Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  She groaned, “No.”

  He twisted his lips, trying to keep from crying. He said, very weakly, “I really did try.” Then he closed his eyes and fell sideways to the lawn.

  Marie moaned, “No,” once more, and tried for a brief few seconds to lift Kieran’s head. Then she withdrew her hand.

  She turned to Crawl and knotted her fist and cried out, “Why are you doing this?”

  “You should be glad,” he said softly. “Guns going off in the middle of nowhere, people hear it, hikers and campers, maybe some rangers. They start asking where it came from. Maybe start circling around. Then you show them a fire they can see from any of those other mountains, put it right on the lake. First thing, you’ve got red lights and police radios going off everywhere. Wasn’t that the plan, to mark the spot with the fire on the boat?”

  “Tell me why!”

  “Well, then,” Crawl said grimly. “Now let’s see what you can do.”

  Brenna was still on the floor of the doctor’s laboratory where Crawl had left her; still sitting pressed against the wall, still pressing her raised knees into her chin. Her hands were still wrapped around her ankles. The house was silent. All she could hear was her own labored breathing as she tried to stop crying. Then, suddenly, she heard something more.

  She stiffened but she didn’t raise her head. She barely breathed. Was it something close by?

  She heard it again. A shuffling sound. Muted, but clearly something shuffling. This time, very near.

  Her head bolted upright. Her expression froze in a mask of horror.

  The doctor was hovering over her, alive, and staring at her with a dark and terrible expression.

  She tried to plead, “No,” but instead of a word, a high-pitched sound began to rise from her throat. She shut her eyes as tightly as she could, shielded them with her white-knuckled fists, opened her mouth wide and let the dreadful sound escape in a desperate, trembling scream.

  Marie didn’t move. She didn’t know if she could move. Even Crawl saying “Now let’s see what you can do” sounded like someone speaking from a hundred yards away.

  Crawl dropped the flare to the lawn beside Kieran’s head. “Put it in the ground close by,” he told her. “It’s our altar candle. Shed some light on the big event.”

  She forced herself to fight back more tears and pressed the flare’s metal spike into the lawn twelve inches from Kieran’s right cheek.

  “Now pray for him,” Crawl said.

  Marie answered, very quietly, “You’re insane.”

  “And you’re pregnant,” Crawl said. “And we aren’t sure with what, are we? And Kieran’s dead. And you’re already on your knees. Pray for him.”

  She closed her eyes and sat back on her heels, her hands folded, one resting on the other just above her knees. She lowered her head.

  “Put your hand on him,” Crawl said. “Show some gratitude.”

  She rested her right hand on Kieran’s chest, away from the blood.

  Crawl said, “He tried to save your life, you know.”

  Marie lowered her head again.

  “Pray out loud, so I can hear you.”

  Marie gathered her thoughts, then said in a voice barely above a whisper, “God, please don’t let him die.”

  “He’s already dead. You’re praying to bring him back.”

  Crawl sank to one knee beside her, his gun still facing her.

  She inhaled slowly, dropped her head again and said, “God, you love him more than anybody else ever will. And he tried to save me. He died trying to save me.” Orange tears trailed down her orange cheeks in the light of the flare. “So please don’t let him be dead. You can do that. Please don’t let him stay dead.”

  She grew silent.

  Crawl was silent too. Then he inhaled and sighed and said casually, “Well, I guess—”

  But Marie snapped, “Quiet!” She came up quickly, raising one knee off the ground. She was staring at Kieran. She exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”

  Crawl looked at her, startled. Then he looked at Kieran.

  Marie said, “Oh, my God!” again, louder, and this time in a high and excited voice. She reached to yank the flare from the ground. “Did his eyelids just flutter?” She moved the flare close to Kieran’s face and bent down, squinting to get a better look. “Did his eyes start to open? Oh, my God!”

  Crawl was right beside her.

  Marie pivoted, and in a single, arcing sweep of her arm she drove the flare’s tongue of fire with all the force she had into Crawl’s gun hand, piercing and sizzling it in the same second.

