A Better Man
- Автор: Пенни Луиза
- Серия: Chief Inspector Gamache #15
- Год: 2019
- Язык: английский
- Год: St. Martin's Publishing Group
- ISBN: 9781466873711
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «A Better Man». Краткое содержание книги:
It's Gamache's first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Floodwaters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil, a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter.
As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter of his own, he finds himself developing a profound, and perhaps unwise, empathy for her distraught father.
Increasingly hounded by the question, how would you feel..., he resumes the search.
As the rivers rise, and the social media onslaught against Gamache becomes crueler, a body is discovered. And in the tumult, mistakes are made.
In the next novel in this constantly surprising series that deepens and darkens as it evolves (The New York Times Book Review), Gamache must face a horrific possibility, and a burning question.
What would you do if your child's killer walked free?
Come on. Come on, you shit. Get in that truck of yours and just try it.
Cameron had been reassigned from the effort to find Vivienne Godin to setting up emergency shelters. Sent home to rest, he’d come here instead.
Tracey was a weak man, Cameron knew. The sort who’d try to run.
And then what would I do?
But he knew the answer to that. He’d pull Tracey over. Tell him to get out of the vehicle.
And he’d do what he should have done weeks ago.
He looked at his watch. It was almost 1:00 a.m. He should go home. His wife might be wondering. But he couldn’t. Not quite yet.
Come on, you dumb-ass. Come on out. Come to me.
Billy Williams stood on the road out of town. He held a long, gnarled stick, and as Reine-Marie and Armand watched, he drove it into the mud. As he’d done every twenty minutes for the past couple of hours.
He was testing to see how far the stick would sink in, but also, it seemed by his cocked head, listening for some sound from the earth. Some permission.
The sleet had stopped an hour earlier, and the temperature had plummeted. Exactly what they needed.
Maybe now …
“Well?” asked Reine-Marie, just as Armand noticed a glow on the hill above them.
Headlights. That could be only one person. Jean-Guy had arrived.
Billy spoke.
“Thank the Lord,” said Reine-Marie, turning to Armand. “Billy says it’s frozen.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They stood on the frozen field, a few kilometers upriver of Three Pines, and watched as Billy’s backhoe dug into the banks of the Bella Bella.
The strong beam from the light on the front of his cab illuminated the ice and muck and stones as the shovel dug in.
Reine-Marie held her phone in her mittened hand. They had, away from the forests and on the clear, crisp night, a fragile signal. That came and went. But was at least there. For now.
Jean-Guy was beside the river, and Armand stood on the running board, guiding the digging of the trench. While Reine-Marie listened for reports back from Three Pines.
They’d left Clara and Myrna on the bridge. The river was now up to the second sandbag.
Ruth was in Clara’s cottage with her landline. Reporting back.
“River’s still rising,” Ruth shouted into the phone. Partly to be heard over the roar of the river and partly because she always shouted into a phone.
“Did you see that?” Myrna shouted into Clara’s ear.
Damn her, thought Clara, who was busy trying to pretend she hadn’t seen anything.
But Myrna rarely looked away from some awful truth. Preferring to know rather than to live in blissful, if dangerous ignorance. It was one of her worst qualities.
“They’ve shifted.” Myrna turned and yelled across to Ruth. “Tell them to hurry. They’ve shifted.”
“What’s that?”
“They’ve shifted!”
“Well, you’re pretty shitty, too!”
Gabri, standing beside Ruth in the kitchen, grabbed the phone. “Here, give me that. Reine-Marie? The sandbags are beginning to shift.”
“Merde.”
“Hey! Hey!”
They turned and saw a flashlight approaching.
“Keep digging,” Armand yelled into Billy’s ear, then jumped off the backhoe.
“What’re you doing? This’s my land,” came a man’s voice.
Armand gestured to Reine-Marie to stay where she was and walked toward the light and the shout. “Sûreté. Who are you?”
But he knew the answer to that. Because he knew whose land they were on.
Jean-Guy left the river and joined Armand. The man was still twenty paces away. And held a flashlight in one hand and something else in the other.
“He’s got a gun,” said Jean-Guy, his sharp eyes not leaving the man slipping and stumbling toward them.
“Oui,” said Armand, and took a step in front of Reine-Marie. “A .22. Hunting rifle. Saw it earlier, in the search. He has a permit.”
“Fuck,” muttered Jean-Guy, shaking his head.
A .22. Small-gauge. But it could still do damage. To a gopher. A fox. A human.
“This’s private property,” Tracey shouted. “Get off.”
They were downwind of him and could smell the whiskey. The donkeys had been put in the barn overnight, so it was just humans now, in the field.
“Monsieur Tracey, it’s Armand Gamache. We met earlier today.”
“I don’t care who you are. You’re on my land.” Tracey stopped ten paces away and raised his rifle. “Get off.”
“Armand?” said Reine-Marie, stepping forward.
“It’s all right,” he said, and put his arm out to gently move her behind him.
Obviously, she thought, his idea of “all right” and hers were very different.
“What’s happening?” came Gabri’s tinny voice down the phone. “Reine-Marie?”
“Drop the gun,” commanded Beauvoir.
“Gun?” came the tinny voice. “Hello?”
“Get off my goddamned land,” yelled Tracey. The rifle still raised.
Billy had stopped digging. Armand turned to him and shouted, “Whatever happens, keep digging.”
“Yurz.”
The machine began again, and Tracey stepped forward, slipping slightly on the snow and mud.
The danger, Gamache could now see, wasn’t just that he’d fire the rifle on purpose but that he’d slip and it would go off accidentally.
“I said stop,” yelled Tracey.
“And I said drop the gun,” said Beauvoir, stepping directly in front of Armand. Directly in front of the gun.
“Oh, my God,” shouted Armand, and waved toward the river.
Reine-Marie, alarmed, turned.
As did Tracey.
The only one who didn’t was Beauvoir, who was expecting Gamache to do something like this. Divert, just for a moment, Tracey’s attention.
Jean-Guy’s hand shot out and wrenched the rifle from his grip.
When Tracey lunged for it, Beauvoir pivoted and knocked him to the ground.
Gamache bent down and lifted the drunken man to his feet.
“We’re diverting the river,” he explained. “To stop the—”
“You have no right. This’s private land,” Tracey shouted. With a yank, he twisted away from Gamache and ran toward the backhoe, waving and shouting, “Arrêt! Arrêt! Stop.”
But, of course, Billy did not.
He hadn’t seen that Beauvoir had disarmed him. As far as Billy knew, a man with a rifle was running toward him. And might very well shoot.
But Billy didn’t care. Myrna was down there. The bags were shifting. And only he could stop it.
He pushed the shovel in deeper and dragged it forward into the field just as Gamache caught up with Tracey and, grabbing him around the waist, hauled the man around and away.
With a gush, the Bella Bella began pouring into the field.
“Hello?” came a tinny voice.
There was no deluding herself any longer.
The wall was coming down.
It was time to leave, Clara knew. Not just the bridge but her home. The village. Time to abandon Three Pines to fate.
Myrna and Clara quickly made their way off the bridge, half walking, half running.
The last of the villagers had to get out of Clara’s home, out of Three Pines, and up to the church.
From there they would witness the destruction.
“Wait,” said Clara, grabbing Myrna’s arm.
Every particle of Myrna’s being was straining forward. Telling her to flee. Now.
But she stopped. And waited, for a moment. Because Clara had.
Too afraid to even speak, she stared at the circle from Clara’s flashlight. It rested, trembling, on the now-askew sandbags. Some had fallen, some were preparing to slide away, pushed by the force of the water.