"That wasn't even so much compared to what a lot of people made with James. Like Milo? His take on the windfall payout was supposed to be twenty million."

  "But everything has a price," he says.

  "Yeah," I say. "James snapped and we jumped. If you had deals to do, you didn't worry about anniversary dinners or soccer games or Christmas or cutting a vacation short.

  "I can't even count all the ball games I missed. The concerts. Birthday parties. But I still had it better than Ben. That's the good thing about a wife who wants things.

  "His wife nagged him nonstop, wore those Birkenstocks and bell-bottom jeans. Granola girl. Philosophy major. Finally she took the two kids and ran off to Palo Alto with some English professor. Ben always came in second.

  "Even the way everyone gave me the credit for airlifting the steel over the picket line and busting the union. It was really Ben's idea. I think people remembered me because I was the one who had my picture in the paper with those big Sikorsky helicopters, and I was the one who stood up to Johnny G

  when he came ranting and raving up to the gate where we were staging the steel. Maybe that's why Ben took that FBI agent's card, decided enough was enough with his best friend always getting the cream."

  "So you got the credit for making the project happen?"

  "Most people gave me credit. Not the one that counted, though."

  "You mean James?"

  "That world is like a shark tank. You act and you react. You eat or you get eaten. That's what he taught me and that's what I did."

  "Even if it meant taking a life?"

  "In a way."

  "James never did that, though," he says, "use union tactics. Murder."

  "Not a bullet to the brain," I say, "but he'd destroy people. You'd either win or lose with him. It was absolute."

  "What about win-win?"

  "Exactly. There was no win-win with James. That's what I learned."

  "With you?"

  "With everybody," I say. "High stakes. High risk. It was like the day after we broke the union picket line."

  "Go back to that," he says. "You were on your way home after they ran you off the road."

  9

  BY THE TIME I GOT HOME to Skaneateles, Jessica and Tommy were asleep. I checked all the doors to make sure they were locked, then I set the alarm and took my shotgun out of the closet and slid it under the bed with a box of birdshot. When I got into bed, Jessica moaned and rolled the other way. I lay there for a long time, listening. I don't know when I finally fell asleep. I know it was barely light when she shook me awake.

  "What's this?" she said. "What happened?"

  I sat up and looked at the pillowcase, stained with blood.

  "I cut my neck," I said, reaching for the wound.

  I told her the story about breaking the picket line and getting run off the road. I told her about Milo.

  "My God," she said.

  We crept quietly downstairs, careful not to wake Tommy, and she made a pot of coffee. We sat at our kitchen table looking out over the lake. The sky began to burn deep red in the east.

  "The FBI was there," I said. "They said the union's just trying to scare us."

  Jessica nodded and said, "You've got to get some security people down there."

  "We've got guys at the site."

  "Not rent-a-cops," she said. "Bodyguards. Tell James."

  "He's been battling these guys his whole life," I said. "He won't go for it."

  "Don't be like your father, Thane," she said, looking away from me and getting up. "I'll make you some eggs."

  "What's my father got to do with this?" I asked.

  "You think that chemical company respected him? They paid him what? Ten, twenty thousand dollars a year to wade around in that poison muck with a shovel?" she said, wiping a wisp of hair from her eye with the back of her wrist, her cheeks flushed. "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."

  "I make that in a month. You should know. It goes out that fast."

  "You don't want your son in decent clothes? You only have one," she said. Both of us froze, thinking the same thing, Teague. Even after a decade, a wound so raw you couldn't breathe on it without flinching.

  "It's called market value," she added quickly, scampering away from the subject, me letting her.

  "You're the one risking your life, he's the one making billions."

  "I'm a partner in this," I said, wanting to assuage her, make it better. Move on. I had learned from her. I wouldn't have gotten all those partnerships if I hadn't.

  My cell phone rang. James. I listened and said I'd be there and hung up.

  "He beckons?" she said, her eyes intent on the toast she was buttering.

