Page 17 of So Far Gone

“That’s not what Shane wants.”

“Bethany left a note askingmeto watch them.” Kinnick took a half step forward. “And that’s what I’m going to do.”

That’s when the man with the goatee casually pulled his jacket back to show Kinnick the pistol in his holster.

Brother Dean closed the distance between them, getting almost nose-to-nose with Kinnick, and cocking his big, bald head. “You skip out for ten years,” he said. “And now you want to play Grandpa? Is that it?”

Rhys felt that one in his gut.Seven years,he thought,not ten. But this time he didn’t say it out loud because he knew it wasn’t much better.

Then, out of the blue, he remembered how he knew Brother Dean. “Wait a minute. You’re Dean Burris! I covered your trial. You’re the Dominion Eagle Killer.”

Dean Burris took a step back, confused, his face coloring with embarrassment. Or maybe rage. Kinnick had written about Burris’s federal poaching trial ten, maybe twelve years ago. Burris had been a long-haul truck driver who, in his spare time, poached eagles across the West. Mostly on Indian reservations. Burris would shoot a deer, then leave it out in the open, scaring off coyotes and other scavengers until a bald eagle or a golden eagle came for the carcass. From a hunting blind, he’d shoot the eagle and part out the valuable birds on the black market: wings, talons, tails, feathers. Sometimes he sold whole stuffed birds for thousands of dollars. He’d also, in his illustrious poaching career, killed and sold bears, bobcats, cougars, and Canadian lynx. He tried pleadingnot guilty by way of dominion over animals,but the judge hadn’t accepted that particular legal theory. Burris had also challenged the jurisdiction of the federal court, of gaming agents, of Indian reservations, of pretty much every aspect of the case, but the judge rejected all of his sovereign citizen defenses and sentenced him to five years in federal prison. Amid rising concern over radical right-wing crime, there had been great interest in these stories, and Kinnick had gotten good play in the paper—three days of front-page bylines.

Dean’s eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. “Kids. Come on.” He began to turn.

Rhys tensed, his fingers curling into fists. “Wait—”

“Grandpa, it’s okay,” Leah said. She put a hand on his arm, giving him the strangest look. Widening her eyes, as if warning him about something. Or telling him:It’ll be okay. Don’t start trouble.They were Celia’s don’t-start-trouble eyes. Bethany’s not-now-Dad eyes. Clearly, she had adopted her mother’s strategy of dealing with people like Shithead Shane—stay back while the pot boiled over. Rhys felt somethingrise in his throat. “Everything in circles,” he muttered. So strange being out among people again. He just kept speaking aloud the words he thought he was only thinking.

Brother Dean grabbed the kids’ backpacks out of Kinnick’s car, then shepherded them toward the pickup, while the man with the goatee remained watching Rhys, arms crossed, that grim smile still on his face.

What to do now? Kinnick couldn’t just let his grandchildren go. Not with the Dominion Eagle Killer. Not so these AOL loons could marry off his thirteen-year-old granddaughter to some pastor’s kid and keep his sweet nonprodigy grandson from losing at chess. “Stop!” he said. “Don’t do this. Let’s call Shane. I’ll talk to him. Apologize—” The kids were almost to the truck, and Kinnick had only taken a first step toward them when Dean Burris half-turned back and gave a nod to the man with the goatee.

There was flash of something black. Kinnick’s head snapped.

The sound inside his skull was like someone breaking a stalk of celery behind his ear. What just hit him? He didn’t see it coming and he didn’t see it land. One second, Kinnick was standing, taking a step forward, and the next, he was on his hands and knees, blood pouring from his nose and mouth, his face throbbing. Was his jaw broken? A wave of pain shot through the left side of his head.

Then the word came to him: blackjack. Sap.

Christ. Had he been hit by a goon out of the 1940s?

Kinnick looked up from his knees to see the man who’d hit him walking away, heels of his cowboy boots making little puffs of dust. The goateed man climbed in the passenger side of the extended cab pickup truck. The door closed and the truck pulled away, gravel crackling in the parking lot, Leah’s pretty face staring at him through the extended cab window. She had a hand over her mouth. He couldn’t see Asher.

“Wait!” Kinnick tried to stand but he was unsteady. Blood pulsedfrom his nose. He felt the return of an old feeling: hopelessness.Well, hello, my old friend. He sat back down in the gravel and watched as the pickup truck turned out of the parking lot. The brake lights winked, and then the truck rolled away down the street.

A young man was running awkwardly from the abbey toward him. “Are you okay? Did that guy just hit you?” He had thinning blond hair and wore a priest’s collar under a casual black sweater. His fingertips were warm, gently touching Kinnick’s throbbing left cheek.

“You have a fractured zygomatic arch,” the young man said. “Sucker- punch injury.” He clicked his tongue, then ran inside to get some towels before Kinnick could ask how it was that a baby Episcopal priest could make such a strangely specific diagnosis.

Two

What Happened to Lucy

Lucy Park strolled across the newsroom, swallowing her anger and striving for that elusive affect, nonchalance, as she went to check on Allison-the-teenaged-cops-reporter, who was bent over her phone at her desk like a nun over rosary beads.

“Hey there,” Lucy said, “I don’t suppose you’re close to filing your story?”

Allison looked up. She was, of course, neither nun nor teenager, but a twenty-four-year-old recent college graduate, still able to conjure a bit of high school indignation on her face when it suited her. “Um,” Allison said, “I’m, like, working on it?” She held her phone up with a flopped wrist. On the screen: a photo of crime scene tape around a light pole. She was, like, posting it! If someone would just, like, leave her alone!

Lucy hated this tone. She also hated that reporters were expected to constantly post on social media, before they’d even gotten a chance to report their stories, before knowing what their stories even meant. “No problem,” Lucy said, leaving her trademark profanity unspoken—as encouraged by her boss in her last three performance reviews. (And maybe,she thought,when you’re done thumb-fucking your phone, you could work some fucking sources and, I don’t know, write a fuckingnews story that I can put in the fucking newspaper, you spoiled fucking child.)

Language, Lucy, her ex-husband always used to say.A hundred-and-ten pounds of verbal rage—that’s what he’d called her during a fight on their honeymoon.Hundred-and-six, you fucking asshole!she’d said back.

“Right, then,” Lucy said to Allison. “So, how long are we thinking?” Lucy glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock.

“Hour?” Allison said, meaning two, meaning right on deadline, Lucy thinking:two fucking hours?For what? This story was a rerun: cops had shot another indigent Freddy, this one threatening people downtown with what appeared to be a syringe. Police responded, stoned guy ran at them, cop lit him up, CAS redux. Cop-Assisted Suicide. Four so far. Banner year.

“I think they’re going for a record,” Allison said.

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