Page 91 of Slack Tide Kill

Mayhew scowled but said nothing more.

A gurney was waiting, half sunk in the muddy field nearby. Logan gently sat her on it and ran a visual inspection. He shone a penlight in her eyes. Took her pulse. Gently probed her throat.

"Where does it hurt, Officer Rogers?" he asked.

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding from the scalp. Your pulse is racing and irregular and you're close to hyperventilating. Let's get you to the ambulance. Can you walk?"

"I'm fine," she repeated.

He put one arm around her and led her away. He was strong and warm. The field passed. She saw Liam, striding alone across the grass with another paramedic trailing him, gaze fixed fervently ahead. Arthur Bledd led the pack, head up and shoulders straight. A sandwich wrapper fell from his grip and he knelt smoothly to scoop it up.

More vehicles were coming in still on the road. The ARV arrived and officers with rifles streamed out.

"Little late," Logan muttered.

More paramedics followed with bags and foil blankets, but Sally could only think of Nancy Cagen's face. It seemed to balloon until it filled her vision. Pinched features, worn by the weather and the world, but still a person. She'd been kind. Helpful. She'd deserved more.

"Her eyes," Sally murmured, as Logan helped her through the wreckage of the fence and up to the road. "Were they gone?"

"Whose eyes, Sally?"

Then she was in the ambulance, and finally laid her swirling head down. Logan spread a silver mylar blanket across her. "We need to take these wet clothes off you. My colleague's here, she's going to help you while I go check on your partner."

A woman appeared over Sally, young, red-faced, terrified.

"Whose eyes?" she repeated, as the woman brought up a pair of scissors and began to cut her uniform away.

36 LISTENING

He washed his hands for a long time.

The water was cold and he stood with his wrists under it and worked the soap up past the knuckles and into the webbing, the way you were taught once and then did forever. Under the nails. The pads of the thumbs. There was nothing on them. He washed them anyway, because the ritual was the point.

The reeds had been harder than he expected. He'd thought of them as soft. Everyone thought of them as soft, the way they moved in a wind, but a bulrush cut green has a spine to it, and you have to work it in, and the sound it makes going is not a sound he had prepared himself for.

That was fine. He hadn't wanted it easy.

He dried his hands on a towel and folded the towel and hung it straight.

The thing about her, the thing he kept turning over, was how little surprise there had been. He had waited for it. He had wanted the moment where the shape of him arrived in her eyes, where all the years came up at once and she understood. He had earned that. He was owed it.

But she had just looked at him.

Not blankly. That would have been better. There had been something in it that was almost patient, almost the expression of a woman waiting for a bus in the rain.

He filled a cup and drank it standing up and looked at the blank wall.

He had thought about the placement a great deal. Where to put her. In the end the answer had been obvious and he'd almost laughed at himself for taking so long over it. The most important things didn't need to be explained. With something like this, he only had to position her correctly and the place would do the explaining, forever, to anybody with the wit to stand still and look.

Hardly anybody had the wit. That was the joke he'd been telling himself for 30 years and there was still some life left in it.

He rinsed the cup. Dried it. Put it back.

Outside the light was turning a dirty pewter, bouncing off the water and contaminating everything with its dull, gritty sheen. He watched it thicken and felt the old anger settle across his shoulders like a coat. He'd thought maybe this kill would help him slough it off, but not yet.

The work wasn't yet done.