Maggie looked. “I don’t know.”
“Finn!” Stride called, but the man couldn’t hear him.
Stride walked faster in the deep sand back toward the driftwood. Maggie lingered behind him with Clark’s body. Stride felt a formless sense of unease.
“Finn!”
Without hearing him, Finn sensed Stride approaching. Their eyes met across the dark beach, and an unspoken hostility passed between them. With increasing desperation, Finn turned his attention back to the ground surrounding the huge tree trunk. Stride suddenly understood. He became aware of a lightness under his shoulder and when he tapped his chest, he realized that his holster was empty. His Glock wasn’t in it. As the ground current streaked toward him, he had ditched his gun in the sand.
Where Finn was now searching.
Stride broke into a run across the remaining distance. Before he could dive past the driftwood, Finn’s left arm broke free of the mud with Stride’s gun in his palm. He curled his hand around the grip, shoved his finger against the trigger, and pointed it at Stride ten feet away.
Stride stopped. He held up his hands. The sirens he had heard were close now. Police cars streaked down the Point.
“Put the gun down, Finn.”
Finn ignored him and trained the barrel of the Glock at the center of Stride’s chest.
Stride felt an old, sharp pain reawaken in his shoulder. It was a wound from years earlier, where a bullet had torn through skin and muscle and driven him to the floor. A bullet from Ray Wallace’s gun. When Stride looked at Finn, he saw Ray Wallace’s face, the same agony, the same desperation, the same intent. They were both men with nothing to lose.
“Don’t do this, Finn.”
When Stride took a tentative step, Finn jerked, waving the gun to stop him. Finn’s muscles were spastic. Stride watched the man’s index finger and worried that it would twitch on the trigger and unleash a bullet into Stride’s heart. He edged sideways, but Finn’s arm followed him.
“Put it down.” Stride motioned toward the ground with his palm.
Finn flipped the barrel up, waving Stride away.
They stared at each other just the way he and Ray had. A standoff over the barrel of a gun. Stride thought about Ray coming to grips with his disgrace at the hands of his own protйgй. Ray, who planted a memory in Stride’s brain of bone, hair, blood, and brain oozing in streaks down the white wall. Ray, his best friend.
Ray, who had pulled the trigger.
Stride reminded himself that this was Finn, not Ray. This standoff could end the right way, but he was running out of time. Maggie called to him, and she was close. Over Finn’s shoulder, he spied the reflected glow of red revolving beacons from a squad car’s light bar. Police would soon be spilling over the hill. All of them converging on Finn like a pack. Making him panic. Making him shoot.
“Maggie, stay back,” he called and hoped she could hear him.
Finn cringed. Beads of sweat and rain dripped down his skull. His eyes darted back and forth. Stride watched the man’s anxiety shoot up like a needle on a pressure gauge.
“Take it easy,” Stride told him, his voice calm and steady. “You’re okay.”
Behind Finn, Stride saw two silhouettes crossing the peak of the dune and stumbling to the flat sand and tall grass. Police. With his fingers spread and his arms already in the air, Stride held one hand higher than the other, hoping they could read his body language. Stop.
One of the figures saw his gesture and froze, but the other kept coming. The shadow who had stopped shouted a warning. “Wait!”
Stride recognized the voice of the policewoman from Superior they had met earlier. He also recognized the other woman, who ignored the warning and ran toward Finn, screaming his name.
It was Rikke.
“He can’t hear you,” Stride called to her. He added, “Finn has a gun.”
Rikke stopped in her tracks. She stood behind Finn, twenty feet away. She wore an untucked, misbuttoned white shirt and navy shorts. Her once sleek long legs were lumpy like tree trunks.
“
Stride pointed behind Finn, gesturing toward Rikke. When Finn didn’t move, Stride took two careful steps backward, giving him space. He pointed and gestured again. Finally, with a painful flick of his head, Finn turned and saw his sister.
“Everybody stay where you are,” Stride called.
Finn swung the barrel of the gun to his left, and Stride understood. Finn wanted him and Rikke both in his line of sight. Stride debated standing still, but then took slow sideways steps down the beach until Finn could watch the two of them without turning his head.
Rikke’s eyes were locked on Finn. When she took a step toward him, Finn immediately raised the Glock and jammed the barrel into the side of his own head. His finger was tight on the trigger.
“Easy,” Stride told her.
“This is between him and me, Lieutenant,” Rikke said. She took another step, and Finn shook his head violently and shoved the barrel harder against his skin.
“He’s not kidding,” Stride warned her.
“I know what he needs,” Rikke said.
Her fingers came together, meeting at the first button on her shirt, which she undid. Finn’s eyes followed, wide and staring. She separated another button and pulled the flaps of her shirt apart, revealing a V of white skin. Finn inhaled loudly through his nose. His entire body trembled, as if he were wracked with chills. His mouth fell open, and he drew the gun slowly away from his head.
“I’m sorry for what she did to us,” Rikke told Finn. “I’m sorry for what we became.”
Rikke detached the rest of the buttons, letting the flaps dangle, and then used her fingernails to push the collar back off her shoulders until the shirt slid off her arms and fluttered to the ground. Her stomach bulged over the waist of her shorts. Her left breast drooped like an underfilled water balloon, its nipple flat and pale pink. Her other breast was a wrinkled cross of scars.
She sank to her knees and spread her arms wide, beckoning Finn to her bare skin. She was crying. He was crying. Finn made a mewling noise like a trapped kitten and sloughed his body toward her.
They were almost touching when another wrenching, involuntary spasm shuddered through his body. His finger twitched on the trigger.
The gun was still pointed at the meat of his skull.
Finn’s expression turned to glass as the bullet tunneled through his brain. Fire and noise cracked open the beach. Rikke wailed, and Stride saw one last flashback of Ray Wallace’s face before he was jolted back to the present, where Finn slumped forward, lifeless and free.
PART FIVE. Fear of Heights
46
Serena stood apart from the cluster of mourners while they prepared to bury Finn Mathisen in the Riverside Cemetery. She tugged her trench coat tighter. Her black hair swished around her face. They were beyond the southern edge of Superior, out past the railroad tracks and landfill, in sloping fields dotted
