Chapter 7 - The Unbroken Rule
The response was instantaneous.
From thirty yards away, out of the blue haze of the diesel exhaust, a dark shape burst through the wooden side door of the tractor shed.
Arthur didn't run like a man in a suit. He ran like a wolf through high grass—low, fast, his heavy shoulders driving through the sleet with a terrifying, rhythmic force.
The man in the yellow slicker turned, raising the iron pry-bar.
Arthur reached him in three strides.
He didn't fire his gun. He grabbed the man’s arm with his left hand, twisted it backward until the joint gave a sharp, wet pop, and drove his right shoulder straight into the man’s sternum.
The man hit the muddy lane with a sound like a sack of wet grain dropped from a roof.
Arthur stood over him, his chest heaving, his dark coat soaked through with rain and oil. He raised the automatic pistol, pointing it straight at the bridge of the man’s nose.
"Don't," Paige’s voice came from the SUV door.
Arthur froze.
His thumb was on the hammer of the gun. His face was a mask of dark, slick blood and rain—not his own blood this time, but the dark spray from whatever had happened inside the shed.
He turned his head slowly toward her. His eyes were black, wide, and wild—the eyes of a man who had gone completely back into the kitchen on Pulaski Road seven years ago.
"Paige," he rasped.
"He's down," Paige said, stepping out onto the wet gravel. Her rubber-soled shoes sank an inch into the mud. "He's down, Mr. Gallagher. You don't need to do that."
Arthur stared at her.
The sleet was turning into hard, needle-like ice now, stinging her cheeks and freezing on the dark wool of her cardigan. She walked toward him—not fast, not slow, but with the steady, measured pace she used when walking down the long corridor of St. Jude’s to her mother’s room.
She stopped three feet away.
"Give me the gun," she said softly.
Miller came around the pump house, his shotgun raised, then stopped dead when he saw Paige standing in the mud in front of Arthur.
"Miss Bennett," Miller warned, his voice shaking. "Get back. He’s... he’s still hot."
"Shut up, Miller," Paige said without looking back.
She held out her hand. Her small, pale palm was open, red from the freezing cold, pointing up toward the sky.
"The gun, Arthur," she repeated.
It was the first time she had ever called him by his first name.
Arthur looked down at her hand. Then he looked at her face.
The dark, blood-red flush on his neck began to recede. His fingers relaxed their grip on the iron stock of the automatic.
Slowly, carefully, as if he were handling a piece of thin glass that might shatter if he moved too fast, he laid the heavy gun into her palm.
He didn't touch her skin. He left a fraction of an inch between his scarred knuckles and her fingers.
"Callahan?" she asked quietly.
"In the car," Arthur said, his voice dropping to a low, ruined whisper. "Frankie’s got him. He... he talked."
"About Leo?"
"About Leo."
Arthur closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, the cold, frozen blue was back in his pupils, but the wildness had gone.
He looked down at his coat. The silk tie she had straightened twenty-four hours ago was torn again, hanging loose around his collar, soaked in mud and rainwater.
He reached up to pull it off, his thick fingers clumsy with the cold.
"Don't," Paige said.
She stepped inside the three-foot line.
She reached up, her cold fingers brushing his wet, warm neck, and unknotted the ruined silk. She pulled it free from his collar, folded it twice, and tucked it into her cardigan pocket alongside the silver key.
"We’re going back to the city now," she said softly. "You have a six o'clock with the port commissioners, and you look like hell."
Arthur looked down at her. His hands stayed at his sides, but his right shoulder leaned forward—just a millimeter—until his coat touched the dark wool of her sweater.
"You called me Arthur," he whispered.
"It was an emergency," she said, stepping back into the safe zone. "It won't happen again."
May you like
Arthur let out a long, slow breath that turned into a cloud of white steam in the freezing night air.
"Yes it will," he said softly.
