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“You still could’ve stayed close. I could’ve come to your place on weekends. We could’ve spent time together. I wanted you there.”

“I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to look at the girl I was with. The first time I saw you two together was the first time I realized I didn’t belong with her.” He waited a moment, then said, “I can’t say I was happy with your mother. I can’t say I enjoyed almost twenty years of being judged by her and always found wanting.”

“Did you let her know that with the back of your hand a couple times, Dad?” she said, her voice curdled with disgust.

“I did,” he said. “In my drinking days. I asked her to forgive me before she died, and she did. That’s something, although I don’t forgive myself for it. I’d tell you I’d give anything to take it all back, but I don’t believe that kind of line is worth much.”

“When did she forgive you?”

“Every time we talked. I talked to her every day in the last six months. She’d call when you went to AA meetings. To joke around. To tell me about how you were doing. What you were drawing. What Wayne was up to. How you and Lou were managing. She’d e-mail me photos of Wayne.” He stared at her in the dark for a moment and said, “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I made some choices that are unforgivable. The worst things you think about me—they’re all true. But I love you and always have, and if I can do anything to help you now, I will.”

She put her head down, almost between her knees. She felt winded and light-headed. The darkness around her seemed to swell and recede like a kind of liquid, like the surface of a black lake.

“I won’t try and justify my life to you. It can’t be justified,” he said. “I did a few good things, but I never got carried away with myself.”

She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. It hurt her sides and felt a little like retching, but when she lifted her head, she found she could look at him.

“Yeah. Me neither,” she said. “I did a few good things, but I never got carried away. Mostly I was best at blowing shit up. Just like you.”

“Speaking of blowing shit up,” Lou said. “What are we doing with this?” He gestured toward the backpack filled with ANFO.

He had a paper tag looped around his exposed wrist. Vic stared at it. He saw her looking, and he blushed and tucked it into the sleeve of his flannel coat.

Lou went on. “This is explosive, right? How safe is it for you to be smoking in here around it?”

Her father inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then leaned in between them and deliberately put the butt out in the ashtray next to the backpack.

“Safe enough, long as you don’t drop it into a campfire or something. The detonators are in that bag hanging offa Vic’s chair.” Vic glanced around and saw a shopping bag strung over one post of the chair back. “Any one of those sacks of ANFO would be ideal for blowing up the federal building of your choice. Which is hopefully not what you’re planning on.”

“No,” Vic said. “Charlie Manx is headed to a place called Christmasland. It’s this little kingdom he’s got set up for himself where he thinks no one can touch him. I’m going to meet him there and take Wayne back, and I’m going to blast his place into the dirt while I’m at it. Crazy f*ck wants every day to be like Christmas, but I’ll give him the f*cking Fourth of July.”





Outside


EVERY TIME TABITHA HUTTER SETTLED AND WENT STILL, THE MOSQUITOES returned, whining at one ear or the other. Brushing her cheek, she startled two of them, sweeping them off her and into the night. If Hutter had to work a stakeout, she preferred the car, liked air-conditioning and her iPad.

It was a matter of principle not to complain. She would die of blood loss first, sucked dry by the fracking little vampires. She especially wasn’t going to grumble about it in front of Daltry, who squatted down with the others and then sat there like a statue, a smirk on his mouth and his eyelids half closed. When a mosquito settled on his temple, she slapped it and left a bloody smudge on his skin. He jerked but then nodded his appreciation.

“They love you,” he said to her. “The mosquitoes. They love all that tender lady flesh, gently marinated in grad school. You probably taste like veal.”

There were three others at the surveillance post in the woods, including Chitra, all of them dressed in lightweight black rain shells over tactical body armor. One agent held the sonic dish—a black gun with a mouth like a megaphone and a coiled black telephone cord stretching to the receiver in his ear.

Hutter leaned forward, tapped his shoulder, whispered, “Are you getting anything out of that?”

The man with the listening device shook his head. “I hope they’re getting something at the other position. I don’t hear anything except white noise. It’s been nothing but static ever since that little burst of thunder.”

“It wasn’t thunder,” Daltry said. “It didn’t sound anything like thunder.”

The guy shrugged.

The house was a one-story log cabin with a pickup parked out front. A single dim lamp was on in a front sitting room. One of the shades was halfway up, and Hutter could see a television (turned off), a couch, a hunting print on the wall. Some girlie white lace curtains hung in another front window, indicating a bedroom. There couldn’t be much else in there: a kitchen in back, a bathroom, maybe a second bedroom, although that would be pushing it. So that meant Carmody and Christopher McQueen were in the back of the house.