Free Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi

head more in black than red. His tattoo’s useless question died with him.
    Why has he forsaken you? Ask him yourself.
    The girl sat up, leaking blood from her center. She covered her bottom half, crossed her legs on the table, wide-eyed at Slone not two feet from her. The bleeding blade still tight in his grip. He hadn’t thought light-colored eyes a possibility among these people, but the girl regarded him now with a teal astonishment. Unsure what else that blade would thirst for. Unsure if another yellow-haired man would pry into her now too.
    I can’t hurt you , he thought. I won’t. Do not fear me . And she seemed able to read these thoughts, to find in his face something she could not find in the other’s. She did not tremble or flee—her tears had abated—and she could not look away from him. On the inner thigh of his pants Slone wiped the matter from the blade and held out the knife hilt first.
    She was ready to read his expression: Use this next time . Kill any man, any person who tries to bring you harm. And she took the knife from him then. This gift. For a reason known only to her, she brought it to her nose to sniff its metal and hilt. She stood from the table and tucked the knife into her unclean garb. She looked to the body at her feet and spat onto it. She reached for Slone’s right hand, tarry with the soldier’s blood, and turned it over to inspect his palm. With her index finger she traced an invisible letter or sign no one but she would ever know.
    Then she limped barefoot from the rear of the house and disappeared into roving smoke.
    * * *
    Russell Core’s motel room smelled of two weeks of sickness, a DO NOT DISTURB tag warning away eager maids from the doorknob. Take-out food plastic from the one Chinese restaurant in town. Damp towels over chairs, a bed disrupted. Newspapers fallen on a floor more concrete than carpet, crinkled bottles of springwater in the trash. Torn packages of flu medicine, balled tissues, mugs of tea for the burn in his throat. On the dresser a chipped ceramic figure of a grinning Hawaiian girl in grass skirt and lei—Core could not decide if this was a joke or not.
    For three days after the hunt his legs and back had ached, painful even to step to the toilet—an insistent reminder of his unfitness and age. His sleep was long and hazy with sickness. He’d wake not knowing the day, fight to recall which month this was. After several minutes not moving he’d remember: the dead boy, Medora Slone, his own wife no longer herself. A daughter he needed to see.
    Since finding the boy he’d waited for two weeks for the return of Vernon Slone. He waited for a call that would finally tell of his wife’s death. But no one knew where he was. He slept away those shortened days, mildly frightened of a sky that gray, of whatever impulse had led him to this place.
    Back from the morgue now, he understood that he had waited for nothing. His daughter’s phone number and address were folded in his wallet like a invitation sent to the wrong man. There was nothing Vernon Slone wanted from him, not another fact he could feed this family’s horror.
    And if Slone had asked him for an explanation? Would he have accepted the facts Core had to tell, the facts he knew of the wild? Those facts he had learned were no help here—no help to Slone and no help to himself. Awake in the night, the memory of Medora Slone’s scent strong in him, he studied starlight from the window. What Medora had done was observable in nature. He’d seen it himself among starved wolves in the north. It was a fact he knew. But a fact that could do nothing to describe this.
    The stale motel room around him, and the end or start of something else now, a new direction he couldn’t gauge. Core unlatched the window, an eight-paned iron relic he had thought long extinct, ferns of frost on its glass. He swung it open into the outer black to let the cold clean this room. He knelt before the dark, his tears consumed now by