Larry walked up beside him and came to a stop. He was crying without making a sound. He looked at Webb and spit on him, and then opened the cylinder of the revolver in his hand, shook the used cartridge out, and offered it to Mark.
“I couldn’t let you listen to any more of that,” Larry said hoarsely. “I know what you were trying to do, and it was the right thing. But I couldn’t let it go on.”
Mark turned the bullet casing over in his fingers and watched Garland Webb’s blood soak into the earth.
Larry said, “I didn’t know your wife, Markus. I wish I had. But what you said, about how she died trying to keep you clean? I believe that. It’s far too late in this life for me to ever get clean, but I can still help her with you. I just did.”
Mark got slowly to his feet. He stepped over to Garland Webb’s body and used the toe of his boot to roll the dead man’s head to the side. The lifeless, empty eyes stared back. Mark spent a long time looking into them. Memorizing them. He knew that he would need the memory for many days to come.
For the rest of his life.
“She wouldn’t have wanted it,” he said. “But it should have been me who did it. It had to be me.”
“Nothing has to be,” Larry said.
“She wouldn’t have wanted it,” Mark said again.
“I’m sure I would’ve loved your wife. But I don’t think I would’ve agreed with her on some of the finer points.” Larry studied Garland Webb’s corpse. “There may come a day, I suppose, when we’ll know. If there’s a God, Markus, I’ll be curious what he thinks of this one.”
Mark watched Garland Webb bleed out and half of him wished he’d fired the shot and another half wished it hadn’t been fired at all. When he turned from the corpse and looked away from the circle of light, he was aware of the vastness of the night as if it were a new player in the scene. A cold wind was blowing out of the north, rustling the pines below them. Far off down the mountain, the blackness was broken by flashers.
Police en route.
“They’re coming,” Mark said.
“Yes.”
Mark knelt and untied Garland Webb’s hands, then slid the AR-15 over with his foot until the rifle and the body rested together. Larry watched in silence, understanding.
“Hell of a defensive shot I made,” Larry said.
“You saved me with it,” Mark said. “There’s no lie in that.”
Mark lingered with Webb’s corpse for a moment, looking into those eyes. Then he turned away.
“Where is Mom?”
“She has the view.” Larry pointed up the slope, to the high rocks above the plateau. It couldn’t have been an easy climb.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said. “I forced things in that direction, just by coming here.”
Larry shook his head. “I’d rather have her there than here. That’s the truth. And I don’t think she was leaving this place on her own.”
They walked away together, through the high fence and down the rocky slope toward the distant flashing lights below.
73
The radio had been silent for the last five minutes of the drive, but when Janell pulled onto the narrow lane that ran parallel to the railroad tracks and the power lines she saw a truck parked off the road, in the trees, and knew that it had to be him.
The relief she felt then made her eyes sting, and she blinked back the approaching tears. He had no use for tears, and after so long a wait, she didn’t want to disappoint him when she finally arrived.
A train whistle shrilled to the east, and she realized, with a delirious joy, that she would be with him for the moment. When it all began, when the darkness rose, they would be together.
Just as it had always been planned and promised, in a place years and an ocean away from this spot in the mountains.
She drove as far as she could on the road and then left it, following the tracks in the grass that led to the truck, bouncing over the uneven terrain. The headlights captured a glint above the train tracks, and she braked hard and stared.
The cables were in place. Novak hadn’t disrupted anything.
She slammed the gearshift into park, opened the door, and took off running toward the truck. Her eyes were focused on the truck and the tracks, and she never saw the thing that tripped her. One minute she was running, the next she was down, landing hard, a jarring impact that stole her breath. She rolled over and looked back to see what had caught her feet.
It took her a few seconds to understand that the twisted, blackened thing in the grass had once been human.
“No,” she said, her voice clear and reasonable. It was not him. It absolutely could not be him. It was the climber, Jay, the last recruit, the one who’d be blamed for so much in short order, the man whose name the world would learn. The trusted worker who’d killed his wife and then turned on his country.
“Eli?” She sat up and looked into the darkness as she called for him. When he answered, all would be well.
It was silent until the mournful train whistle sounded again. The approaching train made the ground tremble.
She knew she should look at the terrible corpse again, look closely, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn.
Not him. No, no, no, it is not him.
The voice came from the outer dark north of the train tracks.
“He took my wife.”
She looked in the direction of the sound, but she couldn’t see the man. He spoke again.
“He thought I couldn’t do anything about it. He was wrong.”
The lights of the oncoming train appeared, and in the increasing glow she could finally see the man. He was climbing down the tower.
She forced herself to look back at the body. At Eli.
The tears started then. Silently. She had not wept since she was a little girl.
Approach from the south, he’d said. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave…Together.
The climber reached the base of the tower and came on, walking awkwardly, stiff as a spaceman in his strange suit. He took clumsy, stumbling steps toward the tracks. It was impossible that a man such as this could have killed Eli.
The climber said, “If you want to run, I’d start now. I’m coming over to cut those cables down, and I’ve got a gun.”
The vibrations in the earth were stronger, the light from the train harsher. The moment almost at hand.
She got to her feet, stepped carefully around Eli’s body, and ran to the stolen Yukon. Opened the tailgate and pulled out the shotgun and racked a shell into the chamber. Then she walked back toward the train tracks, the shotgun braced against her body.
When the man who’d come off the tower stopped on the north side of the tracks, she knew that he’d been lying. He had no gun.
“If you want to run,” she said, “I’d start now.”
He hesitated. She saw him turn and look to the north, to the place where distance and darkness would hide him if he ran.
Then he said, “It’s been too long of a day for that,” and started forward again.
She fired from the waist. The first blast of double-aught rattled into the gravel and sparked off the metal rails and he tripped and wavered but did not drop, stumbling on over the tracks as she levered another shell into the chamber and fired again.
This time he fell. His heavy boots caught the lip of the second rail and he didn’t even get his hands out in front of him. He fell onto the embankment and slid down it, one gloved hand outstretched toward the grove of fir trees on the other side of the tracks. The cold wind rose with the sound of the train whistle, and the trees shifted gently and the earth shuddered beneath Janell’s feet.
She wanted to go to him. Wanted to feel his pulse. She had the thought, brief and bold as a flash of lightning, that he would have a very strong pulse and that she would need that in days to come.
There was no time, though. The train was too close and there were more important tasks for her. The one thing she could not grant them was Eli’s body.