Her mouth was dry. She was still breathing hard, but the sweat was drying on her face. She didn't like this; she could imagine this boy going home and saying to his parents I saw a woman in the woods today. She had a pistol and she said she was out hikin'. She was a big, tall woman, and I can draw you a picture of what she looked like.
'Is your daddy a policeman?' Mary asked.
'No, ma'am. He builds houses.'
She asked if you were a policeman, Daddy, she could imagine the boy saying. I can remember what she looked like. Wonder why she asked if you were a policeman, Daddy?
'What's your name?' she asked him.
'Cory Peterson. My birthday was yesterday. See, I got this rifle.'
'I see.' She watched the boy's gaze tick to her.38 once more. How come she had a pistol. Daddy? How come she was out there in the woods by herself and she don't even live around here? 'Cory,' she said. She smiled at him. The sun was warm out here, but the shadows still trapped winter. 'My name is Mary,' she told him, and just that quick she decided it had to be done.
'Pleased to meet ya. Well, I guess I'd best be gettin' on now. I said I wouldn't be gone too long.'
'Cory?' she said. He hesitated. 'Can I have a closer look at your rifle?'
'Yes ma'am.' He began walking toward her, his boots crunching on dead leaves.
She watched him approach. Her heart was beating hard, but she was calm. The boy might decide to follow her if she let him go; he might follow her all the way to her truck, and he might remember her license number. He might be a lot smarter than he looked, and his father might know someone who was a policeman. She was going to be leaving soon, after she'd gotten everything prepared, and she would worry about this boy if she didn't tie up the loose ends. Daddy, I saw this woman in the woods and she had a pistol and her name was Mary. No, no; that could screw up everything.
When Cory got to her, Mary reached out and grasped the rifle's barrel. 'Can I hold it?' she asked, and he nodded and gave it up. The rifle hardly had any weight at all, but she was interested in the telescopic sight. Having it might save her some money if she ever bought a long-range rifle. 'Real nice,' she said. She kept her smile on, no trace of frost or tension around the edges. 'Hey, you know what?'
'What?'
'I saw a place where a lot of squirrels are. Back that way.' She nodded toward the thicket she'd broken through. 'It isn't too far, if you want to see it.'
'I don't know.' Cory looked back in the direction of his house, then up into her face again. 'I figger I'd better be gettin' on home.'
'Really, it's not far. Won't take but just a few minutes to show you.' She was thinking of the ravine where dead leaves and kudzu covered the bottom.
'Naw. Thanks anyway. Can I have my rifle back now, please?'
'Going to make it hard on me, huh?' she asked, and she felt her smile slip.
'Ma'am?' The boy blinked, his dark brown eyes puzzled.
'I don't mind,' Mary said. She lifted her Colt and placed the barrel squarely in the middle of Cory Peterson's forehead.
He gasped.
She pulled the trigger, and with the crack of the shot the boy's head was flung backward. His mouth was open, showing little silver fillings in his teeth. His body went back, following the shock to his neck. He stumbled backward a few steps, the hole in the center of his forehead running crimson and his brains scattered on the ground behind him. His eyelids fluttered, and his face looked to Mary as if the boy were about to sneeze. He made a strangled little squeak, squirrel like, and then he fell on his back amid the detritus of winter. His legs trembled a few times, as if he were trying to stand up again. He died with his eyes and mouth open and the sun on his face. Mary stood over him until his lungs had stopped hitching. There was no use trying to drag the body away to hide it. She swept her gaze back and forth through the woods, her senses questing for sound and movement. The gunshot had scared the birds away, and the only noises were her heartbeat and blood trickling in the leaves. Satisfied that no one else was anywhere around, she turned away from the corpse and pushed back through the thicket again. Once clear of it, she began running in the direction she'd come, the.38 in one hand and the boy-sized rifle clenched in the other.
Her sweat turned cold. What she had just done fell upon her, and it made her stagger. But she regained her balance, her mouth grim-lipped and her eyes fixed toward the distant horizon. It had been his bad karma to cross her path, she thought. It had not been her fault that the boy was there; it was just karma, that's all. The boy was a minor piece of a larger picture, and that was what she had to focus on. His daddy might have wondered why a woman was stalking in the woods with a pistol on a Sunday afternoon. His daddy might have known a pig, or even a federal pig. One telephone call could start the pig machinery, and she'd hidden too long and been too smart to allow that to happen. The boy had to be laid low. Period.
A little whirlpool of anger had opened within her. Damn it! she raged. Shit! Why had that damned boy been there? It was a test, she thought. A karmic test. You fall down, and you stand up again. You keep going no matter what. She wished it were springtime, and that there were flowers in the woods. If there were flowers in the woods, she would've put one in the dead boy's hand.
She knew why she had killed him. Of course she did. The boy had seen Mary Terror without her mask. That was reason enough for execution.
She couldn't make it on the run all the way back to her truck. She walked the last three hundred yards, her lungs rasping and her sweatsuit soaked. She leaned the rifle against the seat and put the handgun on the floorboard beneath her legs. There were the marks of other tires in the dirt, so she didn't have to worry about brushing out the tracks. The pigs might get a footprint or two, but so what? They'd think it was a man's footprints. She started the engine, backed off the logging road to the paved highway where a sign said NO DUMPING and litter was everywhere. Then Mary drove home, knowing she had a lot of training to do but confident that she had not lost her touch.
2: A Friend's Message
Laura slid the top drawer of Doug's dresser open, lifted up his sweaters, and looked at the gun.
It was an ugly thing. A Charter Arms.32 automatic, black metal with a black grip. Doug had shown her how it worked: the little metal thingamajig that held the seven bullets – the magazine clip, Doug had said – fit up into the grip, and you had to push the safety hickey with your thumb to engage the firing dololley. There was a box of extra clips, with the words Fast Loading and Rugged Construction on it. The gun was unloaded at the moment; a clip of bullets lay next to it. Laura touched the automatic's grainy grip. The gun smelted faintly of oil, and she worried that the oil would leak onto Doug's sweaters. She ran her fingers over the cool metal. It was a dangerous, evil-looking beast, and Laura saw how men could become fascinated by guns: there was power in it, waiting to be released.
She put her hand around the grip and picked the gun up. It wasn't as heavy as it looked, but it was still a handful. She held it at arm's length, her wrist already beginning to tremble, and she sighted along the gun at the wall. Her index finger found the trigger's seductive curve. She moved her arm to the right, and sighted at the framed wedding picture of her and Doug atop the dresser. She aimed at Doug's smiling face, and she said, 'Bang.'
The little murder done, Laura put the automatic back under Doug's sweaters and slid the drawer shut. She left the bedroom, going to the den, where her typewriter was set up on a desk in a sunny spot. Her review of Burn This Book was about half finished. She switched on the TV, turned it to the Cable News Network, and sat down to work, the swell of her belly against the desk's edge. She'd written a few more sentences when she heard the words '… was found in a wooded area outside Atlanta on Sunday night…' and she turned around to watch.
It had been on the news all day, about the boy found shot to death in the woods near Mableton last night. Laura had seen the segment several times before: the sheet-covered corpse being put into the back of an ambulance, the blue lights flashing, a police captain named Ottinger talking about how the boy's father and neighbors had found the body around seven o'clock. There was a scene of reporters surging forward around a distraught-looking man in overalls and a Red Man cap, and a frail woman with curly hair and shocked, dark-hollowed