  "We're meeting at Cascade," I said, going over to her and putting my arms around her waist. "A big announcement."

  "Like what?" she asked, setting down the butter knife.

  "Someone has to get Milo's share," I said.

  "Not his wife?"

  I shook my head. "King Corp partnerships never vest until financing goes through. Milo bought it two weeks too soon."

  "You got the steel in there," she said, turning to me, putting her arm around my neck.

  "Twenty million," I said. "You could build your house."

  I couldn't resist. She'd been working with the architect for two years on the plans. Three stories. Marble pillars. Another granite pool. Five-car garage. Miles of glass to enjoy the view. It would take a colossal windfall to afford. Her eyes strayed from me to the vacant lot on the waterfront bluff adjacent to our own back lawn.

  "We could."

  "Wives are invited to dinner. Seven o'clock. Eva will be there. So."

  Eva was James's wife. Jessica gripped my shoulders and said, "I knew you'd do it. All along, I knew. You just needed a push."

  "I'd like to give you a push," I said.

  I put my hands on her narrow waist. She looked up with her crooked smile and touched my cheek with the back of her nails.

  "You can," she said.

  I looked at my watch. I knew better. I'd seen James cut a forty-two-year-old lawyer out of a partnership for being late to a lunch meeting. Late at King Corp was inexcusable.

  "Tonight," I said.

  "I wouldn't miss it."

  I ran upstairs, put on khakis and a plaid shirt with a collar that covered my wound. Going to the lodge wasn't like going to our offices in Syracuse, where everyone wore a jacket and tie. With James, you never knew. You were just as apt to find yourself talking business in a fishing boat or a duck blind as the conference room.

  I gobbled down my breakfast, kissed Jessica hard, then got into the Mercedes convertible and headed out. Ben was already waiting in the conference room at the lodge. He was tilted back in a chair and stared out the window where the water shimmered in the sunlight, his eyes half closed.

  "Fucked-up night last night, huh?" I said, guessing at his thoughts. He spun his head around and said, "You cleaned up nice."

  "I guess we both look pretty damn good next to Milo."

  We stared at each other before Scott King came in and broke the uncomfortable moment. Scott was big and burly with sandy hair that was thinning fast. He was built like a bear with the heart and stamina of a draft horse, but could slip through the woods like an Iroquois. I got up and smacked my hand into his, answering his force with my own vise grip. We slapped each other's back in a brief hug. Then Ben got up and did the same thing. The three of us had been friends since the day we reported to football camp our freshman year at college.

  We trained together and we partied together. Vacations. Summer break. There wasn't a week that went by when the three of us weren't hanging out. It was like that for all four years. When I got drafted, I thought we'd never be like that again.

  Then I blew out my shoulder at the Giants' training camp. You want to talk about depressed? It was dark. The team sent me packing, and I was actually living back at my parents' house wondering what the hell I was going to do when Scott and Ben showed up at the door. They took me to Coleman's, where we all got drunk and Scott announced that I was going to work for his dad. It was a done deal. He'd already done the same thing for Ben. The plan was that the three of us would earn our stripes and then build our own empire together.

  While we were with his dad, Scott went down to Florida to work with an old partner of James's for about ten years before coming back to join King Corp and reuniting the old team. And, even though it wasn't the same, and even though we never did go out on our own, you don't go through all that together without staying friends.

  "Big announcement, huh?" Scott said. He grabbed a can of Diet Coke from the sideboard and cracked it open. He sat down and swung his feet up on the table in a way only James's son could do. Ben and I looked at each other, then him.

  "Change the company forever," Scott said, taking a sip and looking over the top of his can. "So he says. Don't worry. Word is that all three of us are going to be happy."

  I looked at him, wondering how that could be possible.

  "Where is my dad, anyway?" he said.

  "Where's my Beretta?"

