ought to since you raped her.”
“Raped her?” Moran cocked his head. “Where in the hell are you getting your information, Gordon?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter, as I’d like to know who’s spreading lies about me.”
“Katie Goss said it herself.”
“To you?”
Gordon said nothing.
“No, not to you. Why in the hell would she be talking to you?”
“My daughter—” Gordon said, but the words choked him. He saw the gun barrel waver. The colored lights blurred. “She told you no,” he said. “She told you no and you killed her. Say it. Say it, you son of a bitch. Say you ran her down and threw her in the river to drown. Say it before I kill you.”
“You aren’t going to kill me, Gordon.” Moran took a step forward, his hands still raised.
“Take one more step and find out.”
“You aren’t going to shoot me, Gordon, because you’re not sure you’re right. You’ve heard a lot of talk, and you’ve talked yourself into one version of things, but you don’t know for sure, and the moment you kill me you’ll never know for sure, because if I’m the one who did it, like you say, then I’m the only one who can tell you the truth. I’m the only man who can put your mind at ease. And I won’t do that, Gordon, because it would be a lie, and afterwards you would still not know the truth. Kill me, Gordon, and you will still be in exactly the same place, won’t you. You still won’t know for sure. You will never know, even when you are in prison for the rest of your life. Or dead yourself. You’ll die never knowing for sure if you killed an innocent man, a sheriff, a father of two little children himself, Gordon . . .”
Somehow he’d walked nearly to the barrel. The colored lights filled Gordon’s vision, Moran just a shape in the glistening pulsing lights, like a figure underwater.
The rifle became heavy and he understood that Moran’s hand was on the barrel, lowering it. He let the barrel drop and when it was aimed at the ground he let Moran take the rifle out of his hands. Moran working the bolt, ejecting the remaining two rounds into the snow and recovering them from the holes they made, then digging up the empty casing the same way and slipping all three into his jacket pocket. He carried the rifle to the cruiser and put it in the back seat as if it were his prisoner, then opened the front door and reached in, and the colored lights that had been pulsing all the while stopped and there was only the one headlight casting light on the two of them and the road and the Crown Vic.
Moran stepped to the front of the cruiser and stood looking at the shot-out headlight. Then he walked back to Gordon and stopped before him, his hands on his sheriff’s belt. “Well, Gordon, we’ve got us a situation here. I put you in cuffs and take you in, you’re gonna have to explain why you decided to ambush me, and I can’t say I’m too crazy about that idea. On the other hand, you have committed serious crimes here, felonious crimes, and damn well could’ve blown my head off to boot.”
He looked up into the trestles then, or the dark sky beyond them, and it was the kind of thing a man would do just before he pulled his pistol and shot you dead, and Gordon considered what that would be like—to be shot dead where he stood. To fall back in the snow and feel the life drain out of you, to see the world go dark. And the face that came to him then, that hovered over him in his last seconds, was not his own daughter’s, but Audrey Sutter’s, Oh, Mr. Burke . . . what were you thinking?
But Moran did not pull his pistol and shoot him. He looked at Gordon again and said, “Give me that hat.”
“What?”
“The hat. Give it here.”
Gordon reached up and felt the hatbrim. There was a hat on his head. He took it off and handed it to Moran.
Moran held the hat in one hand, turning it upside down and righting it again.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Not even the real deal.” And he turned and flicked the hat Frisbee-style over the rail and they watched it fall out of the light and into the darkness below the bridge. Wherever the hat