by Fire
He'd like to meet up with Fate in a dark alley sometime, he thought, rolling over and thumping his pillow. With a club in one hand.
He'd like that a lot.
He returned to Newenham three days later, and drove to the trooper post to find Moses Alakuyak sitting on the steps, waiting for him. "You practice while you were away?"
"As a matter of fact I did," Liam said, shutting the door of the Blazer behind him. "I practiced out on my in-laws' deck. They think I've lost my mind."
Moses grunted. "You call her?"
Liam gave the shaman a sharp look. "Haven't had time."
"Make time."
Liam was annoyed. "Mind your own business, old man."
"You are my business, boy," Moses retorted, "and so is she. Let's stand some post."
They stood some post.
After ten minutes his thighs began a fine trembling sensation. He checked out his feet to make sure he was maintaining his three-point connection with the earth--right ball, left ball, heel. Root from below, suspend from above.
"So, your wife's dead," Moses said.
"Yes," Liam said. His stance was solid, but the tremble was still there.
"It wasn't your fault."
Liam said nothing.
"You can carry around the guilt for the rest of your life, that's what you want," Moses observed. "It'll wreck you for sure if you do."
The trembling increased.
"Or you can honor her memory by living your life the best you can."
His whole body was trembling now.
"You got a shot at a new life. Take it."
According to Bill, half the residents of Newenham were there to start over. "I don't deserve it," Liam said.
"Who says?" Moses demanded. "You God, you know all, you see all? If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. If it hands you a Rolls-Royce, climb in and break out the champagne. Take your preparatory breath."
It took Liam a moment to realize that Moses was going into the form. "Ward Off Left."
He caught up with his teacher at right Push Upward. They did Pull Back, Press Forward and Push, and then Moses taught him Fist Under Elbow. It took Liam thirty minutes to train his body to finish up facing the right direction, but at least it was the right direction, no matter how he got there.
Finally, Moses said, "Enough for today. Practice, practice, practice."
"How'd you take up tai chi in the first place, sifu?" Liam said, managing not to groan as he came upright.
Moses busied himself changing into street clothes. "I was in the navy, stationed at Subic Bay. Took my first liberty in Hong Kong. I got up early the first morning, started wandering around, found a bunch of people in a park doing it. Looked interesting, so I went up and talked to the leader afterward. Turns out he'd escaped from mainland China with some American missionaries. He told me what he was doing, the Yang style, and he ran me through the form a couple of times. When I got back to base I looked for a teacher, found one in Manila." He shrugged.
"What do you like about it so much?"
Moses buttoned his shirt, considering. "I like the control it gives me, and the connection it makes between me and the elements. And," he added casually, "the voices don't hassle me so much when I'm doing form. Sometimes it's the only thing that gets me through the night. What'd you find out about Gary Gruber?"
"How did you--"
"I know pretty much everything there is worth knowing, boy, how many times do I have to tell you? He didn't kill Bob for Laura, did he?"
"No. Or at least, not entirely."
"Big wad of cash in his account?"
Liam, who had been trained to talk trooper business only with troopers, and sometimes not even with them, said to this strange old man, "Yeah. Paid in the week before herring. Drawn on Cecil Wolfe's business account."
Moses grinned. "Trust Cecil to figure out a way to claim murder as a business expense."
"Yeah. Nice to know I wasn't completely off base when I fingered Wolfe for killing Bob DeCreft."
"Even you have to get something right once in a while," Moses agreed.
"I took too long to get there, though. I was so afraid Wy was guilty I couldn't see my way clear to who was. And I should have known Wolfe would never have done it himself. Didn't fit the pattern. He sent Mulder to wreck Wy's plane, the rest of his crew to sink McCormick's boat and beat him up. The only time he took direct action was when he shorted Wy on her check, and he knew he was safe enough there because she wouldn't be able to complain without explaining why she'd been shorted. If she did that, she'd never get hired by another herring fisherman ever again."
Moses finished changing clothes and in the process from sifu back into shaman. "He might not even have meant to kill DeCreft. He might have just wanted to scare him. Maybe let DeCreft know that Wolfe knew DeCreft was spotting for two."
