"Because my mother taught me that everyone deserves a second chance, even people who don't deserve it." Jack stopped walking. Five feet between them now. Close enough to see the tears starting in Cody's eyes. "She's lying in a hospital bed right now because of you, but she's the kind of woman who would tell me to give you mercy anyway."
The gun lowered, just an inch. "I'm going to get justice for what you did." Jack said. "But I'm not going to get revenge. There's a difference, one my mother understands better than I do."
The gun dropped completely. Cody stood there shaking, looking about 12 years old despite being 22. "Marcus Webb." Jack said again. "Where do I find him?"
"He He operates out of Sunset Ridge." Jack frowned. "The old mining town that's been abandoned for 20 years?" "Not all of it. Webb has a place there, private, where he does business that" Cody swallowed.
"Business that doesn't show up on any books." "How do I get there?" Cody gave directions. His voice was mechanical now, defeated, the adrenaline draining away and leaving only exhaustion. When he finished, Jack nodded.
"Call the police. Tell them you're turning yourself in for the assault on Martha Morrison. Tell them I said you cooperated. It won't make what you did okay, but it's a start." "What about Webb?
He'll He'll kill me if he finds out I talked." "Webb is going to have bigger problems than you," Jack said. "Trust me." He turned to walk away. "Mr. Morrison."
Jack looked back. Cody's face was wet with tears now. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. We didn't know she'd We just" "I'm sorry."
Jack studied him for a long moment. Saw the truth in it. Saw the regret. Saw a kid who'd made a terrible mistake and would carry it for the rest of his life. Just like Jack had carried his own mistakes.
"Tell that to my mother," Jack said. "When she wakes up, you go to that hospital and you tell her yourself." He left Cody standing in the alley and walked back through El Lobo. The bar was still silent. Everyone watched him leave.
No one moved to stop him. Outside, the sun was starting its descent toward the horizon. The day bleeding into evening. Phoenix turning from furnace to cooling ember. Jack got on his bike, started the engine, sat there for a moment feeling the vibration through his legs, through his spine, through the parts of him that remembered this feeling like a first language.
Sunset Ridge, 60 miles north. Abandoned mining town turned ghost town turned apparently Marcus Webb's private kingdom. Jack checked his phone. 4:15 p.m. If he left now, he'd arrive just after 6:00, right around sunset. Fitting somehow.
But first he had one more stop to make. The hospital parking garage was half empty. Jack found a spot near the elevator, killed the engine, sat in the fluorescent silence. Through his jacket, he could feel the locket against his chest. He'd moved it to an inside pocket.
Safer there. Closer. He took the elevator to the fourth floor. Walked the familiar hallway to room seven. Inside, his mother lay exactly as he'd left her, but her color was better.
Her breathing steadier. The machines sang their steady rhythm. Jack pulled the chair close, sat down, took her hand. "Hi, Mom," he said quietly. "I found it.
The locket and the letter from Dad." Martha's eyelids flickered but didn't open. "I know about Uncle Franklin," Jack continued. "About what happened. About what Dad did.
What he didn't do." He paused. "I'm not angry at him anymore. I understand." The heart monitor beeped its steady pulse.
"I'm going to finish it," Jack said. "What Franklin started. What Dad was too scared to finish." "I'm going to make sure those men, whoever they are, whoever they've become, I'm going to make sure they answer for what they did." He squeezed her hand gently.
"I know what you'd say. You'd tell me that revenge is poison. That I spent 32 years walking away from violence and I shouldn't go back. That you didn't raise me to be that man anymore." Jack's throat tightened.
"But you also raised me to protect family. To stand up for what's right. To be brave when being brave is hard." He leaned closer. "Dad's letter said to be braver than he was.
I'm trying, Mom. I'm trying." For a long moment, nothing. Just the two of them, mother and son, connected by touch and time and blood. Then Martha's eyes opened.
Not all the way, not clear, but open. She looked at Jack, saw him, recognized him. "Jack." She whispered. "I'm here.
Don't" Each word was an effort. "Don't become" "What you were." "Mom." "Promise me." Her grip tightened with surprising strength.
"Promise. You won't" "Lose yourself." Jack felt something break inside his chest. Some carefully constructed wall he'd built between who he was and who he'd been. "I promise," he said and meant it.
"I promise I'll come back. I promise I'm still your son." Martha's eyes closed again, but there was peace in her face now. Trust. Jack sat with her until visiting hours ended.
Until a nurse came and gently told him he needed to leave. He kissed his mother's forehead, whispered, "I love you." And then he walked out of the hospital, got on his Harley, and pointed it north toward Sunset Ridge. Toward Marcus Webb. Toward answers.
The sun was setting as Jack left Phoenix behind. The desert spread out around him, endless and ancient and indifferent to human drama. The highway unwound beneath his wheels like a ribbon of asphalt connecting past to present, connecting the man he'd been to the man he was becoming again. Or maybe the man he'd always been underneath it all. The engine roared.
The wind screamed. And Jack Morrison rode toward his reckoning, carrying his mother's locket over his heart and his father's shame on his shoulders. Sunset Ridge waited in the gathering dark and with it the truth about what had happened 50 years ago. The truth about who had killed Uncle Franklin. The truth about who Jack Morrison really was and who he would choose to be when the moment came.
Behind him, Phoenix glowed in the rearview mirror. Ahead, the desert swallowed the road. And somewhere between the two, a 67-year-old man who'd spent half his life running from his past finally stopped running. And started hunting. The desert at dusk was a cathedral of silence.
Jack had forgotten this, how the land could swallow sound, could make a man feel both infinite and infinitesimal at the same time. The highway cut north through terrain that hadn't changed in 10,000 years. Saguaro cacti stood like sentinels. Rocks the color of dried blood caught the last light. The sky bled from blue to purple to black stars emerging one by one like witnesses gathering for testimony.