Rosemary O’Patchen told him, “You can’t see Schofield Run from the clearing but if you stand very quietly you can hear it. Just make your way to it as best you can. There’s no path to speak of but it’s mostly red pines, so the brush isn’t heavy. Then just follow the run downstream to where it feeds into Lake Wilhelm, a couple tenths of a mile maybe. Then you have to cross over the run—it’s only a few feet wide and a foot or so deep—and pick your way along the lakeshore another fifty yards or so. That’s where the campsite is.”
DeMarco was standing behind his barn now, squinting through the darkness as he surveyed Lawson Street in one direction and then the other. He told Rosemary, “That sounds like a difficult place to get to,” and thought, Especially frog-marching Inman and carrying two cement blocks.
“That’s why Thomas liked it so much. He wouldn’t allow so much as an MP3 player along on those campouts. He took one cell phone just for emergencies, but otherwise it was family only. No outside world allowed.”
“And there’s no easier way to get to it?” A dark shape that was either a vehicle or a couple of garbage bins was visible a block and a half to his right. DeMarco started toward it.
“None,” she said. “But if he’s hiding somewhere near the lake, that will be the place.”
“Thank you,” he told her. “I’m sorry to have wakened you like this.”
“You won’t hurt him, will you?” she said.
“Never.”
“Please promise me that you won’t let him be hurt.”
“I swear to God,” he said. Then, “He didn’t do it, Rosemary. You can tell your husband that for me. Thomas would never harm his family in any way. I know that now.”
“Oh God,” she said and started to sob. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
And now he recognized the distinctive shape of the Mustang’s backend, the taillights and spoiler. Bonnie’s car. “I’m sorry, Rosemary, I have to go now,” he said. And he shut off his phone.
Sixty-One
DeMarco held the handgun against his leg as he approached the Mustang. There were no streetlamps along Lawson and all the houses were still dark. He doubted that Bonnie would draw a gun on him, but on the other hand, he would not have believed she would participate in a multiple homicide. He told himself that love makes fools of us all and moved quickly from one front lawn to the next, staying far enough to the right that he could not be seen in the Mustang’s side mirror.
Only when he was nearly parallel to the car could he distinguish a silhouette in the passenger seat. Bonnie was sitting with her head laid back against the headrest. Awfully relaxed for a murderer, he thought. Maybe she doesn’t know what her boyfriend was up to.
He raised his weapon to a ready position and moved forward. She did not turn his way. He moved closer and looked at her through the passenger window. Still she did not move. She’s sleeping, he told himself. He tapped the barrel against the glass. No response. He tapped again, harder. No movement from within.
With his weapon aimed at her now, DeMarco put his free hand on the door handle, then swung the door open. The dome light had been turned off, and in the predawn darkness she remained no more visible than a shadow, but he was able to see that she did not move in any way. He leaned forward and put a finger to her cheek. Her skin was not cold, but it was cool enough that he felt something catch in his chest. “Oh fuck,” he said.
He slid his hand down the jawline to her carotid artery. Instead of a pulse, he felt the sticky smear of blood that had flowed over her blouse, and immediately the coppery scent reached him too.
He leaned away from her, softly closed the door, stood there breathing deeply. “What a fucking mess,” he told the last dim stars overhead. He hunkered down low to rub his fingers clean in the wet grass.
He knew he should not proceed on his own now, knew that if he did he could end up manning a radar gun the rest of his career, or putting in long hours doing traffic control at a construction site, sitting on his hemorrhoids and trying to stay awake. But he also thought he knew what Huston had planned. The cement blocks were probably to slow Inman down should he attempt to run. In all likelihood, Huston intended to take Inman’s life exactly as that psychopath had taken away Huston’s family. And then to use DeMarco’s revolver on himself.
What Huston did not know was that the first three shells in the .22’s cylinder were filled with birdshot. What would a load of birdshot do to the inside of a man’s head? DeMarco didn’t want to think about it.
He hurried around the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. Inman had not locked the car because he’d had no intention of returning to it. The keys were in the ignition. The smell of blood was thick, its scent of rusty metal. DeMarco turned on the dome light and looked at Bonnie. The front of her white blouse was soaked with drying blood. The blood had run over the top of her jeans and soaked her to the thighs. Her hands were bloody and there were bloody handprints on the dashboard.
DeMarco leaned over her body, pulled the seat belt harness across her chest, and buckled her in.
• • •
Twenty minutes, he told himself. Twenty minutes to the clearing near Schofield Run. Huston had a twenty-minute jump on him. But Huston would be driving cautiously. He wouldn’t want to get pulled over in a stolen car with a man in the trunk. DeMarco, on the other hand, had no such concern. He drove through the graying morning as fast as the turns allowed. He knew there would be no troopers hiding along the highway for another two hours. So maybe he could make up a few minutes on Huston by speeding.
“Then the hike to the campsite,” he told Bonnie. “He’ll have to cut Inman’s legs free. Then he’ll either make a second trip back to the car for the cement blocks or he’ll make your boyfriend carry them. That’s what I would do.”
