Brian said, “How’d you find this place?”
Ned blinked a few times, hissed at the pain as he adjusted his position on the steps. “Dummy corp’s docs on your partner’s laptop. Same company that rented the mining probes out of Jakarta two years ago bought this place.”
“Where else are you looking?”
“Sorry,” Ned said. “Even if I could help you—and I’d probably serve up everything I know for a bottle of water right now—I’m only looped in on what applies to my project and my department, no one else’s.”
Rachel retrieved a bottle of water from the Rover, went to hand it to Ned, but he was struggling one-handed with his wallet, thumbing out a photograph. He dropped the wallet to the porch. Now, if she really wanted to know, she could pick it up and look at his license to learn his name. She left it there.
He handed her the photograph as he took the bottle of water.
It was of a blond girl, maybe eleven or twelve, with a wide chin, big eyes, and an uncertain smile, her arm slung around a brown-haired boy, a couple years younger, with Ned’s small lips and wide nose, the boy’s smile bigger and more confident than his sister’s.
“Those are my kids.”
Brian looked over. “Put that fucking thing away.”
Ned held Rachel’s eyes, went on like Brian hadn’t spoken. “Caylee, that’s my girl, she’s real smart, you know? She’s founded the Big Buddies program in her school. That’s where—”
“Stop,” Rachel said.
“—where the older kids, like her, they mentor the first and second graders, you know, buddy up with them so they’re not scared. It was Caylee’s idea. She’s got a huge heart.”
“Stop,” Rachel said again.
Ned gulped some water. “And, uh, Jacob, that’s my boy, he—”
Brian pointed the shotgun at Ned. “Shut the fuck up!”
“Okay!” Ned spilled a bunch of water on his lap. He’d thought Brian was going to pull the trigger. “Okay, okay.”
She watched him tremble as he drank more water and she tried willing her heart to calcify and shrivel but she failed.
Ned drank a bit more water and licked his lips several times. “Thank you, Rachel.”
Suddenly she didn’t want to meet his eyes.
“My name,” he said to her, “is—”
“Don’t you do it,” she whispered. “Don’t.”
Now she met his eyes and he met hers and he looked at her a long time, long enough for her to see both the little boy and the terrible man inside him. Then he flicked his eyelids in acquiescence.
Brian walked to the edge of the hill, cocked his arm, and threw Ned’s cell phone in a high arc that ended when it splashed into the river. He spoke with his back to them. “What’re we going to do with you, man?”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
Brian turned. “I bet you have.”
“You’re not killers.”
Brian tilted his head toward Lars. “Your road dog there might debate that point.”
“He had a gun on your wife. He was an immediate threat. You did what you had to do. That’s different than executing someone. So, so different.”
“What would you do if you were us?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, you’d already be dead,” Ned said. “But I forked over my soul a long time ago, Rachel. You still have yours.” Ned adjusted himself on the stairs again. “Whether you kill me or you tie me up, it’ll add up to the same thing. The company’s going to send a second team, if they haven’t already. They don’t give a shit about me. I’m just a fucking coolie. If they find me alive or they find me dead, the story is still the same—they continue to hunt you. They might get me to a doctor or not, but they will continue pursuit of you. My point is, you leave me alive, the end result is the same as it would be if you kill me. Except if you kill me in cold blood, you’ve got to look in the mirror every night.”
Brian and Rachel considered that, considered each other.
Ned stood slowly, using the column to the right of the broken railing to do so.
“Hey,” Brian said.
“If I’m going to die, I’d rather be standing.”
Brian looked wildly at Rachel and she looked wildly back. Ned was right—shooting him and Lars had been easy when there’d been no time to think about it. But now . . .
Upstairs the baby howled. It was shriller this time, more frenzied.
Brian said, “That doesn’t sound right. You want to check on her?”
Rachel didn’t know shit about checking on a baby. She’d never even babysat. And the thought of being up there, trapped, if something went wrong down here was more terrifying than standing guard.
“I’ll stay with him.”
Brian nodded. “He moves, you fucking shoot him.”
Easy for you to say.
“You bet,” she said.
Brian went up the steps and put the shotgun barrel under Ned’s chin. “Don’t fuck with her.”
Ned said nothing, just kept his eyes on something in the general vicinity of the blown-out mills.
Brian entered the house.
The moment he was gone she felt half as strong and twice as weak.
Ned wavered in place against the post. He dropped the water bottle and looked about to keel over but kept his balance by slapping his wrist into it at the last second.
“You’re losing too much blood,” Rachel said.
“I’m losing too much blood,” Ned agreed. “Could I ask you for the water?”
She went to pick up the water but stopped. She caught him watching her, and for the briefest of seconds, he looked far less helpless. He looked hungry and ready to pounce.
“The water,” he said.
“Get it yourself.”
He let out a groan and reached for the bottle, his fingers pawing at the wood riser just above it.
A window opened above them, and several things happened in the same two-or three-second span: Brian called, “They killed Haya!”
Ned surged off the porch and rammed the top of his head into her chest.
Ned reached for her gun.
Rachel jerked her gun hand free.
Ned drove his good shoulder into Rachel’s chin.
Brian called, “Shoot him!”
Rachel pulled the trigger and fell to the ground.
Ned came off her body and she heard him grunt and she fired the pistol again. The first time she fired at nothing—it was purely defense. The next shot, as she rolled, she aimed in the direction of Ned’s legs as they scrabbled away from her. She fired the final shot as she came to her knees, fired in the direction of his ass as he reached the top of the incline.
He dove over the hill and she may or may not have heard him make a sound when she’d fired that third shot, a yelp possibly. Or she’d imagined it.