  Crawl screamed wildly and pulled his hand to his chest. The gun fell on Kieran’s chest.

  Marie leapt to her feet and raced toward the rocks that began to rise sharply a hundred yards from the house. She heard Crawl screaming curses behind her and realized she was making a moaning sound as she ran. She told herself to run faster, not to look back. Then, at the same instant she heard a shot behind her, she felt something burn the side of her right calf. She spun and tumbled to the ground.

  As she struggled to her feet, she realized she had been shot in the leg, which meant she was no longer faster than Crawl. She might not even be as fast. And his next shot would drive her to the ground and she wouldn’t get up.

  But the next shot didn’t come.

  As she reached the first rising rocks she risked a quick look back just as Crawl threw his empty gun to the ground with a fiery curse and rushed to pick up the flare.

  Marie stared, mesmerized, horrified, as if in a dream, until she saw him running after her with the flare in his wounded hand. Then she screamed and scrambled as fast as she could up the first shelves of wet rock.

  Her leg burned, and the rain made the rocks slippery. They rose sharply in front of her, sloped and broken granite slabs with grass patches and tall weeds among the thickly gathering pines and aspens.

  She climbed as fast as she could, but the pain was burning hotter in her leg, dragging her into slow motion. She tried to pick up speed by grabbing the trunks of the youngest trees and pulling at overhanging branches. Deep scratches opened in her palms and fingers.

  Again, she looked over her shoulder. Again, she saw the flare bobbing toward her in the darkness, rising on the rocks behind her, now nearer than before.

  She knew that she could never escape if she had to fight her way higher, wounded, through the heavy growth that rose like walls directly ahead of her, so she veered to her left, desperate to find the hiking trail that climbed the cliffs alongside the water.

  Crawl shouted, “I can see you and I can hear you!” And he could. He was climbing after her. No longer cursing. Just breathing hard, in long hisses.

  Marie found the hiking trail in the moonlight, but Crawl found it too, just two minutes later.

  The terrible flare followed her, weaving and bobbing through the trees and the cold rain as the carefully cadenced words, so slowly droned and so dreadful, rose up behind her again. “Run, Mary, run, Mary, run, Mary, run. Herod’s gonna kill your baaaby.”

  She heard herself making a sharp, moaning sound each time she stepped on her right foot, and she began to pray, begging God to make Crawl lose sight of her but knowing he wouldn’t. Not now. The man who would kill her was already too close.

  The deadly song drew closer. “Run, Mary, run, Mary, run, Mary, run. . .”

  She turned her head quickly to look for the flare just one more time and almost screamed when she saw it. It was no more than twenty yards away, right behind her, moving faster, catching up.

  She gasped a loud, “Oh, God, help me!”

  “Herod’s gonna kill your baaaby.”

  The black Mercedes slunk across the lawn like a cat. It showed no headlights and no brake lights, even when it stopped. It crunched softly into the young pines and junipers and rising rock that forced it to a stop ten feet into the brush at the base of the hiking trail, where its engine died.

  The dome light lit when the door opened. It went out again
when the door closed with a single muffled click.

  Once again, the only light on the mountainside was the single orange flame that continued to rise with an uneven swagger high on the ledges where the wind blew and the tall trees swayed over dark and turning waters.

  19

  The trees to Marie’s right and left glowed orange. New shadows cast by the swaying flare swung left and right across her path. She could hear the snapping of twigs and the scraping of Crawl’s shoes on the rocks, and every word of the dreadful song, again and again.

  She expected, at any second, to hear him breathing against the back of her neck.

  And then the singing stopped.

  Her heart hammered fiercely. She was too terrified to turn and look back.

  The trail split in front of her. To the right, it led up and over the face of a steep, layered rock. To her left, it disappeared between two tall pines.

  She turned left and drove herself to move, and move again, wondering with each step when the hiss of the flare and the bright orange of the fire and the man who was no longer singing would be upon her.

