Gripping tight to the shotgun, pushing through the foliage, no sound now but the hissing rain. But he had heard it, a thudthen faint rustling, like a footstep, a slip. He was out here, Tommy knew, he was close. Inching along the hillside, one reluctantstep after the next; his heart pounded wildly, his whole body thrummed. In the presence of Death now, either his own or whoeverhad come. A familiar feeling. He’d met Him many times before. Walking toward the house with Billy, their parents lying deadinside; riding into the crater with Noone. Hell had its own sound, smell, taste, metallic and rancid, rising up in Tommy likehe was already rotten inside; a concussive thud in his veins. His vision had contracted to a pinprick, homing in on that rustlinghe’d heard. He parted the ferns timidly. Like peeling a blanket from a sleeping child. But there was nothing. There was nobody.He looked about, lost, then realized: all there’d ever been was that one single sound.
Too late.
Tommy spun but Percy was on him, slashing at his throat with the knife. It caught him on the shoulder, a cut so deep and clean the blood was spilling in a torrent even before Tommy registered the pain. Howling, Percy swung again, a mad flurry, the knife so close to Tommy’s face he could feel the rush in the air. Twice he fired the shotgun. The second caught Percy in the gut. He sprawled backward into the brush, his feet peddling, pawing desperately at his stomach with both hands. Tommy reloaded. He could hardly use his left arm. Blood soaked his shirtsleeve and hung like webbing from his hand. Once he had the cartridges in, he snapped the breechface closed and stood over the dying man, the shotgun raised to his face. He didn’t recognize the ugly bastard, could have been anyone, but Tommy already knew why he had come.
“You’re Noone’s man, aren’t you? Tell me—is this him?”
A stillness came over Percy. He looked up from his wound. When he smiled, his yellow teeth were swimming in tobacco-stainedblood. He went to speak but coughed, and a thick gout spilled onto his chin.
“He’ll kill you all,” Percy said, laughing. “He’ll fucking kill you all.”
Tommy glanced across the gully, anguish in his eyes. “Arthur,” he whispered, turning, before almost as an afterthought blowinga hole in Percy’s chest.
Chapter 38
Tommy McBride
Across the fields he staggered: stumbling, falling, rising again. A ghostly presence in the twilight, clutching his woundedarm. Ahead, Arthur’s house glowed warm against the darkness of the surrounding trees. Blurred lantern lights dancing, swimmingin the rain, but there was no movement in the windows, no silhouettes in the rooms, the house as bereft as Glendale all thoseyears ago, and now it was happening to him again. They were dead in there, Tommy knew. Noone’s man had got to them first.He fell to his knees and cried out, lifted his face to the rain. Everything he’d ever loved, everyone—all had been taken fromhim, all were gone.
“Arthur!”
Eyes closed, body keening, voice echoing over the fields.
“Arthur!”
A figure stepped from behind the house, rifle raised, barely visible in the gloom: Arthur, peering through the downpour asTommy pitched forward and lay motionless in the mud. Arthur tossed down his rifle, and ran.
* * *
They stood in a line at the graveside, Emily rubbing Tommy’s back, Arthur and Rosie holding hands. Bright morning sunshine, birds chirruping, the field peaceful, the grass still glistening with rain. The shovel had gone in easily, the earth soft and damp; clean edges, clean walls, a mound of black soil alongside. Arthur had done most of the digging; Rosie and Emily helped. Tommy couldn’t manage the shovel—his wound had been cleaned and stitched with catgut sutures and his arm hung limp in a sling. Nobody was talking. Not a word as they lowered Billy in. One on each wrist and ankle, his head tipped back, his white throat exposed, until he reached the bottom and lay there, waiting for the soil to fall. Tommy didn’t offer a eulogy. He couldn’t find anything good to say, Billy a stranger in all but name, save the boy he had been in childhood and the half hour they’d shared yesterday. Later, it would hit him. In the train carriage rattling north. A realization that with Billy’s passing his whole family was gone, Tommy the last of them, and that after all these years spent blaming him, hating him, wondering about him, he still loved his brother just the same. He’d watch the moonlit fields through the carriage window, his reflection in the shuddering glass, and now and then catch a glimpse of Billy’s face in his own. Haunting him. He’d spent the best part of twenty years in mourning. Now he was starting all over again.
Afterward, they went back to the house and sat around the kitchen table, waiting for Tommy to begin. He’d slept all throughthe night but this morning insisted he was well enough to put Billy in the ground; he’d explain things after, he’d said. Sonow he was going to tell them everything, the whole tortured bloody truth, and they weren’t going to like what they heard.But he might as well be honest.
