The music slowed. David and Sunny broke from the dance area and made for the picnic tables set out in the open lawn in front of the old courthouse.
Someone finally had taken the police tape down from around the building. Yet Jason’s window remained boarded over, as it had since after he was killed. No one had yet begun to talk about what to do with the structure, now that it was empty. As much as the stone up the hill south of town, the brick edifice was Jason’s grave marker.
David surveyed the crowd for Charlotte. He was hoping she’d stay. So much of the family was dead to him now. Or just dead. Ben Senior and Bonnie lost in their paranoia. Dale lost in his greed. Samuel lost in dementia. The rest in the ground.
As they stepped onto the lawn, David saw old Henry Smoke sitting atop a table, a cigarette in his hand. They sat beside him.
“Who’s your crane?” Henry asked.
“My crane? Oh. This is Sunny,” David said. “Sunny, this is Henry.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” she started to say.
Whatever she said after that was lost in a boom that echoed in the sky.
The music stopped all at once, and the electricity of the crowd dulled to murmuring voices.
“Was that . . . ?” Sunny started to ask.
“Gun shot,” David said, already on his feet.
Charlotte had run, and the man had come after her, and—damn her stupid shoes—he was gaining on her when she heard the yelled warning.
“Stop!”
She froze as she looked to her side and saw Brooke, with her shoulders squared and gun drawn, pointed at her. No. Not at her. At him.
The man with the knife stopped, too, but only for a moment. Then he lifted the blade. There was only a foot or two between them.
And then the sky exploded with thunder—BOOM BOOM—and the man staggered, and a hiss of air rushed through his lips.
But he didn’t drop.
He ran, darting behind a garage, into hard shadow. By the time Brooke reached it, there was no sign of him. She looked at the woman and only then discovered it was Charlotte. She wasn’t hurt. Thank Christ, she wasn’t hurt.
“Stay with me,” Charlotte said, her voice barely audible. “Please.”
“I’m here,” Brooke said.
Holding close together, they backed into the open space of the street. Footsteps.
David sprinted toward them.
“Charlotte!” he yelled, seeing her.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“Was it . . . ?” he asked.
Brooke nodded.
“That way.”
She pointed with her gun at the shed.
David ran ahead. It was only once he’d crossed into the shadows that he remembered he hadn’t worn his gun. His hands were empty.
Nobody in Old Town had fences in their yards. One lot spilled into the next. Rickety houses. Clothes lines strung between trees. Piles of firewood. He knew this land. Knew this town like the contours of his skin. The killer wouldn’t, he figured. Maybe it was enough to catch him.
He took slow, careful steps. The dance remained quiet, aside from a few faint voices. There was no wind. The night was silent.
David worked his way forward, keeping tight to shadows, along the edges of houses and sheds, along a row of small cedar trees.
He stopped and crouched. Inhaled deeply and held it. Listened.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. There.
The crunch of dry leaves. Just ahead. Maybe twenty feet, in the adjoining lot. Beside a motorboat, covered with a tarp, up on a trailer. David leaned out and strained to focus in the gloom. Was that the outline of a man?
It moved, the shape, and there was another sound of feet falling on leaves.
David searched about him for anything he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing. Across the yard he saw firewood, piled almost head high. Good cover.
His knee griped at him. He ignored it as he tensed his legs.
One, he counted in his head. Two. Three.
He charged forward out of a football stance toward the boat, fists up. As he came to the logs, the whole pile shifted suddenly, like it was caught in a wave, one that crashed against David, the weight of the wood slamming him back, thrusting him to the ground.
The shadow lingered a moment. The same shadow. The one that had haunted him since that night in the courthouse. It took a half step forward, toward him, the blade ready.
Then it ran away, melting again into other shadows in the night.
David shoved the logs free from his chest, righted himself, and sprinted on, chasing.
The man moved impossibly fast. He curled tight around a house, ducked between it and a shed, vaulted over the hood of a parked car.
David lost more and more ground with every step he took until, after what hadn’t even been a minute, the man was gone. In the distance, he heard sirens. He walked back toward Brooke and Charlotte.
They were sitting on a curb behind the old courthouse. Conover and Priest were there, impossibly, with a fleet of black sedans parked at a harsh angle, the doors still open. The sirens grew louder.
There was a crowd by Main Street, but they hung back. David saw Sunny there. He gave a quick wave. I’m okay. Come over.
“Anything?” Priest asked.
David shook his head.
“Saw him. He was fast. Too fast.”
“You see enough to get a description?” Conover pushed him.
“Too dark. They’re okay?” David asked.
