The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 62

Like ten thousand people whispering in the distance.

Standing with his back to the fissured trunk of a pine, Billy strove to silence the sea, but the sea had no respect for Billy.

Not only had the stupid simile changed how he perceived the sound of the surf, but it also led him to the further conviction that those ten thousand people were whispering his name.

Everybody liked Billy. Likability had always been his most valuable asset. But the ten thousand people out there in the fog, down on the shore, were not whispering his name in a friendly way. The muttering multitudes were angry, hostile, and eager.

He didn’t know what they were eager for, and he refused to think further about it, because they weren’t people, damn it, just waves.

What he needed to do was come up with a simile that would push his stuck mind on to a more pleasant image.

Muffled by fog, the breaking surf sounded like…

Muffled by fog, the breaking surf sounded like…

A condensation of fog soaked his thin hair and beaded on his face. Just fog, not a cold sweat.

Muffled by fog, the breaking surf sounded like ten thousand of Billy’s friends whispering about what a great guy he was.

Pathetic. He might be having a midlife crisis, but he was still the old Billy, a tough guy, a funny guy, a guy who embraced the truth of truths, that nothing matters, nothing except how to get what you want.

He had read all the great deathworks, he had read Finnegans Wake three times, three times, he had decanted all those brilliant beautiful scalding ideas into his head, thousands of volumes of deathworks, and because you are the ideas you pour into yourself, he had in a sense been killed by what he read, was already dead to any truth except the truth that no truths exist. Having died in this way, he had no fear of death, no fear of anything, and he certainly did not fear breaking surf that sounded like ten thousand people whispering in the distance!

With one hand he wiped at his wet face.

How could a drawing of a dog give a guy a midlife crisis?

He cocked his head and listened for the sound of an engine.

He thought that he heard the Expedition approaching. Then the fog stole that sound, though it kept paying out the susurrations of the sea.

Nickie growled, Amy said “Stop,” and Brian braked on the rising road.

Denser than any waves before it, a tide of fog poured down from a crest unseen, as formless as dreams, as weightless as air yet as solid as alabaster, pressing the vehicle as if to encapsulate and fossilize it.

Here in a snowless whiteout, where nothing beyond the Expedition could be seen, where nothing layered upon nothing, Amy Redwing was perhaps at an ultimate place, deep in the immortal primordial, where faith mattered so much that she dared rely on nothing else.

Nickie let out a faint sigh, and Amy felt the equivalent of a sigh in the centrum of her soul, an expelled breath of resignation to the power of fate.

“How far yet?” she asked.

“Just over half a mile.”

“She’s lying. We’re close.”

“Why would she lie about that?”

“I don’t know. But I know.”

Billy again heard the engine of the Expedition, and this time it did not fade, as before, but grew louder by the moment, until he could no longer hear the surf crawling on the shore.

Although no headlights brightened the fog at the crest, the SUV appeared, ten feet away, like the specter of a vehicle, ghost ship on wheels.

Puzzled by the lampless arrival, but happy to be back in action, Billy rushed from the shelter of the trees.

Because the sea held the fog close to itself before flinging it at the land, the high catwalk and lantern room of the lighthouse were visible above the slowly churning curdled mass that hid the rest of it, though at the brink of twilight, the halogen beam did not yet stab out from those summit windows.

As expected, at the sight of the lighthouse, the Expedition braked to a stop, and at the same moment, Billy arrived beside it, squeezing a short burst from the Glock 18, blowing out the front portside tire.

He would have stooped and fired under the vehicle, popping other tires, before pointing the gun at the driver’s door and shouting Put the window down, but after he blew one tire, nothing went as planned.

Brian drove slowly up the hill, and Amy walked behind the SUV, concealed by it, left hand on the vehicle to steady herself on the slick pavement, the SIG P245 in her right hand.

From the cargo space, solemn Nickie peered out at her through the tailgate window.

