The Datsun’s windshield wipers soldiered on through the rain. Highway 20, out to the Tumquala Reservation, was surfeited in flats of stilled water that sent fantails up to the doors as his little hatchback slogged through them. It was only mid-afternoon, and already the headlights of passing vehicles were dim and ghostly things that slowly cut past him in the gloom. The scenery on each side of the highway—thickets of trees, fields green and bogged with skeins of water, crumbling outbuildings leaning and wreathed in vines and various hues of rust and weathered wood, the poor odd field animal with its head down, hunched against the downpour—seemed blurred for all the rain, all of it taking on the shimmering, blurry air of a poorly-shot photograph. The only sounds were the clatter of the wipers and the radio turned low, rock songs from his boyhood. The driver’s side window was cracked open to let the cigarette smoke out.
Dinkle was only a bit part in his dreams now. Mendez, the grenade, the Cong, it was all second-tier shit these days—the movie had changed reels. The locale had switched too: no longer the village, everything took place instead on the carved-out hillside of Tumquala Park or, across the cliffs, on the beach itself. Only one thing was constant: the tah-kee-na-teh was the main attraction, growling and muttering and almost visible through the phosphorescent dunes, an almost-shape spied at a glance through the trembling light, the wavering grasses.
He passed the sign demarking the reservation and turned off the highway down a winding road with sodden, empty fields on each side the color of burnt hide. In the distance lay a thumbing of dead trees, and beyond that, a horizon of dark and sloping hills. Ruts in the road filled to the brim with rainwater.
He arrived through the reservation gates to a dilapidated and scattered village of trailers and outbuildings and, here and there, the hulking skeletal frames of vehicles seemingly left to sink into the ground. The ditches on each side of the main road were choked with trash and weeds. He passed a pair of men in bright yellow slickers spearing the trash with hooked sticks, who stopped and stared at him as he drove on. Further out, like spokes from a wheel, he caught glimpses of sheds and tin-roofed houses, mobile homes, some of them manicured and cared for and some gone to rot, as if an apocalypse had already taken place or was well underway. Hayslip realized that he had never been to the reservation in all of his years as a cop—had never needed to, since the Tumqualas had their own tribal police. Funny though, now that he’d turned in his badge and gun, been stripped of them, here he was.
The tale of the tah-kee-na-teh had been found in the library, in a book that collected myths of Northwestern Indians; he had been studying the legend since the day that Leon Davies had shown up with the cease and desist order at the dig site. He had discovered a fervor for it, and an inclination that surprised him. When Hayslip read the story, it had felt like a series of locked tumblers aligning in his skull. Like a flashbulb of recognition. Nothing else that he’d found resonated the way this story did. The brave, and his poor dead wife, and the collection of birds; the nightly, constant visitations; every element was there. The venomous, playful quality of it all. Had Dobbs read it, taken the time, he’d have seen it as well, he was sure of it. Hayslip had reached a place where sleep hardly mattered, food was a thing endured. It was fine; since the discovery of the story, it finally felt like the end was in sight. All of this—all of the loss and confusion and searching—had fallen into place once he was willing to make the leap of faith to believe that there was something long-lived and of ill will prowling the town. Once you made that concession, everything else was a cinch. There were still questions, sure, riddled with unknowns. But the how of it all was answered, and any cop would tell you that all the rest was secondary to that. All else fell into place.
