West Shore

Chapter 2: Every Name He Answers To

He came awake a little after four and did not open his eyes.

He was on his right side, one arm under the pillow, and he did not move. His breathing stayed long and low and even, six hours into the night, with nothing in it that was awake, and he kept it there. The house was quiet. The wind was up and the trees down the slope were making the sound they made every night, a long steady rush that had been going on since long before he bought the place and would go on after. Below the cliff the water worked at the rocks. On the point behind the house, the lighthouse turned.

Dizzy was not breathing.

That was the first thing, and for a while it was the only thing. The cat slept on the chest at the foot of the bed, or on the sill in the hall where the screen had a tear in it, and from either place you heard him at it all night, a small wet catch of breath going in and out. It was not there. He could have gone out. He had slept through that before, twice, three times.

The beam came over the roof and laid a pale band across the ceiling, moved off the wall, crossed the bed, and went. He lay still through it and counted the dark behind.

Mack had not come down the hall once.

His fingers closed on the checkered grip under the pillow.

He waited out one more sweep. When the room went dark behind it he came up off the mattress with the gun in both hands and the front sight on the corner past the closet, the one the beam did not reach.

Something was in it. A hand closed on his wrist and turned it out and over, and the gun went off into the floor.

Outside, nothing barked.

He went with the pain instead of against it. Dropped his shoulder, drove the man back into the dresser, and the dresser hit the wall and everything on top of it came down at once — the travel photographs, the brass tray, the bowl the keys went in — and the frames broke on the boards.

The hand on his wrist eased for half a second.

He took it. Turned, and went out the door.

He hit the hall switch from habit. Nothing happened. He knew the house in the dark — a year of it now, hall and two steps and the turn — and he ran it, and got as far as the doorway.

The chair was across it. Laid flat on its back, one leg out toward the hall, set square in the gap where a man coming out of that room at a dead run would put his shin.

He hit it and went down.

Then something took his ankle.

The hold had a jaw in it. It closed on the bone above his heel and dragged him back a foot along the boards. He pulled against it twice and it did not give, so he stopped pulling and came up inside it instead, and threw a punch at where the head should have been. The man had a forearm in the way. The second one, same. The third he took on the shoulder and stood there and took it.

After that they were both in it.

In the dark, in a house he knew better than anybody on that island, the two of them went at it, and it was fast. A side table went over. Glass broke somewhere by the window. Blows landed on forearms and ribs and once, hard, on the jaw, and the man took that one and kept coming.

The beam came through the front windows and crossed the room, and for the length of the sweep it showed him what he was fighting. Taller than he was. Heavier through the arms and the shoulders. A half step slower and a great deal stronger.

Then the sweep went, and the room went with it, and the man took him by the arm and turned him and dropped a shoulder and threw him over it.

He came down across the coffee table and the coffee table came apart under him, top cracked through the middle, both legs out. His back went white all the way up. He got a hand out on the floor and closed it on something heavy and brought it around into the side of the man's head — a ceramic vase, thick, the kind that rings — and the ring of it came back up through his own wrist.

The man grunted, said something short, filthy, and low, and hauled him up by the shirt.

That was when he came up off the man's hands like a bowstring off the fingers: everything he had, all at once, no plan anywhere in it. He got a foot on the man's thigh, went up over his shoulder, came down on his back with an arm across the throat and his weight behind it, and started closing it.

The man got a hand in and could not get it out again. He did not make any noise about it. He worked. And the arm kept closing, an inch at a time.

The lights came on.

All of them, all at once — hall, kitchen, the bulb over the sink, the porch light he had turned off himself. They came up white and complete and showed him the room: the chair lying in the bedroom door, the glass on the floor, the dogs' empty beds at the end of the hall, and the men standing along the walls with their hands at their sides.

They had been standing there the whole time.

The nearest one was holding Dizzy up by the loose skin at the back of his neck.

The cat hung in the air with his body gone long and all four feet down, straight as something pulled out of a drawer. He looked at the room, flicked his tail once, and the knife came up level with his throat.

"Fuck."

He opened his arm.

The man came out of it, turned over on top of him, and put him face down on the boards with a knee in his back.

They stayed like that a while, both of them taking air. The forearm by his face smelled of gun oil and sweat. The floor was cold under his cheek. Out past the house the tree sound went on.

Then the beam came around again and lit the two of them, and it was not a stranger.

He had been on the news the night before. Yesterday he had stood at Cairn Pass in front of the families, with the cameras on him, and the anchor had given his name and his rank and his regiment and gone on to the weather.

Colonel Jason Vance.

