The Searcher(115)
“Yeah,” Cal says. “Me too. The kid’s got a gift.”
“I’ve to go,” Lena says. “See you later.” And she hangs up. Cal thinks of the array of sound effects Donna would have come up with to convey the iceberg-tip of her feelings about this situation. He actually thinks about phoning her and telling her the whole story, just for the pleasure of hearing them one more time, but he doubts she would appreciate this the way he intends it.
Town has a weekday briskness, old women steaming along with wheeled shopping bags, young ones juggling strollers and shopping and phones, old guys having stick-waving conversations on corners. Cal has some trouble tracking down an inflatable mattress, but eventually the guy in the hardware store disappears into his back room for a long time and comes back with two of them, both coated in dust and sticky cobwebs. Cal takes them both. Even if he welcomed the prospect of a night in his armchair, a lone mattress might give Lena the impression that he has expectations.
In a shop hung with an impressive variety of resigned polyester-based clothing that explains Sheila’s sweater, he finds a wire bin of polyester-based bedding, an extra duvet and a couple of pillows, as well as a set of pajamas, a blue hoodie and a pair of jeans that look to be around Trey’s size. He loads up his supermarket cart with steak, potatoes, vegetables, milk, eggs, the most nourishing stuff he can find. While he’s at it, he picks up a packet of Mart’s cookies. He needs an excuse to go over and let Mart rib him about Lena, before Mart gets impatient enough to try calling round again.
Evening works its way in earlier, these days. By the time Cal leaves town, the light is lowering, throwing great swathes of shadow across the fields. He heads for home faster than he should, on these roads.
He’s still figuring out how to approach Austin. Back on the job, he would have been going in equipped with an elaborate range of sticks and carrots in every shape, size and specification. He watches the slim low moon hanging in a lavender sky and the fields deepening with dusk as they flow past his windows, and feels the wide immensity of his empty-handedness all over again.
Austin isn’t going to talk to an ex-cop, he’s not going to take kindly to a business rival, and he’s not going to give a random civilian the time of day. Cal figures his best bet is to go in as a guy who used to be in the life, retired before his luck could run out, and moved far from home so he wouldn’t get sucked back in or tracked down: tough enough to keep Trey in check and to merit some respect, not active enough to be a threat.
He realizes that he’s thinking like a detective again, but not the kind of detective he ever was. This is undercover thinking. Cal never liked undercover work, or the guys who did it. They moved in an atmosphere of funhouse-mirror fluidity, and had a nimble, flyweight ease with it, that made him edgy down to his bones. He’s starting to feel that they would fit in around these parts a lot better than he does.
By the time he parks in his driveway, his house is two lighted rectangles and a roofline against indigo sky and first stars. Cal gets out of his truck and goes around to the back to get out the air mattresses. When he registers the rush of feet in long grass, he has just time to spin round and see the dark shapes in near-darkness charging towards him, just time to grab at the spot where his Glock should be, before something rough and dusty comes down over his head and he’s yanked backwards off his feet and slammed down flat.
The fall winds him. He heaves for breath, uselessly, like a fish mouthing at air. Then something hard smashes down on his collarbone. He hears the dull clunk of it striking bone and feels himself splinter. He heaves for breath again, pain shears through his collarbone and this time he manages a lungful of dust and grit, mixed with barely enough air.
He twists sideways, wheezing, his mouth clogged with rough fabric, and flails out blind. He grabs an ankle and yanks with all his might, and feels the thud in the ground as the man goes down. A kick in the back makes him let go. The hard thing cracks into his kneecap, the pain whips his breath away again, and a small clear part of his mind realizes that there’s more than one of them and that he is fucked.
A man’s voice says, into his face, “You mind your own business. D’you hear me?”
Cal punches out, connects and hears the man grunt. Before he can get his knees under him, the hard thing slams into his nose and it explodes, pain blooming dazzlingly bright all through his head. He breathes blood, gags on it, retches it up in great helpless hacks. Then the air splits open with a great roar and Cal thinks they’ve hit him again, thinks this is it, and then everything stops.
In the silence a hard clear voice, some way away, shouts out, “Don’t fuckin’ move!”
It takes Cal a moment to make sense of the sound, through the insistent singing fog of blood and stars, and another to identify it as Trey’s voice. In the third moment, he realizes that Trey just shot off the Henry.
Trey shouts, “Where’s Brendan?”
Nothing moves. Cal scrabbles at the cloth covering his head, but his fingers are useless with shaking. A man’s voice shouts, very nearby, “Put that down, you little scut!”
The Henry roars again. There’s a raw yell of pain from behind Cal’s head, then a rising gibber of voices.
“What the hell—”
“Jesus Christ—”
“I told ye don’t move!”
“I’m fuckin’ shot, she fuckin’ shot me—”