Page 34 of The Jackal

Duke's.

The burst that had walked across the room in the dark had walked across him. I ran my hand down his side and found it, found more than one, the old body riddled where the rounds had caught him and never once made him let go. He'd held that man's throat through all of it. Through being shot. He'd finished the job with a magazine's worth of holes in him, because the job was the thing standing between those men and her, and Duke had never in his life quit a job like that.

"Okay," I said. My voice didn't shake. It doesn't. That's the thing I have to give, the one thing, and I gave it to him now. "Okay, soldier. You can let go. It's done. You got him. You can let go."

And the old dog let go.

His jaws came open and the dead man's throat dropped from them. Duke rolled off onto his side on the floor, and I saw the whole of it then—all the places the dark had been hiding. He was dying. He'd been dying since the first burst and had simply refused to lie down and do it while the threat was still standing. Now, the threat was gone, and there was nothing left holding the old body together but the last of him, and that was going fast.

I know death. It's the whole of what I am. I have knelt beside more of it than any man should have to, and I have never once looked away. I did not look away now—from a dog on a living room floor who had spent the final strength of a long and honorable life buying the woman we loved one more morning.

This is what I was made for. Not the killing. People always think it's the killing. It isn't. It's this. The part after. The part nobody else can do, where somebody has to be steady and reverent and unafraid at the exact edge of the worst thing. I put both hands on him, gentle, and brought my face down close to his, and I talked him through it the way I've talked a hundred men through it. Low. Calm. Sure.

"You did good," I told him. "You hear me? You did so good. Best of all of them. You held." His breathing had gone shallow and quick. "She's okay, Duke. Mags is okay. You kept her safe. She's down the hall, and she's okay, and it's because of you. It's done now. The watch is over. You can stand down. You can sleep now."

And here's the thing I'll never be able to make a living soul believe, and don't much care to try. He looked at me. At the very end, out of those cloudy old eyes, he found my face, and he looked at me, and something passed between us in the language that has no words—the one I learned at the bottom of the earth.

He knew what I was. Of course, he did. Dogs always know before people do.

And what he said to me, in that last look, plain as anything anyone's ever said to me out loud, was this. It's your watch now. She's yours to keep. Don't you fail her.

I won't, I told him. I swear it. I've got her. Go on, now. Go on.

His eyes closed. His breath went out and didn't come back. And I felt it—the way I always feel it, the thing that sets me apart from every other man in every other room—I felt the old soldier's spirit come loose from that broken body and go. Light. Unafraid. Finally, finally off duty. Out of the kitchen and through the door I can't see and into that wide, warm country on the other side, where nobody is ever left waiting at a gate again.

Go on, I told him. Good boy. Go on.

Mags came back into the kitchen.

"They're coming," she said. "Cash, they're⁠—"

And then, she stopped. Because she'd seen him.

I watched it hit her. I watched the last of the adrenaline that had been holding her upright go out all at once, and her hand come up to her mouth, and her knees give. She went down onto the bloody floor beside him and gathered the old dog up into her arms, all that gray weight, careless of the blood soaking into her shirt, and folded over him and made a sound I've heard before. The sound the living make in the exact moment the size of a loss arrives in them. There is no other sound like it in the world.

I've stood at the edge of that sound more times than I could count. It's my whole life, that sound. I've learned there's nothing you can say into it, and I didn't try. I knelt in the wreckage of her house, with two dead men and a dead dog and the woman I loved coming apart over the body of the soldier who'd saved her, and I did the only thing I know how to do that's worth anything.

I stayed. I bore witness. I did not look away.

But underneath the stillness, back in that cold room where the work gets done, another thing had already begun. I looked at Mags unraveling over that gray head, and I made a promise. Not to her—she couldn't hear it, and it wasn't out loud. I made it to myself, and to the two men bleeding out on her floor, and to whoever had sent them into this house in the dark to do this.

The killing wasn't done.

Somebody had reached into her life—into the one warm, ordinary, good thing I'd ever let myself have—and put their hands on it, and killed a good old soldier doing it. I'd spent my whole life carrying the dead home gently. I was about to spend a while making some.

There were more souls to walk through that door before this was over. I could already feel them out there, the way I feel everything, waiting.

I'd see every one of them across.

17

MAGNOLIA

Idon't know how long I sat on my kitchen floor with Duke in my arms before the world came back.

Grief does something to time. It puts it somewhere you can't reach.

One moment, I was on my knees in the blood with all that gray weight gone slack against me, my face buried in the ruff of his neck where it still smelled like him, like warm dog and dust and everything safe I'd ever known. The next, Cash was crouched in front of me, close, his hands open and slow the way you'd approach a spooked animal, saying my name in a voice that had been saying it for a while.