Kin

might hurt rather than heal her. It might bring back everything she’s trying so hard to forget.”

When he didn’t move, or give her any indication that he saw the logic in her words, she walked toward him, her hand still on his shoulder, and steered him around until he was facing the truck and walking at her behest. “I promise you,” she said, “When things improve and she’s up to seeing you, we’ll arrange something. Can you leave your contact information?”

When he looked blankly at her, she said, “Somewhere we can reach you.”

He shook his head. “Ain’t nowhere to reach me. They burned down my house, and my second Momma’s gone too.”

The woman’s frown returned, carving a deep groove between her eyes that could hold a dime. “Where do you live then?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”

At that moment, the sound of the front door opening made them both turn. Pete felt his heart swell, his throat tightening. For one confusing moment he worried he might wet his pants.

“Claire,” the woman said. “Go back inside.”

Pete stepped away from the woman. She’d been blocking his view of the door, but now he could see the frail figure who was standing in the doorway. Every fear and hope he’d entertained since that night in Elkwood when he had put her back onto the road from which she’d strayed came together in a vortex that threatened to suck him into itself and grind him up. His trembling intensified. He swallowed. Couldn’t move.

“Claire…” the woman began, but slumped and sighed heavily. “Goddamn it, I can’t do this now.” Then she walked past him, and a moment later, Pete dimly registered the sound of a car’s engine as she drove away.

Still he stood rooted to the spot as Claire, barely recognizable with her dark hair and the equally dark eyepatch, stepped out into the light. “Pete?” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.

He nodded, felt a thousand words cram into his throat, strangling him.

Claire’s face split into a wide smile. “You came.”

The colors of the world seemed brighter in that moment, as if God had, without anyone noticing, touched them up just for this occasion. And still Pete couldn’t speak. All he could do was nod dumbly.

A moment later, the need for speech was negated as Claire hurried toward him, her gait strange and uneven. She stopped before him, her smile wavering as she wept.

Pete willed himself to speak.

“I promised,” he said, and almost cried out with the fright as she dove into his arms.

-32-

They crossed the line into Radner County at dusk. To Finch it was as if whoever was responsible for the distribution of bucolic beauty had run out of materials to work with and left everything beyond the county line stand as an advertisement for desolation. The road narrowed and quickly disintegrated, pummeled over the years by heavy machinery, logging trucks, perhaps, or semis carrying toxic materials to and from the chemical waste facility that even now appeared as an unsightly block of shadow and a tall thin chimney at the far end of acres of fenced- off land. No one had bothered to repair the road, no more than they had felt compelled to repair the fields the treatment facility had contaminated. The air here seemed denser, the sky a curious shade of purple and red, the horizon tinged with emerald green, as if foretelling of tornadoes. Finch thought such a noxious place appropriate for the quarry they were hunting, a natural miasma to which the corrupt would gravitate.

“You do realize there’s every chance McKindrey was bullshittin’ us, right?”

Finch nodded. “Of course, but if he was, you can’t help but feel respect for a guy who would get his nose smashed and toes shot off and then lie to you.”

“Not sure respect is the word I’d use.”

“Your friend Niles get back to you?” Finch asked, referring to the communications officer Beau had known in the Gulf and whom they had relied upon to track the signal from Claire’s cell phone to Danny’s. “Yeah, and that’s why I’m not too confident about McKindrey’s tip.”

“It didn’t come from down here?”

“Nope. If we were trying to track the signal in a city, it would have been a hell of a trick to get it, but out in the sticks there aren’t as many cell phone users, so fewer towers, which made our boy’s job easier. But Niles was able to triangulate the signal to within a ten mile radius, and Elkwood was sitting smack dab in the middle of it.”

Finch shrugged. “All that means is Danny’s cell phone is still in their house, or somewhere nearby. We didn’t exactly turn the place upside down. It doesn’t mean the Merrills themselves are still there.”

“Hope you’re right.”

While they drove, neither of them commented on the thick, ugly atmosphere that surrounded the car. Dark, stagnant pools resisted the caress of current or breeze and lay still beneath skins of yellow foam. They saw few animals other than an occasional coon or possum lying on its side on the road. Vultures circled overhead, seeking carrion a little more tantalizing, a little less rotten. On all sides of the road, stretched countless miles of boggy, swampy land, all of it seeming to emanate from the plant, a large sandy-colored building fronted by a tall white chimney which coughed billowing black clouds into the sky while ugly liquid vomited forth into a putrid lake from culverts at its base. The many windows in the building’s face were made of reflective glass, as if the laborers within felt more secure in their deeds if they went unseen. A chain link fence sealed off the perimeter. Behind the closed gate at the entrance stood a booth with the same reflective glass as the building’s windows. It was impossible to tell if it was manned.

A place of death, Finch thought, and was struck by the sudden, alarming notion that it might well be the place where he himself would die. It was a notion he resisted with everything in him.

He recalled something Beau had said when it became clear they had left the bustling cities far behind them, the nature-burnt leaves falling away to be replaced by spindly-limbed, skeletal trees, the air darker and less pure: “Know what’s funny?” he’d said, out of the blue. “You keep mentionin’ 9/11 and the World Trade Center, comparin’ this to that. Mostly I haven’t agreed with you, thought you were gettin’ carried away with yourself, to tell the truth, but you got me thinkin’ about it now.”

“And?” Finch had asked, wondering if his friend had finally come around to his way of thinking. It didn’t take long to realize he hadn’t.

“And I think those chickenshits flew planes into those towers and killed themselves because they knew they’d never beat us on our own soil. Like you said, if they’da been on the ground, we’d have messed their shit up. So they stuck to the sky where we couldn’t touch them. What they did though was set a trap, make the whole damn country so mad the president wouldn’t have no choice but to send our troops over there, into their crib, where the bad guys’d have the advantage. It was a trap, and we fell for it.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is, bro, that you and I are doin’ the same goddamn thing. Walkin’ into a place we don’t know, to fight an enemy we know even less. And the advantage is all theirs.”

“It would be,” Finch told him. “If they were expecting us, and if we weren’t armed.”

“You puttin’ too much faith in that shit, man. Way too much. Our boys had plenty of guns in ’Nam too, but they didn’t know where to point ’em. Didn’t know the enemy could burrow like moles and have ’em killed before they could get a shot off. Always gonna be a strike against you if you ain’t familiar with where you’re fightin’.”

As long as he’d known him, Beau had liked to debate about matters of war, and apply his extensive knowledge of it to current events, military-related, or not. His clinically clean apartment was crowded with bookshelves, each one packed full of volumes about various historical conflicts. Ordinarily, listening to Beau ruminate about the Viet Cong, or Napoleon’s folly, or Custer’s ego, didn’t bother him, but it did now, because he had yet to compare their present situation to any battles in which the good guys had emerged victorious.

“This shouldn’t be a revelation to you, man,” he’d said. “You’ve been out of your element before. We both have.”