“I didn’t do anything,” Danny said through bloody teeth. “And my kid didn’t either. Leave him out of this.”
Noah looked at Pruitt. The young deputy was being held by Harmon, who had one hand pressing a cloth against the wound and the other still gripping his radio. Pruitt's eyes were open but unfocused. His legs moved once and then stopped.
The man in the camo jacket was dead. The friend with the flask was alive, moaning, clutching his hip. The one with the knife was on his knees with his hands behind his head, sobbing.
Sirens echoed in the distance.
Noah stood. His shirt was torn. His hands were shaking. He looked at the campground. The fire pit was knocked over. Chairs scattered. Cans and blood on the ground. Smoke drifted sideways in the breeze. The gold light of the afternoon hadn't changed. The mountains were still there. The river still moved. The world looked exactly the same as it had ten minutes ago.
But it wasn't.
Callie had Danny secured against the Dodge. She stood and looked at Noah. Her face was blank in the way faces go blank when the mind is still processing what just happened. She had blood on her jacket. Not hers.
"Noah."
He looked at her.
"Pruitt," she said.
He walked over. Harmon was still pressing the cloth but the blood had soaked through. Pruitt's eyes were closed now. Hischest was moving but barely. He was twenty-six. Noah had seen his name on the duty roster a dozen times without ever having a real conversation with him.
"Stay with me, Pruitt," Harmon was saying. "Stay with me."
Two state police cruisers arrived first. Then an ambulance. Then another. The campground became a staging area, lights and radios and boots on gravel. Someone stretched yellow tape across the entrance. A trooper took Noah's weapon, standard procedure, and asked him to step aside.
He stepped aside.
He stood at the edge of the lot with his back to the campground and looked at the river. The water moved the way it always moved, flat and steady and indifferent to everything happening on its banks. A leaf drifted past on the current.
Danny Walsh was loaded into the second ambulance with a deputy escort. He was still talking but Noah couldn't hear the words. It didn't matter. Maybe Danny was the shooter. Maybe he wasn’t. Or maybe Noah had just pushed the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not deliberately. But with the same relentless forward motion that had driven every decision he had made since the night he opened the Parabon report. He had been so focused on the Hale case, so consumed by the pattern and the names and the connections, that he had walked into a volatile situation and applied pressure without enough regard for where it might go.
My kid didn't do anything. Leave my kid out of this.
Connor. Danny's son. The boy who saw the Honda Civic. The boy whose statement disappeared. That thread was still there. Buried under the wreckage of the afternoon, but still there.
Callie appeared beside him. She didn't touch him. She stood close enough that he could feel her presence without looking.
"Pruitt's in the ambulance. They're moving fast. It doesn't look good."
Noah nodded.
They stood together and watched the ambulance pull out, lights cutting through the gold light of the afternoon.
"This is going to be bad," Callie said.
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. They both knew what was coming. There would be an internal review. Shooting board. Media. Savannah. Every decision that led them to this campground would be examined under lights that made everything look worse than it was.
He had wanted to find the edges of the Hale case. He had found them. And they had cut.
The sun dropped behind the ridge. The campground went cold. The gold light was gone and the shadows of the mountains stretched across the clearing like something reaching.
24
Pruitt died at 7:47 PM.
Noah got the call from Harmon while sitting in the Bronco in his own driveway. The words were short. Pruitt didn't make it. Surgery couldn't stop the bleed. Twenty-six years old. Two years on the job. The department had notified the family.