  When we heard that voice--not just the voice, but the tone of it--we all jumped up like choirboys caught drinking the sacramental wine. We were grown men, all three of us. 10

  "You said your father was a 'whip-your-ass-with-a-belt' guy. Is that what James made you feel like?"

  "He was tough, but he wasn't going to throw a punch at me or anything."

  "I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about that choirboy thing, how he made you feel."

  I put my hands on the edge of the battered wooden table and I lean toward him.

  "You hear this," I say, "and then you tell me how I felt."

  I was glad he was looking at Scott instead of me. James was about six feet tall, not as thick as Scott, but solid, with a full head of white hair, long and swept off his forehead. His back was straight and he stood in the doorway with that mischievous glint in his eye. That glint could mean he was royally pissed off or that he was just having fun.

  "What do you mean?" Scott said.

  "I thought we'd shoot some ducks," James said. "But someone took the Beretta out of my locker."

  Scott's face got red and he said, "Maybe Bucky put it in mine by mistake."

  "That must be what happened," James said, "because I know you wouldn't have taken it and used it and not put it back. I'll have to get on Buck."

  Of course, when we walked downstairs, Bucky was right there laying out shotguns and boxes of shells on the workbench in the gun room. Scott made a detour and came back with a gleaming twelve gauge over-and-under. It was engraved with the swirling silver lines of a duck hunting scene. The thing looked like it belonged in a museum, and Scott used his sleeve to wipe some dried mud off the walnut stock.

  "Yeah, it was there," he said, laying it in front of his father on the bench and glancing at Bucky.

  "Bucky, do you think you could put this away in the right place?" James said. Bucky was more than just a hunting guide, although he was the best at that I ever saw. He was more too, than the guy who ran the entire hunting preserve and oversaw the construction of the lodge. He was a man whose opinion was valued by other men, whatever their station, whatever their education. I've seen him make PhDs blush and tycoons clamp their mouths shut tight. And it wasn't unusual at all for James to call him into a high-powered partner meeting to ask his advice about a complex issue. He was the guy you'd want to be close to if there was ever a nuclear war or something like that. Bucky would be the one to figure out how to survive. He had a drooping brush broom mustache and a barrel chest. His eyes were dark, red-rimmed, and so serious they were almost sad as he looked from the gun to Scott, then at James.

  "Thought I did," he said, putting on his country-boy manner the way you or I would put on a hat, "but I forgot to put beans in the coffee machine this morning too. Hot water with my eggs."

  James slapped him on the back and smiled, then said, "Get these guys some gear."

  I took a lightweight cattail camouflage suit off the rack--2X--then found some size thirteen boots on the wall of cubbyholes where pairs of the things were stored from the floor to the ceiling. While we were dressing, I gave Ben a grin and thought about the card he'd taken from the FBI. In a boardroom, my man was an ace, but you could tell by the expression on his face--like he ate a bad piece of fish or something--that he never got into the killing. It didn't matter if it was ducks or rabbits or boar or deer. When something died, Ben always looked the other way.

  Bucky passed out the guns and we walked outside. His blue Suburban was parked right there under the bridge to the main entrance above. Bucky drove us out to the swamps, and Russel, one of his sons, quickly butted out a cigarette. Russel was a baby-faced, thicker version of Bucky, but not as tall. Bucky scowled at him and as we unloaded I heard him mutter something about what kind of a fool would smoke when you know it's going to kill you.

  Russel looked at Bucky from under the bill of his cap with big drooping eyes, ignoring the comment the way the sons of tough fathers learn to do, and he ran us over to a small cattail island in a flatbottomed boat. The blind was like a miniature baseball dugout whose roof and outside walls were plastered with dead cattails. James stood in one end of the blind with Scott next to him, then me, and finally, Ben on the end.

  The sky was clear and blue, too nice a day for duck hunting, but these ducks were farm-raised and conditioned to fly right past us on their way back to the old barn where they lived and were fed. It's called a "flighted hunt."

