Page 7 of Blood Hymn

I don't.

"He was setting up," he says.

His voice is lower than I expected. Rough, like it doesn't get used.

"For what?"

"For the next one." He tips his head at the tailgate. Rope. Tape. A tarp with a body on it. "You know what that is. Or you wouldn't have walked in here with the safety off."

I do know. I've known since I read it in my sister's handwriting three hours ago, sitting on her bathroom floor.

"You're Silas Cain," I say.

"I was."

"You're supposed to be dead."

"So's he." He looks down at Marcus. "One of us is doing it right."

I laugh. It comes out of me before I can stop it, sharp and ugly, and it surprises us both. I put the gun down. Not away. Down, along my thigh, finger off the trigger, and I watch him register that and file it somewhere.

"I've got nine days," I say. "I had six names, and now I've got five. I don't know this parish anymore, not really. I don't know who's on the payroll, where they sleep, or which way they run. You do. You've been out here in the dark for six years, doing exactly what I came to do, and I found you on my first night. That means either you're sloppy or you wanted to be found."

"Neither."

"Then I'm lucky. I'll take it." I step all the way inside and let the door swing shut behind me. "I'm not asking for help. I'm telling you I'm going to do this with or without you. Without you I'll probably get killed halfway down the list, and that'd be a waste of a list."

He's quiet for a moment. Then he asks, "Why should I believe you'll go through with it?"

So I tell him.

Not the whole thing. Not the way I'd tell it to somebody who needed to understand. I tell it the way you'd read off a résumé. Seventeen. The old church on Chapel Road. A youth pastor with a soft voice and a hand on the back of my neck, and a hymnal stand nobody had carried back upstairs since the flood. Cast iron. I tell him what it sounded like. I tell him I stood there afterward with my mother's cross on the floor by his head and didn't feel anything I was supposed to feel.

"I liked it," I say. "I've had six years to find another word. There isn't one."

He doesn't flinch. He doesn't look at me any differently. If anything, something in him settles, like a dog that's finally heard a sound it recognizes.

"Chapel Road," he says.

"They boarded it up. Nobody ever said why."

"I know why." He bends down and takes Marcus by the ankles like he weighs nothing. "Get the tailgate."

I get the tailgate.

His place is not a destination. It's a direction.

We leave Marcus in the river a mile downstream where the current runs deep and the gators run thick, and then he drives my truck because he knows the roads and I don't anymore. I sit in the passenger seat with my sister's box in my lap and the .38 under it, and I watch him take turns I'd never have seen. Old River Road to a cut in the trees that isn't a road at all. A cattle gap. A track of packed shell that ends at black water, and a flat-bottom boat pulled up in the reeds under a tarp. And after that, nothing but him and a push pole and the sound of things moving in the dark on either side.

Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. I lose the shape of it. Cypress knees like a crowd of drowned men. Moss dragging across the road. Once, a heron going up off the water so close I feel the air off its wings and my hand's on the gun before I know I've moved.

He doesn't turn around, just says, "Bird," and keeps poling.

Then a shape in the dark that turns into a shack on stilts, a dock, and a door.

Inside he lights a lantern, and I see it.

One room. A cot. A stove. A workbench with a vise on the end and tools hung above it in a row so straight it makes my teeth hurt. Guns on the far wall, more than I can count in one look—rifles, shotguns, pistols on hooks—and under them boxes of ammunition stacked like canned goods.