For some reason, for luck, for a blessing, Amy raised her hand from the tailgate handle, to which she had been holding, and put it on the glass, in front of Nickie’s face.

Twice Amy glanced around the side of the Expedition, but she could see nothing more than streaming fog.

With the headlights off, the taillights were off as well, and therefore did not prematurely reveal her.

She could not clearly express to Brian the purpose of this tactic, but she had no doubt that it was what she needed to do. Intuition is seeing with the soul.

She knew they reached the crest when she felt the front of the Expedition cant downward.

A moment later, as the back of the Expedition crossed the crest and Amy with it, the brake lights flared red, and she moved at once around to the driver’s side.

She saw a figure rush through the fog only twelve feet or so in front of her, saw muzzle flashes, heard a stutter of shots, the pop of a tire, ricochets off metal.

Her heart knocked against her ribs at the thought of Brian shot.

Sideways to Amy, the shooter started to turn his head, but she had the pistol in a two-hand grip.

In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.

Scared, she was scared, all right, but she stopped, squeezed off a pair of rounds, and when he rocked as if hit, she fired two more as she moved toward him.

Headlights bloomed, and the driver’s door flew open.

Brian got out, not a ghost in the fog, a ghost still safely in his skin, his explosive breath stirring the mist.

The man down, the shooter shot, lay on his back, as sweet-faced as a favorite uncle, bleeding from the abdomen, bleeding from his nostrils, eyes wide and lashes lush.

He blinked at Amy, said, “Do you know me? I’m Leopold Bloom, I’m Wallace Stevens. My name is Gregor Samsa,” and then closed his eyes.

When you shoot a man dead, even when it’s a righteous shooting, your attention tends to fix on him, and Amy’s was riveted, so that Brian had to say her name urgently twice, before she looked up and saw the lighthouse.

The lighthouse in Connecticut was made of limestone, this one of painted brick, and the stone tower’s catwalk was encircled by an ornate iron railing, this one by a plainer wooden railing painted red.

Materials didn’t matter, nor details, nor a distance of three thousand miles. Only the iconic form mattered, a symbol for death and for the love of death, for faithlessness and lies and vows taken with a stifled laugh.

Michael was here. He had found her at last; and through her, Brian; and through Brian, Vanessa.

She didn’t know how, didn’t know why such indirection, but she had no doubt that he meant to finish his blood sacrifice. She was a better woman than she had been on that distant day, and now she was being given the chance to save an innocent if she could be wise and brave and quick. Even if she died trying, there was redemption in that kind of death.

“Get Nickie,” she said, but as she turned, she saw that the dog had clambered across the console, onto the driver’s seat. She leaped out of the Expedition, to Amy’s side.

Somewhere in the dismalness below stood a caretaker’s house, probably two hundred yards away, judging by the position of the lighthouse. Maybe the flow of fog across its roof and around its corners suggested the lines of the place-there-or maybe not.

Michael might be in the house. Or anywhere. If he had been waiting for them to be brought to him at gunpoint, the different voices of the two weapons might have alerted him to trouble.

Brian picked up the dead man’s gun.

Somewhere in the fog, Michael was coming.

She said, “Keep Nickie back.”

Leaning into the SUV, she shifted it out of park.

Brian had engaged the emergency brake. She released it, and jumped out of the way as the car began to roll.

“Something to distract him.”

The blown tire began to shred, but the grade was too steep for the vehicle to be stopped or even much slowed by that friction. The Expedition pulled to the left as it descended, the bared wheel rim shrieking on blacktop, chunks of rubber torn loose and knocking against the undercarriage.

Fog licked thick tongues around the SUV, then swallowed it whole, and there was only the glow of its lights going down the gullet. Rattles and clatters rose as small obstructions were encountered and plowed aside.

“If he’s coming, he’s coming here,” Amy said.

As if she understood, Nickie led them across the road, onto the slope north of it, into scattered trees and universal fog.