like a ball of aluminum foil.
That still left the other guy.
Kayla grabbed his arm. He looked at her lips, tried to understand what she was saying. He got it. It was easy.
“Sorry,” she said.
He patted her shoulder, said, “They wouldn’t have had to burn me with a cigarette. They just showed me one and a match, a lighter, I’d have sung like a goddamn canary.”
She tried to smile, but the smile crawled away, became a tight line.
He gave her one more pat on the shoulder, and steeled himself, started up the hill.
So, I’m kind of fucked here, the chief thought. Or I could be fucked, if I’m not fucked now. Got to put it together. They find this business, it’s gonna look weird, but way I see it, I push this car over the hill too, it comes out like this: Guy comes up here to push an unsuspecting couple over the lip of the hill, a renegade cop.
Yeah. That’s good.
Then he shoots himself in the eye, and drives himself over.
Now that sucks.
Let me see. Okay. I leave the car at the top of the hill. I wipe the gun clean. I put it in Pale’s hand. He committed suicide. Shot himself up here on the hill. Maybe he gets found, and no one will find the car down the hill. Least not right away, therefore no connection.
All right. That sucks too. But it’s a little better.
And what if I sit here long enough someone wants to neck comes up the hill, and I have to kill them too. Then I got a pile of bodies.
Shit. I got a pile now. I got these two, the trussed-up guy, and Harry and Kayla.
I’m getting quite a congregation.
And I don’t even know if they’re all dead. Got to finish the job. Shit. Got to go down there and do that. Make sure they’re in the deceased column.
What a mess.
Think, man, think.
It’s a problem. Could be a bigger problem I fuck around here long enough. Thing is, I make sure those two are finished, then I just leave, walk off, work my way to town, it’ll take me…Good grief, three hours, maybe more. It’s a good walk. I might be seen.
I could stick to the woods. There’s just that highway problem, and if I wait until there’s no traffic, I can run across, and then there’s woods bordering the road there, and I can work my way back toward town. Then there’s that space of houses and the like before I get to my place.
Not easy, but shit, it’s what I got.
It beats sitting here watching Pale’s brains drip off the upholstery.
The chief got out of the car, looked at Tad’s body.
Who is this guy? What’s his story? What’s with the darts? What is he, a freelance dart master hiding in the woods, ready to try out victims?
What do I do with him?
Okay. I can put him in the car with Pale. That would work. I could put his fingers on the gun, make it look like he shot Pale. Yeah, that would work.
When everyone gets a look at this, it’ll be a big mystery. But there’s nothing to connect me. Just some cop gone bad had a deal of some kind going down, and it didn’t work out. Maybe it’ll look like he picked this guy up for a blow job, and the guy turned on him, shot him.
Oh, wait. How did this guy die? He’ll have marks on him from the limb. So that won’t work. Not unless they want to believe he beat himself with a stick.
Okay. I could fire a round into his head, and it could look like they had a fight maybe, and the guy on the ground, he got in the car as Pale was trying to get away, shot him, then for some godforsaken reason, shot himself.
Not so good.
The chief’s head was starting to hurt.
Okay, let’s go at it again….
Fuck it.
I’ll make sure those kids are done for, leave everything as it is. No way anyone is going to figure out this goddamn mess. I made the mess, and I’m not sure what’s going on, so how’s anyone else gonna figure it?
Come to think of it, this is good. It’s like the Gordian knot of crime, so interwoven and messed-up it’s impossible to figure out.
Now, if a UFO would just crash into the side of the hill, it would be a perfect night.
The chief checked his watch.
Okay. I buy the DVD.
The chief felt pressure on his ankle.
He looked down, tried to move his foot, couldn’t.
It was the guy on the ground, the one he had batted with the stick like a tetherball.
He had grabbed his ankle, and now the man’s other hand shot out, his forearm striking the inside of his leg, working a nerve there, knocking him backward and down.
The chief had stuck the gun in his belt, and he pulled it out, tried to shoot the bastard. A hand slapped up, got hold of the chief’s wrist. It hurt. He dropped the gun. He kicked with his other foot, knocking the guy off of him, scrambled to his feet.
But now the man was up, on his feet, wobbling from all those blows from the limb, but, goddamn it, he was standing.
They both looked at the gun lying on the ground, wet-black in the starlight.
Harry came over the lip of the overhang and looked up to see Tad and the chief struggling on the ground. A moment later the chief rose up with something in his hand.
A gun.
Tad, like some kind of jet-propelled shadow, shot across the ground, extended a palm, hit the chief in the chest, knocked him up and onto the car hood, and caused him to do a flip and go over to the other side.
Tad limped around the front of the car, trying to get to him.
The chief, looking as if he might need a winch to get him up, grabbed hold of the car’s tire, made it to his knees. He still had the gun. Tad came around the front of the car and Harry yelled, “Look out, Tad. He’s still got the gun.”
Tad shifted as the chief fired. The shot hit Tad high in the left shoulder and spun him around and knocked him on the ground.
Harry was on his feet now, on the cliff’s edge, seemed to have some of his balance back. He ran toward the chief screaming.
The chief took careful aim at Harry.
Fired.
Harry, when he saw the gun point in his direction, held it a beat, the way he thought Tad would, then dropped so low he was running on hands as well as feet, like a big ape—a spotted-ass ape. There was a burst of light from the automatic and the bullet sang by his head, and now he was almost on the chief, and there was no way the bastard was gonna miss from there, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t do it, was mad as a pig that had just found out sausage was his cousin, was through being afraid. He kept coming and the chief, still on his knees, rose up so that one knee was lifted, took careful aim, and then—
Just before he fired, Tad, lying on the ground, seeing almost double, the night spinning black and star-pricked in his head, managed to grab a handful of dirt and throw it, hitting the chief in the face. The chief, jerked, fired—
—and it was a miss, and Harry was on him.
Tad lay down on the cold ground and rolled onto his back and looked up at the night and all the stars, and they did a milky spin up there, around and around, and he found that he could not feel the ground anymore. All he felt was cold, and as if he were falling, one moment down a bottomless pit, the next, upward into the star-specked
