West Shore

Chapter 6: The Lady's Model

Harkness Island had belonged to the same dozen families for longer than anyone living could count, and no two of them told it the same way. They had come in under three different flags across two hundred years, and somewhere in the middle of that — the date moved depending on whose grandfather was doing the talking — they had stopped keeping the flags straight and started keeping the names straight. A name on the island was not a family tree. It was a statement about where your people had been standing when it counted, which was how families who had arrived with nothing ended up carrying names that sounded older than the families who had arrived with land.

Two hundred years of that, with nobody to marry but each other, had finished the job the boats started, and the faces had come out of it sorted into a few broad kinds. Will Thorne's people still had the sun in them: copper skin, heavy bones, a jaw built for weather. The Vances had gone the other way and spent their lives indoors — white skin that burned before it tanned, black brows, eyes that gave up nothing.

The part that had needed a name was the part the adults called the Compact when they remembered there were kids in the room. An agreement, never written, never voted on: the families on the island did not settle their business with their hands. They settled it with money, with a seat on something, with a contract that went to the other man's nephew, with a house in town nobody lived in, and — this being the island — with a person, moved from one family to another and called a gift by anybody who asked.

Jason Vance had grown up inside that arithmetic and knew, roughly to the inch, how far a Vance could go in his own backyard. He had drawn on it that afternoon — one stone across Will Thorne's wrist, in front of everybody — and he had not thought about it since.

He stood at the east end of the pool with a drink he had no plans to finish sitting on the coping behind him. The yard was quiet. Somebody had pulled the music an hour ago and nobody had asked for it back. Fifty-odd kids in sunglasses, all of them watching. Will Thorne stood off to the side with his right hand hanging at his side, the fingers working in slow reps, closing and letting go, and the smile on his face was doing more work by the second. Amanda Cole was still down where she had landed, one hip c****d, both hands flat on the deck. Past the loungers the low glass table was still on its side, ice and lime where they had fallen and the ice going soft in the sun.

The boy who had come out of the crowd was still walking, taking the long way around the deep end with his eyes down and his hands easy at his sides. He stopped out of arm's reach, and waited.

"Sir."

"Go," Jason said.

Evan waited.

"Don't embarrass me."

That was all of it. No time, no order of events — the rules had already been said out loud, on the deck, where everyone could hear them. Evan bent his head about a quarter inch, which was what he did instead of saying yes, and went around the side of the house, away from the crowd, to have a word with Ted Marsh, who ran the place.

Lance Ellery slid in on Jason's left, which was where Lance stood when somebody else's afternoon had gone wrong and he wanted to be seen standing on the side that hadn't.

"That's him," he said, quiet. "That's the debt."

Jason didn't turn his head. "Mm."

Lance gave it four seconds, longer than he gave most things, and then laughed once and let it go, because he had been raised by people who read rooms for a living, and this one had answered.

"What's he do?"

Jason considered the question for exactly as long as it deserved. "He cooks," he said, and he made no effort at all to keep his voice down, and fifty people heard it.

Lance pushed his sunglasses up onto his head to get a look at the kid's back. "A cook."

"Not a cook." Jason was smiling, the way he smiled right before he enjoyed something. "He was his class's valedictorian, and Harkness Military College took him early. He's a year ahead of me there."

"So he's smart." Lance sounded put out, the way people get put out by good news that isn't theirs. "That's not nothing."

"You want to know what he majored in."

"Sure."

"Human resources."

The laugh went out over the deck in a wave, and by the time it reached the far end of the pool the kids down there were laughing at a joke they had never heard. Lance laughed until he had to give up standing on his own and leaned into Jason's shoulder to finish it. Four generations of a face that had never needed any help, spent on a laugh.

"All right, all right." He wiped under one eye with a knuckle and got himself upright again. "It's not the worst I've seen. He looks like he could get things done, and you've got everything a person could want over here except somebody keeping the small stuff off you. Your grandfather still likes you best. That's all this is."

Evan came back out of the house with a flat black case under one arm, going around the crowd instead of through it, and set it down on the coping next to Jason's glass.

He opened it.

Two pistols lay on gray felt, small and dark and clean, with one spare magazine seated in the foam beside each.

Jason looked, and the set of his shoulders came down a notch.

He knew the model before he touched anything. The Walther P-series was what a man carried when the work crossed borders — flat enough to disappear under a jacket, simple enough to strip and rebuild in the dark. It was Jason's own, on the days he carried one. The PPK was the short one, small enough for a pocket or a purse, and the men who carried something heavier had a name for it.

Down the deck, Will Thorne had stopped working his hand.

"What's the matter, Vance?" He said it loud enough to reach the shallow end. "Your family run out of guns? Or is the lady's model what you hand the help?"