Coyote Destiny (34 page)

I hesitated. I hadn’t brought a Militia squad all the way from Midland just for show; they had a duty to perform, as distasteful as it might be to the chief. But I’d have to do things her way if I wanted any cooperation from her. Besides, I wasn’t unarmed; my gun was in its holster, hidden by my parka.

So I reluctantly nodded and left the blueshirts standing at the bottom of the steps while I followed her onto the porch. The chief had barely touched the brass doorknocker, though, when the door opened from within, and a woman peered out at us.

“Hello?” she asked. “Who’s . . . ? Oh, Emma! What a surprise!”

“Hello, Amy.” Emma Stanley tried to make her tone pleasant, but it wasn’t working. “Sorry to disturb you, but . . . well, something’s come up, I’m afraid.”

Amy Atkins was one of those petite, trim ladies whose age couldn’t easily be determined: older than she looked, yet not quite as young as she seemed. She wore her dark hair long, with bangs that she constantly brushed out of lively brown eyes. From somewhere behind her, I heard a child’s voice pipe up. “Whoizzit, Mommy?”

“Just Ms. Stanley, Erin.” Yet as she said this, Amy caught sight of me. An instant later, she looked past the chief proctor and me, and her eyes widened when she spotted the blueshirts standing at the bottom of the steps.

“What’s going on, Emma?” she asked. “Why are they . . . ?”

“This is General Sawyer Lee, of the Corps of Exploration.” Chief Stanley spoke my name as if it were a curse. “The men with him are . . .”

“Militia. I can see that.” Amy stood in the doorway as if to bar our way into her house. “What’s going on?” she repeated. “Is there some sort of problem?”

“I’m afraid there is.” Stanley hesitated. “Amy, General Lee says . . .”

“Ma’am,” I said, interrupting the chief proctor as I stepped forward, “I apologize for the intrusion, but I’ve come to see your husband. Will you tell me where he is, please?”

Amy stared at us in confusion. In that second, I saw myself as she saw me: a stranger in a uniform, abruptly showing up on her doorstep with three armed soldiers and demanding to see her husband. Every wife’s worst nightmare. I hated myself for what I was about to do to her, but there was no way I could stop what had to be done.

“He’s . . . upstairs,” she said at last. “In the tower. Getting ready to turn on the light.” She looked at Stanley again. “Emma, please tell me . . . what’s going on?”

“Amy, I’m sorry, but . . .” Stanley let out her breath. “These men have come to put Joe under arrest.”

“What?” Amy’s mouth fell open. “I . . . what did he . . . ?”

“I’ll explain it to you in a minute.” The chief turned to give me a quick nod. Moving past her, I stepped through the door. Yet Amy stood her ground, silently refusing to allow me into her home.

“Amy, please . . .” Stanley began.

“How do I get upstairs, ma’am?” I found that I was having a hard time looking her in the eye.

“To the right,” she said, the words falling from her lips as if they were deadweights. “But you can’t . . .”

She wouldn’t budge from the door, so I laid a hand on her arm and, as gently as I could, pushed her out of the way. At first she resisted, but then she seemed to realize that I was coming in whether she liked it or not and reluctantly let me pass.

The living room was small, comfortable, and immaculately clean: blackwood beams across a low ceiling, old but well-kept furniture, a clothbound copy of the
Sa’Tong-tas
lying open on a coffee table in front of a sofa. On the wool rug before the fieldstone fireplace, a little girl—no older than one Coyote year, as beautiful as a child could be—looked up from the wooden blocks she’d been using to build a castle. As I marched through the room, heading for a closed door to the right, her mother immediately rushed over to plant herself between me and her daughter. I tried to ignore the astonished look on the little girl’s face as I opened the door, but I knew that I would be permanently engraved in her memory.

The door led me into a short, unheated walkway in which firewood had been stacked. I went down it, passing shelves containing neatly labeled jars of preserves, until I reached another door. Unlatching it, I found myself inside the bottom of a hollow shaft fifty feet in height. The inside of the lighthouse was as cold as it was outside, with fluorescent lamps along its concrete walls lighting a cast-iron spiral staircase that led up the interior to a ceiling hatch at the top of the tower.

