Harmless (25 page)

He searched the ground and found a jagged, heavy piece of quartz. It would do the trick. One smash and Derek would be unconscious. The flashlight beam bobbed in the dark, jumping from tree to tree like a wild cat hunting its frightened prey. Joseph was doing exactly what Derek expected: running away as fast as he could. But Joseph was
not
that guy, not this time. No more running away. What had he been doing his whole life but avoiding conflict, quietly backing out of promises and bedrooms, hoping no one heard him leave?

He held up the rock, already wet with blood from his finger. One blow to the head. It sounded easy enough, but
Derek was a fast-moving, armed target and Joseph had to execute the knockout blow with a wounded left hand and a right arm he could barely raise above his head. He’d never get a good swing in.

“Think!” he said out loud.

The plan came to him, as clear as a set of instructions in an appliance box. He calmly stepped off the path and behind a tree. Derek expected whoever he was chasing to keep running, and men like Derek never second-guess themselves. He would run right past the tree, oblivious to Joseph’s presence.

Derek acted according to type, flying down the path and into the darkness. Joseph moved to Phase Two, dropping the large rock. He calmly applied mud to his face and strung pine branches through his belt loops. Then he stepped back onto the path and pocketed a few palm-sized rocks.

“Keep going, Derek. No one here but us trees.”

He started walking, speaking quietly but refusing to lower his voice to a whisper. “I know who you’re chasing, Derek,” he said, warming to the game. “Some poor coward praying that you’ll fall down a very deep hole. But
this
guy, he’s right behind you and he’s not afraid of you.” If there were any justice Derek
would
fall into a hole or impale himself on a branch. “But I’m not waiting for an accident.”

Joseph was getting carried away. Enough with the voices. The rain was turning the sandy ground to paste. He stepped lightly, sneaking closer to Derek, who stood silently, his flashlight beam cutting a tunnel through the rain.

This was it.

Joseph moved a little closer and crouched in the low grass beside the path, settling gently onto his tender ankle. He needed Derek to stay stupid a little longer. He dropped lower in case of a sudden backswing of the flashlight, and when the light passed he stood back up and put one of the rocks into his left hand. His finger was still throbbing from the fish hook, but the rest of his arm was strong enough. Derek was less than thirty feet away. If he saw Joseph at this range, the game was over. Joseph raised his lame right arm as a counterweight and leaned back, his left hand dipping below his hip, the posture borrowed from movies where
GIS
cleared out Japanese pillboxes with a grenade toss. He started to calculate the rock’s trajectory, realized he had no idea how to do so, and aimed the rock to pass over Derek’s head.

The rock skimmed through the branches, a gust of wind masking its route until it came down with a thud in the dark. Derek was after it like a dog let off its leash. Joseph sprinted after him, giddy with power and the adrenaline of being in command.

“I heard you, cocksucker!”

“Go on,” Joseph whispered. “Keep shouting, dickhead.”

The path curved left, but he could see Derek through the trees, swinging the flashlight everywhere. Joseph was gaining on him too quickly. He took the next few steps lightly, fear creeping up his legs. There were too many trees between him and Derek to risk throwing another rock. He had to get closer. He walked slowly, stretching out his steps, a bird stalking a mud flat, before ducking behind a tree. Derek’s back was turned, his lowered flashlight
sealing his pant leg in a narrow cone of light, like a display case in a dark shop window.

“Hey man, why don’t you just come out?” Derek spoke as if he knew Joseph was close by. He made a lazy scan of the trees. “I
saw
the blood. The hook must have hurt.” He listened and pointed the flashlight randomly. “I’ve got the fucking phone. If you come out now, I’ll be a little less pissed off.”

Keep talking, asshole
.

Joseph transferred another rock to his left hand, assumed the position, and sent it over Derek’s head—a near-perfect throw that got Derek running before the rock hit the ground, Joseph chasing after him.
I’m really doing this, tracking another man. He’ll have no idea what hit him when I smash him from behind
.

Derek didn’t chase the rock as far the second time. He was getting wise without knowing what he was wising up to. Joseph hid behind a tree and took out another rock from his pocket, watching Derek snort from the coke vial.

“All right, smart guy, let’s cut a deal! I’ll put the gun down.”

