The man couldn’t find his keys. He stopped, retraced his path. Back to the kitchen. He reached, took the keys from the countertop.
The stripe of light at the bathroom opened again, and the girl stepped out. She went to the kitchen. Turned the tap, but the faucet gave no water. She reached again for the gallon jug, then the just-washed cup. As she poured the cup full again, she looked out the window, and East saw her eyes. Her face swam, seemed to look at him sideways. The face was the Jackson girl’s face. The one he’d watched die. He caught his breath and looked away for a moment.
Yes. Just the girl, just the man. Nothing more.
Where was the man now? He’d come out the front. He was at the car! In the open air, away from her. Keys in his hand, even. East peered back along the trees’ edge, but Ty and Walter weren’t there where they’d been. Everyone was moving now: without anyone saying Go, it was happening. East slipped left, farther toward the front, past the bedrooms, past the short brown stockade around the air conditioner. One lone pine stabbed up out of the earth, away from its pack. Then he was near the black truck and the car—a little Volvo wagon, snub-nosed, Illinois plates.
The man fobbed open the doors and lifted suitcases out of the back. He wrestled with them—big ones, not the little tote size, but monsters. He couldn’t make it with both. He put one down on the beaten dirt and entered with the other. East watched him disappear inside.
The other suitcase sat beside the car, unattended.
Uncalculating, straight and quick, East rushed behind the truck, around the light that spilled out the front door, to the suitcase. Was there a tag? A name card? He reached for it, the pine bough still in his hand. Looked for a name card, something on the handle, down the side. Nothing.
Then he found the golden stitching on the highest flap. Faint in the house’s glow: a monogram. CWT. For a moment his brain buzzed, pulling up the name of the man they were hunting. Then a shriek echoed inside the house: it all clicked in. Carver. Thompson. The right initials.
The right man.
The girl. “Daddy? Daddy? Someone—”
She came running. Not at him—not to shut the door. He saw her eyes. Never mind the initials—this suitcase was what she wanted.
He straightened, raised the pine mask idiotically to his face.
“Daddy!” She burst through the door, came outside.
East’s heart hammered. Discovered now.
The father’s first cry was faraway. Then he came barreling, yelling now: Melanie! Melanie! East spun away—where was his gun, even? He kept his face hidden, for being spotted by her was not like being spotted by him. She was a witness; he was the target. He was the one who knew too much. East cleared his throat, but as he did, she reached her suitcase, and he heard the other pair of feet sliding to a stop on the piney ground: his brother. Arrived.
Ty said, “Here we go, E. Is it him?”
East nodded. “It’s him.”
The judge stopped at the door. East watched him stare and then smile. Half laughing, a curious voice: “Do I know you boys?”
Ty’s arm came up and a growl rose from his throat, a reproach. Then he fired through the screen door. Two shots, three. East heard them punch the man, heard the long, failing gasp.
The girl tugged the suitcase and shut her eyes. Opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Her father hit the floor. Walter arrived.
“He finished?”
Ty leveled the gun at the girl, who hadn’t unsqueezed her eyes. She clutched the black handle.
“Not her,” East said.
Pock. Pock. Twice his brother shot. The noise ripped the black yard. “No,” East said, but already she was falling, the suitcase toppling over her.
Walter’s face was pale, stretched. “Is he finished, I said.”
“Three in the heart,” Ty said. “That’ll do. He’s the right dude?”
East dropped the pine bough. “He’s the one,” he murmured.
And the girl. The girl with her face going still in the lamplight. In the dark, she had the Jackson girl’s face. That same all-seeing look, into a world where nothing moves. East stood near her. “I told you not to,” he said.
“My call. I did it. That was what we said,” said Ty. “No time to talk about it.”
“You want to lose that gun, man,” Walter pointed out.
“No,” said Ty. “Ain’t the way it works. Right now I got to find my shoes.”
He sprinted, dirty socks, back to where he’d mounted the window. East staggered away. The gunshots still echoed around the spaces of his brain. Seconds were passing.
Lights in a house deeply set behind pines. But they might have been on before.
Ty’s feet scrambling in the needles behind the house. Every sound carrying sharply now, every breath leaving its shape like ghosts in the air.
“We got to go,” Walter urged. “East. We got to leave.”
“I know it.” East’s neck crawled. He did not look at the two dark piles, the man behind the door, and the other, under the black suitcase toppled over. He stared down the cleared channel beside the lit, empty house.