Hank took it. Inside the bag was the gun unloaded the slide lock back. Beneath it, in a separate Ziploc bag, the magazine and the loose rounds. "You gave these to your father last night? " "Yes, sir.
" I drove to his house at 11:15. He was awake. He was waiting for me. Hank looked at him. "How long were you there?
" "He slept on my couch," Colt said. He did not want me to be alone. He did not say much. He just sat with me and made me eat something and made sure I was still there in the morning. "That is a good father," Hank said.
Colt looked at the ground. "Yeah, I am starting to understand that. " Hank stepped back from the door. "Come in. Coffee is ready.
" Colt came inside. He stood in the kitchen looking at the cabin. The way people look at a place that tells them something about the person who lives in it. The wood-paneled walls, the stone fireplace, the photograph on the mantle. He looked at the photograph for a moment without saying anything.
Hank poured two mugs, black. He set one on the table in front of Colt and sat down across from him. Colt reached into the pocket of his sweatshirt, and set June's wedding ring on the table between them. Hank looked at it for a moment. Then he picked it up, threaded it back onto the silver chain, and clipped the chain around his neck.
He felt the ring settle against the sternum, the familiar small weight of it, and he was aware that it felt different this morning than it had yesterday morning. The same weight, something new inside it. "Can I ask you something? " Colt said, ""Ask. " "Why did you come yesterday to the dojo?
" After 9 years of not doing any of this, why did you come? " Hank looked at his coffee. "Because a woman with a broken radiator asked me to," he said. "And because I was tired of being the kind of old man who says no to things that matter, even when I do not yet know that they matter. " He looked at Colt.
"You were not the only person I was there to save yesterday. I want you to understand that you were saving me as much as I was saving you. That is how this particular arrangement works. That is how it has always worked. Colt's eyes filled.
He looked away toward the window where the early light was coming in pale and flat across the desert. They drank their coffee in the quiet of the early morning. At 6:25, they heard vehicles on the gravel. Not one vehicle, several. Hank looked out the kitchen window.
Archer Garrison's pickup was pulling in. Behind it came a second truck, and behind that, a third. By 6:30, there were eight vehicles parked in the gravel outside the cabin. The sound of boots on porch steps was a sound Hank had not heard at this address in a very long time. Vince Steel came through the door first carrying a thermal coffee carafe.
Rupert Cobb behind him with a paper bag from a bakery. Curtis Whitmore with his cane moving slowly but steadily. Three other veterans from the dojo the previous evening. Roy Boon last carrying a foil-covered casserole dish in both hands, eggs and sausage and biscuits, still warm from his kitchen at 4 in the morning. Behind Roy, quieter than the others, came Wyatt Decker.
He was 28 years old and looked older. He was wearing a clean flannel shirt and jeans, and he had the particular stillness of a man who has been told to be somewhere and has come without knowing exactly what he is walking into, but who has decided to come anyway. Because the alternative is another day at the halfway house on Inyokern Road and he is running out of mornings where that feels like enough. He looked around the kitchen. He looked at the veterans at Cold at Hank.
He did not say anything. He found a place to stand near the back wall and he stayed there watching. Roy set the casserole dish on the counter and looked at Hank. He smiled, the smile of a man who has been waiting a long time for a specific moment and is now inside it. "Told you," he said.
"Told me what? " "Told you that you were hiding, Hank. Not retiring. Hiding. " You have been hiding for nine years, and I have been waiting for you to come back out.
Hank looked at his oldest friend, Roy Boon, who had been present at every important moment of his adult life going back 47 years, who had sat with him for 2 days after June's funeral without being asked, without speaking, much simply being the continuous human presence in the house that kept Hank from disappearing entirely into the silence of it. He crossed the kitchen and put his arms around Roy Boon. The two old men held on to each other in the kitchen of the cabin while the veterans set out the food on the counter and the desert morning came in through the windows. Roy's voice was rough when he spoke next to Hank's ear. "Welcome back, brother.
" he said. They left at 7:30. Eight motorcycles. Archer Garrison's pickup with Colt in the passenger seat. Roy Boon's truck with Wyatt Decker.