last two days. Everything you saw, everybody you talked to, everything you said.'
I didn't have any grandstand play of bravery in me. If I'd been alone, I might have gone for him out of sheer desperation. But he kept Laurie carefully between us, and if I did, she'd drop to the ground with her spine snapped in two. I didn't kneel, either. I would have, or flopped on my belly or back or done anything else in the world if I thought it would keep him from pulling the trigger. But he was going to anyway. I knew I'd end up screaming and groveling, but I'd go out feeling like less of an asshole if I did it after he shot me instead of before.
His mouth tightened. 'All right, let's start with her,' he said.
The rifle's muzzle slid down the back of her right leg to the pocket behind her knee. She was wild-eyed and panting, but this time there was nothing like a car key at hand.
I dropped to my knees.
He shifted the gun barrel to beside her waist, so it was pointed toward my belly. I sucked in my breath, staring at that quarter-inch circle inside a ring of blued steel that could hurl out a slug the size of a baby's fingertip with enough speed and force to turn a human being into an agonized lump of flesh.
A boom and a shriek ripped into my ears, so close together they were almost the same sound. My body convulsed, braced for the terrible surge of pain that would come in an instant.
But it didn't, and I started to grasp that the scream hadn't been mine.
John Doe was reeling backward, his arms flying upward like he'd just stepped barefoot on a hot wire. Blood was spilling out of his right upper arm. Laurie was stumbling away from him, moving like she was running underwater. The rifle was lying on the ground.
I scrambled to my feet, lunged forward, and full-faced John Doe with my right fist, catching him on the side of his mouth. The sound was like an ax splitting a chunk of wet larch. He screeched again and went spinning away.
I was starting after him to rip him several new assholes when a familiar gravelly voice spoke out.
'Sorry that took so long. I was trying to line up a better shot. Finally couldn't wait no more.'
Madbird came walking into the clearing, holstering his long-barreled.41 Magnum pistol. He pulled a thick wad of bills out of his pocket and handed it to me.
'Here's your half,' he said.
41
We found Laurie a hiding place up in a rock pile with a good view of the terrain, just in case Balcomb knew where we were or someone had heard the pistol shot. We made her comfortable with sleeping bags, food, and water. Then Madbird and I took John Doe for a hike deep into the back country, shoving him stumbling along with his elbows duct-taped tight together behind him and more wraps of it as blindfold and gag. Madbird had done this before. He stayed quiet and so did I. I wasn't about to intrude on what he might be remembering.
The way he'd engineered this left me helpless with admiration. Like I thought, he'd called Balcomb and offered us up for ten thousand dollars.
'Hot enough to fuck twice,' was how he described Balcomb on the phone.
But Madbird had refused to identify himself, or give up our location, or meet face-to-face. Instead, he'd insisted that John Doe drop the money where the dirt road to here turned off the highway, and wait a few hundred yards away. Madbird then had appeared out of the woods, riding my Victor for maneuverability, scooped up the cash, and led John Doe to this spot. He'd marked it by throwing a towel on the roadside, then hauled ass. John Doe couldn't kill him before that, not knowing where the place was, or catch him afterward. A half mile farther, Madbird had dumped the bike and run back through the woods. John Doe had been wary, probably on the lookout for exactly that. Before he'd moved in on us, he'd hidden and waited ten minutes. With only the pistol, Madbird hadn't been able to get close enough for a decent shot until John Doe decided he was safe and got busy with us.
Five thousand bucks was a lot of money for me, especially if I figured it by the hour. Better still, another hired gun disappearing was going to drive Balcomb nuts. The more frustrated and desperate he got, the more likely he was to make a mistake.
After we'd marched John Doe four or five miles, we came to a rock shelf above a steep, deadfall-choked ravine.
Madbird gave me a nod and said, 'This'll work. Tape his wrists.'
He sliced John Doe's elbows free, at the same time torquing his wounded arm up into a hammerlock. John Doe thrashed and snarled into his gag. The round hadn't lodged in his triceps, just torn a gouge, and the bleeding had pretty much stopped. But it must have hurt like a bitch. Madbird shoved him face-first against a thick Doug fir. We forced his wrists around it so he was hugging it and I taped them together good and tight.
I'd been following Madbird's lead, assuming half-consciously that John Doe wouldn't be coming back with us, but not thinking about specifics. Now that the moment was here, my heart was starting to pound again. I tried to slow my breathing, reminding myself of what he'd been about to do to Laurie and me.
Then it occurred to me that you didn't need to bind somebody to a tree to shoot him.
John Doe seemed to be realizing the same thing. He craned his head around at us, cheeks puffing in and out like gills as he tried to mouth threats or pleas through the tape.
Madbird unsheathed his knife again-a scalpel-sharp, crescent-bladed Puma game skinner.
'Time you learned how to do this,' he said to me. 'I'll get you started, then you take over.'
Learn how to do what? I tried to say. But my breath stuck in my lungs. Madbird put his left hand on top of John Doe's head like he was palming a basketball and slammed a hip into his back, pinning him against the tree.
'You grab hold here,' Madbird said. He closed his fist and jerked the head back by the hair.
Then he pressed the knife blade just under the far left edge of the hairline.
'And slice toward you, nice and careful.'
John Doe squealed, an impressively loud sound considering the duct tape.
My stopped-up breath exploded out of my mouth.
'Jesus, Madbird! Wait!'
He glanced over his shoulder at me, annoyed.
'You ain't got to yell, I'm standing right here.'
I floundered to explain. 'Shouldn't we at least kill him first?'
'What's the point of that?'
'Well-it just seems like, you know, common courtesy.'
He lowered the knife and stepped away, shaking his head.
'Fucking white people. You already tell us how we're supposed to do everything else, and now this?'
John Doe was trying to hop around the tree, or maybe climb it. A thread-thin red streak a couple of inches long had appeared on his forehead where the blade touched and blossomed into a dribbling stream of blood. Madbird thunked the knife into the bark beside his face, raising another squeal.
'Your call,' he said to me. 'But if you don't mind a little advice, you're gonna have a problem. His hair got some kind of greasy shit on it.' He sniffed his left palm and wiped it disgustedly on John Doe's back. 'You got to reef on it pretty good to tear it loose, 'cause of all them roots going down. So I brung some dikes. It's kind of cheating, but I ain't gonna tell.' He felt around in his pockets and pulled out an old pair of lineman's pliers, their scarred plastic grips wrapped with electrician's tape, and slapped them into my hand.
I walked to the bull pine and wrenched the knife free. By now John Doe was slamming his head against the tree, blowing snot like a mule and maybe trying to howl. I slammed my hip against his back like I'd seen Madbird do, clamped a hank of his greasy hair with the pliers, and twisted up hard. He bucked and gurgled, cheeks bulging. I raised the knife with my other hand and pressed its edge against his hairline.
Then I let go of him, and stepped around to the other side of the tree, and cut the tape on his wrists.
Neil McMahon – Lone Creek
We sat John Doe on the ground, pulled off his stiff new hiking boots, sliced them to pieces, and threw those into the brush. Then Madbird crouched beside him with the knife point to his cheek and spoke close to his ear.
'Now, you go telling anybody what really happened here, it sure ain't gonna make you look good. If I was
