This man’s head was shaven, his forearms tattooed, his face too young; he wasn’t Tommy. There was enough in his death that I could remember him from life, could see him running away from me, down my street in the middle of the night. From fourteen years’ distance, I could see Chris Quick, and he had died with the same fear on his face he’d worn when his father had caught him trying to rape me.
I’d come down in the puddle, felt the blood soaking through my jeans, and it wasn’t Tommy and it wasn’t Mikel, but maybe it was my mother, and I could smell the grass and the beer and the gutted pumpkins and the cigarettes and the truck. I could see my father, his look of horror; I could see Mikel, his look of despair.
The door knocked me as it was shoved open, pushing me and the body aside, and I toppled dumbly, wincing into the sunlight. Flooded with backlight, there was a new man in the doorway, and at first I thought he was wearing a parka, but there was no hood, only long hair flopping loose onto the shoulders of his jacket, and the sunlight licking around his legs showing a camouflage pattern, and his boots were black and high.
It was the same man who’d been in my bedroom the night I’d returned home.
I realized that at the same moment I realized he was holding a rifle in both hands, and that the rifle was pointed at me.
“Fucking cunt,” Brian Quick told me, and he brought the gun up to his shoulder.
CHAPTER 33
I could smell the pine and the mint in the air, crisp and clean odors suddenly revealed beneath the stench of blood and the chemicals brewing behind the shack. I could hear the sound of traffic on the Coburg Road out of Eugene, even though that had to be over a mile away.
I could see this man, maybe four years older than me, barely older than Mikel, the mass of metal in his hands, solid and unforgiving, pointed at me.
This isn’t real, I thought. This cannot be real, this is another memory I’ve manufactured, another fiction created, but this cannot actually be happening to me. I am a musician, I play guitar in a band, I drink and I pass out and feel sorry for what a fucking good life I have.
I do not have guns pointed at me, I am not a detective, I am not a cop, I am not supposed to be here.
And the rifle was now at his shoulder and his mouth was opening to say something else, but the words I heard didn’t come from him, they came from farther away, louder than before.
“Drop that weapon! Drop that weapon fucking now or I drop you! Drop it!”
“Mim! Mim, stay down!”
Brian Quick balked, staring at me on my knees in his brother’s blood.
“Drop it NOW!” Marcus screamed.
The rifle came down, hit the floor without a clatter, like a brick.
“Back it up! Back it up, hands high!”
Brian was looking at me, I could feel it, but with the sunlight behind him, I couldn’t make out his face, see if there was fear or excitement or anger in it. His hands had come down to drop the rifle, and he’d begun to step back, and Marcus was still yelling at him to reverse out of the shack, to do it slowly, to raise his hands. Brian started to follow the last order, but his right rose slower than his left, crossing inside his body as it came up instead of moving straight, and I gave it full-throat, everything I’d ever used onstage, everything Steven had ever taught me about using my diaphragm, and then some.
“Gun, he’s got another gun!” I screamed, pulling myself out of the doorway, tumbling over Christopher Quick’s corpse, and there was a shot that seemed so loud I figured the shack would fall down around me from the percussion.
To my side, behind where I’d knelt, a circle opened in the wooden wall, spitting splinters and showing green leaves beyond.
There were more shots, two or four or three, I couldn’t count them they came so fast, and they didn’t come from the same places. New circles opened in the wood around me and I cowered against the dead man, hiding my head and trying to breathe and not get killed. More shots came, but from a different direction, answered from the opposite, maybe behind me, now, but I didn’t move, I didn’t think I could.
It got quiet again. It stayed quiet.
I didn’t move. My blood-soaked jeans were making me cold, my bruised side ached, but I didn’t move.
I kept seeing Mikel and Tommy and my mother and the truck.
“Mim? Mim, where are you?”
I forced my arms apart, unwrapping my head. Hoffman was in the doorway, her gun in her hands, pointed at the ground. She saw the movement, focused on me.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said, like she’d been kicked and hadn’t seen it coming.
I was starting to push myself up but she took a step forward, pushing me back down with one hand, putting her gun away with the other, shouting for her partner.
“Marcus, ambulance! We need an ambulance! Jesus, don’t move, Mim. Goddamn you, where’re you hit? Where’d you get hit?”
I kept pushing her hands away, and she kept batting them aside and trying again, and I flailed, finally managing my voice again. “Not! I didn’t! Not me!”
She caught it at last, stopped, grabbed my wrists.
“Not me,” I said. “Him, it’s his blood. His blood. I didn’t get hit.”
Hoffman looked at me like this was another of my lies, too, like she couldn’t believe I was this stubborn. I shook my head and indicated Chris’s body, and she didn’t let go of my wrists, just used them to pull me to my feet as she got to hers.
Marcus filled the doorway, breathless. “Sheriff’s on his way, and an ambo . . .”
Hoffman propelled me toward him, releasing her grip. “Cancel the ambo, add a coroner.”
I stepped out, into the hot daylight again, Marcus guiding me by the shoulder. There was already the sound of a siren in the distance, maybe more than one. When I looked down at myself, I saw that the front of my jeans was soaked, and the bottom of my shirt.
Marcus led me back to the Ford, using his free hand to dial his mobile phone. When the call connected he spoke in fluent cop, using numbers and words like “homicide” and “medical examiner” and “fugitive” before he was through. Once we reached the car, he opened the rear door and had me sit on the backseat.
“Sure as hell looks like you got hit.”
“Not me,” I said, and pointed back to the shack. “Chris Quick.”
“That makes the one who was shooting at us brother Brian?”
I nodded. “They did the cameras, you can tell, you just look in there you can tell they did the cameras on me. And they were at my house, it was Brian the first time, the one who put me in the truck, he must have a truck around here, a Ford truck. The first time, not the second time, the second time it was Chris. I should have recognized them, I should have known, but they looked different. It was them.”
“You think Brian’s got your father?”
I started to nod again, then heard the word “fugitive,” just the way Marcus had said it on the phone, and I stopped myself before my chin came down, twisted my face so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eyes.
“Brian got away?”
“He won’t get far. You think he’s got your dad?”
I swallowed, hard, mostly to put my stomach back where it belonged. “I don’t know where Tommy is.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“I know.”
“You are fucking unbelievable—” he said, but then stopped, because the sirens had arrived. “Don’t move, Miss Bracca. Stay right here.”
I nodded, and the sirens cut off, and he went to speak to the new arrivals. I heard the frustration in his voice, could tell it was with me, and reaching its end.
But Brian had escaped, and unless Tommy was nearby, the cops weren’t going to find him, either. Which