The Tribal Council office was a squat, mustard-colored building with a rickety ramp entrance, ringed by a gravel parking lot. Hayslip turned off the engine and, by habit, went to adjust the gun belt that no longer sat on his hips. He sat there listening to rain fall on the roof. He had little in the way of a plan, and was almost positive that any answers he’d get would be because Davies wanted to tell him. There would be no cajoling or trickery. Davies was smarter than him, and Hayslip had long since surpassed the point where he could physically overpower someone Davies’ size. Anything given here would be given as a gift. But Hayslip had seen the crime scene photos of Todd Whitlock’s body, and how the tenets of a body’s architecture had been entirely, gleefully, disbanded (there lay an arm where a leg should be, and that was probably a leg over there, and look: strings of intestines unspooled like tape from a cassette and strung everywhere in the blood-darkened sand) and he was positive now that Dobbs would do nothing. That the man was willfully blind. Hayslip was the only one that could help the town, and he sat for a moment beneath the thrumming roof and tried to prepare himself. As always, when he sat still for more than a moment, he felt his eyes drooping closed, felt his head begin dipping toward the steering wheel, and he slapped at his cheeks and stepped out into the rain and up the splintered ramp.
He was surprised to find Leon Davies alone in the office, seated behind an oak desk at the far end of the room. He wore a red-checkered flannel shirt, his hair loose on his shoulders. He peered at Hayslip over the rims of his bifocals and, surprisingly, seemed to brighten at his entrance, rising from his desk. Above their heads, the fluorescent lights buzzed. Wooden paneling lined the walls, and a pair of elk horns lay mounted on felt near the clock. A pair of glass cases was set into one wall; they held a collection of woven baskets and reed pipes, and a headless mannequin wore a beaded shirt. There was a pair of metal folding chairs in front of Davies’s desk, and he shook Hayslip’s hand and motioned him toward one. They both sat and Davies said, “Haysworth? Was that it?”
“Hayslip. Nick.”
“That’s right. How’s things, Deputy Hayslip? Looks like you’ve gotten into it recently.”
“What’s that?”
Davies pointed. “Your mouth.”
“Oh, right. Yeah.” Hayslip smiled. “Now that you mention it, we’d better stick with Nick, actually.”
Davies frowned. “Oh?”
“I’m here informally. A personal day.”
“Really.”
“Really. I’m doing a little investigative research into the case of the Tumquala girl, was just hoping you had a second.”
Davies nodded and took off his bifocals, tucked them into his shirt pocket. His hair shone glossy under the lights and Hayslip wondered again about the whitened scars on his eyebrows, his nose. He could hardly imagine the man throwing a punch, but that kind of underestimation was advantageous, wasn’t it? “So this is independent research?” Davies asked. “For yourself, or is there a third party involved?”
“A third party?”
Davies smiled at him, indulgent. “Come on, Deputy Hayslip. Nick. Give me a break. I’m happy to share information, but I want to know who I’m speaking to. You were there at the gravesite when I handed the papers to those kids, so you’ll understand if I’m a bit trepidatious, right? I just want to know who I’m talking to. Where your loyalties lie, and all that.”
“Well, my loyalty’s with the truth,” Hayslip said, and Davies actually laughed out loud.
“I’m serious.”
Davies leaned forward, bracing his forearms on that big desk. The clock thunked out a new minute, and in the silence, Hayslip could hear the gentle purr of the rain on the roof. “You’re not here in the capacity of a police officer at all? This is off the record, that’s what you’re telling me.”
Hayslip shrugged. What did he have to lose? “I’ll be straight with you, Mr. Davies. I’m on administrative leave.”
A slow and measured nod from Davies. “So we’re definitely off the record then.”
“Absolutely.”
Davies leaned back in his chair, ran his tongue over his teeth. He shuffled some papers, straightened them and put them in a drawer. Running a hand over the surface of the desk, he said, “Okay. Shoot.”
Hayslip, surprised, was unsure what to say. He realized he’d hardly expected to get this far, hadn’t expected anything to get green-lighted that quickly. “I guess I was wondering, in part, about the actual forensics involved.”
“Well, that’s not really . . . that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with our aspect of the girl’s death.”
“I understand that. But surely you know some of the specifics.”
“Well, we got copies of the reports from the anthropologists’ field studies, copies of their photographs, things like that. The university’s actually being very forthcoming, so we know about as much as they do. But like I said, that’s not really in our scope. We just want the bones so we can perform the proper death rites on them. To bury the girl where she belongs.”
