He pocketed the rifle’s magazine and removed the bullet from the firing chamber. He took a deep breath before standing up and retracing his steps to the ladder. A moment later he started down.
“Well, how did it go?” Jeanne questioned in a whisper, yet loud enough to be heard over the lapping of the water against the pier’s piling. She took the rifle so he could climb aboard the Zodiac.
“Again, it couldn’t have been better,” Brian managed. “They’re gone. It’s over. Emma, Juliette, and Riley and countless others have been avenged and maybe, just maybe, we’ve started the ball rolling to change a sick healthcare system.”
“That’s the hope,” Jeanne said. “Now I think we’d better get out of here.”
“Right you are,” Brian managed, starting the motor.
Five minutes later he gave the Zodiac’s engine full throttle and brought it up to planing speed as they rounded the tip of Kings Point and headed due west. A mile and a half ahead they could see the twinkling lights of City Island. Although the sun had long since set, the sky was still a light silver-gray, and Brian turned on the boat’s running lights even though they’d be back at Butler Marine well before total darkness.
With the sound of the outboard, speech was near impossible. Both Brian and Jeanne were isolated in their thoughts, but he didn’t mind, as it gave him time to recover. With the stiff sea breeze in his face, he felt a strong sense of peace despite having little idea what the next chapter of his life was to be.
Epilogue
October 18
Similar to what he had been doing for more than a month, Brian tried to imitate the ease with which Jeanne mounted her horse. As per usual, it didn’t quite work, as the horse moved just as he was throwing his leg over the animal’s back. Getting himself up off the ground and readying himself for another try, he was prepared to blame the horse if Jeanne said anything derogatory, but she didn’t. Although he didn’t fall on his next attempt, it was hardly an impressive mounting, and he could hear her giggle as he settled into the saddle.
Prepared on their white Camargue horses, they started off just after four p.m. on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Their goal was the Mediterranean coast, which lay about nine miles due south. This was to be their first visit to the beach since their arrival in Camargue five weeks earlier. It had been Jeanne’s idea to go for a seaside picnic as a change of scene. She’d been eager to show the coastline to him, as it had been one of her favorite destinations when she was a teenager.
The Camargue had turned out to be as interesting for Brian as Jeanne had suggested it would be. He had no idea such a wild, mostly uninhabited place existed in France where there were many more horses, cattle, and sheep than human beings. Those parts of northern France where he’d visited as a boy along with his siblings had every square inch taken up by old stone walls, carefully planted hedges, paved roads, planted fields, and venerable buildings, all evidence that the area had been occupied and altered by humans for untold centuries. In sharp contrast, Camargue was more than three hundred square miles of open space with a flat horizon that seemed to go on forever. One-third of it was lakes, brine lagoons, and marshland. Often the only signs of human interference in the natural order were some cultivated agricultural fields in the northern part, a number of man-made canals that were straighter than natural waterways, and a lot of dikes to keep certain areas dry in times of rising waters. The rare homes were simple, quaint, white stucco structures with picturesque water-reed roofs, exactly like the one that Jeanne and Brian had been occupying since their arrival.
The night of the shooting had gone exceptionally smoothly, which they had attributed to a combination of their extensive planning and the rigid schedules of both Charles Kelley and Heather Williams. On top of that was good luck — a lot of good luck. By the time they’d returned to Butler Marine that night, gotten their deposit back for the Zodiac and fishing gear, and picked up the Subaru, it still wasn’t quite seven-thirty. With such efficiency, they had time to spare, giving them an opportunity to stop for food on City Island, which they ate while driving out to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to return all the borrowed ESU equipment. The original plan was for Brian to make the visit himself after dropping Jeanne off at JFK Airport, but with so much time on their hands, she had preferred to stay with him to limit how long she’d have to cool her heels in the terminal.
Even returning the equipment took less time than planned. Probably because of the pandemic, there were only two duty officers at the ESU Academy, neither of whom Brian knew. Usually there were always a number of ESU officers hanging out instead of cruising the city awaiting action. What took the most time was Brian’s decision to write a thank-you note to Deputy Chief Comstock for offering him the chance to rejoin the ESU. In the note he explained that Juliette’s sudden and unexpected death had caused him to change his plans, and he wouldn’t be rejoining. As a postscript, Brian said that he thought the Remington MSR was a superb piece of engineering and that it should be considered as part of the NYPD’s armory, the cost notwithstanding. He left the rifle on Michael’s desk with the note on top.
Then after dropping Jeanne off at JFK, Brian had so much free time that he decided to drive home to leave the car in the driveway, blow off some steam for a few hours in the workout room, and then use a ride-share to get out to Newark around 6:30 a.m. Originally, he had planned to leave the car at the airport and call Camila to retrieve it.
“Come on, slowpoke,” she teased as she interrupted his reverie by suddenly turning her horse off the dirt trail to begin galloping across a wet, marshy field and putting a huge flock of greater flamingoes to flight in the process. Another thing he had learned about the Camargue was that it’s the home to more waterbirds than he’d seen anywhere else in his life.
Brian urged his horse to follow, but the animal wasn’t so eager to pick up the pace, and he wasn’t sure how to make him change his mind. Finally, he was able to get the horse to canter but not gallop. Ahead, Jeanne had pulled up to wait for him. For several weeks both of them had been riding with the gardians, otherwise known as the Camargue cowboys. The gardians had begun a roundup of the semi-feral cattle that lived on Jeanne’s parents’ land. As a consequence, he was learning to ride, and he was also recalling his French.
All in all, Brian was slowly becoming comfortable with his new life, had begun to relax to a degree, and felt extraordinarily lucky that he’d met Jeanne. Otherwise, he might have ended up in Cuba for whatever that might have meant. When the two of them had first arrived in Arles, the major French city just north of the Camargue, after their drive from Frankfurt, Brian had no idea of what the near future would bring. Although he’d worried about his acceptance by her parents, it turned out to not be a problem. They had driven north to Arles to pick up Jeanne when she returned the rental car. If they had been surprised by his presence or the fact that Jeanne had driven all the way from Frankfurt rather than flying into France itself, they didn’t let on. She had explained that they were so surprised and pleased by her unexpected return to live in France that they weren’t about to question any of the details, including what the relationship was between her and Brian, at least in the near term.
“You have to move your body more forward if you want your horse to gallop,” Jeanne reminded Brian as he reached her. “And don’t be afraid to use your legs, that’s the key.”
“You make it look so easy,” he complained.