sleep to stage her rescue from the scene on Coral Shores. Walker shudders as engines from North and Southside stations roar past the Flordana, screaming down Central Avenue toward Bayfront Drive and over the bridge to the island. Something’s ablaze out there. The sirens tell him it’s big. Good thing he’s parked here in front of the Flordana, praying – insofar as Walker prays – that the kid will sleep through the racket and stay inside. He does not want to go out to Coral Shores where the commotion is and he certainly doesn’t want the kid to go. Walker hates to see anything burn, won’t let Dan see. Or put either of them out there, where they can be blamed.
The trucks recede and Walker shakes himself, trying to unclench. Nothing to see now, Pike. Nothing to do here but sit behind the wheel, waiting. Stay until morning, just to be sure this new person in his life is safely stashed. Now that his son is here, it’s his duty to – he supposes it’s: protect, and if Dan wakes up and races out to chase fires, he’ll follow, and . . .
He doesn’t know what comes next, only that it’s important.
Yes, Walker’s been tailing him. When he left the warning on Carteret’s windshield today he thought his job was done, but it isn’t. He went home thinking, He’ll be fine, but that was a lifetime ago. Chaplin showed up at his house tonight. He looked like a carcass washed up on the beach, standing under the porch light leached of substance. ‘We have to talk.’
Walker didn’t want to. They did.
When it was done, Walker did what he had to. He came here. He’s been standing vigil ever since. Responsible.
Sad, square old Bob Chaplin came inside all shaky and diminished. God, that was weird. He begged Walker to hear him out, all, I alone am left, I alone am left to tell. It was hard for him, just being there. It was hard for Walker too, but he let Chaplin talk, and Chaplin brought it back. All of it.
Walker gritted his teeth and held back, even during the hardest part, because he must never even think what he’s thinking. He can’t go there. Correction: must not go there. Ever.
At the end, Chaplin choked out an apology for everything he’d ever done and the one grave thing that he had failed to do. Protect her. In a way, it released both of them.
It was the first time they’d ever sat down together, and in another life, in a different society, Walker thinks, he would have liked the guy.
As it was, they were alike, with Fort Jude society like a ditch between them. The grimy kid whose dad ran a failed body shop out on Pierce Point came into Northshore Elementary under deep cover. The Coral Shores kids thought he didn’t belong. When he shambled off the bus at Northshore Elementary in Pop’s flapping shoes and torn castoffs they laughed at him. They pointed, they mocked his walk. Hurt, he turned his back on them, even on Chaplin, who tried to make nice when they landed in the same advanced math class. Nobody gets to see the cluttered, filthy rooms where Pop raised him and his little brother. He’d die. The grilled windows. The chicken wire that kept them inside before Walker got big enough to look after Wade and strong enough to work in the body shop. Nobody. He turned away in a protective slouch, put on a scowl that hid whatever he was thinking.
To his surprise, compared to most of those kids he was pretty smart, but you hide smart because you know it will make them hate you. In classrooms he grabbed the last seat in the back, kept his head down, never raised his hand, solved math problems no problem, but he did it on paper only. Teachers knew he knew, but he wouldn’t go to the blackboard, so they stopped asking. They got along with Walker after they stopped trying to praise him. They never pressed because even adults were a little scared of him; by then he’d perfected the glare, growing up under deep cover. He graduated a year ahead of his class; nobody noticed, nobody cared.
Chaplin was just as smart, but he was better at dissembling. He knew how to please the people. In high school he was way too smart to show how smart he was, although Walker knew.