Page 108 of The Maverick
Somewhere, up at the house, the windows were warm with the lights. Somewhere, out across the back lawn, the harborwas a flat, wide darkness with the running lights of small craft moving slow against the far shore.
The pier was lit by low landscape lights.
A yacht was moored at the end of it.
It was big.Bigthe way Dominion Hall was big—not gaudy, justof a different scale.Eighty feet, at least. Polished dark hull. Lit deck. The kind of vessel that lived in marinas where the slips were named on plaques.
Rebecca slowed.
She looked at it.
Her hand was in mine and the cold was on her cheeks and she had been crying somewhere tonight—I could see it in the slightly puffed line of her lower lid, in the way the wind found that small wetness and reddened it—and she looked at the yacht and let out a small sound that was almost amused.
"I wonder who that belongs to," she said.
I laughed.
It came out wrong. It came out the way laughs came out of men whose interiors had walked off the cliff and who were standing on the lip of the cliff still pretending they were standing on a porch. It came out a little crazy. I heard it and didn't care.
"I think it belongs to me," I said.
She turned and looked at me.
"What?"
I opened my mouth to explain the thing I did not yet have language for.
The yacht exploded.
My primal instinct gave me time for exactly two thoughts.
The first wasget her down.
The second was that I was already moving and I was not going to be fast enough.
The shockwave hit us before the sound. A hot, hard wall of pressure that came across the lawn and across the pier and into our chests like a hand the size of the world.
My arm was around her and we were going backwards. The air around us was a roaring orange. The ground came up sideways. The only thing I felt with any clarity, in the half second before everything else stopped, was her body against mine, and the absence of her grip on my hand because the wave had taken our hands apart.
I wished that I had told her, one more time, that I loved her.
Then, the dark took us.
29
TOMMY
Icame up out of the dark to noise.
Voices. Sharp, professional, the voices of men who knew what they were doing on a worksite. The thud of a fire pump kicking on somewhere down at the water. A radio.
I cracked my eyes.
The first thing I saw was men.
Big men. Broad through the shoulders the way men got broad when their fitness was a job requirement. They moved across the lawn with the easy economy of operators who knew what to do without being told.
Brothers.
