Hollis called me at one minute after midnight, just as I reached the stretch of road outside Pronghorn that followed the river. I couldn’t see it in the dark, not even by the bright starlight, but I could hear water rushing over rocks and swirling against the tree roots at its shore. The river must be running high and fast for the sound to carry over the Barracuda’s throaty engine, and the wind whistling past the open window.
I pulled over to the side of the cracked pavement and killed the lights. It took me an extra second. I wasn’t used to the controls in my new car yet.
“Hollis?” I said.
“Van. I’m never sure if this time of night is late or early for you,” he said.
“You called it right tonight.” I stepped out and took the shotgun with me. “Any later and I wouldn’t have a signal.”
“You’re working, then. Good, good.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Not on this end. Just . . . after all of the bedlam during the past few days, I felt the need to check in. Premonitions, maybe. Are you well?”
I walked down to the river’s edge, feeling the grind of rocks shifting under my soles. The water was visible only through the absence of light. A wide dark ribbon that made its speed known by sound and by the smell of clean droplets thrown into the air. I took in a lungful. Breathing hardly hurt at all.
“I’m all right,” I said to Hollis. “My chest is healing.”
“That’s a blessing. Luce asked after you.”
“Tell her I’ve recovered. Scratch that, I’ll call her myself.” I could apologize—again—for being a jackass.
Hollis chuckled. “It’s just as well. I never—”
“Hang on.”
I set down the phone and listened closely. The night enveloped a lot of sounds. Splashing water. Frogs in the marshes. The slow tick of the car’s engine cooling. Nothing else.
“I’m back,” I said.
“And busy, right. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Hollis.”
“Yes?”
“Did Dono ever kill anyone?”
The pause was long enough for me to count five ticks of the engine.
“Why do you ask?” Hollis said. “No, never mind—not the point. And it’s over the phone, for heaven’s sake.” There was another pause. I let him think.
“You don’t speak much about your time overseas,” he said finally. “Not to me, at any rate. I’m not sure which of us that’s meant to shield, but no matter. Your grandfather, now. He was much the same. Close to the vest.”
“About when he was young.”
“About a lot of things. His family in Belfast. His life during the Troubles. I learned more about those times from your grandmother in the short years I knew her than I did in the decades I was Dono’s friend.”
“I can see that.”
“Most of all, Dono didn’t talk about crimes he’d done before I knew him. On the rare occasions that I would ask, he’d sidestep. Or tell me to shut it, depending on the day. But we both know what sorts of jobs he was suspected of. Sometimes convicted of.”
Armed robbery. Weapons charges. Assault with intent. Everything short of the big M-One.
All crimes I’d committed myself in the past two days alone.
“Of course, this was back when police were more inclined to grab the collar of the sorry fellow nearest them, or find the same man they’d pinched last week, instead of running down clues and worrying about lawsuits,” Hollis said. “So I take rumors with a grain of salt.”
“You’re stalling, Hollis,” I said.
“I know I am. It’s a hard thing to say.”
The engine had gone silent.
“Yes,” he said. “I believe Dono killed someone. More than one. Between his temper and his . . .”
“Savagery.”
“Instincts was what I was grasping at, but yes. That. Compare those unfortunate traits with the decision he made later in life to avoid guns, and yes. I think your man killed people, maybe innocent people, and it weighed heavy on him. Perhaps more than he ever thought it would. He rejected the Church early on, so he didn’t fear any eternal damnation. His suffering was more earthly than that.”
“Dreams,” I said. “That’s where it has teeth.”
“I understand.”
“Thanks, Hollis.”
“You’re all right, then? Is there anything I can do?”
“You just did it.”
I hung up.
My grandfather and I had last spoken when I was barely eighteen. Still a kid in most ways, even if life had shoved a few lessons down my throat early on. Dono and I had never talked as adults. I wondered if he would have ever shared what made him turn that corner in his life. What he might have said about my dreams, and I about his. Comparing the weight of our souls.
A mosquito buzzed around me. I caught it before it found my neck. After listening again for the sound of any pursuit, I got into the car and made it howl on the road into the rocky hills.