Huston leaned back, raised both hands to the trunk lid.
“Okay, okay,” DeMarco said. “I’ll listen to you.”
Even in the darkness, Huston’s smile looked sad to DeMarco—so tired and sad. Huston nodded toward the floor. “What’s this piece of shit want with you?”
“He’s down there?” DeMarco asked.
“Hog-tied. With a big, ugly bump on the side of his big, ugly head.”
“I like the sound of that.”
Huston said, “I don’t understand why he came after you.”
“I don’t either. I also don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
Huston smiled. “I’ve been staying upstairs in the little apartment you’re making. Ever since the night at the lighthouse.”
“You’ve been out here all this time?”
“You believed me. I thought I’d be safe here.”
“Jesus,” DeMarco said. “How did you get here?”
“After the lighthouse, I just walked along the shore for a while. I came across three kids sitting there drinking beer, two boys and a girl. They had a pickup truck, so I offered them sixty dollars to drive me to my friend’s house.”
“The sixty I gave you.”
“Originally I thought I might just knock on your door. But then I saw this little barn and… I used to sleep in my grandfather’s barn when I was a boy. In the summer, when I’d help him make hay. A couple times in college, before my grandmother passed away and the place was sold, Claire and I sneaked in for a while. I can still smell the hay, the night air…the way she always…always made me feel.”
There was a quality to Huston’s voice now that made DeMarco uneasy, a timbre of melancholy, of longing resigned to loss. DeMarco said. “No hay in my barn, though.”
“No, but…it was very comforting to look out and see a light on in your house, you know? I watched you come and go to your car. Then tonight I looked out and saw you standing on your back porch. Then not long ago I heard your car being pulled inside, and then I watched this asshole marching you across the yard. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.”
“I’m glad you’re good at arithmetic.”
Huston smiled.
“So how about you cut me free now? Let me take care of things from here on in. I guarantee he’s going to suffer a long time for what he’s done.”
“Time is short, my friend,” Huston said. He continued to smile. “So I think I’ll take care of the cleanup myself. No use getting your hands bloody.”
DeMarco knew that kind of smile. He knew it held no happiness, only a peculiar feeling of calm and the pleasant strangeness of knowing that the end is near. He said, “You can’t do what you’re thinking, Thomas. You can’t go down that road.”
“It’s the only road there is now.”
“Thomas, please, you have to trust me on this. I have some experience with what you’re feeling. I lost a child too.”
“I lost all of them. Everything and everyone.”
“I know you did. I did too. And yet I managed to go on. I’ve been doing it now for a dozen years.”
“You have to want to,” Huston said. “And I don’t.”
“No, I never wanted to. I just did it.”
Huston smiled awhile longer. Then he said, “I found your handgun in the house.”
“My service weapon? In the bedroom?”
“I’m going to have to take it with me. I’m sorry.”
“You’re a writer, Thomas. You’re not a killer.”
“I am and I want to be. The writer is dead. The husband and the father are dead. All that’s left is the other guy.”
DeMarco lifted his legs, hooked his heels over the edge of the trunk, and pulled himself into a sitting position. Huston stepped back toward the shelf. He reached behind his back then, pulled DeMarco’s handgun from his waistband, and aimed it at DeMarco’s chest. He said, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Just do it very slowly now.”
“You’re not going to shoot me,” DeMarco said.
“Him, you, me… In the end, what difference does any of it make?”
“It makes a difference and you know it.”
Huston said nothing. Then he stood to the side until DeMarco managed to crawl out of the trunk and stand. He placed a hand against the back of DeMarco’s shoulder and directed him to the passenger side of the car. There, to an eyehook screwed into the garage wall at waist level, Huston had tied a six-foot length of nylon rope. He turned DeMarco to stand facing the eyehook, then tied the free end of the rope around the sergeant’s wrists.
“You’re just going to leave me like this?” DeMarco said.
“You’ll get yourself loose.”
Huston returned to the car, laid the service weapon on the shelf, and retrieved from the trunk the strip of tape he had peeled off DeMarco’s mouth. “I’m afraid this has to go back,” he told DeMarco.
“Even if I promise to be quiet?”
Huston smiled and pressed the tape into place. He remained standing close. “I wouldn’t have shot you,” he said.