  She lurched down the descending trail and through a short, curving corridor of pines and jagged red rock, and limped into the center of a long, flat clearing with an unprotected cliff overlooking the water breaking over the rocks nearly a hundred yards below. Then she stopped and turned with a sharp cry.

  She wasn’t on the trail any more. She had entered a scenic overlook that was walled in on three sides. The only way out was the same way she had come in.

  She had recognized it too late. The pines that she had come through were already glowing orange.

  Terror-stricken, she limped another fifteen yards backward toward the wet rock that walled her in at the farthest end of the clearing.

  And then she saw his face.

  She wanted to scream again, but she didn’t. She pressed her back against the wall at the end of the clearing, not three feet from the cliff, and waited, helpless.

  Crawl emerged into full view.

  When he saw her captured in the glow of his flare, he stopped and grinned.

  Marie raised her hand in front of her face and screamed into the wind, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Crawl repeated in a flat voice, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  He was no longer smiling. He was moving closer.

  “Why do you want to hurt me?”

  “Why do you want to hurt me?”

  She sank to the ground. She thought of her mother and father. She said, “I haven’t done anything to you!”

  “I haven’t done anything to you.”

  Marie grabbed the thin trunk of the single young aspen growing out of a crevice in the rock near her foot. She knew it couldn’t save her. She just wanted to hold on to something.

  Crawl laughed abruptly, joylessly, and then, just as abruptly, he stopped laughing.

  But he didn’t stop moving closer.

  Marie sank to her knees. Her free hand closed in a fist over her belly and she rocked back on her heels.

  He was standing over her, the flare hissing very near, so near she felt its heat.

  She looked past the hissing orange tongue and said to him in a soft and hopeless whisper, “What do you want?”

  “You don’t have the power to give me what I want,” he said. “Remember?”

  Suddenly Marie’s eyes opened wider. She tilted her head, staring past Crawl, then raised her hand high and screamed, “Help me! Quick!”

  Crawl spun.

  What he saw was an impossible sight: a specter glowing hellish orange in the fire of the flare. The doctor was alive and walking, coming toward him, his shoulders rounded, his head hanging forward, his white hair blowing in the wind, his coat flapping open. In his trembling hand, pointed unsteadily at Crawl’s face and moving steadily closer, was a silver-plated Smith & Wesson automatic.

  Crawl struggled for breath. He stumbled backward into the wall next to Marie. His eyes bulged with fear and disbelief.

  “Move away from her,” the doctor growled bitterly.

  “Did she pray for you?” Crawl said, struggling for breath. Then he called it loudly: “Did she pray for you?”

  The doctor struggled to angle his gun skyward, and, straining, fired once into the air. The explosion seemed to rock the small enclosure. The weapon lowered again to point at Crawl. “I said, move away from her.”

  Crawl, still staring and breathless, ignored him. He spun to Marie. His words were desperate. “Did you pray for him? Can you really do it? Is that how you brought him back?”

  The doctor took several more uneven strides forward. “For the last time, move away from her.”

  Crawl, still stunned, said to Marie, “My God, you can do it!” He looked from the girl to the doctor and back again. Then, before the doctor could react, he rushed at Marie, flinging his arm around her neck, holding the deadly fire just six inches from her chin.

  Marie cringed instinctively, but the furious candle left her nowhere to go.

  “Throw the gun over the edge,” Crawl demanded.

  The doctor started forward but stopped. He tried to steady the gun. He started to say something then stopped. His mouth was open. His eyes were narrowed to slits.

  “You won’t shoot for two reasons,” Crawl shouted into the wind. “First, you’ll probably hit her, your hand waving around like that. But more certain, I’ll burn a hole in her throat as big as your fist if you hit me. I don’t care who she is or what she can do. So help me God, it’ll happen.”

  The doctor spit the words out like a curse: “Your dead friend said that to me. So help him, God.” He worked to hold the gun steady.

  “It’s time to play our favorite game again,” Crawl said loudly. “I count to three. At three she gets another open throat. If you shoot me after that, I won’t care. I’ll want you to.” He stared for a moment at the man he had shot in the heart, then cried out, “One.”

