The Searcher(81)

He’s afraid to answer Trey, in case he leads him wrong and gets him into all kinds of trouble, but no one else is going to do it. “Morals,” he says in the end, “is the stuff that doesn’t change. The stuff you do no matter what other people do. Like, if someone’s an asshole to you, you might not be mannerly to him; you might tell him to go fuck himself, or even punch him in the face. But if you see him trapped in a burning car, you’re still gonna open the door and pull him out. However much of an asshole he is. That’s your morals.”

Trey chews and considers this. “What if he was a psycho killer?”

“Then maybe I wouldn’t help him up if he fell down and broke his leg. Still wouldn’t leave him in that car, though.”

Trey thinks that over some more. “I might,” he says. “Depending.”

“Well,” Cal says, “I got my code.”

“You don’t ever break it?”

“If you don’t have your code,” Cal says, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.”

“What’s your code?”

“Kid,” Cal says, with a sudden surge of weariness, “you don’t want to listen to me about this stuff.”

“How come?”

“You don’t want to listen to anyone about this stuff. You gotta come up with your own code.”

“But what’s yours?”

“I just try to do right by people,” Cal says. “Is all.”

Trey is silent, but Cal can feel more questions shaping themselves in his mind. He says, “Eat your dinner.”

Trey shrugs and does as he’s told. When he finishes his second helping, he sets down his fork and knife, leans back in his chair with his hands on his belly and gives a satisfied sigh. “Stuffed,” he says.

Cal hates to bring the kid’s mind back to Brendan, but if he doesn’t provide a plan for the next step, Trey is liable to come up with one of his own. After he clears the table, he finds a pen and a fresh page in his notebook, and puts them in front of Trey. “Draw me a map,” he says. “How to get to the cottage where Brendan hung out.”

The kid genuinely tries, but Cal can tell within a minute that it’s hopeless. All the landmarks are shit like BIG GORSE BUSH and WALL THAT BENDS LEFT. “Forget it,” he says in the end. “You’re gonna have to take me there.”

“Now?” The kid is half off his seat.

“No, not now. We’ll go tomorrow. Up to here”—Cal taps the map at a bend in the mountain road—“I can follow what you’re driving at. I’ll meet you here. Three-thirty.”

“Earlier. Morning time.”

“Nope,” Cal says. “You got school. Which means right now you need to go home and get your homework done.” He stands up and takes the notebook away, ignoring the look that says Trey will do no such thing. “Take one of those cupcakes with you, for your dessert.”

On his way out the door Trey turns, unexpectedly, to give Cal a great big grin over his shoulder, through the half of the cupcake that’s already stuffed in his mouth. Cal grins back. He wants to tell the kid to be careful out there, but he knows it wouldn’t do any good.





FOURTEEN


During the night, something happens. It reaches Cal through his sleep, a snag somewhere in the night’s established rhythms, a disturbance. As he comes awake he hears, away across the fields, a hard savage howl of pain or rage or both.

He goes to the window, cracks it open and looks out. The cloud has cleared some, but the moon is slim and he can see very little except different densities and textures of darkness. The night is cold and windless. The howl has stopped, but there’s still movement, far off and ragged, ruffling the edge of his hearing.

He waits. After a minute or two, the sounds grow and sharpen, and his eyes pick out a shape among the grass in his back field. It’s loping towards the road at a good pace but with an odd ungainly gait, like it’s injured. It could be a big animal, or a hunched-over human being.

When it moves out of his sight line, Cal pulls on his jeans, loads his rifle and goes to his back door. He switches lights on as he goes. Mart has a shotgun, presumably P.J. does too, and the other thing might have or be anything. Cal isn’t aiming to take anyone by surprise.

He sweeps the fields with his flashlight, but it’s not strong enough to make much of a dent in this dark. The hunched shape is nowhere to be seen.

“I’m armed!” he shouts. His voice spreads out a long way. “Come out with your hands where I can see ’em.”

For a moment there’s sharp silence. Then a cheery voice yells back, from somewhere off on P.J.’s land, “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”

A narrow beam of light flicks on and bobs across the fields, getting closer. Cal stays where he is, keeping the rifle pointed down, until a figure stumps into the pale spill of light from the windows and lifts an arm in a wave. It’s Mart.

Cal goes to meet him in the back field, making a few more sweeps with his flashlight on the way. “Holy God, Sunny Jim, put that away,” Mart says, nodding at Cal’s rifle. His face is alive with excitement and his eyes glitter like he’s drunk, although Cal can tell he’s stone-cold sober. He’s holding his flashlight in one hand and a hurling stick in the other. “D’you know what you sounded like there? You sounded like something off that Cops show. You’d make a great aul’ Garda, so you would. Are you going to tell me to get down on the ground?”