Chapter 23: The Hose

We didn't hide.

That was my idea, and Cade hated it for about a minute.

"He wants it dark and empty," I told him. "So we leave it dark and empty, and we stand right behind it."

By midnight the lot looked abandoned.

The oak table was gone, the bikes were gone, and a single pickup sat by the road with its lights off.

Behind the garage wall, thirty women in coats sat on upturned buckets with a thermos of Pearl's coffee going around.

The gray-bearded patch had put twenty men in the shadows by the back fence.

The deputy waited in his cruiser a quarter mile up Route 9, with his radio turned low.

Boone sat by himself on the steps of the burned doorway, an old man in a plain jacket, with his hands between his knees.

He hadn't asked to be there.

Nobody had told him to leave.

I stood at the garage tap with the hose in my hands.

It was a dull green hose, thirty feet long, the one the club used to wash bikes.

Cade stood at the valve with his hand on the handle.

"You don't have to hold it," he said. "I can."

"I want to."

"Becky."

"I'm the one he's coming for."

At ten past two, a truck came down Route 9 with its headlights off.

It stopped at the gate.

A man got out, slow and careful, with something heavy hanging from one hand.

He wore a dark jacket without a patch, and he moved.

I knew the shape of him in the dark.

I had slept beside it for five years.

He crossed the lot to the garage and set the red can down by the wall.

Then he unscrewed the cap and began to pour, left to right along the cinderblock, humming under his breath.

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