by Jack Ketchum
He saw her glance at his burden and then at him and then at the blankets again. Her eyes widened and skittered side to side as she realized what lay beneath them.
‘Oh, my god,’ she said.
‘I need to speak with your husband, ma’am.’
‘Oh, my god.’
Her hand moved to her mouth. He saw she was crying.
‘I’m sorry. It’s your husband who needs to see this. Not you.’
She shook her head.
‘Why are you doing this to us? I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t mean any disrespect but I’m afraid you’ve got that wrong, ma’am. I mean about who’s done what to who.’
She stepped toward him urgently and turned her head.
‘Do you see this?’
Beneath the stray ringlets of hair that framed her face the bruise on her cheekbone was an ugly blue and yellow.
‘I got this last night, Mr Ludlow. We were getting ready for bed. All I did was ask about you. Do you understand me? All I did was mention your name and ask Michael what on earth was going on. This was my answer.’
‘He did that to you often?’
‘No. Never.’
‘Never?’
‘Once. A very long time ago. He’d had much too much to drink.’
‘A man hits you one time, he’ll probably hit you again.’
‘This wouldn’t have happened except for you! Don’t you see that? Can’t you please just leave us alone?’
‘I didn’t start this, ma’am. I’m sorry you have to be here seeing this. It’s not what I was after. To trouble you.’
She looked at the blankets again. ‘My god,’ she said. He saw her face turn pale. Her hand went to her mouth. For a moment he thought she was going to be sick. The wind had died down. The smell of the dog was high again, wrapping them in the scent of death.
‘Where is he, Mrs McCormack?’
‘Right here,’ McCormack said.
They stepped through the doorway behind her, McCormack first and then his two sons. He could see Pete Daoust in the shadows behind them. Danny held a pistol in his hand. From the look of it a .38 revolver.
His father had a pistol too, only McCormack’s was a .44 magnum. Ludlow had fired one once. It could take down a bear.
This was a family, he thought, that liked its guns.
‘You’re a goddamn lunatic,’ McCormack said. ‘Coming here.’
‘Maybe.’
‘My friend, there aren’t any maybes about it.’
‘Sometimes the only way to know a thing is to know it first hand, Mr McCormack. See it. Taste it. Smell it. Then you know it Somebody burned my store down last night. A few nights back somebody put a rock through my window. But I’m not here about any of that. I’m here about this.’
He set the body down gently on the porch in front of them and unfolded the blankets.
‘It still all comes down to this,’ he said.
‘Jesus H. Christ.’
He pulled the shirt free of what remained of the dog’s head. The shirt tore, it’s fibres thinned. Maggots squirmed in the sudden light.
‘Get that goddamn thing out of here. Now, Ludlow.’
‘Sure I will, in a minute. When you tell me what you’re going to do about it’
‘I’m not going to do shit about it. You’re trespassing.’
‘I know that’
‘Then you also know I could damn well shoot you.’
‘I know that too.’
He saw Danny step around his father in two long strides and then he was down the steps to Ludlow and the gun was pressed to Ludlow’s ear.
‘You old stupid fuck,’ he said. ‘You don’t fucking listen.’
He reached for the boy’s forearm and had it in both his hands and heard McCormack yell, No, goddammit Danny! when the gun roared against him and he felt a sudden wet shock where his ear had been, the gun still pressed there so that he could smell the powder and feel the cold wet bloody barrel against his cheek as he fell back down the steps, falling away from a vision of man and boys and woman all open-mouthed leaning toward him down from the porch. His hands still gripped the forearm so that he took the boy with him, tumbling down on top of him, head to chest onto the lawn.
He wrenched at the arm and slammed it against the first wooden step and heard the boy scream dim and far away beneath a torrent of black sound.
The gun dropped to the grass. Ludlow rolled the boy over and reached for the gun and lay there pressing it hard against the boy’s head, his other arm wrapped around his neck and squeezing. The boy tried to twist away and then felt the gun at his head and went still.
