Dani, Ray, Carlyle, Carlyle’s captain, Carlyle’s sons, and some other shit. Finn says little because they want him to say little. They’ve rewritten the facts to suit their needs. They’ve got enough bad news on their plate without admitting
that a cop accidentally killed his wife and then tried to blow out his brains. And fucked that up too.

Freddy’s gun was a drop. The kid at least cleaned up after himself before he ran out of Finn’s house. Or somebody wiped it down anyway. No fingerprints, no blood, it was like the kid was never there.

The team’s already written it up that Dani shot Finn in a fit of jealousy and that he killed her in self-defense. Forensics must be laughing their asses off at that one. How a guy with his brains blasted against a kitchen wall could shoot anybody in self-defense is another question they’re not asking. Bad as it looks, it looks better than the truth, and it saves his rep. Makes the force look better. Everybody’s ass is covered and the force escapes a full-scale investigation into corruption.

Finn plays like he has amnesia. It makes everyone feel better.

IAD shows up afterward and asks him all the same questions about all the same people and events. They don’t want to know the answers either. Not on this one.

Roz has been let go from the hospital but the administration doesn’t follow up with charges and she retains her status as an RN. She shows up twice a day to bring Finn flowers, air freshener, potpourri. She reads the newspapers to him.

He finds out that Freddy Carlyle has been sent to a private hospital in Tempe, Arizona. Freddy was so attached to his older brother that when they buried Donald, Freddy jumped in after him and made a big scene in front of all the wiseguys and the feds taking photos. A few days later, Freddy tried to hang himself with his
shoelaces and pulled down the ceiling fan in the rec room.

Finn’s rage is aimed elsewhere. He’s got nothing but sympathy and a complex kind of understanding for the kid.

He goes under the knife again for more touch-up surgery.

Despite everything, Carlyle manages to snake his way out of an indictment when one of his boys finally manages to blow up the DA. It’s the sort of thing that went down all the time in the early seventies, when the mob was icing opposition in the streets with no subtlety at all. Carlyle shows up on the news a lot, giving interviews on morning shows. He’s articulate and sharp and has learned the fine art of sounding like one of the downtrodden masses who is nothing but a pawn of much greater forces.

In his hospital bed, Finn listens intently.

As he suspected, Ray goes down but only gets a nickel jolt in Sing Sing. So do a couple of other cops and a few members of Carlyle’s crew. It’s a cakewalk. They’ll buddy up in the joint and take over the place within a week.

Ray phones from prison and says, “I told you they were going to move fast.”

“You didn’t tell me that Freddy Carlyle worshipped his older brother. For him, it was personal.”

“Yeah, that kid, he had some weird wiring. I didn’t think he’d have the heart to take a poke at you.”