The Triggerman Dance

Fargo hopped up the steps and into the cabin. It took him a second to find his target—going from sunlight to the shade. Maybe he was distracted by the dogs. But when he saw John standing there motionless in the kitchen he raised his gun quickly and John blew him back out the door, over the railing and onto the bed of sycamore leaves piled high by the wind. The dogs raced outside. They leapt off the deck and charged past Fargo's body, looking for the quail. Then Boomer circled back and sniffed the dead man's face, twice, before backing away and looking up at John with a puzzled expression.

CHAPTER 42

It is a quiet restaurant off the tourist path in Laguna Beach, given to candlelight, mismatched flatware and locals. John, the nominal guest of honor, lifts his tequila glass to Joshua and Sharon, who face him from across the booth. Their proximity to each other surprises him.

It is five days after Liberty Ridge. Boomer, Bonnie and Belle are snug in the Laguna Canyon home, a place where John has spent many solitary hours in the last five days, trying to decide if he belongs there or not. He has been looking into rooms a lot, as if someone he cares about might be there, as if anyone ever really was. It feels good to return to a place that is, in some small way, his own.

"To the three of us," says Joshua.

They drink.

It is the second toast of the night, though dinner hasn't arrived yet. The first was to the three of them also, and John can see that Joshua's rum and coke has gone straight to his non-drinker's head.

"What was the worst of it?" asks Sharon.

"Snakey."

Snakey, of course, has been vigorously forgotten by everyone but John. Joshua revealed to Frazee what had happened to Snakey—one Peter Boardman, originally of Trenton, New Jersey—the day after the shooting of Holt, and Frazee managed to insert the official paperwork regarding his death after the fact.

The questionable circumstances of Snakey's arrival at the morgue have been tucked into the larger folds of Federal procedure, vagueness and clout. Snakey, it seems, had lived his life as a criminal, and his memory has been treated like one, too.

The food comes and they eat, but John cannot find his way into a celebratory mood. In fact, the dinner seems more an obligation than anything, a business meal with people you have spent too much of your life with as it is. Still, he describes his days on Liberty Ridge to a surprisingly curious Sharon and Josh. Tonight, the tequila offers an anaesthetic touch to his brain. He looks out the window to Coast Highway, slick with the first rain of the fall. Through the cracked window beside him he can smell the sweet aroma of rainwater and asphalt.

". . . So we're hiking across Liberty Ridge in the dark, on our way to the tombs, and Josh jumps every ten feet because of snakes. He made me crawl under the table to attach the microphones, because of bugs."

Sharon smiles and throws back her hair in a way John has never seen her do. He notices that if you traced the arc of Sharon's arm down from her shoulder you would find her hand resting on Joshua's thigh. Her high spirits surprise him, because he has learned that she and Josh shot almost simultaneously at Partch, both hitting him with fatal bullets. He was expecting a more subdued agent.

Joshua looks as he always looked, and just as John always pictured him during those feverish minutes when he was with his box of toys by the young oak tree, calling in: pale, hyperfocused, humorless. Even the alcohol can't dull Joshua's sharp edges, though it does unleash a little sentiment in him. John looks at his black eyes, his thick curly mop of hair, his big Adam's apple traveling up and down his throat. And oddly, he sees that Joshua is ashamed of something, embarrassed. It takes John a moment to realize why: Sharon. Not the woman herself, he knows—she's far too handsome and level and healthy for that—but the idea of a Sharon at all. Joshua, he sees, has finally embarked down the long path away from Rebecca and back into the world. John wonders if Dumars will be able to withstand the test that Joshua will put her through, as he judges whether or not she is worth the journey.

"Good luck," he says.

"With what, John?" Sharon asks.

"Everything."