by Tim Downs
“Where did you—”
“He hid it inside the Bible—a place he knew you’d never look.”
He read one entry and winced. He read another, then rubbed his neck and rolled his head in great circles.
“You coward!” she seethed. “You thought you had been cheated; you thought someone had taken something that was rightfully yours. But I was never yours, Peter. I was never yours!”
“I can explain—”
“So can I! I can explain everything now! You found out about Jimmy’s drug habit, and you went to turn him in—but you didn’t, did you? You realized there was a better way to use that little piece of information, didn’t you?”
“Kath, wait—it wasn’t like that—”
“Then when you ran into Jimmy and Andy at Al Salman you saw your chance. Andy got ahead of you, he got separated. It was dark, it was crazy, there were bullets flying everywhere—and Andy started waving to you. He wanted you to come to him, Peter, he wanted you to help him. He was calling you—he was calling his friend.”
Tears were streaming down her face. Her voice trembled with rage, and her legs shook as if they might buckle at any moment. Peter started to rise from the sofa to reach for her.
“Don’t!” She forced herself to stand erect. “Not ever again!”
He sat back again.
“Why did you have to bury him? Why didn’t you just shoot him in the back and claim it was an accident? Why didn’t you blame it on ‘friendly fire’? I would have believed you—everyone would have!
“What was it like when you saw later that I couldn’t let go of Andy? What did you feel when you realized that when you buried Andy, you buried any chance that I could ever love you? Did you wish you could go back? Did you wish you could do it all over again? You did it to yourself, you little coward! When you shot Andy in the back, you shot yourself too!”
Peter said nothing.
“And then you made poor Jimmy help you bury Andy. You got rid of Andy’s body, but Jimmy could never get him out of his mind. Jimmy wasn’t like you, Peter. He had a conscience—he had a soul. He remembered what he had done and it ate him alive.”
She stopped abruptly. A sudden look of realization came over her face.
“That’s why you overlooked Jimmy’s drug habit all those years, isn’t it? You didn’t want him getting clean and straight and dealing with his conscience—you wanted him hooked. But Jimmy had no money for drugs. … But that means … you must have … You supplied him, didn’t you?”
She shook her head in disgust. “You didn’t kill one man at Al Salman, Peter, you killed two—and they were both better men than you’ll ever be. Jimmy was right, you know,” she said with utter contempt. “I would have taken him before I’d take you.”
Peter sat quietly staring at the pages of the journal. He lifted a page, looked it over front and back, then slowly ripped it from the binding and lay it on the sofa beside him.
“Since the day he married you,” he said without looking up.
“What?”
“Isn’t that the question you were going to ask me next? ‘How long did you think about killing Andy?’ Since the day he married you.”
Kathryn watched in horror as he tore away a second page. Nick said he hoped to bring back proof—but that proof, whatever it was, would only tie Peter to the death of Jimmy. The journal was the only thing on earth that linked Peter to the death of her husband—and Peter was shredding it before her eyes.
“Give me back my journal!”
“Jimmy’s journal,” he replied quietly.
He gathered the remaining handwritten pages together and removed them, then tossed the journal on the floor at her feet.
“There you go. All yours.”
He collected the handful of scribbled pages and carefully folded them, placing them in his front shirt pocket.
“It doesn’t matter,” she choked. “You can destroy those pages if you want to—but I still know what you did. Maybe I can’t have you arrested or send you to jail, but I can hate you for the rest of my life. You’ve lost, Peter. You did it all for nothing. You will never marry me, and I will never, ever love you. Take a good look—because I never want to see you again.”
Peter rose slowly from the sofa. He bent over slightly, hooked his thumbs inside his trousers, and hitched them up an inch or two. Then he straightened, stretching his shirt front tight again.
“Do you believe everyone has a perfect match? I do. I think God made one perfect person for everyone, and your job is to search the world over until you find her—and then you get married. But what if there’s a mistake—what if someone else marries my perfect person? Not on purpose, not out of meanness, but just because they didn’t know any better. Then there’s something wrong with the world—something that has to be fixed, don’t you see? They can’t be happy together, because there’s someone better for both of them out there somewhere, and I can’t be happy because they’re keeping me from my perfect match.”
He shook his head. “How can I make you understand? I didn’t hate Andy, and I don’t blame you for marrying him. You were just … confused, that’s all, and I just had to straighten things out.”
He began to step quietly toward her. Kathryn heard a buzzing sound slowly begin to rise. She started to tremble.
“I don’t expect you to love me. Not right away. It’s going to take time. There’s been so much pain and disappointment, and we have so much to talk about …”
The angry buzz grew louder as he drew nearer. He held out one hand as he approached, like a rider trying to steady a skittish mare. He was only an arm’s length away now, and the buzz in Kathryn’s mind was almost deafening.
He took her gently by the shoulders.
“I told you before, Kath. I told you all along. We were meant to be.”
With every bit of strength left within her she swung her right foot up between his legs. He crumpled to the floor.
She stumbled back and stared wild-eyed at the figure writhing on the ground—and then she turned for the door and ran, ran as fast and as hard as she could run. She had to run, she had to get away, because the swirling black cloud was right behind her, and she knew that it would follow.