Joseph had to keep his head here. Derek was not the cool guy back at the farm joking about the apocalypse.

“You can see me put down the gun. I know you’re watching me, man.”

Joseph stepped onto the path and threw the rock, his body suspended in the brief silence before it cracked off a tree trunk. Derek whipped the flashlight beam toward the sound of impact. Joseph took out the knife.

It was time.

He ran down the path toward Derek. Twenty more steps. Fifteen.

The world exploded with a loud flash. Derek stood inside a life-size snow globe, pistol raised, every falling raindrop and wet leaf illuminated by the white flash of the gunshot. He was firing into the forest. Everything was blacker than it was before, and Joseph ran, knife descending, into the suddenly vacated space where his quarry had been standing.

“I heard you!” Derek screamed from inside the woods. “You fucking pussy! Come out and be a man!”

The insult seemed to punch Joseph in the solar plexus, obliterating his thoughts. There was no more Joseph, just a cascade of anger charging through the trees, bearing down on that useless fucking asshole Derek. He moved the knife to his right hand and threw his last rock without stopping, not caring where it landed so long as Derek stayed distracted. Lightning lit up the forest. They were descending into a ravine, Derek racing down to where the rock had landed. The bank was getting steeper, too steep to charge. Joseph cut to the right, holding to the higher ground until he found his moment to strike—and he would, silently, with force, with rage. He took his place next to a tree with a clear sight line on Derek, who was stood in the gully, gun raised—puzzling, puzzling. Where was his target? How did he get away?

Derek turned off the flashlight. The forest was still dark but the sky seemed to show faintly through the branches. Beneath the sound of falling rain, the forest throbbed like blood, flowing over Joseph’s eardrums, the collective rush of sap throbbing up through the trees, from roots to trunk to branches. The storm was close. The elements were on
Joseph’s side. Another lightning flash showed Derek’s silhouette moving closer.

“Hey, buddy!” Derek wasn’t shouting now. Somehow he knew Joseph was close. “You’ve been fucking with me.” He laughed. It might have been genuine. “That’s cool, man.”

He lit a cigarette, knowing Joseph didn’t have a gun to sight on such a clear target.

“Who are you, man? You ain’t a cop, and you’re no gangbanger.”

He took another snort of coke.

“You were probably snooping around, thought you’d sample Nature’s bounty.” He made a loud noise like a beeper on a game show: “
Baaamp!
Wrong.

“Just a taste, a little baggy for your personal stash.
Baamp!
Wrong.”

How long had Derek been waiting to use this routine? All he needed was the 1970s soundtrack, and some badass funk to add “Negro” authenticity.

“Maybe you should come over to my place when I’m not home and fuck my wife.”

The pause, for performance’s sake.

“No one’s using that pussy, right? A little taste won’t hurt.
Baaaaaaaaaaaamp!
There’s no victimless crimes!”

Derek was pissing, a beer-fuelled geyser that dared Joseph to make his move, but he sensed that the ground was too slippery for a direct charge. How had the tables turned so quickly? He felt exhausted, pulled closer to the earth by the retreating adrenaline rush.

“You learn a few things when you’re out on the road,” Derek said.

And he was about to share them.

“Like how to stand around doing nothing for long periods of time.”

Joseph got it: Derek was going to outlast him. Joseph disagreed. He could crouch by this tree for hours. He had a genetic gift for crouching, it seemed—secondary muscles evolved from generations of ancestors hiding in the forest, waiting for the Saxons, Mongols, Vikings, and Romans, with their period-appropriate tag lines and locally scented beer piss, to burn down the village and move on.

“Look buddy, we can both stand here ’til we shit ourselves or the sun comes up. Or we can talk about this, man to man.
You
can be a fucking man!”

Joseph’s superior intellect could not stop Derek’s clichéd words from stabbing him in the soft places physically powerful men probe for sport. It was true: Joseph could not face his opponent in open combat. Why didn’t Derek just die? What organic force protected him while thousands of decent, hard-working men and women expired before their time?

The ember of Derek’s cigarette pointed briefly at the sky before it was hurled out of sight. “You had your chance, cocksucker!”