  The decoys bobbed on the water in front of us, and Russel stayed outside the blind, blowing tentatively on his call and hunched his wide shoulders down over a black Lab that whined and shivered in anticipation. James talked to Bucky on the radio, and a minute later a flight of ducks appeared over the trees to the south and swept right toward us, a big green-headed mallard in the lead, quacking happily in answer to Russel's call.

  We shot flight after flight until our gun barrels were hot and the Lab was gasping for breath over a mound of broken ducks. Even Ben blasted his gun off a few times, but I never saw a bird fall from his shot and we kidded him about that.

  " That's it, James."

  It was Bucky's voice crackling over the radio.

  "That's it?" James said, his thick eyebrows disappearing under the bill of his camo hat. "Any more back at the barn?"

  " Sure."

  "Okay. Get some."

  We all sat down on the wooden bench that was tucked into the back of our narrow blind. The water in front of us was dark like oil and, where it wasn't broken up by patches of cattail islands that were brown and dead, it glittered with sunshine. I looked out at one of the decoys that was turning little circles in the breeze and saw that its pale gray back was speckled with blood.

  "Milo was a duck hunter," James said, looking out over the water.

  I felt a charge go through me and my breath go short. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ben's glasses shifting my way, looking down at James.

  "He'd always jump up and start shooting before anyone else could get a shot in," James said.

  "Remember that? Can you really trust a guy like that? He was great with the town boards though, and the EPA. He got that site ready, but he got in too deep down there. Obviously."

  Behind us on the old trolley bed we could hear Bucky's truck racing past on his way back from the duck barn.

  "Anyway," James said, "I'm saving the big announcement for tonight. I want all our families there because it affects everyone.

  "All three of you are going to be happy," he said, and my heart seemed to swell up against the inside of my ribs.

  "You should be anyway. But I wanted to get this thing with Milo out of the way. You've all done things to help this project, but that's your jobs. And, in all honesty, one of you was more critical in putting this financing into place than the other two . . ."

  In the distance, there was the sound of quacking ducks. James picked up his gun and stood and we all did the same. Getting Milo's percentage in this deal would wipe out all my financial worries. Pay off my mortgage. My credit cards. Have real money that could only grow bigger and bigger. I could spend without thinking, and stop worrying about what Jessica spent. She could build that house. She could start tomorrow. Even half of Milo's share would put me back in the driver's seat. Russel started calling to the flight of ducks, but they veered off before coming in.

  "Hold the damn dog still," James said, leaning forward so he could scowl down at Russel. Russel sat down hard on the dog and blew like hell, his cheeks puffed out like red balloons, pointing his call after the flight. One lone duck peeled off and circled back toward us, coming in.

  "Thane, you take it," James said.

  I realized that I was holding my breath. It was a green head, a big mallard. He gave a quack and cupped his wings. His feet came down like landing gear and he kind of floated there, wobbling a bit in the current, sailing in. A sweetheart shot.

  I fired once. Twice. Three times fast. The duck veered and a few feathers floated down, but he started flapping like mad and quacking his ass off, and away he went, disappearing over the wooded ridge beyond the swamp.

  "So," James said, sitting back down and keeping his eyes out on the swamp. "I'm giving Milo's equity to Scott."

  11

  "And that made you feel what?" the shrink asks.

  "Truth?"

  "That's why I'm here."

  "At that moment I felt like jamming that twelve gauge right in his face and pulling the trigger."

  "But the gun wasn't loaded."

  "What do you mean? How do you know?" I ask.

  "My granddaddy was a hunter," he says, leaning back and folding his hands over his belly. "Three shots in a duck gun. Federal law. You said you took all three."

  I tucked my lower lip under my front teeth.

  "So you really couldn't have," he says.

  "You ever go down into a basement and see something out of the corner of your eye?"

  He says yes.

  "So maybe it was like that. Something dark that flashes on the edge of your brain. It doesn't mean anything. It's there, then it's gone."