Nick could barely breathe under the weight of Beanie’s hands. He had to break that grip; he had to get away. He knew he was in no immediate danger from the childlike deputy, but at any moment the sheriff would emerge from Kathryn’s house, and then with a single word the harmless deputy could become the sheriff’s executioner. Nick grabbed the pipelike wrists and strained, but he was no match for the deputy’s incredible strength. He felt along the back of Beanie’s right hand for the exact spot where the bones of the thumb and first finger joined in the base of the massive hand; he made a knuckle with his own right hand and drove it hard into Beanie’s ulnar nerve. The deputy winced in pain and momentarily released his grip. Nick rolled hard to the left, pulling his right arm from his shirt, then his left. The startled and confused deputy stood motionless, still pinning an empty shirt to the hood of the patrol car.
The realization that his prisoner had escaped began to slowly dawn on him. He dropped the shirt and slowly started toward Nick with outstretched arms. Nick ducked his head into the patrol car for an instant, jerked the hood release, then began to backpedal quickly around the car until they faced each other from opposite sides. He continued to circle, Beanie slowly following, until he had maneuvered the deputy to the trunk of the car. Then with one quick motion he raised the hood, grabbed two spark plug wires and ripped them from the car.
At that moment the front door exploded open and Kathryn raced out. She saw the shirtless Nick with Beanie in frustrated pursuit, and Nick saw the look of absolute terror in Kathryn’s eyes. They both knew that escape was the only thing that mattered now.
“We’ll take yours!” He pointed to her car.
“The keys are in the house!” she shouted. “Where’s yours?”
Nick pointed down the street toward the tw
o rusting Dumpsters. Kathryn spun to face the deputy.
“Beanie, Uncle Pete is hurt! He’s in the house, Beanie, and he needs you! Do you understand? Uncle Pete is hurt!”
Beanie stared blankly, then he nodded slowly and lumbered off toward the open door. Kathryn and Nick raced across the driveway and down the street toward the waiting Dodge.
They scrambled into the car and slammed the doors. Nick fumbled for the keys.
“Go, go!” she shouted.
“What’s your hurry?” He grinned as he tossed the two spark plug wires into her lap. “They’re not going anywhere without these.”
She held them up and then looked at him.
“Is this it? Is this all you got? Just two?”
“I thought I did pretty well, under the circumstances.”
“Nick—don’t you know anything about cars?”
Nick shrugged.
“A Crown Victoria has an eight cylinder engine! You can’t just pull out two spark plug wires, you need three or four! The engine will run rough on six cylinders, but it will still run! All you did is make their car run as badly as yours! You bought us a few minutes, that’s all—now get this pile of junk moving!”
They roared out from behind the Dumpsters as the patrol car lurched down the driveway behind them.
I got it, Mrs. Guilford,” Nick shouted over the roar of the engine. “I got all the proof you need.”
“What proof?”
“When the sheriff released our specimen, he thought he had covered his tracks, but he was wrong. The fly left behind a puparial capsule, and from that capsule we were able to identify the species. The fly from Jimmy’s body doesn’t come from North Carolina, Mrs. Guilford—not anywhere in the state. It’s found only in Florida and southern Georgia. Did you hear me?”
“Southern Georgia … Peter’s hunting cabin!”
Nick nodded. “Sometimes a car is an entomologist’s best friend. The radiator acts like a giant butterfly net, collecting specimens wherever it goes—and leaving a record of where it’s been. I checked the radiator of the patrol car—guess what? I found the same species of fly. That means the sheriff spent his vacation in Georgia, not Myrtle Beach—and Jim McAllister was with him. They drove back together—only your friend came back in the trunk with one leg propped up. A microsearch of the trunk will verify it. We’ve got all the proof we need, Mrs. Guilford, we’ve got—”
Suddenly Nick slammed his fist against the dashboard.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“My shirt! I left the radiator samples in the pocket!”
Kathryn said nothing.
Nick glanced over at her. “Mrs. Guilford—you’ve got to believe me.”
“I believe you,” she said evenly. “I believe everything you’ve said all along. I believe he killed Jimmy. I believe he killed Teddy. I believe he killed poor old Mrs. Gallagher.”
She turned and stared at him.
“I found Jimmy’s war journal. It wasn’t in the papers Amy gave me—Peter went through them himself. It was hidden inside that Bible. It told about the Gulf, about the drugs, about the conflict. It told about everything.” She closed her eyes hard. “It told how Peter shot Andy in the back.”
Nick said nothing. He knew he should reach out and comfort her; he knew he should take the time to express his outrage and sympathy—but his mind was too busy racing, fitting together the remaining pieces of this fascinating puzzle.
“Where is this journal?” he asked.
“He destroyed it,” she said without emotion. “It doesn’t matter.”
Nick groaned. “It matters, Mrs. Guilford. Without the specimens from the radiator, we can’t tie the sheriff to the death of your friend. And without that journal, we can’t prove that he had anything to do with the disappearance of your husband. We know what happened, but we can’t prove anything. We’ve got nothing, Mrs. Guilford, we’ve got—”
He stopped abruptly.