  He moved the flare a half inch closer to Marie’s neck.

  She winced from the heat and pressed backward.

  As the doctor’s gaze met Marie’s, the fury drained from his eyes. He said, suddenly sounding desperately sad and tired, “I wanted to make up for the death of your parents. I wanted to make you the house of God.”

  “I already was the house of God,” Marie said, crying hard. “And you were, too.”

  The doctor blinked twice, his mouth half-opened, his eyes half-closed.

  “She won’t be around to bring anybody else back from the dead,” Crawl yelled. “Or to bring the baby home to you. ‘Cause in about a minute from now, the baby will be dead. Two!”

  Only the doctor’s gaze moved, sliding darkly from Marie to Crawl.

  “Throw it over the edge. Do one thing right in all of this. Because now I’m saying. . . Three!”

  “Don’t,” the doctor said. It wasn’t even a shout. It sounded with no anger and no alarm. Just a single hollow word. Then, with an awkward jerk of his arm, he tossed his Smith & Wesson over the edge of the cliff.

  Crawl relaxed his grip on Marie’s shoulder. “Listen to me, both of you,” he said. He eased his arm away from the girl, taking care not to point the flare at her. He focused on the doctor. “I wouldn’t have hurt her, I swear to God. Even if you shot me. Not now.” He shifted his weight and moved backward, inching away from the girl. “I just had to stop you. I don’t know how this is happening here, but if she’s the one that brought you back, if she can do that, then Michael can come back too.” He looked at Marie and pleaded, “Can’t he? And Kieran. He’ll be okay too, won’t he? I didn’t want that.” His voice climbed with a rising excitement. “But he already is, probably. You prayed for him direct. You touched him and everything. It just takes a little while, right?”

  Marie stared, transfixed, then she leaned away from him, pressing her back into the wall of rock.

  Crawl tossed the flare into the corner of the clearing behind him, wincing with pain as he opened his hand to let it go.
“See?” he said. “I’m not going to hurt either of you.”

  The doctor slid his right foot forward and shifted his weight, very slowly.

  “I didn’t want any of this killing,” Crawl said, looking down at Marie. “None of us wanted this. It just took over. It wasn’t my fault.”

  The doctor took another step toward the flare. Then another.

  Crawl grinned weakly at Marie. “But maybe we do get to go back,” he said. He laughed suddenly, and tears rose in his eyes. He shook his head and said weakly, “My God, girl.”

  Marie glanced past him. Her uncle was bending down to pick up the flare.

  Crawl watched her expression change and spun in time to see the doctor advancing with raging eyes, the flare held high.

  “Leave her alone!” the doctor thundered, and he swung the flare like a sword.

  Crawl leapt to his side, ducking and grabbing the doctor’s wrist with his burned hand. He cried out in pain but held on as the doctor tried to pull away. Locked together and twisting, they slammed against the wall of rock, then swung back into the center of the clearing.

  Crawl was shouting, “You don’t have to do this! You don’t have to do this!” His bandaged hand reached for the doctor’s throat.

  The doctor swung at Crawl with his left fist. Crawl twisted and pulled backward. The blow glanced off his cheek, but its momentum propelled them both toward the edge of the cliff.

  Crawl held the doctor’s flare hand at arm’s length with one hand. His other hand found the doctor’s chest and pressed into it. He grabbed at his shirt, trying to push him back. He yelled again: “You don’t have to. . .” But before he finished the sentence, his eyes bulged and the words died in his throat.

  He grabbed the doctor’s shirt in his bleeding fist and pushed, twisting his hand viciously against the doctor’s chest, this time with enough force to drive them both several feet backward, away from the cliff. In a blind rage, he spun the doctor to the ground and fell on top of him. Tearing the flare from the doctor’s grip with both hands, he sent the fire rolling back toward the cliff. The doctor twisted with ebbing strength, trying and failing to work himself free. Crawl stared at the doctor’s chest for the briefest of moments, and then he tore open the doctor’s shirt with both hands and pressed his open palms into the doctor’s bulletproof vest.