His back was out again and it was bad this time. He could feel the pain shoot down all through his leg. Blood from his ear was dripping into Danny’s face, onto his cheek and into his open mouth as he gasped for breath, the taste of blood making him sputter up a fine spray of red.
‘You got more damn mistakes in you than any kid I ever knew,’ he said.
He cocked the trigger.
‘You’re going to shoot a man, you kill him. Or he’s going to think hard about killing you.’
McCormack was shouting something. He couldn’t make it out for the ringing in his head.
He looked up and saw the .44 magnum pointed at him.
‘Put it down,’ he said. ‘You can’t shoot me without me shooting the boy. That simple.’
He saw the woman mouth the word Please, whether to him or to her husband he didn’t know, her face gone suddenly old and drawn. McCormack glared at him for a moment, then lowered the gun to his side. Ludlow watched him a second or two, getting his breath and then turned to Danny.
‘Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to get up, Daniel. Together, real slowly. Knees first and then the rest of the way.’
The boy did as he was told. Ludlow’s back hurt so bad it almost doubled him over. He didn’t let it. He felt blood running down his neck and wondered if there was anything left of the ear at all.
‘Ma’am?’ he said. ‘Would you throw me that hand towel you’re holding there?’
She was gripping it in her hand, her knuckles angry red. She stepped forward, shaking. Her face was white. She handed him the towel and Ludlow nodded and pressed it to his ear.
The gun never left Danny’s temple. He told the woman, Thank you.
‘I’m taking him into town,’ he said. ‘Trespass is one thing and I guess I’m guilty there but weapons assault’s another. I never knew anybody to shoot a suspected intruder in the ear at point-blank range in broad daylight. I don’t think the police have either. I think they’ll want to talk with Danny. We might even make the papers this time, Mr McCormack. You never know.’
McCormack shouted something, his mouth an angry snarl.
‘I can’t hear you,’ Ludlow said. ‘Sorry.’
He put the gun to Danny’s ribs and started walking him down the hill, then told him to stop and turned and looked at the woman, McCormack’s wife, standing frozen in front of the porch.
‘I’d appreciate it very much if you’d cover up my dog for me again, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back for him.’
Twenty-six
‘You drive,’ he said. He handed Danny the keys.
He held the gun on him while Danny got behind the wheel and then walked to the passenger side. He groaned getting in and saw the boy turn and look at him. The boy was hoping.
‘Go on,’ he said.
The boy put the keys in the ignition and started it.
‘Go easy. It’s a damn bumpy road.’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Yeah, something.’
‘You wouldn’t fire that thing.’
‘Were you expecting me up here today?’
‘No.’
‘Than how do you know what I’d do?’
‘You’re crazy, old man.’
The boys voice was coming from very far away through a high steady whine of sound.
‘Maybe,’ he said. �
��But in that case you’d better do as I tell you, hadn’t you?’
The boy put the truck in gear and they started down the road. Ludlow turned the blood-soaked towel to its clean side and pressed it to his ear and then removed it and looked at it. It came away bloody but less so than he’d expected. He guessed the bleeding was slowing down. He turned the rear-view mirror toward him so he could see.
The whole upper portion of the auricle was gone as though somebody had spooned it away with a jagged spoon. He saw shattered cartilage poking through bloody shreds of skin. There was a glistening line about an inch in length and a quarter-inch wide along the side of his head just behind the ear where the hair was gone. It was seeping blood. A slightly different angle and he’d have been a dead man. He turned away the mirror and pressed the towel to the wound again.
‘Would it help if I said I was sorry about the dog?’
‘It might have once. Some. If I thought you meant it. Which right now, I don’t. Your brother already told me, did you know that? No. I bet you didn’t. But I think you’re pretty damn late with your apology. I think we’re way beyond that now.’
‘Mister . . .’
‘Just drive,’ he said.