An electrical generator hummed as I began to climb the stairs, but not so loudly that it muffled Emma’s and Amy’s voices behind me. I couldn’t make out what Stanley was saying, but I had little doubt that the chief was explaining the situation to Joe Ross’s wife. My boots clanged against the risers; looking up, I saw that the hatch was shut. No one had followed me into the lighthouse, but I knew that I wasn’t alone. David Laird was up there.

Halfway up the stairs, I paused to open my parka, pull out my gun. Not an airpulse pistol this time—I’d seen where trying to use a nonlethal weapon would get me when it came to dealing with dangerous men—but an old-style fléchette gun of the type used by the Militia. Making sure that its safety was disengaged, I raised it in my right hand as I continued up the spiral staircase, never letting my gaze leave the hatch, ready to open fire at the first sign of trouble.

But the hatch remained shut until I reached it. With my left hand, I pushed down the lock lever, then shoved the hatch open. Pointing the gun at the opening, I waited, carefully listening for any sound. Nothing but a steady mechanical grind, though, and the only thing I saw was a bright glow that rhythmically pulsed like the silent beating of a luminescent heart. After a few seconds, I slowly climbed the rest of the way through the open hatch.

The top floor of the lighthouse was a small, circular cupola, its broad windows facing in all directions. At the center of the room was the light itself, an immense quartz iodine lamp contained within a ribbed metal drum that slowly revolved upon a rotary pedestal. At the base of the light was a small control panel; lying on a table next to it was a loose-leaf logbook, a pen resting upon its open pages. A so-called dumb compass—not magnetic, but fitted instead with an arrow that could be manually moved to calculate the correct latitudes and longitudes of the offshore buoys—stood upon another table, a radio transceiver just below it.

The sun was down, and so the lamp had been lit, along with the buoy lights. It slowly revolved in a clockwise direction, throwing a brilliant beam through the windows that threatened to blind me every time it turned in my direction. Careful not to look straight at the light, I glanced around the cupola. There was no one in sight, but I saw that, to my right, a small door was open, leading to an outside balcony.

The light turned to the southeast, capturing a solitary figure standing at the railing not far from the door. His back was turned to me, and he didn’t look my way as I slowly crossed the cupola. Gun gripped in both hands and raised to shoulder height, I stepped out onto the balcony.

“Are you David Laird?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m David Laird,” he said. “Hello. I’ve been expecting you.”

 

 

The lighthouse beam swept past Laird again, and it was then that
I was able to see him clearly. He’d aged a bit in the last seven years— his body was thicker, his face a little more wide, his hair short and becoming thin at the top of his head—but he was unmistakably the same person. The lapels of his long wool coat were turned up against the cold, and he held on to the railing with both hands, still not looking at me but instead out at the Straits.

“I’m General Sawyer Lee,” I began, pointing my gun straight at him, “and I’m . . .”

“I know who you are and why you’re here.” Laird nodded toward the ground below. “I saw you and the others coming. This time of evening, it gets quiet enough up here that you can hear just about everything . . . including what’s being said on the front porch.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to look up at the lighthouse to see if anyone up there was watching and listening. A quick glance over the railing confirmed what he’d said; from this side of the tower, we were almost directly above the front door. The blueshirts stood below, murmuring to each other, apparently unaware of our presence.

“That makes things easier,” I replied, looking back at Laird. “Unless you’re going to give me any trouble, that is.”

“If you’re asking whether I’m armed . . .” Turning toward me, Laird slowly raised his hands so I could see that they were empty. “We don’t even have a gun in the house. Amy won’t allow it . . . and even if she did, I wouldn’t carry one anyway. I gave that up a long time ago.” He looked at my pistol. “Might as well put that away, General. You’re not going to get a fight from me.”

I wasn’t about to trust him. We were standing on a narrow balcony sixty feet above the ground, and he knew this place much better than I did. “All right, then,” I said, keeping the gun trained on him, “since you’ve been waiting for me, let’s . . .”

“That’s not what I said.” Lowering his hands, Laird turned toward the railing again. “When I said that I’ve been expecting you, I didn’t mean you personally . . . just the day when someone like you would come for me.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “I was hoping that it wouldn’t be quite so soon. At least not until Erin grew up a little more, so she’d understand who her father really was . . . but I suppose that can’t be helped, can it?”

