“Rome,” Talbot said. “But Maureen didn’t want to visit any of the normal tourist places, like the Vatican or the Colosseum. She wanted to go to a chapel made out of human bones. It was the creepiest thing I ever saw. But Maureen loved it. Some of the bones were broken apart and made into patterns. Maureen said it was the patterns that made the place beautiful. Showed how everything in life is connected and repeated and reflected in each other. That a hip bone or a piece of vertebra can look the same as a flower. She said that it made her believe in God.”
Talbot was running his fingers through his sideburns, over and over, like he was searching for something caught between his chin and the frazzled gray hair. The old man’s face was drawn, his shoulders hunched around the baby in his lap. But he still carried the same dark edge of violence he had on Whidbey, and his time spent searching for Hawley had only sharpened those corners of himself. There was a pinned hardness to his eyes, like he was taking in all the smells and sounds of the world and also walling himself against them. Loo began twisting around and kicking her legs. She reached out and touched the muzzle of the suppressor. Talbot looked down at the baby but did nothing to stop her. And that’s when Hawley realized that the old man planned to kill himself, once he’d finished with them. All along, that’s what he’d been working himself up to. That’s why he was stalling.
“You broke her nose,” said Talbot. “She had such a beautiful nose.”
Hawley slid his hand the rest of the way across the blanket. He gripped the fork tight in his fist. He couldn’t wait any longer. There was no more time. Hawley took in a breath. He held half of it back. And then he swung out long and hard and jammed the fork into Talbot’s leg with all his might. The old man screamed and sprang up from the lawn chair. He dropped the baby but not the gun.
Hawley snatched Loo just as she hit the sand. And then he was running down the length of the dock. The baby felt light in his arms, like nothing at all. Loo’s mouth was open but she wasn’t crying. Her breath was wet against his cheek, smelling of formula, and her fingers clutched the skin of his neck. He set her in the bottom of the canoe, and yanked the rope free and shoved the boat adrift with all his might. The canoe shot out some thirty feet, then caught the current and started floating across the lake. He could see Loo’s chubby legs kicking underneath the elephant blanket. He’d done it all without thinking. Without even looking back. Then he heard the sound of Talbot coming up behind him.
Because of the suppressor there was no bang or boom—just a huff of air and the shots whizzing past him. Hawley crouched to protect his head and gripped the dock. Even with a gun trained on him, he was afraid to get into the water. Then Talbot tagged him with two bullets. Snip. Snip. Right in the ass.
Hawley would have thought it was funny if it didn’t hurt so much—the pain bursting out of his flesh and flying up the base of his spine. His knees buckled, and he sensed his body falling, falling, falling, falling until he was ready to scream for the water to come. His shoulder hit with a crash, and everywhere was white froth and bubbles. Hawley tried to push himself deeper, tried to remember the lessons Lily had given him, to keep his fingers together as he scooped his hands, to let out tiny bits of air instead of blowing it all at once.
He stayed under as long as he could. Then his lungs began to fail and he surfaced beneath the dock, gasping. The pain threaded around his thighs whenever he moved his legs. With one hand he gripped the underside of the dock and with the other he pressed the wounds, trying to stop the blood. Overhead Talbot was dragging his injured leg along the boards.
“I know you’re under there.”
Hawley tried not to move. Not to make a sound. It was too dark to see and so he just stared at the slits of light. The floats under the dock were covered with slime and smelled of rotted foam and cobwebs and the hollow casings of dead bugs and spiders and the years that had passed since the boards had been placed there and all the waves that had run through. It smelled of being caught and being left behind and it smelled of being forgotten.
Hawley couldn’t get his footing—the reeds were tangled around his knees and the sand was full of silt and washed up bits of life and then the dragging noise stopped and he heard Talbot slide another magazine into the pistol. The first shot went long and broke through a board five feet ahead of him. The second and third were two feet away, and left holes that immediately shone circles of light on his skin. Hawley took a deep breath and pushed against the dock and sank as far as he could, hoping that if he kept moving and if he went deep enough Talbot would keep missing, until the gun was ready for the next magazine and that by then he might figure what to do next.
But Talbot didn’t miss—the fourth shot went past Hawley’s face and took off the bottom of his left ear, and the ear bled so much that it became hard to see through the clouded water. As he kicked, the bullets in his ass seemed to dig farther into his tailbone, until he could barely move his legs for the pain. Soon his lungs were pushing for air again. Hawley knew he’d have to surface and when he did Talbot would kill him.
The current churned gold and red, and Hawley’s chest twisted hard with the desire to open—to air, to water. The reeds at the bottom of the lake were waving in the gloom, and Hawley pushed down and grabbed for them. The tendrils wrapped around his wrists, slimy and seemingly sentient, until it was hard to say if he was anchoring himself or if the reeds were pulling him down into the shadows.
His hands sifted stones and algae and trash, beer bottles and what felt like a piece of a grill, and then the dead bodies of creatures, fish and birds, half broken down and making their way back into the earth. Hawley plunged his fingers into the icy murk and thought of Loo. He hoped that he had saved her. He hoped that he had done enough.
The clump of reeds broke free and came loose in his hand. Hawley clutched another patch and another, but none would support his weight. He could feel his body coming adrift, drawn back toward the surface. The cold faded as he rose. A pattern of thuds radiated through the depths, footsteps along the dock, and then came a much louder boom—like a sudden crack of lightning from a storm, followed by an explosion overhead that Hawley felt more than heard, the water displaced by a torrent of bubbles. He turned his head toward the surface, and through the gloom saw the body of a man coming toward him.