Where the forest ended, the paved road began and they drove that through the wide green rolling farmland. Ludlow noted that Danny wasn’t pushing the truck to more than thirty even out here on the straightaways, trying to prolong this he supposed, trying to think of something to say or something to do that would change Ludlow’s mind about taking him in. Well, thirty miles an hour was fine with him. His back had eased up but it was still hurting bad and the headache from the bullet throbbed like the steady rythmic blows of a hammer. The slower they went, the better.
It was only when they passed into forest land again that he realized the error in his thinking.
Suddenly the truck was jolted from behind. He glanced over and saw that Danny was braced for it, knew then that he’d been watching them coming up behind them through the rear-view mirror. Ludlow slapped his right hand against the dash. His shoulder hit the door. He saw Danny glance at the gun.
No way, boy, he thought. He held it steady.
He turned and saw McCormack behind the wheel of the big black Lincoln, a boy silouetted in the passenger seat beside him who Ludlow thought would probably be Pete because of his size, and another passenger in back. He guessed that would be Harold. He wondered if Harold had volunteered for this duty.
The car shot forward and rammed again. This time he was braced and ready. The truck veered up the hill but held the road.
He saw Danny take his foot off the accelerator.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You keep going.’
The boy frowned but did as he said.
They were going to run them into a goddamn tree. McCormack’s own son was driving.
And McCormack said that he was crazy.
He tried to think. The headache pounded interference.
He could tell the boy to stop, get out of the truck and confront them. But that was most likely what they wanted him to do. McCormack had the .44 magnum and he’d bragged about his shooting. While Ludlow hadn’t shot in years, hadn’t shot seriously since the war and hardly ever with a handgun. He could use the boy to bargain with again as before but the boy was right, even if he didn’t know it. Ludlow had no intention of killing him. Or anybody else for that matter. Which ruled out firing out the goddamn window. McCormack might have guessed that about him by now. That he didn’t want any killing. Maybe that was why he was out here.
Banking on that.
No. It was better to keep driving, to take the chance that McCormack wouldn’t come at them hard enough to risk his own son’s life in a collision. Once they were out of the forest they were on the open coast road after that. There were homes and people living in the homes. Witnesses. Beyond there, the highway and town.
They had only to get out of here. Another two miles, maybe.
The Lincoln hit them again, harder this time.
The truck swerved onto the narrow shoulder, skidded and then righted itself back onto the road.
‘Jesus! Can’t we stop this thing? You’re gonna get us killed!’
‘Just go on. Just the way you been going. No faster.’
‘He’s not going to stop, I’m telling you.’
‘He’d better stop.’
‘I know him. He won’t.’
‘Maybe you know him and maybe you don’t.’
‘I’m fucking telling you! We got to stop this truck!’
‘You forget. I don’t listen. This gun says you keep on driving.’
The boy was sweating, fists clenched tight at the wheel.
He felt a moment’s doubt. Ludlow knew the boy was a liar and a damn good liar at that. But what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t know was just how good. Whether what he said about his father was true or wasn’t true.
And then he had his answer.
He turned and saw that the Lincoln had fallen six or seven yards behind them.
Suddenly, horribly, he saw it surge.
When it hit, the Lincoln was probably doing seventy. It took the bed of the truck on the passenger side and Ludlow heard breaking glass and the screech of metal on metal and Danny screaming something beside him. For a moment they were weightless, frozen together in time. Passengers in a sudden void. And then they were down over an embankment pounding through scrub and rocks and fallen logs headed for the pine trees and birch trees dense ahead of them and he saw the windshield go on his side, webbed and shattered by some fatal heavy limb hanging across their path and felt a fine dust of glass fall across his face and hands as the truck lurched sideways and tumbled, rolled once and then righted itself and rolled again, so that he was on the roof and then on the seat and then on the roof again with the passenger door flung open, though he had no idea when that had happened.
He felt Danny slam into him as something jarred them to a sudden stop. And the last thing he thought was errant nonsense.
