A Better Man (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #15)(41)
He looked at his watch. It was almost 1:00 a.m. He should go home. His wife might be wondering. But he couldn’t. Not quite yet.
Come on, you dumb-ass. Come on out. Come to me.
* * *
Billy Williams stood on the road out of town. He held a long, gnarled stick, and as Reine-Marie and Armand watched, he drove it into the mud. As he’d done every twenty minutes for the past couple of hours.
He was testing to see how far the stick would sink in, but also, it seemed by his cocked head, listening for some sound from the earth. Some permission.
The sleet had stopped an hour earlier, and the temperature had plummeted. Exactly what they needed.
Maybe now …
“Well?” asked Reine-Marie, just as Armand noticed a glow on the hill above them.
Headlights. That could be only one person. Jean-Guy had arrived.
Billy spoke.
“Thank the Lord,” said Reine-Marie, turning to Armand. “Billy says it’s frozen.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They stood on the frozen field, a few kilometers upriver of Three Pines, and watched as Billy’s backhoe dug into the banks of the Bella Bella.
The strong beam from the light on the front of his cab illuminated the ice and muck and stones as the shovel dug in.
Reine-Marie held her phone in her mittened hand. They had, away from the forests and on the clear, crisp night, a fragile signal. That came and went. But was at least there. For now.
Jean-Guy was beside the river, and Armand stood on the running board, guiding the digging of the trench. While Reine-Marie listened for reports back from Three Pines.
They’d left Clara and Myrna on the bridge. The river was now up to the second sandbag.
Ruth was in Clara’s cottage with her landline. Reporting back.
“River’s still rising,” Ruth shouted into the phone. Partly to be heard over the roar of the river and partly because she always shouted into a phone.
* * *
“Did you see that?” Myrna shouted into Clara’s ear.
Damn her, thought Clara, who was busy trying to pretend she hadn’t seen anything.
But Myrna rarely looked away from some awful truth. Preferring to know rather than to live in blissful, if dangerous ignorance. It was one of her worst qualities.
“They’ve shifted.” Myrna turned and yelled across to Ruth. “Tell them to hurry. They’ve shifted.”
“What’s that?”
“They’ve shifted!”
“Well, you’re pretty shitty, too!”
Gabri, standing beside Ruth in the kitchen, grabbed the phone. “Here, give me that. Reine-Marie? The sandbags are beginning to shift.”
“Merde.”
* * *
“Hey! Hey!”
They turned and saw a flashlight approaching.
“Keep digging,” Armand yelled into Billy’s ear, then jumped off the backhoe.
“What’re you doing? This’s my land,” came a man’s voice.
Armand gestured to Reine-Marie to stay where she was and walked toward the light and the shout. “S?reté. Who are you?”
But he knew the answer to that. Because he knew whose land they were on.
Jean-Guy left the river and joined Armand. The man was still twenty paces away. And held a flashlight in one hand and something else in the other.
“He’s got a gun,” said Jean-Guy, his sharp eyes not leaving the man slipping and stumbling toward them.
“Oui,” said Armand, and took a step in front of Reine-Marie. “A .22. Hunting rifle. Saw it earlier, in the search. He has a permit.”
“Fuck,” muttered Jean-Guy, shaking his head.
A .22. Small-gauge. But it could still do damage. To a gopher. A fox. A human.
“This’s private property,” Tracey shouted. “Get off.”
They were downwind of him and could smell the whiskey. The donkeys had been put in the barn overnight, so it was just humans now, in the field.
“Monsieur Tracey, it’s Armand Gamache. We met earlier today.”
“I don’t care who you are. You’re on my land.” Tracey stopped ten paces away and raised his rifle. “Get off.”
“Armand?” said Reine-Marie, stepping forward.
“It’s all right,” he said, and put his arm out to gently move her behind him.
Obviously, she thought, his idea of “all right” and hers were very different.
“What’s happening?” came Gabri’s tinny voice down the phone. “Reine-Marie?”
“Drop the gun,” commanded Beauvoir.
“Gun?” came the tinny voice. “Hello?”
“Get off my goddamned land,” yelled Tracey. The rifle still raised.
Billy had stopped digging. Armand turned to him and shouted, “Whatever happens, keep digging.”
“Yurz.”
The machine began again, and Tracey stepped forward, slipping slightly on the snow and mud.
The danger, Gamache could now see, wasn’t just that he’d fire the rifle on purpose but that he’d slip and it would go off accidentally.
“I said stop,” yelled Tracey.
“And I said drop the gun,” said Beauvoir, stepping directly in front of Armand. Directly in front of the gun.