Josh marches up to the gate and angrily loosens the cable, throwing it open. The rattling noise echoes. Lilly’s flesh crawls with panic. She whispers, “Josh, be careful, they’re gonna hear us.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he says, swinging the gate open for her. “Ain’t a prison. They can’t keep us from comin’ and goin’.”
She follows him through the gate and down a side road toward Main Street.
Few stragglers walk the streets at this hour. Most of the denizens of Woodbury are tucked away indoors, having dinner or drinking themselves into oblivion. The generators provide an eerie thrum behind the walls of the racetrack, some of the overhead stadium lights flickering. The wind trumpets through the bare trees of the square, and dead leaves skitter down the sidewalks.
“You have it your way,” Josh says as they turn right and head east down Main Street, trudging toward their apartment building. “We’ll just be fuck buddies. Quick pop every now and then to relieve the tension. No muss, no fuss…”
“Josh, that’s not—”
“You could get the same thing from a bottle of rotgut and a vibrator … but hey. Warm body’s nice every now and then, right?”
“Josh, c’mon. Why does it have to be this way? I’m just trying to—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He bites down on his words as they approach the food center.
A cluster of men gather around the front of the store, warming their hands over a flaming brazier of trash burning in an oil drum. Sam the Butcher is there, a ratty overcoat covering his blood-spackled apron. His gaunt face puckers with distaste, his diamond-chip blue eyes narrowing as he sees the two figures approaching from the west.
“Fine, Josh, whatever.” Lilly thrusts her hands deeper into her pockets as she strides alongside the big man, slowly shaking her head. “Whatever you say.”
They pass the food center.
“Hey! Green Mile!” Sam the Butcher’s voice calls out, flinty, terse, a knife scraping a whetstone. “C’mere a minute, big fella.”
Lilly pauses, her hackles up.
Josh walks over to the men. “I got a name,” he says flatly.
“Well, excuse the hell outta me,” the butcher says. “What was it—Hamilburg? Hammington?”
“Hamilton.”
The butcher offers a vacuous smile. “Well, well. Mr. Hamilton. Esquire. Might I have a moment of your valuable time, if you aren’t too busy?”
“What do you want?”
The butcher’s cold smile remains. “Just outta curiosity, what’s in the bag?”
Josh stares at him. “Nothing much … just some odds and ends.”
“Odds and ends, huh? What kind of odds and ends?”
“Things we found along the way. Nothin’ that would interest anybody.”
“You do realize you ain’t covered your debt on them
“What are you talking about?” Josh keeps staring. “I’ve been on the crew every day this week.”
“You ain’t covered it yet, son. That heating oil don’t grow on trees.”
“You said forty hours would cover it.”
The butcher shrugs. “You misunderstood me, hoss. It happens.”
“How so?”
“I said forty hours on
The staring match goes on for an awkward moment. All conversation around the flaming trash barrel ceases. All eyes are on the two men. Something about the way Josh’s beefy shoulder blades are tensing under his lumberjack coat makes Lilly’s flesh crawl.
Josh finally gives the man a shrug. “I’ll keep on workin’, then.”
Sam the Butcher tilts his lean, chiseled face toward the duffel bag. “And I’ll thank you to hand over whatever you got tucked away in that bag for the cause.”
The butcher makes a move toward the duffel bag, reaching out for it.
Josh snaps it back and away from his grasp.
The mood changes with the speed of a circuit firing. The other men—mostly older loafers with hound-dog eyes and stringy gray hair in their faces—begin to instinctively back away. The tension ratchets up. The silence only adds to the latent violence brewing—the soft snapping of the fire the only sound beneath the wind.
“Josh, it’s okay.” Lilly steps forward and attempts to intercede. “We don’t need any—”
“No!” Josh jerks the duffel away from her, his gaze never leaving the dark, bloodshot eyes of the butcher. “Nobody’s taking this bag!”
The butcher’s voice drops an octave, going all slippery and dark. “You better think long and hard about fucking with me, big boy.”
“The thing is, I’m not fucking with you,” Josh says to the man in the bloody apron. “Just stating a fact. The stuff in this bag is ours fair and square. And nobody’s taking it from us.”
“Finders keepers?”
“That’s right.”
The old men back away farther until it feels to Lilly like she’s standing in some flickering, ice-cold fighting ring with two cornered animals. She gropes for some way to ease back the tension but her words get stuck in her throat. She reaches for Josh’s shoulder but he pulls away from her as though shocked. The butcher flicks his gaze at Lilly. “You better tell your beau here he’s making the mistake of his life.”
“Leave her out of this,” Josh tells him. “This is between you and me.”
The butcher sucks the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “Tell you what … I’m a fair man … I’ll give you one more chance. Hand over the goodies and I’ll wipe the debt clean. We’ll pretend this little tiff never happened.” Something approximating a smile creases the lines around the butcher’s weathered face. “Life’s too short. Know what I mean? Especially around here.”
“C’mon, Lilly,” Josh says without moving his gaze from the butcher’s lifeless eyes. “We got better things to do, stand around here flapping our jaws.”
Josh turns away from the storefront and starts down the street.
The butcher goes after the duffel. “GIVE ME THAT GODDAMN BAG!”
Lilly jerks forward as the two men come together in the middle of the street.
“JOSH, NO!”
The big man spins and drives the brunt of his shoulder into the butcher’s chest. The move is sudden and violent, and harkens back to Josh’s gridiron years when he would clear the field for a running back. The man in the blood-stippled apron flings backward, his breath gasping out of him. He trips over his own feet and goes down hard on his ass, blinking with shock and outrage.
Josh turns and continues on down the street, calling over his shoulder. “Lilly, I said c’mon, let’s go!”
Lilly doesn’t see the butcher suddenly contorting his body against the ground, struggling to dig something out of the back of his belt under his apron. Lilly doesn’t see the glint of blue steel filling the butcher’s hand, nor does she hear the telltale snap of a safety being thumbed off a semiautomatic, nor does she see the madness in the butcher’s eyes, until it’s too late.
“Josh, wait!”
Lilly gets halfway down the sidewalk—coming to within ten feet of Josh—when the blast cracks open the sky, the roar of the 9-millimeter so tremendous it seems to rattle the windows half a block down the street. Lilly instinctively dives for cover, hitting the macadam hard, the impact knocking the breath out of her.
She finds her voice then, and she shrieks as a flock of pigeons erupts off the roof of the food center—the swarm of carrion birds spreading across the darkening sky like black needlepoint.
TWELVE