“Which isn’t in a museum,” Hayslip offered.
Davies pointed at him from his clasped hands. “Exactly. The Tribal Council is really just hoping that once we get the actual bones—which, according to the university’s Anthropology Department, is supposed to be any day now—the whole thing just quiets down. Like I told those kids, we don’t want years of litigation and cross-suits. It’s messy and expensive and self-indulgent. And it doesn’t really help anyone in the long run.”
“Like I said, I’m not here to stir any political pots.”
“Well, the university is being very helpful, and we appreciate that.”
“I’m curious as to what you think happened to her.”
Even as exhausted as he was, he caught it: how Davies’s eyes skated away from his, rabbit-fast, to the door and back. “Again, that’s not really in the scope of what matters to the Council.”
“I understand. But what do you think happened? You mentioned something before that stuck with me. About Indian hunters up and down the coast. Ex-prospectors.”
Davies nodded grimly. “I shouldn’t say just prospectors. Some of them were farmers who tried to make a go of it but the land didn’t hold up. Or ex-soldiers. Drunks. Psychopaths. Whoever could stomach hunting and killing people for a living.”
“The anthropologists’ evidence suggested defense wounds on her hands, bite marks.”
“It sounds like,” Davies said with a dismissive smile, “you’ve read more of the report than I have.”
“They said it’s likely the girl was killed by an animal of some kind.”
“Like I said, cause of death isn’t really in the Council’s scope. Or interest, frankly.”
Hayslip folded his hands in his lap and leaned forward. “So it’s a coincidence that the Tumquala girl died in 1868 the same way that a man did just last week, not half a mile from where her remains were found?”
It was unmistakable now, the way Davies’s eyes skirted the room. When he looked back at Hayslip a hardness had been cast on his face, an anger. Fuck, Hayslip thought. Looks like the politician’s taking a backseat. Who’s this I’m talking to?
“It sounds like you’ve got an agenda, Nick.”
Hayslip reached into his jacket and tossed the sheaf of mimeographed pages onto Davies’s desk. Davies just stared at him, his mouth a knitted line.
“That’s the story of the tah-kee-na-teh,” Hayslip said, “an old Tumquala—”
“I know what the tah-kee-na-teh is,” Davies said. “It’s probably time you hit the road, Nick.”
The chair was rigid and unforgiving against his back; the clock, again, notched loudly in its housing. His hands gripped his knees, and he could feel his heartbeat thud in his chest like a pool ball, wrapped in felt, colliding clumsily against his ribs.
“Two months ago,” he said, “a citizen brings a dead bird into the sheriff’s office. Thing’s ripped in half. Someone—something—leaves more of them in front of the sheriff’s house a short time later. All the while, we’re getting reports of dead birds and dead dogs on the beach in record numbers. Dead seals. You name it. Crazy shit. And now this kid, Todd Whitlock, gets literally pulled apart near Wolf Point. Just dismantled, right? And everyone—”
“I can’t help you.”
“And everyone’s standing around with their heads up their asses, Mr. Davies. We’re all way off the mark, I think. We’re not even looking in the right neighborhood, know what I mean?”
He paused a moment before he decided to go for it. Lay it out. What could be lost at this point? “What is it, Mr. Davies? The tah-kee-na-teh? What’s happening to the town? I don’t—I don’t know what to do anymore, man. I’ve lost my badge over this, I can’t sleep. Can’t eat. I’m having dreams about this thing, these fucking nightmares.”
“You know you sound crazy, right? Batshit.”
Hayslip nodded, shoved his fists into his armpits and leaned back in his chair. “I know. But I also know the Tumquala girl was discovered, according to the article in the Observer, right where Todd Whitlock was found. Just a hundred and twenty-five years apart.” Whatever surety he’d had was a distant thing now; he sounded simply desperate, ragged.
But some new and galvanizing thing had made Davies raise his chin sharply, made his eyes bore into Hayslip’s, the creases on his forehead suddenly standing out in vivid relief as he frowned.
