'So Baxter's dead?'
'Dead as a doornail,' Collins said from the backseat, his voice sounding almost gleeful. 'Shot full of holes.'
'Perforated,' the farm boy said.
'Like a sieve.'
They both grinned at me. They seemed excited, like two boys on a field trip.
'He was killed down near Appleton,' Collins said, 'at the entrance to the Turnpike there. He ran into a pair of state troopers, shot one of them in the leg, and then the other one blew him away.'
'Four shots,' the farm boy said.
'Three to the chest. One to the head.'
The farm boy glanced across the seat at me. 'Does that bother you?' he asked with sudden seriousness.
'Bother me?'
'Having to go ID him if he's been shot. The blood and everything.'
'Head shots can be pretty ugly,' Collins said. 'It'll be best if you just give him a quick glance. Try to think of it as meat, like you're looking at a pile of ground--'
The farm boy interrupted him. 'His brother was shot,' he said quickly.
Collins fell silent.
'Remember a couple months ago? That guy out here that came home and found his wife in bed with his landlord? The one that went crazy?'
'That was your brother?' Collins asked me. 'The gambler?'
The farm boy shook his head. 'His brother was the other guy. The one that got shot coming to the rescue.'
I could actually feel the mood in the car shift downward. It was as if we'd driven into a shadow. The farm boy leaned forward and turned the cruiser's heat up a notch. There was a warm push of air against my face.
'I'm sorry, Mr. Mitchell,' Collins said. 'I didn't know.'
I nodded. 'It's all right.'
'How's that dog?' the farm boy asked. He glanced in the mirror at his partner. 'His brother had a real nice dog. Mr. Mitchell adopted it.'
'What kind of dog?' Collins asked. They were both working together, trying to revive their good spirits.
'It was a mutt,' I said. 'Part German shepherd, part Lab. But I had to put him down.'
Neither of them said anything. The farm boy fiddled with the radio.
'He didn't adapt very well to my brother's absence. He got mean. He bit my wife.'
'Dogs are like that,' Collins said. 'They get attached. They feel grief just like us.'
After that no one said anything for the rest of the trip. The farm boy concentrated on the driving. Collins sat smoking in the back. I stared out the window at the road.
VERNON had been shot at a tollbooth, trying to get onto the Ohio Turnpike just north of Appleton. As he'd pulled up to take his ticket, his car had slid on a little patch of ice and banged into the one in front of him. There were a pair of state troopers on the other side of the median, and when they saw the accident, they came over to help. Even then, if Vernon had stayed calm, he might've gotten away. He'd changed his blue car for a red one sometime after leaving Ashenville and had put on a parka and a wool hat to cover his crew cut, so he didn't look like the man the troopers were searching for. But he panicked when he saw them coming, climbed out of his car, and pulled a gun.
It took us a while to get through to the tollbooth. The entrance ramp had been blocked off, and there was a state trooper rerouting traffic, waving it on down the road to the west. There were five or six police cars parked at odd angles across the little plaza. An ambulance was just leaving as we arrived, its lights flashing.
There wasn't much around the exit -- a pair of gas stations, a boarded-up Dairy Queen, a convenience store. It was farm country, flat and featureless.
We pulled off onto the edge of the road, then got out and walked toward the tollbooth. Vernon's car, a cherry red Toyota hatchback, was sitting there with its door hanging open. The area around it had been roped off with bright yellow tape. There were state troopers everywhere, but no one seemed to be doing anything. The car Vernon had rear-ended had been driven away.
I could see a body lying beside the Toyota. It was covered with a silver blanket.
We ducked under the tape and made our way through the milling policemen to the corpse. The farm boy and I crouched down beside it, and he flipped back the blanket. Collins stood behind me.
'That him?' he asked.
It was Vernon. He'd been shot in the side of the head, just above the ear. I could see the entry hole, a black puncture, no larger than a dime. There was blood everywhere -- on Vernon's face, the blanket, the pavement, even his teeth. His shirt collar was pink with it. His eyes were open, round with surprise, staring straight up at the sky. I had to resist the temptation to reach down and shut them.
'Yeah,' I said. 'That's the guy.'
The farm boy flipped back the blanket, and we stood up.
'You okay?' he asked. He touched me on my elbow, turned me away from the corpse.
'I'm fine,' I said, and then, surprising myself, felt my face begin to grin. I had to concentrate to stop, had to clench my teeth together and tighten my jaw. It was the relief that did it -- I was startled by its strength -- it eclipsed my sadness over Carl's murder, made his death seem almost worthwhile, expedient, the sort of price one might expect to pay for a bag full of treasure. For the first time since the night we decided to take the packets, I felt absolutely secure. Sarah had been right, it was perfect: now there was no one left to connect us to the money. Everyone was dead -- Vernon and his brother and Carl and Lou and Nancy and Jacob and Sonny and Pederson. Everyone.
And the money was ours.
Collins went off to radio Sheriff McKellroy and tell him that I'd identified the body while the farm boy fell into conversation with some of the state troopers. I started to return to the car -- it had gotten cold out, and I wanted to sit down -- but then changed my mind and remained where I was. I was curious to see if they'd found the bag of money yet and thought that if I hung around I might hear about it. I moved off toward the tollbooth and stood there, just beyond the yellow tape, with my hands in my pockets, trying to look inconspicuous.
A red-haired policeman began to take pictures. He pulled back the blanket and photographed Vernon's body. He photographed the Toyota, the tollbooth, the blood on the pavement -- everything from several different angles. Although the weather was continuing to clear, the day was still dark, and he used a flashbulb on his camera. It went off again and again in rapid cadence, little explosions of light, like sun bouncing off a mirror.
After a few minutes, a news crew pulled up in a yellow van. CHANNEL THIRTEEN was written diagonally across its side in large red letters, and below it, in black, ACTIONEWS. They had a Minicam with them, and they started filming the crime scene with it. They tried to get a shot of Vernon's body, but one of the troopers ordered them away.
A dark brown car arrived right after the van, and two men climbed out of it. I could tell they were from the FBI as soon as I saw them. They looked like Vernon had -- tall and lean, short haired and hatless. They were both wearing overcoats, unbuttoned over dark suits and sedate ties. They had black shoes on their feet, black leather gloves on their hands. Hovering all around them -- both in the way they moved and in the gestures they used when they spoke to the troopers -- was that same coolly professional air, that same sense of icy precision and control, which Vernon had so successfully imitated when we'd been introduced. And it intimidated me now exactly as it had then; my chest went tight, my heart sped up, my back began to sweat.
The horrible fear that I'd overlooked something, that I'd left some clue, some incriminating trace of myself within the crime, drifted, draftlike, into my thoughts. If I were to be caught, I realized with a chill, these would be the men who'd do it.
I watched them walk over to Vernon's body and crouch down beside it. They uncovered him and began checking his pockets, pulling them inside out. One of them took Vernon by the chin and turned his head back and forth, as if he were examining his face. When he let go of it, he wiped his hand on the silver blanket, murmuring