Vance had been looking at him since the light came on, and he was not doing it fast — he went over the face an inch at a time, the eyes and the mouth and the line of the jaw, the way a man looks at a lock he has opened once already and cannot remember how.

"What do I call you?"

He had the jaw in his hand and he turned the face up into the light with it, and he was not being careful.

"Jay. Evan Mercer. Or — Indigo."

Jay was the island's name for him — the deed, the county rolls, Gila calling it across the diner every morning of the past year. All three of them, and nothing in his face changed.

Three breaths, slow, in through the nose, and then the work began. He was good at this part. He had had years of it. It took about two seconds, and in those two seconds his shoulders came down and his jaw let go under the hand and everything in his face that had edges in it went away.

What came up in its place was the old warm look, and it still fit.

"Colonel."

He had said it in that voice for years, with the same smile he had built out of nothing and worn smooth.

The hand on his jaw tightened until the pressure went into the bone, and the marks came up red under the fingers.

Then Vance came down close. His mouth stopped just short of his nose.

"Did you miss me?"

"Yes." There was no gap at all between the two words. Not a breath. "Yes. I missed you to death."

The mouth came off him and went to his ear. "I don't believe one word out of your mouth." Every word separate. "Not one word of it."

Nothing in his face moved. His breathing stayed exactly where it was. The only thing that happened was his eyelashes, once.

Then Vance was up off him and standing with a fistful of his shirt, and his own face had closed down completely.

Vance walked him down the hall with a hand at the back of his neck. The glass did not matter to the hand, or the broken frames, and the sill caught a toe on the way through. The bedroom door closed and took the hall light out of the room with it, and then he was on the bed.

The beam went over the window and turned everything white for a second and let it go. Vance's shoulders took most of it. What was left of his face was the shape of a jaw and the eyes, and the eyes were cold and did not move off him.

He did not fight it. He had spent what he had in the living room, and he had put a full fist into this man's jaw there and the man had come back at the same speed he started at. Fighting him here would only be a way of asking for more of him.

He went limp instead. Dizzy did the same thing when he was picked up by the loose skin at the back of the neck — all four feet down, all his weight in the hand that held him, no opinion about any of it — and it had not cost the cat anything yet.

A hand closed on his throat.

"What's your real name?"

"Marcus Hale."

The hand tightened.

"Owen Boyd."

Tighter.

He got both hands on the wrist and grinned up at him — the grin was bad, he knew it was bad, he could not get the breath for it — and said, "Whatever you want to call me, Colonel. Whatever you say."

The grip came off his throat all at once.

Vance looked at him for a while and did not say anything.

He wanted to try one more thing on him. He got as far as opening his mouth.

Vance came down on him.

It was not a kiss. Teeth caught his lower lip and went through it, and then there was iron in his mouth, and in Vance's too, and Vance did not seem to mind that.

The shirt went in one pull — he heard the seam give — and then the mouth was on his neck, going down, biting on the way, and it stopped at the collarbone, and then in the hollow of his throat, and stayed there longer.

"Colonel," he said, into the side of the man's head. "You came all this way. You must be — let me get you something. I'll fix you a—"

Teeth closed on the side of his neck and broke the skin.

Vance licked at the wound and stayed there, breathing against it, and did not move off until the shaking under him had run itself down and started again.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes."

Vance held him down and got the last of it off him. The beam came around again. His face was wet and it was calm.

Vance came down again, heavy, all his weight, and this time there were no teeth in it.

He opened his mouth for it and shut his eyes and got a fistful of sheet, and held on to that while the rest of it went through him.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes." It came out shaking.

Vance smiled at that, slow and complete, and then he stopped being careful about anything at all.

The beam came over the room and went on, and it did not change anything in there.

Later, breathing fast and uneven at his ear: "Remember this, Evan. What you are feeling right now is not one ten-thousandth of what I have felt this past year."

He shut his eyes as hard as he could and they moved under the lids anyway. The hand holding the sheet was taken off it, finger by finger, and made to lock into Vance's, and pressed flat into the mattress, and it stayed there.

Vance did not move off him. He looked down at the face under him — the wet on it, the eyes shut, the hand held flat under his own — and he took his time with it.

Outside, the wind turned and came up through the trees, and the shadows moved on the wall, and the sound of it got louder. It had been there every night anybody had slept in that house. It never sounded like trees. It sounded like rain on a roof — rain that had been coming down for years and had never once let up.

It was falling on another roof, a long way from any coast, a long time before that night. Three stories of gray stone at the end of a gravel drive a quarter mile long, a slate roof, copper gutters, a ballroom on the east side that nobody used.

The bell at the gate had not worked in years. Cars coming up had to sit at the gate and honk.