Get behind the razor, he thought. Get behind the razor.
Twenty-seven
At first he couldn’t see, he could only hear.
Rough voices, anger in them. Anxiety and maybe fear. For a moment the sounds themselves made no sense to him, only gradually resolving themselves into words and language though for some reason the emotions they expressed were clear to him from the moment he awoke. It was as though for a moment on awakening he were listening to a foreign tongue or as though he were an animal with no language at all yet with senses necessarily alert to all the nuances of human feeling.
‘Well, find the fucking goddamn thing, will you?’
McCormack’s voice. He thought that a man should not be using such words around his boys.
‘We’re looking, dad!’
Harold’s voice. Shaky, scared. Close by. Somewhere to the left of him. He could hear the boy’s feet dragging through heavy leaves, scuffling over the surface of a rock. Then in the leaves again further on.
He was lying on a bed of pine needles. He could smell them, feel them pricking at the back of his hands. The thick root of a tree lay directly beneath his head. Whether he’d been thrown here from the truck or been dragged here he couldn’t say.
‘Try over that way. Did you double-check the truck?’
A sigh. ‘Jesus. Yes, dad.’
Danny Ms time. Sullen-sounding. Like his father was just one great big annoyance to him. So that Danny was alive. Danny was well. He could hear his shoes in the pine needles just beside him.
There was no justice anywhere.
‘I want that goddamn gun. You find it.’
Slowly his vision cleared. It would not be wise, he thought, to let them know he was awake. He lay motionless and kept his eyes slitted nearly shut so that he was able to see them only darkly. He would’ve liked to have moved around some to see if anything was broken. But he didn’t dare. He could hear them shuffling back and forth, searching the ground.
For what? For the
gun, the .38, the one he had in the truck with him. He could not remember letting go of it. He risked moving his fingers. It wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t.
‘Look, dad. If we can’t find it, what makes you think they will?’
Danny again. Impatient. He wants to get out of here, Ludlow thought.
‘They’re cops, you fool.’
‘Town cops. I mean, we’re not talking FBI here, y’know? This is just gonna be an accident to them, that’s all. I mean, these guys are not a bunch of geniuses. They’re gonna write it off as an accident, for god sakes.’
Not as confident as he was trying to sound. A dim grey shadow standing above him a few feet away, waving his arms at his father. This time Ludlow could hear the nervousness in his voice, the brittle tension. So the crash had shaken him at least. It wasn’t much but it was something. He guessed the boy was just like anybody else to that extent. He could fear his own death in a truck plunging headlong into trees. He could fear the law.
The knowledge didn’t help him much. Not right now.
‘I gotta agree with your dad, Dan.’
Pete Daoust. The farthest away from him, somewhere out of his field of vision. This boy definitely scared, his voice on the edge of breaking.
‘The gun’s evidence, man,’ he said. ‘The gun belongs to you guys. So if they find it, what’s it doing out here? Jesus! We gotta find it.’
‘We don’t gotta do anything, shit-for-brains. Like I said, we don’t find it, they won’t find it.’
‘Hey. You two. Shut up. Just find the fucking gun.’
McCormack again. He saw the man pass by him walking left to right. The .44 magnum glinting in the light through the trees. A moment later Pete Daoust walked by. There was a rifle or a shotgun in his hands. Ludlow couldn’t tell which without further opening his eyes. He didn’t want to do that. He guessed it didn’t matter much one way or another.
For a long while they searched in silence.
He heard only footfalls and birds above and beyond him and the wind rustling the pines and scrub.
‘Jesus. Damn,’ Pete whispered.
The silence lengthened.
A while later McCormack sighed.
‘All right. I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be out here too damn long. Not with the Lincoln sitting up there. I guess it got thrown way dear of us when his door opened up. So we’ll just have to hope for the fucking best. I don’t like it much but we can’t stay out here the rest of the day looking.’