They Picked the Wrong Gardener

Chapter 10

You do not swim a river in the rain with a bullet in your arm. You hang on, and you let it decide.

Noah went into the water holding his red plastic dinosaur above the surface for three seconds before the current dragged us under. I hooked my right arm through the iron rung of the falling ladder section as it swept past the last piling of the pier. My left arm was torn open high on the bicep, but I got my fingers twisted into the collar of his jacket and held while the water hammered against my ribs, trying to peel us apart.

We came out of the river on the far bank, in the mud, a quarter mile below the tower. Noah coughed up half the river, spat silt into the reeds, and then began to cry: loud, furious, ordinary crying. I lay flat in the mud with my cheek against the wet earth, listening to him make that noise in the dark.

"You shouted your name," I said. "On the ladder. I heard you, buddy. You did exactly right."

"I did the gardening," he said. His teeth rattled against each other. "The chin one. Mr. Cole — you're bleeding on me."

"Then we're even. You cried on me first."

I stripped off my soaked coat, wrapped it around his shoulders, and carried him through the scrub oak along the drainage ditches behind the lumber yard. We kept off the asphalt. Headlights crawled along the county highway above us, but the back lanes belong to people who walk them in the dark.

Sarah met us at her door with a blanket. It was the door I had fixed, the one that opens both ways. She took Noah out of my arms without a sound, wrapping the wool around him. Then she stopped on the threshold and looked at the mud, the weeds, and my arm hanging wrong from the shoulder.

"Hospital," she said.

"Tea first."

"Elias."

"Tea first, Sarah. Put him in a hot bath. I have one stop to make."

She pulled her boy close against her neck, her jaw tight, and nodded once.

I crossed the grass to my kitchen, washed the silt from my face at the sink, and wrapped a clean towel around the torn muscle in my arm to pin the bleeding. The lead had cleared the bone. I picked up my shears from the counter, took down the thermos of hot tea Sarah had left on my stove before the tower, and stepped back into the rain. One more thing in the night would not wait.

◆

Danny Cruz was in his car behind the black-windowed bar, drunk, with the engine running and the doors locked.

I knocked on the glass with the ash handle of the shears.

He jerked sideways, squinting through the misted glass at my face. He reached down and unlocked the door. He slid across the console into the passenger seat without a word, letting me sit behind the wheel. I pulled the door shut against the drizzle and set the thermos of Sarah's tea between us on the console, not a weapon.

"Drink," I said.

He unscrewed the metal cap with shaking hands. He swallowed two hot mouthfuls, staring straight through the windshield at the brick alley. He sat there deciding which man he was going to be: the one who held the umbrella over Marco at the water tower, or the one who stood up in a casino and apologized to a widow's ribbon. The tea decided him.

"It wasn't Marco," he said at last, to the windshield. "Marco made the call, sure. But the order never started with him, Elias. It came down from the top with Marco's name pinned on it, so if it went wrong, Marco would be the one who hanged. Victor Kane ordered your boy taken. Victor Kane picked the tower, the note, the bullet they left on your porch. All of it. And Victor said your name like he'd been keeping it. 'Tell Elias Cole,' he said, 'that ten years is long enough to owe a man.'"

He pressed his phone into my hand. "Every call Marco ever made me is on there. I kept them in case I was the one they decided to hang."

The plastic was warm from his pocket. I slid it into my coat next to the shears.

"Why give it to me, Danny?"

He looked at the thermos, then at the shears on my knee. "Because you brought tea," he said.

Ten years ago Victor Kane was the younger son of a family that laundered money and men with the same soap. I was the instrument Concord leased them for the clean room, the one you wind up, point, and never name. They fed me addresses, and I did not ask what burned.

The last address was a safe house by a frozen lake. The targets were a man who had skimmed the family's charity money, his wife, and his son. The file had photographs: the boy's age, his school, the gap in his teeth.

What the file did not have was the drawing on the refrigerator.

I stood in that kitchen at three in the morning with my work in my hand. The boy — seven years old, hair like a dandelion, sent down for water in his sleep clothes — stopped in the doorway and looked at me. He did not scream. He looked at the gun. He looked at my face. And he pointed, with one small finger, at his own drawing held up by a magnet shaped like a strawberry.

"That's me, flying."

I put the gun down on the counter, the way a guest sets down a thing he has brought into the wrong house. I walked out of that kitchen and out of that family and out of that life, and I kept walking until the walking became a street and the street became a garden.

Concord closed my file because the alternative was a war they might lose. The Kanes let me go because Victor, who had loved me the way a boy loves the knife his father keeps in the high drawer, swore an oath in a room with no windows that when he was somebody he would come and collect me himself.

A decade of silence had passed. Victor waited until there was something growing in my life worth burning. He does not collect debts; he collects interest.

Danny stared at the dashboard. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to finish my garden," I said. "And then I'm going to go and see an old friend about a debt."

I opened the car door and stepped out into the dark alley, leaving the latch to click shut behind me.

◆

I pieced together later what happened across town that same night.

In an office above the freight yard, Victor Kane stood at a wide window looking at stills from the tower. The last one showed an old man folded around a child, going off the catwalk.

His aide, Mr. Webb, stood near the desk with a leather ledger under his arm.

"Marco failed," Webb said.

"Marco performed," Victor said. "Marco was the bell. One does not blame the bell for the hour." He tapped the print against the glass. "The boy is home. The street is awake. The gardener is out of his garden, bleeding in the open. Everything is proceeding, Mr. Webb. Everything is blooming."

Webb shifted his weight. "The street will go to the police now. The k********g took place in front of a school trip."

"The street will lock its doors and the police will file their reports." Victor touched the falling shape on the screen, his thumbnail resting against the gray outline. "Light it anyway. All of it. Every flower planted in ten years of pretending. Burn his whole pretend life down to the dirt it grew in, and when he comes out of the smoke—" he smiled "—he will come out as mine."