An Incidental Reckoning (22 page)

“Steve? You still open? Tractor broke down and we need a wrench…”

The younger man had spoken, and now saw Will with the gun, and put out an arm to stop the other from going any further. The old man looked him up and down, and with a sneer of contempt said, “What the hell’s going on here. Who are you?”

“Shut up. I want you two to go back to the front of the store, into the next aisle, and then walk all the way down to the back. You try to run outside and I’ll shoot him.”

“Let me tell you something young man…”

“Dad, let’s just do what he says. Don’t want Steve to get hurt.”

Reluctantly, they backed up, eyes on Will. He looked for fear but detected only a sullen acceptance. He didn’t believe the gun necessarily kept them from rushing him, only concern for their friend. He had made a mistake coming here. No police, maybe, but a tougher breed of man, one used to hard labor, fixing his own problems, and taking care of a neighbor. Not the sort of people to back down and wait for the cavalry. The accusation in their eyes, as they rounded the corner and began tramping up the other side, made Will feel ashamed. But out of that shame came the anger, of always being on the wrong side. The weak side. Damn them. They hadn’t been bullied in school. If anything , they had probably been the bullies, or at least large enough that no one, not even Brody Stape, would have picked on them.

He waited until the sound of their heavy steps reached the back wall, listened for movement that signaled an attack, wanted only to flee now and go home and rethink all of this.

“You guys stay there…for ten minutes. Steve won’t get hurt if you do that.”

Will moved towards the door, walking backwards with the gun pointed at Steve, who stared back with a wry smile of amusement. He lifted up the gun, pointed it at the head of a large buck on the wall and fired, satisfied when a hole erupted in its side and hair and stuffing fluttered down on top of the shopkeeper. Steve flinched and put his hands over his head, and Will had his trophy at last.

“Sonofabitch. He shot Steve!”

Like a pair of rhinos, they charged from the back towards the counter, knocking hammers and screwdrivers into the aisle.

“Get back!” Will shouted, the door only a step away. The two men, on reaching Steve and finding him unharmed, slowed but glowered at him, stopped but held their ground, expressing clearly in their stances that they had no intention of retreating. Steve picked up the phone and began to dial. Time to go. He no longer controlled the situation. If he ever had.

Will pushed open the door and sprinted to his car, stumbling on the steps and nearly falling down. The grocery bag flapped as he ran, a flimsy and pathetic prize for stepping into this wolves’ den. He made it to his car and started the engine, backed out fast as the younger man erupted from the store and ran to a pickup truck
. A man that big shouldn’t move so fast
, he thought as he put the car in drive and tore onto the road, heading west according to the plan now shot to hell.

The pickup roared out of the lot in a cloud of gravel and dust and followed. Will cursed. Sweat filled the ski-mask and pasted it to his head. His heart beat wildly both at the pursuit and in response to the speed of the car. Sixty, now eighty, edging eighty-five and the farmer continued his chase, the speed matching Will’s and then exceeding it. He wondered if he should poke the gun out and fire, but this wasn’t a movie and he suspected that the distraction would just cause him to wreck the car. Instead, he kept both hands on the wheel and drove, slowing slightly for bends in the road but feeling a near lift onto two wheels several times. The race continued, the truck only thirty or so feet back now.

He approached the road he had marked to turn onto, to angle north, and passed it, not daring to slow enough to risk capture or being rammed. He did not know where this road went. Screw the wild card. Seemed he had been dealt a whole deck of them.

Will checked the rearview mirror, watching helplessly as the truck gained on him and so missed a sharp bend. The car bounced up and down and his head smacked into the roof, hadn’t had time to fasten his seatbelt. He yelped in pain as he wrestled with the wheel. A fine brown dust surrounded him, filling the air and reducing visibility and he realized he had driven onto a dirt road. His speedometer read forty-five, much too fast for this terrain, but he kept his foot on the gas, knew he couldn’t let up, the truck now holding an advantage. He flipped on his wipers but it only smeared the dirt onto the glass.

Will saw the curve just in time to turn, skidding over the surface, riding up on a bank of weeds on the opposite side that ascended to a cow pasture, praying and cursing in the same breath. He got the car back on the dirt and glanced behind. Through the haze of dust he witnessed the truck continue straight through the bend and with a heart-stopping bang, a sound horribly clear through his rolled up windows, strike a massive oak tree.

Will slowed down, watching the truck for signs of life while a wave of nausea washed over him. The front end of the pick-up was half as long as it should have been: the hood buckled and pushed into the windshield, steam pouring out from the twisted mess of metal. He came to a complete stop and put the car in reverse, backing up slowly and ready to drive away if the man should leap out after him. But the closer he got, as the fine details of the havoc wreaked on the truck came into focus, he doubted anyone could emerge under their own power. He drove past the wreckage, torn between stopping to check on the man and getting away. He stopped, put the car in park, and got out on shaky legs and closed his eyes, listening for sirens, heard nothing but the lowing of cows and the sound of water rushing through a stream down below where the truck had come to its sudden and violent end.

He looked for movement but saw none while relief and guilt washed over him in alternating waves; hoping that the man would be okay, glad he now had a chance at escape.

"Why'd you have to chase me?" he said out loud, his voice cracking, his mouth dry, lips coated with dust beginning to settle. "A couple of bucks. Was it worth it?" He felt strangely triumphant; sick with the tragedy, but proud to be the last man standing.

He again considered going to the truck, checking on the man, wondered how long it would take for someone to find him, if anything could be done for him at all. Perhaps he could find a pay phone and call an ambulance once he had gotten further down the road. Then realization and its hard truth came to him and Will felt the blood drain from his face.

