“My loyal sidekick,” he said solemnly. Our mounts, Annie, the sorrel mare and Harry, the big bay gelding, moved over dry ground and stubby grass toward the path that led down to the beach.
“Okay, I see where this is going.” Narrowing my eyes, I nudged Harry’s sides and propelled him into a trot. “So, if you’re Robin Hood, I’m . . .”
“Little John,” he finished with delight, urging Anna after us.
Counting myself lucky he hadn’t said Maid Marian, I continued the game. “Butch?”
“Sundance!”
“Batman?”
“Robin!” he crowed, laughing at the image of me in green tights.
I couldn’t decide whether to howl in outrage or laugh. I laughed. It was an easier choice to make then—far easier. “No more old reruns for you, Lukasha.” And then we were on the trail and rocketing down it to the beach at a pace that would’ve turned any adult’s hair white instantly. When we hit the bottom we were at a full gallop. Sand plumed in the air and burned pale gold in the December sun. Salt stung our nostrils as we sent Anna and Harry into the water, but it was a good sting. It was the kind that let you know you were alive and made memories that refused to fade. Until the day I died, the smell of the ocean would always be intrinsically linked with the scent of horse. As much as the rest of that memory sucked, the beginning of it I still cherished. It had been the last perfect moment in my life—the last instant I hadn’t been one of the walking wounded. It was the last time I’d been whole.
“Slowpoke,” Lukas called over his shoulder as he raced his mare along the shore to leave me in the proverbial dust.
I let him go, not realizing just how true that was. I let Lukas go, never knowing how permanent a surrender it was. Directing my mount deeper into the water, I hissed at the chill that soaked through my jeans. Harry snorted at the sensation, tossed his head, but kept going. I would chase after Lukas later. After all, we had all day, right? Child that I was, I believed that . . . right up until I heard the first gunshot.
It was the first I’d ever heard. And although I’d heard a few since, the sound would never rip through me like the first. It couldn’t. The bullet didn’t hit me. It wasn’t even aimed at me, but it staggered my heart as if the lead had plowed through it dead center. When I saw Annie fall, I started to suspect that it might as well have. And when Lukas tumbled onto an outcropping of rock, I wished it had. I wished the blood staining my brother’s pale hair were pumping from my chest instead.
I don’t remember how, but I managed to get the gelding out of the water and gallop him down the beach. I was in the water and then I was almost to Lukas, limp on his back, with no passing of time between. I was close enough to see his hand lying half on sand, half on rock. It was turned palm upward, the fingers curling slightly, unmoving; a piece of flotsam washed in with the tide, lifeless and still. As the next shot took Harry between his intelligent, dark eyes, Lukas’s hand was the sight I carried with me.
I wasn’t knocked out, although I may as well have been. Harry took me down as quickly and thoroughly as any tidal wave. The fall crushed the air from my lungs and for several agonizing minutes all I saw and all I breathed in was blackness. Blind and deaf, I struggled against the vise locked around my chest. When the darkness finally parted, I blinked up at an intense blue sky. Not a cloud . . . not one. It was beautiful. The sun was warm and heavy on my legs; so damn heavy. I reached down and felt it under my hand. It was soft, silky, and tickled my skin with the caress of butterfly wings. I frowned. It wasn’t the sun. Warm, yes, but it wasn’t the sun.
Harry.
Pulling ragged gasps of air into aching lungs, I pushed up on my elbows. Ominously motionless, the gelding lay across my legs, pinning me to the ground. In my life less than half a day, Harry had now moved on. Reaching over to pull myself up with handfuls of glossy bay fur, I saw someone else moving on as well.
The man had his back to me. All I could see was short dark hair, a black Windbreaker, and a gun tucked in the back waistband of the man’s jeans. He didn’t look at me, not once—not even when I began yelling at him, when I screamed for help; when I screamed for my daddy in a way I hadn’t since I was a baby. The shooter ignored it all. Stooping, he scooped Lukas up in his arms and began walking away. Thin arms and dangling legs, my brother was the puppet turned into a real live boy, only this time it was the other way around. I screamed until my voice was gone, but the sound of crashing waves and screeching gulls was my only answer. The house was too far, the party too loud. I clawed uselessly at the sand, trying to dig my way out from under the horse.
When the man disappeared up the trail with Lukas, I was left with nothing but a throat torn to silence, a jaggedly bloody slice along my jaw, hands scraped raw, and a burden of guilt far heavier than the dead horse across my legs.
There were times, even ten years later, when I woke up in the middle of the night and still felt Harry weighting the lower half of my body down against the mattress. Tonight was one of those. Considering the news Saul had broken to me at lunch, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Brushing a hand over my legs, I almost felt the rasp of horsehair against my palm. “Sorry, Harry,” I murmured.
Pushing against the invisible weight, I sat up and slid out from under the sheet. The clock on the bedside table read just past three a.m. Not your usual digital alarm, it was a fancier, chrome-and-silver-chased timepiece. A gift of my last girlfriend, Natalie, I’d wondered whether it had been her way of telling me our time was running out. In the end, I never got the message, as it had stayed longer than she had managed to. She was the exception. I wasn’t much on long relationships. Blaming it on my “work” would be easy enough, but the true bottom line? The search for Lukas took up so much of my resources, including the emotional ones, that I simply didn’t have enough left over to live a life.
So I screwed around with the type of women who didn’t mind my unpredictable hours or what I did with that time. Most were dancers at the club or friends of girlfriends of the guys I rubbed shoulders with. Consequently, most had a moral elasticity that more than rivaled mine. They weren’t any more invested in me than I was in them. Screwing around was the right term on both sides. Our kind weren’t into relationships. Natalie though . . . Natalie had been different. I’d gone to college with Nat and even dated her off and on my sophomore and junior year. When I ran into her three years later, we had picked up where we’d left off without missing a beat. There was the same banter; Nat had a wit sharper and more delicately cutting than glass. There were the same habits of late-night pizza and early-morning runs, which was one helluva sacrifice for me. Sleeping late wasn’t just a hobby; it was a God-given right. Only Natalie could’ve prodded me out of bed as quickly as my frequent nightmares did, but her way tended to be much more pleasant. Long red hair, that natural kind almost as orange as a carrot, laughing blue eyes, and freckles that bloomed like tiny scarlet poppies across the tops of her milk-pale breasts, she was beautiful, intelligent, quick-tempered, and honest to the bone—so honest, in fact, that she became the first woman I lied to.
It was pretty much a doomed effort from the very beginning, and I knew it. But the weeks we had together gave me a glimpse into a life that might have been . . . if I hadn’t lost my brother . . . if I hadn’t fallen in with thieves out of sheer apathy . . . if I’d been a man instead of an obsession-driven tin soldier. Wind me up and watch me go, blindly marching down a path without end.
Nat had found out soon enough what my life was all about. Obsession she could’ve lived with, I think. But dishonesty and only a passing acquaintance with the law-abiding world, that wasn’t a life she would embrace—or tolerate. She had loved me, but she’d loved something else more . . . her soul.