“Stand up.”
“What?”
“Stand up. I’m going to frisk you.”
Hayslip rose and held his arms out at his sides. Davies stepped around his desk; his work was efficient and quick as he laddered his hands up and down Hayslip’s ribs, his legs. “I’m going to tell you something. If you repeat it, if it ever gets back to me that the information’s left this room, I’ll deny it, and you’ll come to regret speaking out. I won’t say how, but I’m sincere about that. Are we clear?”
“We are.”
“I need to know you understand me.”
“I understand.”
“Wait here.” Davies walked to the doorway below the antlers and took a key ring from his pocket. He fished through the keys and then opened the door and stepped inside; when the light came on Hayslip saw nothing save for another wedge of cheaply paneled wall and part of a steel bookshelf heavy with plastic binders and books. Some of the books were new and some were old enough to have cracked leather spines, the color flaked and worn to illegibility. Davies came out with one of these tucked under his arm and shut the door carefully behind him. He stood next to Hayslip’s chair and opened the book on his desk. It was large, leather-bound, and with pages of yellowed vellum that were ragged and uneven. Beyond the smell of the leather itself, Hayslip caught other ghosts: tobacco, dampness. Davies thumbed through the book quickly and the pages fell with a particular severity, a heaviness. He found the page he wanted and pointed.
“Here,” he said. “What does this look like to you?”
Half of the page was an illustration, a woodcut of some kind. The columns of text beneath were written in English, but the script itself was so heavy and serifed that it was nearly indecipherable. The inks were faded as well, almost the same off-yellow as the pages. A few words leapt out from the dense text—and, a, that right there looked like it might be the word night—but it was the drawing that Davies had rested his finger on.
The illustration was detailed, rich in contrast, heavy with blacks. It showed the floor of some valley and at the outskirts were buildings, more small huts fringing the sides of the panel, but central to the panel were bodies. Hundreds of bodies littering the floor of the valley—men, women clutching babies, small children with their arms curled around their knees. Dead and dying.
And, in the distance between hilltops, was a silhouetted shape. Its back bristled with spines as it stood hunched over like a man, but with the great darkened head of a wolf, a coyote. And it raised its skinny arms toward the sky, toward the blackened outline of a fleeing bird.
“I don’t understand,” Hayslip said.
“I know,” Davies said, not unkindly.
“What’s happening to them?”
“Here? In this picture? That’s the pox, deputy. Everyone is sick and dying. The end of the world. The white man came and the world changed.” There was no humor in Davies’s grin.
“I still don’t get it.”
Davies pointed at the shape in the dunes. “It’s an early warning sign. A harbinger.” He stepped back inside the room where he’d retrieved the book and came out with another one. Smaller, well-kept. Cracked it open, and Hayslip recognized it immediately: Briggs-Jenson’s Myths and Legends of the Coastal Indians. The origin story of the tah-kee-na-teh. Hayslip’s mimeographed version lay right next to it.
“It arrives and it begins cutting through the people right fucking smart. Just mowing them down. Taking children in the night, harrying the camps. There’s a mention here that some of the elders dreamt of it before it arrived.”
“So it’s real,” Hayslip said.
Davies gave a sad little laugh. “Wake up! You asked, and I’m telling you. Read this first sentence.” He pointed to Myths and Legends of the Coastal Indians.
Hayslip read, “‘Shortly before the whites came to this area, and many of the people took sick with disease and hunger, there was a young brave who was mourning his wife.’”
“The key’s in the first sentence. Shortly before the whites came this thing shows up. Shortly before the people were stricken with disease and starvation. Shortly before the world ended. When did the article appear in the Observer about the Tumquala girl?”
“1868?”
Davies nodded. “January 16, 1868. She was discovered by what’s his name, Meachum, on January 11.”
“Okay.”
