Envy the Night

23

__________

The flashlight blinked three times, then stopped. Ezra waited for the pause, then hit the lights on his boat, just tapped them on and right back off, enough to show Frank that he understood the signal.

It was almost two in the morning, and Frank wanted Ezra to come in? This couldn’t be good. Ezra ignored the outboard—too noisy—and turned the trolling motor on, brought the boat in to the beach with no sound but that soft electric whir. Frank met him in the shallows, waded out, and took the bow line and threaded it through the U-bolt Ezra and Frank’s father had bored into the log wall long ago.

“You all right?” Ezra stepped off the boat and onto firm ground.

“We’re fine.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

There were no lights on the boat or outside the cabin, and Frank’s face was only a few shades lighter than the shadows that surrounded it.

“Devin’s on his way.”

The wind was blowing warm and steady out of the southwest, and Ezra turned his face into it, breathed it in.

“How do you know?”

“Just talked to Grady Morgan. You remember him?”

“FBI.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t seem to be my biggest fan.”

“Didn’t know you.”

“Sure,” Ezra said. “Well, what did Mr. Morgan have to say?”

What Frank told him then made some sense. Made a lot of sense, actually, because the one thing Ezra had never been able to get his head around was why Devin would possibly have called him and told him to open the cabin up. The only reason he could have understood was if it had been a taunt, Devin deciding he’d screw with an old man’s head, make it damn clear that Ezra no longer intimidated him or never had. Problem with that was the tone of the call. The message had been simple, businesslike, as if he’d never had a problem with Ezra. The answer, Ezra understood now, was that it hadn’t been Devin who made the call. The other guy, Vaughn, had apparently understood Ezra’s role as caretaker, but it didn’t seem he knew the back story.

“He’s out of the hospital,” Ezra said when Frank was done, “with three bullets in him?”

“That’s what I’ve been told.” Frank was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and Ezra could see the muscles of his chest and shoulders under the shirt, taut and hard in the easy, natural way they could be only when you were young. Ezra could remember when he had looked like that. Could remember when Frank’s father had looked like that. The boy’s features didn’t resemble his father, he’d taken after his mother in that way, but the way he stood now, the energy in his words, the eagerness for battle . . . those traits ran warm through his blood.

“Sounds like Devin’s hurt bad, then,” Ezra said. “Hell, he might not make it up here, son.”

“But you know he’s coming,” Frank said. “You know he is. That’s his wife out there on that island, and either she shot him or Vaughn did. They betrayed him, tried to kill him. You think he could be headed anywhere else?”

Ezra didn’t answer, and after a few beats of silence Frank said, “He gave my father up. Brought him into it, and then turned right around and gave him up to save his own ass.”

“I know the story, son.”

Frank extended his arm, pointed out across the dark water. “He’s coming for them, Ezra. The people out there on that island. Why? Because they tried to take him down, and that’s something I sure as hell respect. They did our work for us.”

“Unsuccessfully.”

“Fine. Unsuccessfully. But I’m not going to let that son of a bitch come out here, to the place my father and his father and you and me all shared, and kill those two, Ezra. I’m not.”

“At least one of those two is headed for jail, Frank. You don’t want to interfere with that.”

“You want to see them go? You want to see them go to jail for shooting Devin? Don’t you remember—”

“I remember it all,” Ezra said, and there was a depth of anger he hadn’t heard to his own voice in a long time. “Don’t stand there and ask me if I remember. It goes back a hell of a lot farther than you, back to places you’ll never see and can’t imagine. Understand that, son?”

There was fury in his words, and he was leaning into Frank, his face close, but the boy didn’t back away. Just stood there and held Ezra’s eyes for a long time.

“Yeah,” Frank said at last. “I understand that. Now you listen to yourself, hear what you just said, and explain to me how in the hell you’re going let Devin go out to that island.”

“Didn’t say I would. I’m telling you there’s another option here.”

“The police? Shit, Ezra. You want somebody to go jail for trying to kill Devin?”

Ezra looked away, out into the lake, and said, “What do you want to do, then?”

“To get them out of here,” Frank said. “Is that so much to ask? We get them out of here. If he catches them somewhere else, fine, but he’s not going to settle up here. Not on this lake.”

“Get them out of here,” Ezra echoed. “That’s your goal?”

“It’s what I said.”

“And when you get in the middle of it? What then? Devin comes at you, or comes at the girl inside your cabin, the same way his boys already have?”

“If that happens,” Frank said, “we deal with it.”

Ezra gave a low, ugly laugh. “That’s what you’re hoping for. You want to hang that son of a bitch from one of these pines, but you also want it to be justified.”

“It’s already justified.”

“Bullshit, son. Not in a way you can accept it’s not, and you know that.”

Frank didn’t answer. The wind picked up and the water splashed into the logs below them and something rustled through the woods a few yards away.

“It’s going into action tomorrow,” Frank said eventually. “Whether it’s cops or Devin or those two assholes he sent up here, somebody is going out to that island. Are we going to let them do it? Are we going to step aside and wait for that, pretend we don’t know anything?”

Ezra took a few steps away, knelt and dipped his hand into the lake, cupped his palm and held the water. It was cool against his skin, cool enough that the hairs on his arm rose in a ripple. He kept his fingers tight, held the water until it slipped through the fractional gaps and fell back into the lake, and then he turned to his old comrade’s son.

“No,” he said. “No, we’re not going to step aside and wait for that.”