Episode 11 · A Clear Road

Maxim came around the front of the truck before Soles could stop him.

Kerr stood beside the passenger door. Beyond his shoulder, a van blocked the workshop entrance; a driver was leaning out to argue with someone in the yard. Soles needed Maxim back behind the wheel. As soon as the van moved, they could leave.

— We know who you are, Maxim said.

Kerr looked at him, then at Soles.

— Does he?

Soles held the phone low against his leg. The investigator’s number was still on the screen. He pressed call again.

— Kale and Mary, he said. Say their names.

Kerr’s eyes moved to the phone.

— Put that away.

— Why?

— Because you’re making a mistake.

The words were ordinary. Soles had heard them over misread drawings and parts ordered in the wrong size. Kerr said them with the same impatience, as though the difficulty here was explaining something simple to him.

— You came through our gate. You shot me beside the kitchen door.

Maxim moved closer. Kerr turned enough to keep him in view.

— We can talk, Kerr said.

— Then talk.

— Without him.

For an instant, Soles wanted it. An explanation he did not have to share, a name spoken low enough that only he could hear. He could almost feel himself opening the door.

Kerr reached through the window for the phone.

Soles pulled it away. The movement dragged across his chest, and his breath caught. Kerr’s hand closed on his shirt instead, high beside the dressing. His fingers smelled of tobacco.

— Give it here.

Maxim caught his wrist.

— Take your hand off him.

He pulled Kerr away from the window the way he would have pulled a pallet, with his whole back and no thought for the man on the other end. Kerr went with the pull, turned and drove his free elbow into Maxim’s face. The impact threw Maxim against the front of the cab. His hand slipped from Kerr’s arm.

Soles pushed the passenger door open to get between them.

He had forgotten how high the step was. His foot found it, his weight followed, and pain folded him over the door. He could not stand straight. Across its upper edge, he saw Kerr reach beneath the tail of his shirt.

A gun.

The same blunt shape. It came out low, hidden from the workshop by the open door.

— Back in, Kerr said.

Maxim straightened with blood beneath his nose.

— Leave him alone.

Kerr swung the pistol toward him.

For half a breath, something in Soles loosened. Not me. The shame came right behind it, hot enough to move him.

He caught Kerr’s forearm with both hands. He meant to pull it down between them. Instead, he found himself stepping into the space Kerr had left, his shoulder behind his hands, his feet braced beneath the truck door.

For a moment, he knew exactly where to stand.

The road was hard beneath his shoes. He felt mud around his ankles. The fear was still there, cold under his ribs, and for one second it did not reach his hands.

Kerr was heavier, and whole. He did not waste time on the arm Soles held. His free hand found the dressing, and his thumb went in beneath the collarbone, hard, the way a man presses down a nail he wants to stay.

It should have ended there. It should have opened Soles’s hands.

They stayed closed.

He felt the pressure. He did not feel the pain. Something held it on the far side of that second, and he did not ask what.

The door. Use the door.

He drove the arm sideways into the edge of the open door. Kerr’s fingers stayed on the grip. Again. The barrel swung past Maxim’s chest, toward the cab. Kerr’s breath came into his face, tobacco and coffee, and with it the yard at home came back so sharply that Soles heard Lucky throwing himself against the kitchen door.

— Kale, he said into that face. Mary.

It was not a question. Kerr’s eyes did not change. He leaned his whole weight in instead. The thumb went deeper, and the barrel began to turn back, a finger’s width at a time, toward Soles’s head.

Soles set his hip against the door and pushed. The edge rang under Kerr’s wrist.

The pistol went off beside his head.

Sound vanished on his left.

He was still holding the arm. The certainty lasted long enough for him to think he could keep it there. Then the second ended.

Everything it had held back arrived at once: the thumb, the dressing, the stitches beneath it, the step he should not have climbed. His chest tore. His knees gave. Kerr ripped the pistol free, and the trigger guard dragged through the flesh beside Soles’s thumb.

He fell against the step.

Maxim hit Kerr from the side. They struck the door together, and Soles pulled his legs clear before it slammed against the cab. Through a high, thin ringing, he saw mouths moving in the workshop entrance.

People had heard.

Kerr drove his knee into Maxim’s thigh and shoved him away. Maxim stumbled but stayed upright. He reached for Kerr again.

— Don’t, Soles said.

He could barely hear himself.

Kerr had the pistol pointed at Maxim’s stomach.

Soles expected the shot. He waited for it with his bloody hand pressed to the step, unable to move quickly enough to do anything useful.

The driver of the van shouted. Kerr looked over his shoulder.

His choice took less than a second. He backed across the road with the gun low beside his leg, then ran through the workshop gate. A man inside sprang out of his way.

Maxim started after him.

Soles caught his pant leg.

It was a poor grip. Blood made the cloth slippery. Maxim could have walked out of it, but he stopped and looked down.

— Stay with me.

Maxim knelt so hard his knee struck the road.

— Where?

His hands hovered over Soles’s chest, searching for the new wound.

— He didn’t hit me. I don’t think—

Soles looked down. The front of his shirt was red beneath his left hand. He could not tell how much had come from the hand and how much from under the dressing.

Maxim pulled a clean cloth from the cab and folded it around his palm.

— Hold that. Hard.

The van driver came over with his phone. Soles could hear him now, distantly, on the right, giving the road name to someone and saying there had been a shooting.

— You saw him? Soles asked.

The driver nodded.

— Give them your name. Please. Don’t go before they come.

He heard how desperate that sounded. A stranger had stood above him at the house too, and for weeks he had tried to recover what he had failed to see. This time someone else had seen the gun.

— I’m staying, the driver said.

Maxim’s nose was swelling. Blood had reached his upper lip, and he kept wiping it with his sleeve without noticing he was doing it.

Soles tried to loosen his grip on the cloth. His fingers shook too badly.

— I had him.

Maxim looked at the red cloth, then back at him.

— You had a gun beside your head.

The words reached him through the ringing. He remembered the weight behind his hands, the second in which the fear had not reached them. It had not felt like his. He wanted it back so fiercely that it frightened him.

A siren sounded somewhere beyond the workshops.

Maxim put an arm behind his shoulders and helped him sit against the wheel. He stayed there, blocking Soles’s view of the gate.

The van moved. The road was clear now.