“The puparium!” he shouted. “It’s at the lab—I dropped it off on the way back from the university. We’ve got to get it, Mrs. Guilford, it’s all we’ve got left. With that puparium I can at least prove that your friend didn’t die in North Carolina. That’s enough to convince the medical examiner to reopen the investigation, and anything can happen from there.”
Nick raised the sagging rearview mirror and stared into the distance behind them. Through the billowing oil smoke he could see glints of black and white. The patrol car was gradually gaining on them—now less than two hundred yards away.
“They’re right behind us—and they’re getting closer. At this rate they’ll catch us before we reach the lab.”
Kathryn twisted the mirror and looked. “In this car we’re about as hard to spot as a forest fire!”
“I thought I slowed them down more than that.”
“Part of the problem is the car,” she said, “and part is the driver. Switch with me!”
“What?”
“Switch with me!” she shouted again, and without hesitation she grabbed for the wheel. Nick rolled to the right and dragged himself into the backseat, and Kathryn slid into the driver’s seat after him.
“The fence with the razor wire,” she shouted. “Does it have another gate?”
“On the west side. There’s a service entrance.”
“Then I know a shortcut. It should be right about … here!”
She jerked the wheel to the right, and the Dodge slammed into the curb. The car lurched crazily left and right, then once again as the rear wheels followed after. There was a bone-jarring clank of metal as the rims cut hard into the concrete through the aging tires, and Nick was slammed weightless into the ceiling. He came crashing down again beneath a hailstorm of paper, notebooks, and debris. Instantly there was a second clank, then a third and much louder one as the muffler tore away and did a rusted dance on the pavement behind them.
The hood of the car blasted into a thick screen of privet and viburnum and then nosed suddenly downward, careening down a steep bank and into a small fence. A single strand of barbed wire stretched across the windshield and snapped like an old guitar string. The car cratered hard in a dry red gully before nosing up again into a vast field of shimmering yellow-white and green.
“When you said shortcut”—Nick struggled up from the floor of the backseat—“I assumed you meant a road.”
The car bounded across the open meadow like a charging water buffalo. A sea of roof-high reed and feather grass whipped and stripped across the windshield as they plunged ahead.
“How in the world can you see?”
“You just have to know where you’re going,” she shouted. “I know this field—I used to race here with the boys all the time when we were teenagers!”
“Who used to win?”
For an instant Kathryn actually smiled.
“Then the sheriff knows this field too?”
“He knows.” She nodded. “Take a look behind you!”
Nick whirled around and saw the patrol car not more than thirty yards behind them, drafting in their wake like a stock car at Rockingham.
“He’ll be even with us soon! He’ll try to pass us, to cut us off!”
She shook her head. “He’s gaining on us because the grass is slowing us down! If he pulls out from behind us he’ll lose ground! He knows he doesn’t have to catch us—he just has to stay with us until we finally have to stop!”
Suddenly Kathryn began to slow down, narrowing the gap between the two cars.
“What are you doing?”
She watched until the patrol car filled the rearview mirror with a thundering blur of black and white.
“Do you have anything valuable in the trunk?”
“Do I what?”
She jerked the wheel hard to the right and jammed the brake pedal to the floor. The Crown Victoria braked an instant late, slamming head-on into the Dart’s right fender. The patrol car windshield blazed white as twin air bags exploded into the driver and passenger, and
before the shock of impact could wear off she stomped on the gas again and spun away, spewing a cloud of red dust behind her. She veered hard right, dragging the crumpled remains of a fender as she disappeared into the tall grass.
Nick was thrown forward like a toy, hurtling almost into the front floor, then rebounded back once again amid the paper and debris.
“It would help if you told me what you were going to do before you did it.”
“You’ll get used to it,” she said. “I did.”
She steered the car in a wide circle until she was at a three o’clock position to the patrol car, no more than twenty yards away. She slammed the brakes down hard again, shoved the stick into reverse and looked back over her shoulder.
“I’m going to back up now,” she said to Nick. “Just thought I’d let you know.”
“You’re going to what?”
“Didn’t you ever go to the Demolition Derby when you were little? Oh, that’s right … you’re a city boy.”
She jammed the accelerator to the floor. The car fishtailed left and right, and the grass behind them began to divide slowly, then faster and faster like an endless parting curtain. They both braced themselves …
A split second later they saw the black-and-white cruiser flash past them on their right. They had missed the front end by less than a foot.
As they raced past they saw that the hood was crumpled and bent down and back, and the grill and right headlight were shattered. They saw the face of the deputy frozen in shock and confusion.
But the driver’s seat was empty.
Kathryn curved left away from the car and sped backward thirty yards or more. She braked hard and sat silently for a moment, the engine idling but her mind still racing. She felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a voice near her right ear.
“He’s on foot, Mrs. Guilford. He can hear our engine—and he has a gun. For crying out loud let’s get out of here!”
Kathryn stomped the gas and veered hard left—then slowly began to curve right again in a wide circle around the patrol car.
“The other way, the other way!” Nick jabbed frantically over his shoulder.