Derek’s instincts were drawing him up the incline, his flashlight moving in methodical, 180-degree sweeps. When the beam passed Joseph’s tree, he switched the knife back to his left hand and reached the next tree up the hill in four crouching steps. The flashlight froze in place. Derek stopped to listen, searching for a flash of eyes, the glint of a belt buckle. He moved up the hill, closing a little more distance
between them before he slipped and cursed, giving Joseph time to scuttle to a small copse of trees higher up the ravine. A lightning flash revealed patches of squat pine trees farther up that would provide the shelter he needed, and beyond that a high mound that might be a haunted castle but was more likely a hill, a geographical extremity he could use to his advantage. Between him and the pine trees was a stretch of earth spiked with a few birches no thicker than a value-size Coke bottle. Hopefully they’d provide some cover if Derek started shooting.

Joseph ran, his foot smashing into a root on the second step, sending him sprawling into the leafy mud, the knife flying from his hand. He dug through the dirt and leaves, twigs digging at the throbbing hole in his finger. Derek was shouting insults again. Lightning revealed the knife a few feet away. Joseph picked it up and scrambled on his hands and feet up the hill, his movements too noisy, every crushed twig as loud as a finger bone snapping. There were ways to move silently through the woods, but no one had taught them to Joseph. Luckily, no one had taught them to Derek either. He trudged through the undergrowth as though Joseph were a partridge he could flush out into the air.

Joseph dodged the birches and reached the pines, throwing himself behind the first tree. He lay there fighting the panic, then slithered under the branches to look down into the ravine. Water collected behind the dams of his curled legs. The rain was picking up and it was colder, as if the drops were falling from an earlier season. Derek came into view near the hiding place Joseph had just abandoned, his gun ready to fire at the first available target, the flashlight
weaving and then dropping like a dowsing rod over subterranean water.

“I know you, and I’m going to find you,” he called out. The peal of thunder that followed was so synchronized with Derek’s threat that it might have been staged by his limited imagination.

“Fucking iPhone! Fucking hipster! Used to see you fuckers at our shows.”

Joseph
had
been to two Hardwar shows, the first with a group of pitcher-buying computer geeks Jane had met at a pub, the second on a date with a woman whose ruler-straight black bangs impressed themselves on his memory.

“You were the guy watching the chicks dancing at the front. A little too cool to dive in there, telling yourself you’d do a better job if it was you up on stage, putting down my band to your
ironic
friends.”

Jesus, he could have been sitting on Joseph’s shoulder both nights.

“You know what you didn’t know? Me and the boys, and the girls who loved to dance, we were laughing at
you
!”

Lightning flashed, turning the forest into a giant photo booth, Derek the guy with enough quarters to last all night. The thunder came a couple of seconds later. The storm was almost on top of them. Joseph rose into a crouch, his ankle crying out under his weight. When another flash came and went he ran to a bigger tree. One more tree and he’d be out of the flashlight’s range. The lightning came again and he ran until the rug of leaves was pulled out from under his feet, the impact forcing a squeak from his lungs and landing him on a branch that split with a loud crack.

“I heard you!”

Joseph crawled on all fours across the rock and moss until he reached a patch of topsoil. Another flash exposed a rock the size of a car, its sides smeared with lichen and crystal scabs. He hid behind it. Derek hadn’t seen him, but in the darkness Joseph got a glimpse of the bobbing flashlight beam racing up behind him like a hound. Maybe he could still cut a deal. Derek would get what he wanted: the thrill of standing over a male body in the begging posture, another memento for his mental trophy room.

“The next one’s going right up your fucking ass!”

He was shooting at Joseph. The impacts sounded like a spoon smacking against mashed potatoes. The next one would be closer and the next would find its target. Joseph ran, trying to avoid every crevice and slick rock face, his hands helping when the ground rose too quickly. Even when he made it to a copse of trees he didn’t dare stop. The thunder held off long enough for him to hear Derek slip and fall and swear, his loud voice stripped of swagger.

“You’re going to pay for that,” he screamed.

Joseph had almost made it to what he guessed was flat ground a little further up the hill when his foot slipped into a hole, twisting his leg as he fell. Something popped in his knee, loosening the big hinges that secured the joint for a second before sliding back into place. The pain hit him like a slap from a giant hand. The knee supported his weight, but his bones felt like they’d slide apart if he pivoted too quickly. He was going to survive this. He was soaked and cold and his entire body hurt, but the pain was not of him, it was
around
him.