A Single Shot

Nobie tosses his skivvies on the porch. “I hear Ira’s sister lives down in Philadelphia inher’ted the place and ain’t set foot on it since the murders.” Nobie walks over to the spigot, turns on the water, then bends down and picks up the hose. When the water starts coming out the end, he brings the hose up to his mouth and drinks. Then he aims the spray at his feet. “You let yourself think about it, it can give you the creeps knowing whoever done it could still be living hereabouts.”

“Why would they be?”

“Gotta be living somewhere, ain’t they?”

“Yeah,” says John. He turns, starts walking toward the front of the house, and is stopped by Nobie’s voice.

“Maybe you’ll think ’bout it, huh, John? ’Bout the job?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. Think it over. There ain’t no hurry.”

Glamorous women in nightgowns, underwear, bathing suits. Marble-skinned, haunted-eyed women. Women dressed in striped ties and suits. Starved-looking women. Women with sour pouts, bored frowns, mad, toothless smiles. Women with weight-trained muscles and gnarly-looking breasts coiled like jack-in-the-boxes beneath their skin-tight outfits. Women who beckon alluringly. Laugh haughtily. Jut out their chins, asses, elbows. Shave their heads. Wear tattoos. Show their nipples beneath their shirts. Dance, sing, stride like racehorses around tartan tracks. Who look right through him as if he is the air they breathe.

Dozens of Moira’s old Redbooks and Glamours lie among empty beer cans on the front deck beneath where John sits leafing through them, searching for a look similar to the dead girl’s, a face to recall hers, with its novelties and nuances. Straining the limits of his memory, he seeks to contradict his unconscious, nightmarish revelations from the previous night. But he can’t make her complete. She is inchoate in his mind—a pretty face, an adolescent’s evolving body, pale blue eyes, dirty-blond ponytail.

The sun sits straight over the mountain. Puffy white clouds, shaped like beanbags, rest above both horizons. The heat from the last several days is unabated. There is almost no breeze to temper it. John thinks he might not recognize her were she to walk this very minute into the trailer, so intent had he been after killing her not just to conceal her death from the world but to expunge her life, to act as if she’d never been. That, he realizes, was a worse crime than shooting her. People who loved her—her parents, her two girlfriends, Tools and Germ—even now must be wondering where she is. And Waylon? Maybe he’d loved her also.

He stands up, walks inside and over to the kitchen wall phone, not sure whom he intends to call, until he picks up the receiver and dials the county sheriff’s department.

“I’m calling ’bout that girl,” he says, then, thinking he ought to disguise his voice, jerks the phone from his ear and reaches above the sink for a dish towel.

“Hello?” says a woman’s voice.

“Just a minute,” says John. He puts the towel over the phone’s mouthpiece. “ ’Bout that girl…”

“What girl?”

“The one lost.”

“Please speak up, sir. I can’t hear you.”

“The girl.”

“I heard that part. What girl?”

“The one reported missing—the runaway—I’m calling ’bout her.”

“About who?”

“The missing girl.”

“Which one?”

“Ain’t somebody reported a girl’d run off recent?”

“We’ve got an envelope full of flyers, sir. In country and out.”

“Flyers?”

“About missing kids. Runaways. Are you talking about a particular girl.”

“One ’bout sixteen? Blond ponytail? Blue eyes?”

“Does she have a name?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“What?”

“I don’t know her name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to call you something.”

“You ain’t got to call me nothin’.”

“How do you know she’s run away?”

“Was in her pants.”

“What?”

“Was a note in her pants pocket. Said she’d run off.”

“Note from who?”

“Her.”

“To who?”

“Somebody else.”

“Do you know who she ran from?”

“If I did, I w’udn’t be calling the goddamn sheriff.”

“How’d you happen onto the note?”

“What?”

“What were you doing in her pocket?”

“Somethin’ bad happened her. An accident.”

“What sort of accident.”

The phone starts shaking in John’s hand.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Does she need an ambulance?”

“What?”

“Does the girl need medical assistance?”

“No.”

“Would you hold on for a minute, please, sir?”

“What for?”

“I’m going to let you speak to an officer.”

“I’m just tryin’ to find out her name. That’s all.”

“Hello?” says a male voice.

John hangs up the phone.

Paralyzed by his predicament, he sits in one of the plastic deck chairs, with the beer cooler resting at his feet, and watches through binoculars for the black Chevy Blazer to descend from Hollenbachs’.

The kitchen clock ticks loudly behind him. Mutt endlessly stalks a woodchuck at the upper edge of Nobies’ pasture. The sun slowly heads for the horizon. John gets drunker. His thoughts fragment. Waylon, the dead girl, the money, Obadiah Cornish, Moira’s leaving him—each, alone, is horrible to consider. Their combined weight is staggering.

He thinks about Ira and Molly Hollenbach’s murder, how the police had questioned about everyone in the area, including John, who’d ever heard Ira brag that hidden in his house was a safe containing over twenty years’ worth of undeclared profits from the quarry and farm that Ira would retire on. Like most of the county’s populace, John theorized that being a blowhard is what got Ira killed. He figured that whoever had cut up Molly to get Ira to open that safe was so enraged at discovering its piddling contents he’d slit both their throats. Now, though, he wonders if Ira really had been loaded and the money John has found was his. But why would the robber have hauled