The seat belt straps across Bonnie’s chest and lap kept her upper body tight against the seat, but her head jounced forward and back, side to side. Her feet slid over the floor mat, sometimes kicking out violently in reaction to a hard turn. She was wearing a pair of straw-colored mules but soon both feet were bare. DeMarco wished he could stop long enough to put her shoes back on, but he could not.
“Why did he kill you?” he asked. “Did you balk when you realized he was coming for me? Did you try to talk him out of it?”
He wondered if she had even known about the Huston murders before the fact. Probably not. Hard-timers like Inman learn to trust no one. They impart information on a need-to-know basis only, and even then it’s usually a lie.
“Why did he come after me?” he asked. “Why not just get away as far and as fast as you could?”
Her head rolled side to side with the movements of the car. Her bare feet scraped the floor.
Sixty-Two
In gray light, DeMarco pushed his way through the stand of red pines, his left arm raised to bat the branches away from his face, his forearm already scratched and bleeding. He moved toward the burbling of water over rocks. The needle-matted ground was soft and fragrant, and if he ran stooped low, he could pass under most of the branches. Behind him in the clearing, his car and Bonnie’s Mustang sat side by side, both hoods lightly steaming from the engine heat. He thought maybe he could get to the campsite in time. Maybe he could prevent what he knew was going to happen there.
The first shot echoed through the tops of the trees and over the misted lake like the crack of a bullwhip. It threw DeMarco off stride for a moment, then he was running again, harder now, listening to the silence, the pause, and praying that it continued. Huston would have been surprised by the effects of that first shot, the spray of tiny pellets, the sudden bloody pockmarks all over Inman’s face and chest. It would be a killing shot only if delivered point-blank, and he doubted Huston’s ability to do that. So now maybe Huston was checking the cylinder, seeing the two remaining rounds of birdshot, the three .22 longs. Maybe he would take some delight in the birdshot, see it as
a way of prolonging Inman’s pain. But certainly he planned to save the last round for himself.
A less attractive scenario was that the little shell full of birdshot had been emptied inside Huston’s own mouth or against his temple. In which case, Huston would have already used the knife to dispatch Inman. Both images made DeMarco cringe.
Only ten more yards and he would be into the white beyond the trees, the mist along the shore and over the lake. He ran full speed now, chest aching. Praying for more silence.
He broke out of the trees and onto the pebbly shore and swung left. Then he was splashing with long strides across Schofield Run, the water icy against his shins. He slipped and went down and banged his elbow hard against the rocks but was quickly on his feet again, splashing onto dry ground. He put a hand to his jacket pocket, made sure his service weapon was still there, though he felt no need to take it in hand. He had already decided that he was not going to pull a gun on Huston, no matter what.
DeMarco could make out two dark figures through the mist now, two faceless silhouettes, one standing in the water, one lower, possibly sitting on shore. Then the second shot cracked. The sound slapped DeMarco full in the face. “Thomas, don’t!” he yelled. But with the words came the splintering crack of four more shots in rapid succession, and the figure on the shore fell onto his back, and DeMarco slowed, blinked, and as his focus on the figure in the water sharpened, the ache in his chest swelled and pulsed, and he reached into his pocket and withdrew his weapon and walked toward Inman. The man was standing beside a small boulder that protruded from the water, his hands taped at the wrist and clasped hard around DeMarco’s father’s revolver.
• • •
Huston’s face and neck and chest were riddled with bloody splotches from the first three shots. The last three, all to his chest, had made slightly larger wounds, and around them, the blood was bright and flowing, emerging with the slow, shallow pulses of his heart.
DeMarco knelt beside him. He kept his right hand extended toward the lake, held Inman ankle-deep in the water. He placed his left hand atop Huston’s head. Huston lay with his eyes wide open, staring into the high, deep whiteness. His hands were clenched against the pain but a small smile creased his mouth. “You’re a very clever man,” DeMarco told him.
Huston gave no indication that he had heard. He’s somewhere else, DeMarco told himself. Maybe he was with Claire and the children already. Maybe he was watching as they approached him hand in hand.
“I’m fucking bleeding to death, man,” Inman said, but DeMarco had no interest in him at the moment. He was interested only in the art of dying as practiced by a former writer he admired, so he sat very quietly with his hand atop Huston’s head until Huston’s labored breathing ceased and he lay still and smiling and far away from the pebbly shore.
Now DeMarco turned his attention to other matters. Beside his knee lay Inman’s heavy-handled knife, where Huston had placed it. Inman was leaning forward from the edge of the water, shivering violently. There was a cut down each of his thick arms, running from the armpit to elbow, and a long cut down the inside of each thigh. His jeans and gray T-shirt bore Rorschach images in blood. Lashed to each ankle was a cement block from DeMarco’s garage.
DeMarco smiled. Something of Huston’s calmness had passed into him and he was in no hurry now; he had nothing important to do.
“That fucker got what he deserved,” Inman said. “He’s a fucking lunatic.”
“Is he?” DeMarco said.
“Look what he did to me!”
