The Triggerman Dance

"I like you better breathing. How could I throw away all those other good parts? Like you hands and your back and your arms?"

"Well, you could do a full-body job. Stand me up in the corner like a polar bear."

"Ugh. Have you see Dad's trophy room?"

"No."

"It's his sanctuary. His ultimate place. With all of the paintings and sculpture everywhere, all the valuables littered around this place, the trophy room is still the only one he locks. He says it's because of the humidifier and air conditioning, but I know it's just because he loves the place so much. His place. Nobody else's. His little chapel full of animals. Over a hundred of them. Most of them are real trophies, too—Boone & Crockett, Safari International—true record-book stuff."

"He gave me a house tour, but didn't mention it."

"It's in the basement, actually."

"Your father is a remarkable man."

Valerie sips her wine. "He truly is. He went a little crazy when Patrick died and mom got wounded. I can't blame him. I do feel sorry for him."

"Crazy?"

"Inward. Secretive. Half-there. I mean, he was always secretive about his work—you knew he was FBI for almost thirty years, didn't you? But after Pat and Mom, well ... he got even more vague. He'd sit for hours with a Scotch in his hand and stare out a window. Wouldn't talk. Wouldn't move. Wouldn't even drink. You know something's wrong with Dad when he won't drink. I'd sit down with him and we'd go hours without talking much. It was like sitting with Mom. Pat was killed by that bullet, and Mom was paralyzed by it, but part of it got into Dad, too. Maybe into me, also—I mean, it changed the way I look at things."

"How?"

"It made me love more, and hate more. It made me old. It got into my dreams. It took away two things that were a big part of me, and nothing good can take their place. You have this hole inside, and you've got to protect it, keep the bad things out. I don't know—it's hard to explain."

"I think I understand."

He can feel her looking at him. She drinks more wine. "Yes, you do. When I saw the way you looked at Rusty, I knew you would understand. And when I was sitting across from you at dinner, I knew you'd understand. You're old, too."

"A lot older than you."

"Not years old. Life old. Miles old."

John looks at her bedstand clock: 3:53 a.m. "It's late."

"Who are you?"

He smiles a smile of falsehood. "John."

"Besides that."

"What I told you."

"I'm not fully convinced."

"I'm not who I say I am?"

"No. You're more than that. Much more than that."

"Well," he says, opening the bedroom door. "Let me know when you find out the truth."

At 4:08 a.m. John is back in his cottage, snatching his penlight from the bedstand drawer. A moment later he crouches under the rear bumper of his truck to find the magnetized hide-a-box containing his tension wrench and lockpick.

At 4:16 a.m. he is in Vann Holt's private library office shooting copies of all of Holt's handwritten notes in the "B" file Brief and unrevealing as they are, John has wondered if perhaps Baum is being discussed somewhere here, under a code that only Holt knows. He holds the penlight camera to his eye and listen; to the faint click of the shutter opening and closing as he rotate: the shaft.

At 4:24 he is standing in front of the basement door of what he assumes is the trophy room. It takes him five minutes to get in because the deadbolt has eight springs and he is half drunk and nervous as all get-out crouching here with the penlight in his mouth, the pick clicking in the lock and the sweat running down his neck.

He steps inside and turns on a light.

The room is not what he was expecting. There are no head: on the walls, no antlers, no horns, no ivory, no racks. There are no skins or pelts. There are no flattened bodies with stuffed head: tacked to the wall as decoration.

Instead, there is the natural world. Or something that look: like the natural world.

It is an astonishingly large room, and standing in it John feels like he is in a natural history museum.

Along the eastern wall are dioramas of what appear to be India, China and Nepal. Each stretches from floor to ceiling and is probably forty-feet wide. They are built out from the far wall and literally spill forward into the room. They are separated by massive stanchions of river rock that form a kind of border for each. Opposite, along the western wall, is Africa, the Belizean jungle and the Canadian Rockies. The southern wall offers the Australian bush and the Ecuadoran lowlands. And the middle of the world is an immense North America rising from plains of buffalo and ending high up near the ceiling where a magnificent puma stands alert atop a pile of stones and gazes down toward John.