It's the last you'll get from anybody. Wade looked at the water, at the old man holding it, and something in him, the part he had been trying to bury since he was 14, finally went quiet and clear and cold. Why? He asked. Why?
What? Why do it, Amos? Rudd sighed almost sad. Everybody sells eventually, Wade. Not me.
No, not you. That is the problem. I'd like to know who to be angry at. Voss. Callaway.
The Lord. Pick one. Wade stood, walked to the bars, took the cup from Rudd's hand gently, polite as a Sunday guest. Then he threw the water in the old man's face. Rudd gasped, stumbled back half a step, which was exactly the half step Wade needed.
His arm shot through the bars, fingers closed around the sheriff's collar, and he yanked hard. The Rudd's forehead slammed against the iron with a sound like a dropped frying pan. The revolver was in Wade's hand before the sheriff finished sliding down. Wade patted the key ring off Rudd's belt, unlocked the cell, stepped out, looked down. Rudd stared up at him, blood trickling from his eyebrow, mustache dripping, eyes wide.
You won't shoot me, Rudd said. No, because you're a good man. Because I hate the paperwork. Wade cocked the hammer anyway. Let the old man hear it.
But I want you to think about something, Amos. For the rest of your life, I could have. He locked Rudd inside cell, tossed the keys into the stove, and walked out into the night. Hale's horse was still tied at the rail. Wade grabbed the reins, swung up, and rode out of Red Bluff the way he had ridden in through the old wash road, faster than he had ever ridden in his life.
Because somewhere behind him, a man was shouting for deputies. And somewhere ahead of him, three people were waiting in a cabin he had told them was safe. He saw the glow while he was still two miles away. orange, pulsing, climbing into the stars. Wade did not remember urging the horse. He only remembered the wind and the sound of his own heart and the word he kept whispering over and over like a man begging a stranger.
No, no, no. The cabin was gone. Not gone like a lost cause, but gone like a fire had eaten it down to the stones and was still licking the bones. The roof had collapsed. The chimney stood alone like a gravestone. his father's table, his father's bed, his father's whole life.
Ash. Wade slid off the horse, his legs went out beneath him. He caught himself on one knee and knelt there in the heat with his hands in the dirt. Gone in one evening. Wade, a voice low from the darkness near the well.
He grabbed the revolver, spun, and found Guan crouched behind the stone rim, face smeared with soot, a burn across her forearm, rifle in her hands, his father's rifle, the one from above the fireplace. You saved it, Wade said. It was the only thing worth saving. Where are the others? She did not answer fast enough.
Guan, where? Dakaya rose from the shadow of the well-housing slowly, like an old tree deciding whether to fall. His shoulder was bloody. His eyes were worse. They took Nalin, he said.
The world went very still. Who? Six men. The sheriff's deputies. They came an hour after you left.
The one you tied up was with. He knew where we were hiding. He knew. Yes. Because Rudd let him go.
Yes. And Nalin. The boy would not stop fighting. Dakaya's voice cracked just a little. He bit one of them.
They carried him away. Guan's jaw trembled, but no tears came. She was too angry for tears. They set the fire to flush us out, she said. I shot one man in the shoulder.
They ran, but they had the boy. Wade stood, walked a few steps into the dark, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and fought something very close to a Saab alone in the hands of men who had killed a deputy and hung it on a stranger. I should have never gone to town, he whispered. You did not know, said Guan. I trusted him.
So did we all. You didn't. No. She stepped closer. Her voice softened.
But I wanted to be wrong. Wade lowered his hands. And for one strange moment, the two of them just stood there in the firelight. A grumpy cowboy with nothing left and a furious young woman with a burned arm, neither one of them knowing what to say. Then she held out something in her open palm.
Half a bronze disc, scratched, dull. The same symbol, circle, line, three short marks. He gave it to me, she said. before they took him. He put the real one in the pouch. A copy.
He made it that first night from a tin lid while you were arguing about the rope. Wade stared. He made a copy. He is a cleaver boy. He's an idiot.
He is both. Wade nearly laughed. It came out as a ragged breath, a crack in the ice. But then Dakaya spoke froze over again. There is something you must know.
Wade turned. The old man stood at the edge of the fire light, his face half gold, half shadow. And when he spoke, his voice dropped deep, slow, rolling like water over stone. "We did not stumble across you by chance," weighed Harland. "A prickle crawled across Wade's skin.
" "That voice? Where had he heard that voice? " "We were not lost," Dakaya said. "We were coming to your cabin. " "Why?
" "Because of your father. " "My father's been dead since I was 14. " "Yes, a fever. " Tea did not answer. The wind shifted, the embers hissed, and something moved in the back of Wade's memory. something small and buried.
At night, a boy of 14 crouched in the dark with his hands over his ears and somewhere beneath him the deep a voice. Low chanting in a language he did not know. That voice, this voice, Wade took one step back. You not now you were there. Not now, Wade.