“We’ll go back to the car now,” I said.
He nodded, wiped his eyes with the back of one hand. “Then where?”
“The car first.”
We retraced the path, buckled in. I jammed the .38 into the dash clip and then backed the car around and drove fast up and over the hill without a glance in the rearview mirror. Neither of us spoke until I turned off the county road onto the highway.
Manganaris asked then, “You planning to notify the sheriff?” Matter-of-factly; not as if he cared.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Your son’s dead and buried. I don’t see any reason not to leave him right where he is.”
“But I killed him. Shot him down like a dog. I deserve punishment, eh?”
Old and dying like his crossroads store, like his farm. Precious little time left. Where was the sense — or the additional justice — in forcing him to leave the Outback and die in prison? But all I said was, “Not by anyone on this earth. God’s instrument, you said. All right. We’ll let God make the final judgment.”
23
When we got back to the Outback, Manganaris seemed reluctant to quit the car. He sat motionless, staring at his knobbed wrist. Without looking at me he said, “I’ve got a gift bottle of whiskey in my cabin.”
“A drink at this hour? It’s not even eleven.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t use hard liquor.”
“Neither do I,” he said.
He opened the door, lifted himself out, moved away in slow, arthritic steps. After a few seconds, I shut off the ignition and followed him.
His cabin was cluttered with possessions, mostly books. While he hunted up the whiskey and a couple of glasses, I sat at an oval table and watched him. It struck me then, for the first time, that he was not very much older than me. All along I’d been thinking of him as an old man, but there could not have been more than a dozen years separation in our ages. If he was old, what did that make me?
The whiskey was single-malt Scotch in a dusty, unopened bottle. He broke the seal, poured two fingers for each of us, lowered himself into a chair across the table. He still wasn’t looking at me, as if he’d grown too embarrassed to make eye contact. He didn’t want to be alone, but he didn’t really want me there, either. Neither of us had anything more to say.
Pretty soon I picked up my glass and drained it. The Scotch went down easily, trailing smoky heat. So easily that I craved another. But I wouldn’t have one, not now and not ever again.
Manganaris hadn’t touched his. He was staring away from me, at something not in this room — something long ago and far away. His eyes were full of blood.
I left him in silence and got into my car and went away from there. Once I was on the highway, moving at speed in the direction of Hollister, I began slowly to uncoil inside. And my thoughts grew as clear and sharp as they’d ever been.
Maybe the law would get onto Dingo and come around asking his father the same sort of questions I had. I hoped not, but if they did he wouldn’t tell them anything; I was the only one he would ever share his secret with. Maybe Annette Byers would recover and provide details of the murders and make noises about the missing money; maybe Grant Johnson would be forced to tell about me after all. And maybe Fuentes would hound me for a while whether I decided to turn the seventy-five thousand over to him or not. But none of that seemed to matter much right now, one way or another. It was all little more than echoes of a period of sound and fury that signified nothing.
Four things had come out of that period, and as far as I was concerned only those four were meaningful.
I had survived.
I had finally stopped bleeding — unlike Adam Manganaris, who would continue to bleed until the day he died.
The clicks were fading, and with the passage of enough time, they would stop haunting my waking hours.
I could not, for any reason, go through something like this again. When you boiled that last one down, it meant that Kerry had been right and I had been wrong. It was in fact the answer to my morning-after question of how, in what profound way, I’d been changed. My work was no longer the only thing that defined and sustained me; I would not shrivel up and die without it. I was sixty years old. I was tired mentally as well as physically. I was sick of pain and sorrow and blood; of dealing with lowlives like Dingo and Byers and Cohalan and Steve Niall and Charlie Bright and Nick Kinsella and Jackie Spoons and Zeke Mayjack and the drunk at the Blacklight Tavern. The time had come to pull back, look elsewhere for satisfaction and peace of mind. I’d had a good long run, done pretty decent work for more than thirty years. I could take pride in my accomplishments, and I had nothing left to prove, to myself or to anyone else.
I’d known all this for some time now at the center of myself, maybe even before Harold Manganaris put that gun to the back of my head, and I was finally able to admit it and to act on it. Tomorrow I would have a long talk with Tamara, start making arrangements for her to take over primary control of the agency and for the hiring of someone to do the fieldwork. The sooner there was an ending here, the sooner there would be a new beginning.
I thought about Kerry, Emily. How much I missed them, how much I needed them, how much I owed them. And I drove a little faster.
Home is the place where.