'I'm not asking you to come in, I'm telling you,' Grandpa snarled in the dark. 'This is not an option; this is an operation. We are going to try to figure out a way to put an end to this investigation.'
'How're we gonna do that?' Carl asked. The windows in the front had curtains, and now a silhouetted figure parted the curtains and looked out. The silhouette looked to Carl like a woman's.
'Watch,' Grandpa said.
They walked up to the porch and as they were about to knock on the front door, it opened. A woman was there in a terry-cloth dressing gown, yellow with age; she was forty, overweight, with dark, oily skin; she smelled of bourbon and cigarettes.
'Who're you?'
'I'm Roger's grandfather and this is his son. We need to talk to him for a moment,' Grandpa said.
The woman looked them over, then turned and called, 'They say it's your kid and your grandpa.'
'I'm coming…'
She stepped back from the door, and they stepped inside. The place smelled like cheap burning wood and newspaper, and baked beans. Roger came out of the back. He was a tall man, wearing black jeans and a plain white T-shirt; his hair, once blond, was going gray. He was barefoot. 'What do you two want?' he asked.
'We need to talk to you for a moment. It's important, but…' Grandpa looked at the woman, and then back at Roger. 'It's private.'
Roger looked at them for a long four seconds, then asked, 'Something happen to Jan?'
'No. It's about the four families,' Grandpa said. 'We've got a big problem.'
'Fuck that,' Roger said. But he turned to the woman and said, 'You go on back in the bedroom. I'll be back in five minutes. You shut that door tight.'
She put her hands on her hips and sighed, as if he'd just unloaded the burden of the world on her, then sullenly went back to the bedroom and slammed the door.
When the door slammed, Roger looked at Grandpa and then at Carl, and said, 'Carl knows?'
'Yes,' Grandpa said. He had his hand in his pocket and when he took it out, he had the silenced pistol in it.
Carl said, 'What?' when he saw the pistol coming up, and Grandpa shot Roger in the heart.
Roger, looking surprised, fell down with a thump. The wooden floor echoed like a drum.
Carl said, 'You shot my dad.' Like a slap in the face; it staggered him.
Grandpa said, 'Don't think. Go do the woman.' He handed the gun to Carl. 'Don't think, don't touch her, don't touch anything. Just go do it.'
'You shot my fuckin' dad,' Carl said, and the gun barrel drifted up toward Grandpa's waist.
'Don't point the gun at me; just take care of the woman.'
'You… Jesus Christ.' Carl stared at the old man.
Grandpa's voice turned to gravel: 'Take care of the woman.'
For a moment, everything balanced on a knife. The gun was now aiming at Grandpa's heart, and Carl took up the slack in the trigger.
'Don't think…'
They posed for another three seconds, then Carl suddenly turned, walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open. Grandpa heard the woman say, 'What?' and then three shots, a quick bap-bap, and then a finishing bap.
Carl wandered back into the living room, a dazed look on his face. Grandpa said, 'Are you all right?'
'Maybe.'
'Give me the gun.'
Carl handed it over. 'Are you going to kill me someday?'
Grandpa was neither startled nor disturbed by the question. 'No.' He put the gun in his pocket and took out two black oversized garbage bags. 'Help me get Roger in these things. I don't want blood in the trunk of the car.'
'What's going on?' Carl asked, a pleading note in his voice.
'The cops were breaking us down-they're going to break us down. Unless we give them the shooter. We're giving them Roger.'
'Why would… this is crazy.'
'No. I can't tell you all of it. I can tell you this: from now on, you have to be a kid. You told me about maybe asking this girl to the home-coming. Tomorrow you've got to do it. You have to borrow some money from me for a sport coat and slacks, and you have to go buy them.'
'What…?' Crazier and crazier.
Grandpa touched Carl on the shoulder, looked straight into his eyes. 'There's more on this to do… But listen to me now. You are the last one of us. You have to go underground, and for you, that means that you have to go back to being a kid. A child. You're an adult now, and it'll be hard, but it's critical, Carl. You have to remember what you are, but you have to play at being a high-school boy. Can you do that?'
Carl shrugged, and said, 'I suppose,' and a flock of tears trickled down his cheek. He didn't notice.
Grandpa pointed at Roger's body, and Carl, stunned, helped roll the body into the two bags. When they were done, there was a small blood puddle on the floor, and Grandpa cleaned it up with paper towels and water and found that he'd left a clean spot on a dirty floor.
They fixed that by dragging a welcome mat across it a few times, until it had blended. That done, Grandpa went in to look at the woman: she was dead, all right. Carl had walked the gun up her body, shooting her first in the stomach and then in the chest, with a final shot in her forehead.
Okay.
'Let's get him out to the car.'
The worst of it, Carl thought, was that Roger was still warm. He could still feel his father's body, all the heat, all the still-living cells, that hadn't yet gotten the message from his father's brain, as he staggered out into the rain and put him in the back of the car. The warmth reminded him of the day he'd killed the little dog…
Inside, Grandpa picked up the first of the nine-millimeter shells, the one he'd used to kill Roger; the others he left. And before walking out of the house, he took a single orange hunter's glove from his jacket pocket, and threw it in a closet.
'That's like…' Carl started. He looked at Grandpa. 'Oh, Jesus, you knew way back when I went after the Russian.'
'I was ready if we needed it,' Grandpa said. 'Come on. We need to go through the house and find what Roger would have taken with him, running. One suitcase. One duffel bag.'
They actually found a hockey duffel in a closet, and threw everything into it that Roger might have taken-his shaving gear and miscellaneous clean-up stuff, like tweezers, Band-Aids, fingernail clippers, a brush, and comb. They took the best clothes and shoes they could find; they took photographs, including a photo of Carl as a five- year-old, on a park swing being pushed by his mother, both of them laughing; they took cigarettes and a jar of quarters and some cheap jewelry and they dumped the woman's purse and took the money out, seven dollars.
They did it all hastily, throwing the stuff into the duffel; except for the photograph of Carl and his mother, which Carl put in his pocket.
When they were done, they turned off the lights and tramped back out through the rain and got in the car. 'Drive that way,' Grandpa said.
Carl followed the instructions, turning this way and that. At some point, he began to cry, clutching the steering wheel in both hands, trying to stay in the middle of a narrow gravel road track while looking through both tears and the rain.
'Turn left, right after this tree,' Grandpa said.
'Where are we?'
'They were logging here last summer. Starts a hundred feet back or so.'
They followed a rough dirt track through the trees, down a gentle slope, around a stump; a hundred feet in, as promised, the forest suddenly ended and the headlights punched into featureless darkness. All the trees were gone. In the near foreground, Carl could see dirt chewed up by bulldozers.
Grandpa got out of the car, walked around to the trunk. 'You'll have to dig,' he told Carl.
Carl dug, in the light of a flashlight; Grandpa was afraid to use the headlights. They found a low spot without
