Charlie rose inch by inch, so as not to spur the unseen gunslinger into precipitous use of his trigger. Charlie was confident that Drummond had had the presence of mind to take the Colt from Candicane’s saddlebag when he took the fountain pen. When Drummond stood and followed the instruction to put his hands up, however, Charlie saw no hint of the gun.
“I could stand another fifty-fifty proposition,” Drummond said. Charlie understood this to mean Drummond required a diversionary tactic, like at the battlefield.
“Zip it,” the stranger barked.
His black-lacquered machine gun was distinguishable from the night by a filament of light. Although Charlie saw him only in silhouette, it was obvious the barrel of his machine gun was shaky. Probably not coincidentally, the man was chattering furiously-oddly, without making any sound. He collected himself sufficiently to steady the barrel, point it at Charlie, and get out, “Time to say your prayers.”
An idea struck Charlie. “Sir, first, there’s one thing that, legally, I need to inform you,” he said.
“What?”
Charlie looked past him, in the direction the helicopter had flown. “Our helicopter has you locked in its sights.”
The stranger peeked over his shoulder at the dark sky. “I can’t even see it anymore.”
Drummond’s bullet hit the man in the head. He fell dead long before the brash report ceased bouncing around the ridge. Charlie was at once sickened and glad the diversion worked.
“Are you okay?” Drummond said.
“Better than him,” Charlie said numbly.
“We need to hurry.” Drummond scrambled back to his horse blanket.
“You think he might have a car around here somewhere?” Charlie asked.
Drummond packed snow into the bald spots on his blanket. “Maybe, but that shot was probably heard for miles. If there’s a road down from here, they’ll block it.”
Charlie pulled his blanket back on with all of the joy of getting into a cold bath.
“Fine diversionary tactic, by the way,” Drummond said.
“The old there’s-someone-behind-you trick? Who’d have thought it would work?”
“It wasn’t that simple. There was nothing distinctive about his appearance or dialect. Yet you deduced he wasn’t in league with the helicopter. How?”
“Oh, that,” Charlie said. “Lucky guess: I didn’t hear anything when he was chattering. I got the sense he was missing a lot of teeth.”
“Ah, symptomatic of methamphetamine usage?”
“Like a big, old red nose is to whiskey.”
“I see.” Drummond rolled onto his haunches, pulled his blanket over him, and shoved off.
“Fine diversionary tactic, by the way” was as much commendation as Charlie ever would have expected. “The young and impressionable profit more from constructive criticism than puffery,” Drummond had long maintained-an adage Charlie speculated had been originated by a childless Spartan. With a coping sigh, he resumed crawling downhill. The ground seemed particularly coarse and cold.
“You have a good nose,” Drummond said. “I was thinking of the first time I saw it. At the office, when you were ten. I let you go down to the basement. Do you remember?”
“No.” Charlie braced for a recounting of an early trip down the Easy Way.
“There was another stairwell, down to the subbasement, but we’d walled it off before we moved in; we needed to keep the existence of the subbasement secret from the legitimate employees. And none of them ever guessed a thing. But you said, ‘Dad, there’s a secret room down here!’ I asked, ‘What makes you think that?’ You just shrugged, so I dismissed it as childish fantasy. On the subway home, though, you blurted out, ‘The closet opens inward!’ Which was the key. We’d made the stairs to the subbasement accessible by what appeared to be a utility closet, which was kept locked. You’d noticed there were no hinges on the outside of the frame. You intuited that the door opened inward-which closet doors customarily do not-meaning the door led somewhere. Ten months we’d been there and no one had thought of that. I had it fixed that night.”
Drummond was fond of citing ability to frame underachievement. Charlie girded for the inevitable drop of the other shoe.
Drummond said no more.
When they’d crept another hundred yards downhill, Charlie considered that Drummond had told the story in appreciation. It kindled in Charlie a good feeling, like winning. He wouldn’t have thought such a nice moment could arise from capping a meth head, but there it was.
As they forged onward, the terrain didn’t bother him as much.
At a back table at Miss Tabby’s, Fielding read the message, forwarded to him by Pitman. Two minutes ago, a man on the ridge texted the pool player: