The Searcher(108)

Trey gives an impatient hitch of her shoulders. “It’s no big deal. I’ll be grand.”

“This time, you will. Because they got your mama to do it, and she only went as far as she thought would satisfy them. Next time, they’ll go after you themselves. Or after your mama. Or your little brother and sisters. Or me. These are serious guys, doing serious business. They don’t fuck around. They didn’t kill you because they don’t want the attention a dead kid would get, but they will if they have to.”

The kid blinks fast at that. She goes back to shoveling food into her face, head down.

“Jesus Christ, kid,” Cal says, suddenly right on the edge of blowing up. “What the fuck is it gonna take to make you knock it off?”

Trey says, “When I know. For definite. Not some bullshit that someone made up to get rid of me.”

“Yeah? That’s all you want? Just to know for certain?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. If you find out for certain that Brendan skipped town, you’re gonna want to find out why, and then you’re gonna want to track him down. If you find out for certain that someone ran him off, you’re gonna want to get back at them. There’s always gonna be just one more thing left to do. You gotta know when to stop.”

“I do know. When—”

“No. When to stop is now, kid. Look at you. If they have to come after you again, what are they gonna do? When to stop is now.”

Trey’s face turns up to him like she’s drowning. She says, “I wanta stop now. I’m tired to fuckin’ death of this. At the start, when I first came here, it was like you said: I’da kept going forever. Now I just want it gone. I wanta never think about him again. I wanta go back to doing my own things that I usedta do before. But whatever happened to Brendan, he deserves for someone to know. Just one person, even, to know.”

Cal wasn’t sure, until this moment, whether she understood the size of the chance that Brendan is dead. They sit there, listening to it settle into the crevices of the room.

“Then I’ll stop,” Trey says. “When I know.”

“Well,” Cal says, “there you go. You were asking about having a code. There’s the beginning of it.” He looks at that beat-up, half-comprehending face and feels his throat thicken for all the things the kid is just starting on, all the rivers she’ll have to struggle across that she hasn’t even glimpsed on the horizon. “Finish your breakfast,” he says. “Before it gets cold.”

Trey doesn’t budge. “So are you gonna help me? Or not?”

“Truthfully,” Cal says, “I don’t know yet. First I need to track down the people who came calling on your mama yesterday, and have a talk with them. Once I’ve done that, I should either know what happened to your brother, or at least know whether we can keep looking without getting ourselves killed.”

“What if we can’t?”

“I don’t know. We’re not there yet.”

Trey doesn’t look like that satisfies her, but she goes back to scraping up egg yolk with her toast. “Tell me something,” Cal says. “You think it was Donie who got your mama to do this?”

Trey snorts. “Nah. She’d tell him to fuck himself.”

“Yeah, me neither. But these guys came calling two days after you talked to Donie. That’s not a coincidence.”

“You said if I talked to Donie, you were outa this.”

“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “Things change. How’d you get hold of him?”

“His mam goes to half-nine mass in town every day,” Trey explains, with her mouth full. “She gets a lift with Holy Mike. I waited in the hedge by Mike’s lane till I saw his car go off, and then I went across Francie Gannon’s fields to Donie’s back door.”

“You see anyone on your way in or out?”

“Nah. Someone could’ve seen me, but. From a window. Nothing I could do about that, only go fast.”

“Listen,” Cal says. He gets up and takes the plates over to the sink. “I gotta go out for a little while. Not long. You gonna be OK here by yourself?”

“Yeah. Course.”

The kid doesn’t sound entirely happy about the idea. “No one knows you’re here,” Cal says, “so you don’t need to worry. But I’m gonna lock the doors just in case. If anyone comes calling while I’m gone, don’t answer, don’t look out the window. Just sit tight till they go away. You got it?”

“You going to talk to Donie again?”

“Yeah. You gonna get bored? You want a book or something?”

Trey shakes her head.

“You could take a bath if you want. Wash last night off you.”

The kid nods. Cal figures she won’t do it. She doesn’t look like she could manage anything that complicated. Just getting up for breakfast has tired her out; all of a sudden her face has a kind of exhaustion that’s unnatural on a kid, a slack droop to her one good eyelid and deep grooves from nose to mouth. She looks, for the first time, a little bit like her mama.

“You just rest,” he says. “Eat whatever you want out of the kitchen. I’ll be back soon.”



Cal heads for Donie’s by the same route Trey took, down the back roads and across Francie Gannon’s fields. The wind has ripped branches off trees and thrown them, scraggly and splintered, into the roads; the long gold autumn light laid over them gives them the look of a deliberate, sinister harvest. Cal heaves the bigger ones into ditches on his way. He knows he must be tired, but he can’t feel it. The walk and the crisp air are shaking the aches out of his muscles, and he still has that light-headed clarity buoying him on. The only thing in his mind is Donie.