He didn’t seem to be disturbed at all by my arrival, or the fact that there was a gun pointed at him. Instead, he gazed out at the flashing lights of the buoys, as if studying them to make sure that they were lit and in the correct position. “If you think you can beg me to leave you alone,” I said, “you’re talking to the wrong man. You’re responsible for the deaths of everyone who was on the
Lee
. . . including someone very close to me. No way I’m leaving this island without you.” I paused, then added, “Dead or alive . . . your choice. Doesn’t make much difference to me.”

“Is that why you’re here? To kill me?” He barely glanced at me. “If that’s what you’d really like to do, then go ahead. Shoot.” The light flashed by us again, this time revealing a sad smile upon his face. “You can always say that I tried to throw you over the side and that you acted in self-defense. I’m sure your men will back up whatever claim you make.”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to do just that. It wasn’t just Lynn who called out for vengeance; it was also Chris, who’d died trying to find this man. But there was something about the placid detachment with which Laird was willing to accept his fate, whatever it might be, that made me curious.

“You’re awful calm about this,” I said. “Not what I was expecting from someone who spent the last six years or so covering his tracks. Or do you think that, just because you call yourself another name and have a family now, that I’m going to give you a break?”

“No, I don’t.” Again, Laird shook his head. “You’re not a follower of
Sa’Tong
, are you?” When I didn’t reply, he went on. “Well, I am . . . or at least I have been, ever since I met Amy. One of the things we believe is the Fifth Codicil . . . that wrongful acts must be atoned for with righteous acts of equal or greater proportion.” He let out a sigh. “I can’t do anything for your friend or anyone else who was aboard the
Lee
. I didn’t kill them myself, but that’s only a minor point, isn’t it? I built the bomb that Alberto used to destroy the ship, and that makes me just as culpable as he. And to make matters worse, one of those aboard was the
chaaz’maha
, whose teachings I’ve come to embrace.” A reflective pause. “I regret every death I caused, but that . . . that has weighed upon me the hardest.”

I had an urge to tell him that the
chaaz’maha
was still alive, no thanks to him, and his death need not be on his conscience any longer. But I wasn’t about to allow him even that small mercy. In fact, I was still undecided whether or not to shoot him on the spot. “Don’t you dare play the spiritual card with me,” I said, sounding angrier than I intended. “I’m not buying the idea that converting to
Sa’Tong
makes you a better man.”

“I’m not claiming anything of the kind,” Laird said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that, in the years that I’ve been waiting for someone like you to find me, I’ve tried to atone for what I did. Amy showed me the way, when I moved out here with her. I once ended lives. Now I do my best to save them.”

He nodded toward the offshore buoys. “Every night, I come up to turn on the light and the buoys. I issue weather reports, sound the foghorn when I need to, listen for distress signals. Last year, I was even able to help rescue several men . . .”

“I know. Chief Stanley told me all about that.” I shook my head. “It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.”

“No . . . no, I suppose it isn’t.” He looked at me again. “But you’re wrong about one thing. I
am
a different person now. David Laird was an angry young man who hated the world, and everyone he met, for reasons he couldn’t understand. So he made bombs, but since he was too cowardly to use them himself, he put them in the hands of those who would, then ran away while others died for . . . well, whatever infantile causes he happened to believe in. That’s not who I am anymore. I’m Joe Ross, and I’m a lighthouse keeper. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Yeah, you’re breaking my heart.” I wasn’t accepting anything he said. “You didn’t let your wife know the truth, did you? To her, you’ve always been just some guy who drifted into town?”

“No . . . and I’m afraid that it’s her heart that’s going to broken, not yours. Erin’s, too.” He continued to gaze at me, his face once more cast in shadow. “So . . . are you going to shoot me now? I rather wish that you would. It would be a kindness, really.”

As soon as he said this, I made up my mind. “No,” I said, “I’m not going to kill you.” I cocked my head toward the door. “You’re going downstairs with me, and after you say good-bye to your family, you’re getting on the chief’s boat, and we’re taking you with us.”