The farmer had been riding close to his bumper. Close enough to see and memorize his license plate and tell the police.

If he survived.

Will stood frozen in the roadway. He glanced at the gun sitting on the front seat, and then at the truck. He felt eyes on him and turned towards the pasture. Four cows had come close to the electric fence, standing shoulder to shoulder and watching him with unblinking eyes, a mute crowd of witnesses. Witnesses to murder. He wanted to run at them, shouting so they would scatter. Instead, he tried to swallow, his throat clicking with the complete lack of saliva in his mouth, and bent down to retrieve the gun.

Will couldn't waste any more time, hated what he had to do if it needed done. He walked slowly towards the truck, praying the impact had killed his pursuer.

He smelled burning rubber, gasoline, and the sweet tang of anti-freeze in a heady mix as he approached. All of the windows except the back had blown out, and that cracked beyond repair. He eased up along the side to the cab, and then quickly peeked in, gaining only an impression of blood and grave injury, not enough to determine dead or alive.

He drew up and raised the pistol in a shaky hand. His tears, unable to escape into the tight fabric stretched over his face, pooled and blurred his vision, and an involuntary sob escaped from somewhere inside.

An explosion rocked him. He felt the heat of something passing close to his head, a wasp shot out of a cannon. A bullet. Will almost ran away, but anger seized him, an uncontrollable fury he gave its head. He had fired the pistol through the shattered window before he understood he had fired; four shots before he gained control of his finger and forced it back from the trigger. He had unconsciously moved forward while unleashing the barrage of bullets, and now stared in on a bloody mess that had once been a man, a hunting rifle angled across his body.

He frantically peeled off the ski mask, turned away and threw up, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stumbled back to his car. The bawling of a cow caught his attention, and he looked to where the quartet had stood. Three had fled, but the fourth lay on the ground, its legs thrashing weakly, the bullet meant for him instead finding the cow. This struck Will as utterly ridiculous, and he laughed out loud, a shrill, high-pitched sound that made him jump. He quickly pulled off the sweatshirt, deciding keeping the evidence until later was too dangerous, and trotted through the weeds to the bank of the creek. He tossed the clothing in and watched it drift downstream and then, increasingly waterlogged, sink.

He got back in his car, did a three-point turn, and traveled out towards the blacktop. He drove slowly, just a man in his car, nothing to see here. At the junction, he had to wait for light traffic to pass. He cracked his window, listening for sirens but heard none, looked at his watch and noted twenty minutes had passed since the robbery; but as much action packed into that time to equal several years of his life before this. Maybe the entire thing if he excluded Ravensburg.

Will drove home, keeping to the speed limit, expecting a police road block to snare him but reached Erie without incident. He stopped at a self-serve carwash at the edge of the city and cleaned the film of dust from his vehicle, trying to act normal but so nervous: suspecting every patron as an officer in disguise, waiting for someone to finger him as a murderer, a SWAT team to materialize and push him face down in the soap and tire cleaner running in rivulets to the drain in the center of the concrete.

He pulled away still at large and drove towards home. As the fear wore off or at least diminished to manageable levels, he finally experienced the buzz he had sought, a fix that filled his body with a sense of lightness, as though he had exchanged the oxygen in it for helium. He wondered if the real purpose of prison wasn’t punishment, but quarantine to keep this sort of behavior from infecting the people, knowing that simple laws couldn’t stop a revolt once people got a helping of this stuff. The more he considered this, the more it made sense. Attach a stigma to what you sought to control, and let the unsuspecting carry that message throughout society, reinforcing it with their frowns and anger and disapproval in a way that guns, dogs and steel cages could not. Let them believe they’re free and on the right side of things, and they’ll accept their chains and shackle each other.

Will had never gone in for conspiracy theories, shook his head in disgust at the 9/11 “Truthers” and laughed at the claims that men had never walked on the moon. But his thoughts right now seemed anything but funny. He’d been there, done that, and experienced true freedom in destroying the template he had accepted as proper conduct for his life. His mind came back round to the killing, and he could understand how that fit, too. It wasn’t man against man, but idea against idea, freedom versus blindness; the latter revealing ignorance in chasing down what it feared and couldn’t understand. Will wished the farmer could have had an epiphany instead of a violent, intimate encounter with the tree and then with his pistol, but was it really his fault that it had come to that? And in light of this, his cowardice took on new meaning. Not cowardice at all, but a built-in resistance to what he now had dared to overcome and embrace.

Now he realized that the divorce papers were a gift from his wife.

Justin.

This new worldview seemed much more flimsy when viewed in light of a child’s innocence, almost barbaric. Somewhat troubled, he decided to think on that later, sure that an explanation would come, eventually.

Will glanced around before climbing the stairs and entering his second floor dwelling, looking hard at a few cars parked on the curb to detect any cops that might have staked him out, not sure what he would do if they had. Go down shooting, maybe. Satisfied that nothing appeared suspicious, he opened the door and slipped inside, locking the door and exhaling in a sigh of relief and exhaustion. The sun had started to set, and aside from a few rectangles of golden light that slid through the venetian blinds to rest on the wall, the apartment was dark.

And from that darkness came a voice.

“Hey, Will.”

Chapter 15

Brody watched as Will fumbled with the zipper on a duffel bag he had carried inside, then dropped it and pawed at the lock. Amused, he stood up from the easy chair and crossed the floor. Will spun around and actually bared his teeth, appeared more animal than human and with flight denied, ready to fight.