Rook sighed. “After I kill him, you’ll feel different.”
Peder shook his head. “No. Stanislav, I begged you to leave, but you did not. Now I beg you, do not try this.”
“Look, he’s dead, end of story. We have to figure something else out. What do we do with the body? We need to dispose of it where no one will ever find it.”
Peder frowned. “The ground is too hard to dig. I do not think we can rely on animals to do the job. How about the ocean?”
“I don’t know the currents around here, but too much chance of it floating somewhere. I guess we’ll just have to burn it.”
Peder met Rook’s eye. “We cannot create a fire in my stove hot enough to burn the bones.”
“It’ll be hot enough to serve our purpose. It’s a crappy job, but the alternative is that someone finds out. Better everyone thinks he disappeared, especially Eirek.”
Peder didn’t say a word. Instead he dipped his head in a nod, then turned and walked slowly to the house. Unlike the first time Rook had seen him, the old man looked his age, a frail and tired specimen nearing the end of things. Rook felt a small bit of regret, but not a lot. Things would probably get worse before they got better. “Story of my life,” he muttered under his breath.
Then he looked down at the body. The flow of blood was slow now, just a gradual oozing. Soon it would stop entirely. Nevertheless, he needed some sort of old blanket or sheet to wrap the body in to avoid getting blood anywhere else. He followed Peder into the house to ask for one.
By nine in the morning, they’d taken care of the body. Plenty of charred bones remained, but those Peder would drive twenty miles up the road and scatter into the water at various locations. The specifics of how they managed the burning—well, Rook preferred not to think about those ever again if possible.
Rook could feel the fatigue from two nights of no sleep weighing on him. So he made his way into the barn and lay down on his blanket in the hay. He could hear low sounds from the animals in the barn, and it helped calm his mind as he closed his eyes. Just before falling asleep, he could have sworn he heard a faint roar in the distance, the sound of the creature carrying from several miles away.
Then again, he might have just been dreaming.
6
Rook returned to town in the middle of the afternoon. Peder had allowed him to take the car, but had refused to come along.
“No, Stanislav. I am an old man, so I will not try to stop you, but I will not be part of it.”
Four hours of sleep had served only to fuel Rook’s anger. Between a mysterious creature that could shrug off a fifty caliber round and a man who would rather take his own life than answer questions, the town had proven far from a quiet place to hide. Now it was time to take the action right to the source of power: Eirek Fossen.
By sending his son, the man might as well have tried to pull the trigger himself. In Rook’s world, such men needed to be confronted sooner rather than later. You never gave someone an extra chance to take you out.
Rook parked outside Anni’s store, just as Peder had done the previous day. He didn’t know where Fossen lived, but he figured all he had to do was show up in town and the man would find him. So he leaned against the car, crossed his arms, and stared out at the waves crashing into the sharp rocks a few feet past the other side of the road.
Fossen showed up a minute later. Walking down the street, he seemed even larger, one of the few men at whom Rook did not have to look down to make eye contact. Rook thought he’d glimpsed a door closing at a house a few doors down behind Fossen, and filed away the information for future use.
Rook stood with his hands at his sides, but he knew he could draw, aim, and fire the Desert Eagle in less time than it took most people to blink. Gunning the man down in the middle of the street wasn’t his first choice, but he didn’t have a problem if it went down that way. Despite Peder’s warnings, Rook suspected that killing Fossen would actually solve more than just his own problem, and not every resident would shed a tear at Fossen’s demise.
The taller man stopped a few feet away, smiled, and opened his arms in a welcoming gesture. “Stanislav, it is good to see you again. Allow me to apologize if I was rude yesterday. It was no way to welcome a visitor.”
Rook blinked. Of all the ways he’d considered Fossen might react to Rook’s return to town, this one had never crossed his mind.
No way, he thought. The bastard is up to something.
Rook said, “You told me yesterday to get out of town or something bad could happen to me. You didn’t want any visitors. The threat was pretty direct.”