The Darkest Evening of the Year

but she had no doubt that it was what she needed to do. Intuition is seeing with the soul.
    She knew they reached the crest when she felt the front of the Expedition cant downward.
    A moment later, as the back of the Expedition crossed the crest and Amy with it, the brake lights flared red, and she moved at once around to the driver’s side.
    She saw a figure rush through the fog only twelve feet or so in front of her, saw muzzle flashes, heard a stutter of shots, the pop of a tire, ricochets off metal.
    Her heart knocked against her ribs at the thought of Brian shot.
    Sideways to Amy, the shooter started to turn his head, but she had the pistol in a two-hand grip.
    In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.
    Scared, she was scared, all right, but she stopped, squeezed off a pair of rounds, and when he rocked as if hit, she fired two more as she moved toward him.
    Headlights bloomed, and the driver’s door flew open.
    Brian got out, not a ghost in the fog, a ghost still safely in his skin, his explosive breath stirring the mist.
    The man down, the shooter shot, lay on his back, as sweet-faced as a favorite uncle, bleeding from the abdomen, bleeding from his nostrils, eyes wide and lashes lush.
    He blinked at Amy, said, “Do you know me? I’m Leopold Bloom, I’m Wallace Stevens. My name is Gregor Samsa,” and then closed his eyes.
    When you shoot a man dead, even when it’s a righteous shooting, your attention tends to fix on him, and Amy’s was riveted, so that Brian had to say her name urgently twice, before she looked up and saw the lighthouse.
    The lighthouse in Connecticut was made of limestone, this one of painted brick, and the stone tower’s catwalk was encircled by an ornate iron railing, this one by a plainer wooden railing painted red.
    Materials didn’t matter, nor details, nor a distance of three thousand miles. Only the iconic form mattered, a symbol for death and for the love of death, for faithlessness and lies and vows taken with a stifled laugh.
    Michael was here. He had found her at last; and through her, Brian; and through Brian, Vanessa.
    She didn’t know how, didn’t know why such indirection, but she had no doubt that he meant to finish his blood sacrifice. She was a better woman than she had been on that distant day, and now she was being given the chance to save an innocent if she could be wise and brave and quick. Even if she died trying, there was redemption in that kind of death.
    “Get Nickie,” she said, but as she turned, she saw that the dog had clambered across the console, onto the driver’s seat. She leaped out of the Expedition, to Amy’s side.
    Somewhere in the dismalness below stood a caretaker’s house, probably two hundred yards away, judging by the position of the lighthouse. Maybe the flow of fog across its roof and around its corners suggested the lines of the place— there —or maybe not.
    Michael might be in the house. Or anywhere. If he had been waiting for them to be brought to him at gunpoint, the different voices of the two weapons might have alerted him to trouble.
    Brian picked up the dead man’s gun.
    Somewhere in the fog, Michael was coming.
    She said, “Keep Nickie back.”
    Leaning into the SUV, she shifted it out of park.
    Brian had engaged the emergency brake. She released it, and jumped out of the way as the car began to roll.
    “Something to distract him.”
    The blown tire began to shred, but the grade was too steep for the vehicle to be stopped or even much slowed by that friction. The Expedition pulled to the left as it descended, the bared wheel rim shrieking on blacktop, chunks of rubber torn loose and knocking against the undercarriage.
    Fog licked thick tongues around the SUV, then swallowed it whole, and there was only the glow of its lights going down the gullet. Rattles and clatters rose as small obstructions were encountered and plowed aside.
    “If he’s coming, he’s coming here,” Amy said.
    As if she understood, Nickie led them across the road, onto the slope north of it, into scattered trees and universal fog.

 
    Chapter
63
    W aiting for the gunfire that will signal the game has begun, Harrow stands in the open kitchen door, fog seething past him and into the house.
    He would have assisted Billy except for two reasons, the first of which is that, for this kind of work, Billy is the best man Harrow has ever encountered. Billy is a machine. A perpetual-motion machine, free of friction.