“The Tumquala Massacre happened on January 22. There’s a less than two-week gap between the girl’s death and the massacre. That’s what the Tumquala girl is. She’s a preemptive sign. That’s all she is, in the big scheme. She’s a warning: tragedy’s coming down the pipeline. The tah-kee-na-teh’s like some shitty by-product, that’s all it is. There’s no meaning to it, there’s no great plan. It’s just this piece of darkness that runs scattershot through the world, a precursor to larger, more awful events that’ll be perpetrated by man upon man.”
“So, what, it’s showing up now because something terrible’s going to happen? When?”
Davies shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, what is it? What’s going to happen?”
“Nick, you’re asking questions that just don’t have answers.”
Hayslip laid his fingers on the book; it felt clammy, the leather ridged, the vellum almost tacky. “Well, this, at least—this needs to be stopped. If it’s an animal, it can be killed.”
The smile Davies gave him was a pitying one. He put a heavy hand on Hayslip’s shoulder. “There’s no stopping it.” He smiled at the look Hayslip gave him, shrugged again. “There’s not. It’s a vanguard. It’s—it’s a muscle flexing. It’s idiotic. There’s no purpose to it.”
“Why even tell me this then?”
There was a moment of silence between them. “Because,” Davies finally said, “you look like you’re dying. No joke. Like this is killing you an inch at a time. Whatever’s going to happen will happen no matter what you or I will do. I want you to understand that. That’s why I told you. Some members of the council think that once we get the bones back and perform rites, the tah-kee-na-teh will change its mind. That the tragedy will be avoided.”
“What do you think?” Hayslip asked.
“I think it doesn’t have a mind. I think it’s pure function. It’s performing a duty, something it was built for. There’s no petitioning that. You might as well try to bite the wind.”
“That’s some real spiritual shit.”
“You know what I mean.” Davies gingerly took the book from beneath Hayslip’s tented fingers. “There’s something bad coming down the avenue, and there’s nothing you, me, or anyone can do about it. What is, is. We’re at the mercy of the workings of the world.”
Hayslip looked at his face, at the worn carpet, the cheap paneled walls. “Why even bother with the bones then? Why worry about what happens to them?”
Davies had turned away by then, and the keys rattled in his hands as he opened the door with the books tucked under his arm. He said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
• • •
Bottles grew on his coffee table like stalagmites. His television stayed on, the ceaseless struttings and shouts and laugh tracks and gunfire soothing him better than the silence, which seemed to yawn ahead of him, which seemed suddenly laden with threats. He murdered the night’s hours at the Sandy Bottom, where he sat in a corner booth away from everyone and tilted beer bottles up to the neon lights until he drove home drunk and angry at questions that sang out in his skull in a dark litany. If Sherry came in right now, right through that door, what would you say to her? If Melissa did? What is your greatest sorrow, Nicky? Why the rift between him and Fitz? Was Dinkle grateful that he lived, legless and all? Dizziness threatened, at times, to overtake him and he stood stock-still until it slowly crept away, until the swimming, pulsing darkness at the edge of his vision went away. The dreams continued, and one night after waking, he punched a buckled crater in the wall above his bed and then wept with exhaustion as he cradled his knuckles. Drinking was beginning to become difficult; he couldn’t keep it down, at least not very much of it. A shot sent him reeling into drunkenness. He was becoming a vessel for something, and in doing so, he was emptying himself out. A week into his suspension, he woke up and drove along Hastings Street and parked in front of the Silver Sands. Even with its shock-bright tulips and white paint, it seemed as foreboding as a haunted house. There were no cars at the curb, but an OPEN sign hung in the curtained window of the front door.
The office was shadowed, dark paneled and couched in gloom. Crosses and driftwood and taxidermied birds. Little decorative plates everywhere. Lace on all the windows that gave the daylight a misty, damp quality.
Recognition didn’t take long, but Hayslip was surprised when Lyley’s eyes bulged behind his little John Lennon eyeglasses, and he shrank theatrically against the wall, the back of his head thocking against the wall. “I don’t know anything about it!” he cried, his voice high and reedy.