"I suppose that's possible," Liam said, reluctant to concede Wolfe even a negative virtue.
"Doesn't matter what he meant." Moses cocked an eyebrow. "Could have killed Wy as easy as Bob." He stared hard at the horizon before delivering judgment. "In a way, you could say Cecil killed himself. He set the process in motion--he bribed Gruber to sabotage the plane, DeCreft gets killed, Cecil takes advantage of his death to rape Laura, Becky finds out and kills him. Yeah, you could say he killed himself."
You could, Liam thought, if you ignored the fact that Wy and DeCreft had been double-crossing Wolfe to begin with. "Anyway, Gruber had been on Wolfe's payroll for a long time. I had them pull Gruber's account for the last couple of years. When he first came to Newenham to spot herring, he was spotting for Cecil."
Moses nodded. "Figures." They sat in silence for a moment. "So the way it looks, Gruber being in love with Laura Nanalook and all, Wolfe paid Gruber to do what he wanted to do anyway."
"It looks like it. They're both dead, so we'll never know the whole story."
"We won't miss 'em, either one of them."
From the tall white spruce across the road, a big black raven croaked agreement. Looking up at him, Liam thought he looked like the angel of death, shiny and black and so very well fed. "Three deaths the first week I'm in town," he said. "People are going to think I'm a blight on the community."
Moses grinned. "Sorry, boy, you just ain't that powerful. Or that important," he added with a bark of laughter.
Again the raven echoed him, with a sound eerily similar to Moses' rusty laugh: caw, caw, caw.
"That damn raven--what is he, your familiar or something?" Liam said irritably. "I see him everywhere you go."
"No you don't," Moses said testily, "you see him everywhere you go. He's not mine, he's yours."
"What?"
Moses got to his feet and dusted off the seat of his pants. "He's yours. He looks to you. Poor bastard."
Liam didn't know who Moses was referring to, him or the raven.
Moses leveled an admonitory finger. "You watch out for him--he's a trickster, like all of his kind. He'll bring you the sun and the stars, but you give him a chance and he'll steal your woman away, too. Why didn't you kill him?"
"What?" Liam said, off balance. "Who? The raven?"
"The man who killed your wife. Why didn't you kill him?"
The shaman's eyes were bright and penetrating. Liam felt pinned to a board, with no means of escape but the truth.
Well, what was the truth? He wasn't sure he knew anymore, and he'd been there. "I suppose you mean when I arrested him, after he got out."
"Six months he did," Moses said. "For driving drunk and killing your son and putting your wife in the coma that eventually killed her. You must have been mad."
"Mad?" Liam turned the word over in his mind. "Mad? I don't know. I couldn't believe it when I pulled him over and ran his plates. I couldn't believe it was him. And then when I walked up to the car, and saw him. He knew it was me; he recognized me from the courtroom." He paused. "He started to cry, and beg." He looked at Moses. "He opened his door and fell out onto the road and crouched down on
his knees, shivering and sobbing, snot running from his nose."
"And drunk," Moses said.
"And drunk," Liam said. "I wasn't mad, I was disgusted. I wanted to kill him, all right. I wanted to pull out my gun and put him out of his misery."
"He probably did, too," Moses said. "Better you didn't, though."
Liam looked at him. "Thanks, Moses," he said with real gratitude. "You're the first person to say that to me. Everybody else seems to think Dyson should have been shot while resisting arrest. You should see what it's like when I go into headquarters. There isn't a trooper I know who can look at me without contempt."
"Bullshit," Moses said bluntly. "You did what was right, for you, for Dyson. Even for Jenny and Charlie. Don't matter what anyone else thinks, boy, only you. And your shoulders are big enough to carry the load. So carry it."
The old man stamped off to his truck. The engine turned over and the window rolled down. "Remember," the old man shouted. "Raven'll steal your woman and everything else that matters along with her, but only if you let him."
He slammed the truck into first. "Don't let him!"
The truck lunged off down the road, leaving Liam sitting on the steps, staring up at the raven, eyes bright with malicious knowledge, beak sharp and polished, ebony feathers smooth and gleaming.
"So?" he said. "Mind telling me what I do now?"
It croaked at him.
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