Chapter Fifty-Four

NICK SAT ACROSS the living room from Vinny at the inn. He’d known guys in the service who looked the way Vinny looked now. The old gangster was gesticulating with his battered hands, his speech steadily growing faster as he described the scene at the diner. Vinny’s eyes were distant. Relishing. Reliving. Nick had played attentive audience to dozens of men like Vinny in his time. Proud killers. He was glad that Angelica and the woman guest with the kid had all moved to a motel in town to get away from the trouble at the inn. The way Vinny was talking would give normal people nightmares.

“So I’m tryin’ not to look,” Vinny was saying, his smile so wide Nick could see his blackened molars. “But I’m watchin’ the plates, and I’m hoping these are the kind of rednecks who just add salt to everythin’, you know? Without even tasting. And what do you know? Soon as the plate hits the table—bam. I got the one guy. He’s loadin’ up his plate. Shicka-shicka-shicka.” Vinny made a shaking motion with an imaginary saltshaker. Nick rested his chin on his knuckles on the arm of his chair.

“And it’s like I said.” Vinny shrugged. “I don’t know how strong this stuff is. I bought it for way too much from a pair of truckers, and they couldn’t tell me. Every time they take this stuff, they said, it’s a roll of the dice. Trial and error. Life and death. Kind of exciting, huh? And I mean, that’s the whole point, right? Nobody knows what they’re buying or what they’re dealing. So I’m thinkin’: These guys are either gonna shrivel up like a pair of slugs or they’re gonna get a little giggly like teenagers on mushrooms. Who knows?”

“How long did it take them to die?” Nick asked, his tone even.

“The guy in the booth? He went out like a light,” said Vinny, snapping his fingers. “But the one guy who Bill caught before he hit the floor: I don’t know. I didn’t stick around. When I left, Bill was trying out CPR. Man, Driver’s face when the guy across from him started coughing.”

Vinny laughed, pretended to choke, grabbing at his throat and rolling his eyes up in his head. Nick didn’t move. Didn’t smile. The older man hadn’t seemed to notice that he was the only person enjoying this conversation.

Nick wasn’t having fun but he wasn’t angry. He felt numb, looking out at the darkness beyond the French doors. He wondered how long it had been since he’d become the kind of person who could sit listening to a man laugh about murders he had committed that day like he was reciting a beloved family anecdote. It felt like a lifetime. Nick couldn’t find the lines that divided just and evil actions anymore, good and bad deaths, times to be silent and times to speak. So he just listened. He looked at his phone on the coffee table before him, thought about the recording it contained.

He’d just put into words memories that he’d kept inside since 2010.

And as he’d voiced them aloud, he’d experienced the same unquestioning paralysis. Like he’d already felt all that he could possibly feel about what happened in Afghanistan, and now he was hollowed out.

Nick heard Effie’s footsteps on the stairs, and then she was in the doorway, pointing frantically toward the hall and the little foyer beyond it.

He went there and recognized Breecher’s silhouette beyond the stained glass panels in the door. He opened it, feeling Effie crowding at his back, the enormous rifle in her arms pointed at the ceiling. Nick looked Breecher over, gave Effie the nod that it was OK.

“You gotta go,” Nick said. He held a hand up before Breecher could speak. “It’s not safe here. We’ve got all kinds of trouble headed this way from Bill’s end of things and… it’s just not a good time.”

“I’m sorry, Nick,” Breecher said.

For a moment Nick thought she must have meant about the timing. Some part of him assumed she was about to suggest they meet again in the daylight hours, when the unease that comes with night had lifted, and she could try to convince him that she wasn’t lying to him. But another, deeper part of him was unsurprised as he heard glass breaking at the back of the house. Effie’s sneakers squeaked on the floor behind him as she swiveled, desperately trying to decide if she should respond to the intruders at the back or stay with the intruder at the front.

Nick looked down at the pistol Breecher drew from her jacket pocket. She leveled it at his chest.