“Take it easy,” Hayslip said, putting his hands up.
“I told the Sheriff, it’s nothing to do with me! With anybody! I don’t know anything!”
A woman stepped from the doorway. “Joseph?”
“Wait, what are you talking about? Sheriff Dobbs?”
“Yes. Dobbs.” Without looking away from Hayslip he said, “Go on, Dolores. Go back to the living room.”
“He assaulted Joseph,” the woman said reproachfully, stepping out of the office and closing the door behind her.
Lyley adjusted his glasses and said, “Someone left an animal on his doorstep. Some birds. He thought it was me. He came here and threatened me.”
Hayslip squinted, thinking of Dobbs laying the Polaroids next to him at the urinals. But Dobbs coming to Lyley’s place and strong-arming? It seemed so unlike him, but who was acting the way they were supposed to these days? There were angles upon angles at work here. “What’s the tah-keena-teh, Mr. Lyley? The low walker? If you had to describe it to me, I mean.”
Lyley frowned, searched his face. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know anything about that.”
“No? The sorrow eater? The Tumqualas? The girl in the hill?”
He should be used to it by now, that look of careful consideration everyone gave him these days, like they were trying to hold a conversation with a man juggling grenades. That look that was reserved, clearly, for those coming undone. And the fact that Joe Lyley was giving it to him probably should have worried him more than it did. Carefully, Lyley said, “This has nothing to do with the bones. The park, none of that. This has been foretold. It’s the End of Days.”
The same flat proclamations. Lyley knew nothing; he was doing nothing more than reading from a script, a man shouting from a street corner. Hayslip took a brochure from the rack near the door—Visit Riptide’s Waxworks Museum of Oddities!—and wrote his phone number down. He handed it to Lyley, who leaned over the countertop and gingerly took the brochure as if there was a lava pit between them.
“If the Sheriff comes back, Mr. Lyley, please call me.”
Lyley, obviously, was dubious. Hayslip almost smiled.
“Believe me, sir,” he said, opening the front door. “If Sheriff Dobbs comes back here again, no good’ll come of it for you. You’ll need every friend you can get.”
• • •
Sometimes, he woke on the floor, at other times curled between the right angles of two walls. Two weeks into his suspension, he woke from the dream and saw it was hardly even eleven yet. The night yawned huge and mean against him, promising no sleep. He put on his pants, washed his face, grabbed his keys. There was no one at the Sandy Bottom. His Colt .45—the same kind of sidearm he’d used in-country, and one that that still felt strange against his hand now that he’d turned his 66 in to Dobbs—sat like a brick in the waistband of his pants, warmed metal at the small of his back. Tumquala Park was falling back into disrepair; the sharply defined edges of the hill were beginning to slope down again, to curve; Hastings Street was a wash of red mud where the slurries had bled out onto the gravel. He drove down to the turnaround. There was supposed to be someone stationed there, but instead, there was only a sagging swath of police tape between two sawhorses. He ducked beneath the tape, a six-pack of beer in one hand. He traveled to the small inlet where the Whitlock boy had been found and discovered a small scattering of wilted flowers, blackened candles, a few miraculously untouched cans of beer. All of it leaning against a large boulder, the word TOAD scrawled on its face in hazard-orange spray paint. He left a beer, frightened more by his sentimentality than anything else, and moved on down the beach. He stood in the wind and tried to drink one of the beers; a few mouthfuls in and his head swam. He poured the rest of the bottle out onto the sand. As he walked, the foghorns of distant ships occasionally hung their music, low and lonely, over the ocean. Finally, he stopped and made his way back to the turnaround. He left the beers on one of the large fence posts that braced the turnaround and drove home beneath a nickel moon.
It was only when he pulled into his own driveway again did he realize that a plan had formed.
The next night, he drove north and parked near the entrance to Slokum Beach. A light rain was falling and traffic was sparse, and next to the walkway that led down to the beach, he saw a Fish and Wildlife truck parked next to another pair of sawhorses. It was laughable; he jogged a hundred yards down the street and walked through a thin copse of trees and then slid down the embankment to the dunes below. He sat down between two dunes and changed his clothes, stuffing his civvies into his backpack. He removed a pair of binoculars, a Maglite with the lens covered in black paper save for a small aperture in the center. Handcuffs. His .45 heavy in his waistband again. A flask, though he doubted he’d be able to partake. The lampblack felt cool on his face and he began walking north on the beach, away from the Fish and Wildlife truck, keeping to that narrow valley between the escarpments on his right and the dunes to his left. Some notion of stealth had come back to him with strange ease, the same rigid silence that had cocooned him in Vietnam, but it felt like a luxury now, like a gift. Like putting balm on a burn.
He did this each night, crept amid the dunes, staying in one spot for a few hours and then hiking further down the shore, or back up to his car to another spot. Waited and listened and readied himself. Looked for tracks as best as he could but found little to recommend anything out of the ordinary. The wind buffeted his ears, the howl of it a constant companion. Occasionally, he would sip from his flask, feel the warmth of it course through him; but no matter how much he drank, he didn’t feel drunk. He finally just put it away. Alone, out in the dark, hunting for the low walker. It was the calmest he had felt since Melissa’s death. Probably before that, even.
One Friday night, a group of high schoolers ducked the tape at the turnaround. Hayslip was a quarter-mile north of Whitlock’s death site and he saw their bonfire like a winking jewel in the distance. It was raining, and yet, there they were. There was something ancient about it: a group of people gathered around a fire, something timeless. He lay on his belly between two bushes of crabgrass. The pistol lay on his backpack, out of the sand, as he glassed the party with his binoculars. Would he hear anything if the tah-kee-na-teh came up behind him, the wind in his ears like this? No. And yet, he trusted fate—fate itself had put him here, placed him in this position. Within an hour, he saw the glowing beacons of a pair of cops, bright in their yellow rain ponchos, walking down the paved ramp of the turnaround and heading toward the fire. He felt a stitch of excitement when he recognized Fitzhugh. They still had not spoken since the day at the rally but he recognized the man’s walk, a certain unhurried swagger. He traced the scar tissue on his neck with his free hand, hardly aware he was doing it.
He realized that he had been waiting for this his entire life. This stringed-together section of nights. Everything prior to this had been a kind of preparation, he knew that now. Vietnam had steeped him in it, had familiarized him with the shocking speed of sudden violence. It had taught him that there were many, many things larger and stronger than one’s will to live. Police work had sharpened him, kept that part of him from atrophying after the war. The dreams had dismantled him enough to be awakened to what needed to be done, had culled from him all the unnecessary accoutrements. Had brought to him the understanding that the tah-kee-na-teh was real, more than a myth. And the loss of Melissa Finster—to have had love, however paltry or hidden, and then have it so brusquely taken away in a broken-music-box stutter of collapsing metal and glass—had brought him here, to this.
He had become an envoy of sorrow himself, and he was courting the thing’s arrival.
Fitzhugh and the other cop stood by as the kids poured out their beers and kicked their fire out, the group of them leaving in one ragged cluster. Who was it with Fitz? Lonnie Ridges? A Fish and Wildlife guy? He couldn’t tell. Hayslip picked up his binoculars and glassed the beach both ways. He saw nothing for another hour, two. He was just about to put his gear in his pack when, through the glasses, he saw a dim shape loping down the shoreline. He thumbed the safety off his .45 with his free hand. His body felt suddenly cold and empty, like the wind was blowing right through it. He whistled and the head of the animal turned his way and trotted toward him. In a break in the wind, he heard the jingle of a chain.
It was just a white and brown dog, a mutt of some kind, that crested the dune and trotted toward him, happy and dumb and lost in the dark, pink tongue lolling. Someone’s pet dragging its leash, just the kind of thing that didn’t last long out here.