DeMarco studied the situation. Inman’s clothes were wet to his chest. Huston’s clothes were too. A thick ribbon of mud swirled through the green water behind Inman. But there were no drag marks leading into the water.
DeMarco said, “Check me out on this, Carl. He held the gun on you and marched you out into deeper water, right?”
“I’m fucking freezing here!”
“Answer my questions and you can come out.”
“All right, yeah, that’s what he did.”
“Did he tie the cement blocks to you in the water?”
“No, before. Then he made me carry them until I was out there farther.”
“And that’s when he cut you?”
“While holding this fucking gun to my head!”
“Then he walked back, laid the revolver on that little boulder there, came back here, and sat down on the shore. Do I have that right?”
“I told you he was fucking nuts, didn’t I? What did he think, I wouldn’t go for the gun? Dumb fuck just sat there grinning at me.”
DeMarco smiled. “He even left your knife here so you could cut yourself free afterward. He knew your only hope would be to get back out to the road. But the harder you ran, the faster you’d bleed out. He wanted you to experience your death. Every terrified moment of it.”
Inman shivered. “And you think that’s fucking funny?” He made an attempt to hurl the empty revolver at DeMarco, but with his wrists still bound, the handgun barely cleared the water and clattered against the rocks.
The urge was strong in DeMarco to pick up the revolver, clean it off, take it home where it belonged, the only thing he had left of his father. But it had to stay.
DeMarco looked away from Inman then, down the lake and across the water to the trees. They were still dark in the rising mist, but behind them the soft orange light of morning glowed.
“Hey, asshole,” Inman said. His voice was softer now, pleading. “You just going to sit there and let me die?”
“I would never do that,” DeMarco answered. “Come ashore.”
Inman dragged one foot forward, then the other. The cement blocks scraped over the lake bottom and churned up the mud. Finally he stood shivering and hugging himself only a few feet from DeMarco. He said, “You going to get these fucking blocks off my feet or what?”
“Of course,” DeMarco said. He then laid his left hand atop Huston’s head a final time, raised his right hand toward Inman, and put a bullet through Inman’s heart.
Sixty-Three
Bowen laid the slender sheaf of papers down on his blotter, then looked across the desk at DeMarco, who was gazing out the window. Early afternoon sunlight gave the air beyond the glass a stunning clarity. The few remaining leaves on the twin maples in the barrack’s front lawn trembled like brown flames in a guttering breeze. Bowen said, “It’s nicely written, I’ll say that much for it.”
DeMarco smiled. “I’ve been taking a crash course.”
“How about we go through it together. I’m still puzzled about a thing or two.”
“Have at it,” DeMarco said.
“Last night at your place. So Huston just showed up out of the blue. Knocked on the back door. You let him in. You take him into your living room. But you don’t remember much about your ensuing conversation.”
“Only what’s there in the report. And for that I have your little white pills to thank. I was spacy from the time he woke me pounding on the door until Inman coldcocked me.”
“In the kitchen.”
“Correct.”
“Where you went to get a couple of beers.”
“Get some beer, make some sandwiches… Huston hadn’t eaten since I saw him at the lighthouse.”
“So you go out to the kitchen, just you, and there’s Inman standing.”
“Big, bald, and ugly.”
“And how did he know where to find Huston?”
“Are you asking me to guess?”
“I’m asking you to surmise. Speculate. Ah what the hell; take a guess.”
“Maybe he was watching my place, hoping I would lead him to Huston.”
“If he wanted to kill Huston, why didn’t he do it when he had the chance last week?”
“I guess I should have asked him that. My bad.”
“What do you fucking think?”
“I think maybe he initially thought Huston would be arrested, convicted, disgraced, put away where Inman’s buddies could have some fun with him. Obviously Inman likes to play with his victims. Problem was, we couldn’t find Huston, and I was starting to make Inman nervous. So he decided he’d better take out the one remaining person who could pull him out of a lineup.”
Bowen rubbed a hand over his cheek. Then he ran both hands through his hair. Then he said, “So you go into the kitchen to get Huston something to eat, and there’s Inman, and he decks you. Just like that.”
“I was still groggy, remember? Reflexes were slow. Thanks to you. In a fair fight, I would have kicked his ass in six seconds flat.”
“Okay, sure. Next thing you recall is looking up from the kitchen floor to see him dragging Huston out the door.”
“I also recall this little dream I had. Something about mermaids on the linoleum. Should I have put that in the report?”
Bowen leaned back in his chair. “So you pull yourself together, make your way outside, and you’re just in time to see your car going down the alley behind your barn.”
“You’re an attentive reader, Kyle. It’s nice to know you take my writing seriously.”
“How about if you take this conversation seriously?”
“Absolutely.”
“Every question I’m asking you, the press is going to ask me. I’d like to not come off as a complete moron.”
“It’s a little late in life to be making that decision, isn’t it?”
Bowen sighed audibly. “Our history together will carry you only so far. You need to understand that.”
DeMarco smiled. “History used to be my favorite subject. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Or something like that. George Santayana.”
“Santayana the guitar player said that? The guy who wrote that devil woman song?”
Two Days Gone Page 28