He nodded to Charlotte and Brooke, who sat beside each other. Brooke held Charlotte’s shaking hands in hers.
“Your deputy did good work. Heard screaming. Saw the attack as it was starting. She hit him, she says. Heck of a shot from that distance, if she did,” Priest said.
“Charlotte?” David asked.
“She wasn’t able to say anything yet. You might want to try.”
David settled onto the curb beside his cousin.
“Charlotte. God. I’m so glad you’re okay.”
She was crying. Little choking sobs.
“He didn’t hurt you?” David asked softly.
She shook her head.
“Cousin, I’m sorry to have to ask you this. I am. But I have to, so we can stop him. Did you see him? Do you think you can describe him?”
Charlotte looked at him. Her eyes were opened so wide the white showed all around.
“Why me, David? Why does he want to kill me?”
She didn’t say anything more, just sat there and gently shook her head back and forth, rocking.
Brooke gave David a knowing look. She understood now. Understood the weight of what he’d carried all this time. Understood the extremity of danger facing all of them. The weight of it pulled down at her shoulders, heavier than gravity.
“I hit him,” Brooke said. “I know I hit him.”
“I know,” David said. “He could be wearing a bulletproof vest, or . . .”
He let the sentence die in the air. He didn’t know what other explanation there could possibly be.
“God,” Charlotte said.
David looked over to Brooke.
“You didn’t get a good look at him?” he asked.
She stared emptily back.
“Brooke,” he said, snapping her back to attention.
“What?” she asked.
“The killer. You didn’t see him?”
“No. I don’t know.”
Priest was looking around them, at all the eyes peering at them as an ambulance and a state police cruiser raced toward them.
“Okay, this is enough. We need all of you in a secure location,” she said, recovering her assertiveness. “Everyone in the car. Now.”
They spent the night at the new courthouse. They put Charlotte and Brooke in different holding rooms and asked them to recount their stories again and again. Sunny checked to see if either had any traces of the spire on them, but both were clean.
David watched through one-way glass. Charlotte kept stopping, seizing up in crying fits, then apologizing. David so badly wanted to go and hug her and provide whatever comfort he could. But more than that, his anger boiled over into a rage that surprised him with its intensity. Every bit of his skin felt as if it had been pricked with pins. His heart charged inside his chest. This was it. This was the last time that son of a bitch hurt someone.
“Why would anyone want you dead?” Priest asked Charlotte, as curt as ever.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte whispered. “I don’t know.”
In the other room, Brooke looked as if she’d seen a ghost, and it had scared her into a catatonic state. She showed no fear or sadness. She sat there, her face seeming especially pale, and stared straight ahead.
It was nearly dawn by the time they finally let Brooke out of the room. David waited for her as she came out.
“You did good,” David said. “You saved her life.”
Brooke said nothing.
“I called Spady,” he continued. “I told him you’re okay. That there was a shooting, you’d have to work late. He was worried, but he knows you’re okay.”
She nodded.
“Thanks.”
“You can’t tell him, Brooke,” David said. “You understand what’s at stake, right? You can’t tell anyone.”
She nodded again, then she left for home.
Priest said they would take Charlotte back to her hotel and watch over her. David drove behind them, Sunny riding along, then David followed inside, hugging Charlotte as tightly as he could before watching her step into the elevator and disappear.
David drove them toward his apartment but turned at the last moment, pulling onto a dirt road that ran down to the river. Sunny didn’t question him. As he stepped out of the truck, she followed.
To the east, where the sky remained open, unbroken by the giant or anything else, the sky exploded in pink and indigo that traced the wispy clouds like watercolor seeping across paper as the sun mounted its first attack against the night.
David led the way through thick brush down close to the river. In the shallow water, cranes stood in great bunches, thousands of them, just beginning to rouse with tentative calls. This was where his parents had brought him when he was little, to this exact spot, a place no one else knew existed.
They stood there, watching, and as Sunny leaned against David, he wrapped her in his arms.
The sun rose, a sliver of fire breaking the plane of the horizon.
The cranes grew louder. In ones and twos, then all at once, they beat their wings and pulled themselves into the sky, flying so close overhead that David and Sunny could hear the soft whap-whap-whap of wing against wind. They moved not as single birds but as one great body, each linked with the other, so that as one dipped or soared or turned, all did the same, effortlessly, etching a grand pattern overhead.
“Oh,” Sunny said.
It broke the spell of the long quiet, and David startled, looking down at her. She still studied the birds.
“Oh what?”
“I think I understand.”
“Understand what?”
She looked at him. She was smiling. In spite of everything, she was smiling.
“I think I know how Gulliver works.”