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  Wayne? Wayne?

  Death a real, sudden possibility, a comet streaking across her suddenly gone-black-as-midnight sky.

  She struggled, clawed at the fingers sunk too deep for her to grip and stared up into his face pleading at him with her eyes, aware of her tongue protruding eyes bulging blood soaring through her cheeks. She twisted under him and kicked and pulled desperately, hopelessly at his forearms, stones raking her spine, she pounded him with her fists, trying to scream but nothing but a bubbling strangled sound like something under water coming out of her until the curled hard fingers seemed to receive some distant message, some caution from the brain—and he released her. And she could almost breathe again through throat and lungs that throbbed with rushing life as he groaned and collapsed on top of her.

  He rolled away. Lay panting while she gasped and fought for air.

  And being next to him was like lying next to a poisonous, treacherous snake. She got to her hands and knees and scuttled away.

  “You bastard! You fucking bastard!”

  “I…”

  There was no way to know when the tears had begun but now all of a sudden she could hardly see. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and groped for her blouse, her panties, her jeans.

  “Bastard!”

  She stumbled getting into the jeans and nearly fell, still dizzy and sobbing, too much movement too soon after…what had happened…and him just sitting there watching.

  Not moving. Not reaching for his clothes. Just sitting there looking dazed.

  Looking almost…my god! Looking almost innocent!

  “You bastard! You almost killed me! Was that your idea of some kind of game? Are you crazy?”

  “Susan, I…”

  “What? You’re sorry? Is that what you’re going to say to me? You’re sorry?” She shook her head. “Jesus! and to think that I…Jesus, I’m the one who’s crazy!”

  “Susan just listen to me, all right? I don’t know what…”

  “NO, you bastard! I’m not going to listen to you! You come near me and I swear I’ll kill you. You understand me? God damn you!”

  She couldn’t stop sobbing. Chest heaving huge deep still-liquid gulps of air. Still so out of control of herself that it hurt.

  He reached for his clothes. She wiped her eyes and watched him.

  She saw no remorse. No concern for her.

  He doesn’t care! she thought. My god. He really doesn’t care!

  And the tears this time were worse in a way than before because they came from somewhere deeper inside her. Not from lingering fear or pain or even anger, but from the loss of him, the loss of her idea of him and of the two of them together. She had held that idea much closer than she’d imagined.

  “I loved you,” she said. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you would do…this to me. I think you need help or something, Wayne. I think you’re a…very sick person.”

  She buttoned her blouse and tucked it in. Turned. Her footsteps along the stone and dirt path unnaturally loud in her ears as she stumbled toward home down the mountain.

  He’d come so close this time.

  In the end, he hadn’t dared.

  God! He’d wanted to. Every cell and nerve end in his body seemed to demand it of him. Its power was wonderful, the holding back a brute physical ache. And now he felt drained, as though pummeled by some massive orgasm. When in fact his own had been weak, brief, unfulfilling. Nothing to what it would have been, he knew, had he given in.

  Had he killed her.

  He wondered—for maybe the thousandth goddamn time in his adult life—why he hadn’t dared.

  So close.

  He tied his Reeboks, got up and slipped the backpack over his shoulder. He felt depressed. It would be good to walk for a while. There was a place down by the pond he thought was okay. He had the sandwiches.

  Jesus! She’d been angry!

  Thinking about it now, it was almost comical. He almost laughed. Because of all she didn’t know. Because of what none of them knew and what they couldn’t see.

  That so many of them asked to die. Men, women, kids. Their sex didn’t matter. Their age didn’t matter. The Leigh kids who kept tearing up his fence at night. Roberts, the fatass next door with his goddamn dog from hell. Half—no, nearly all—his regular customers over at the Black Locust Tavern. Murdoch with his smelly backyard barbecue every summer. The weird old lady who waved to him from her three-wheel bike and whose name he didn’t know but who seemed to know him or want to know him, some friend of his mother’s maybe attempting some fucked-up down-home intimacy.

  Assholes. Going through life with so little on their minds that it was comical. Knowing nothing about life, really—that life had nothing to do with love and home, family and friends, that life was made up of stealth and planning and brains: brains and guts and will. That, and the obvious—the isolation. All of them thinking that they actually mattered to somebody. And that because of that their weaselly little lives had to matter too. When they didn’t. Couldn’t. Ever.

  He kept a notepad and jotted down offenses. “Roberts: dogshit in left-hand corner of the yard, 1/3/93—he picked up the big chunks but left some smeared on the grass. RETAL.” Or “Loden: ordered scotch with water back, then tells me no, soda back, 2/25/93. RETAL.”

  Just so he wouldn’t forget just who and when.

  He wondered why he hadn’t.

  Killed her.

  It felt cowardly somehow.

  There had been deaths at his hands for sure but he hadn’t dared for years now, not with what they called the higher animals, and even then it was only cats. And one old miserable stray dog.

  Even then it was wonderful.

  Of course the aftermath wasn’t. Not exactly. He’d had to bury them in his yard. Worrying all the time that his mother would see or suspect something. Whereas here, now…

  Here he could have just pulled her into the bushes and left her that way.

  The way god left his dead.

  The bird who strikes the wire.

  The old raccoon too crippled to fish or scavenge anymore.

  The weak and the stillborn and the cold and hungry.

  The way the dead had been left useless—no, not useless, because you had to think about the soil and how the dead enriched the soil—since life began.

  God’s way.

  There was nobody who would miss her. Not for a few days at least and maybe not for a long time. Her parents had moved to South Carolina and they’d never been close.

  They had that much in common, at least, he and Susan. Nobody would miss either of them.

  He lit a Camel. Susan didn’t like him to smoke. Now it hardly mattered.

  The Black Locust Tavern had gone half smokeless three months ago. A separate section, and smaller than the other, for those with the habit. It was a case of the manager, Peters, allowing himself to get pussywhipped by a bunch of yuppies and blue-hair oldsters.

  Peters was in the notebook, naturally.

  RETAL.

  He climbed a shelf of rock and allowed himself a glance over the edge. He was susceptible to vertigo sometimes but felt sure that this was the way to beat it. Just keep on looking over. The trail below was obscured by a squat stand of windblown pines growing out of the rock, trunks twisted like elbow joints of gutter pipe to accommodate the need for growth both out and up simultaneously. The pines weren’t doing too great a job at either. They looked small and beat and scruffy.

  He moved away. The pond wasn’t far.

  He had dreamed last night that he and his mother had driven to a house neither of them knew but which was to be her home from then on and he abandoned her there, old and crippled in the legs, which she had never been, left her standing shaky in the enormous open yard looking confused and frightened and angry. There were cats in the yard and she hated cats. He had driven away laughing. The dream was very vivid. Very real.

  He wondered if Susan would ever fuck him again. It was possible. But not likely.r />
  Too bad. She was pretty good at fucking and there were fewer notes about her in his notepad than there were on most people. He decided to give it a week or so and then see if maybe he could talk to her. If he could talk to her then he could possibly convince her to start fucking again because even if it wasn’t the whole thing it was something.

  He was considering taking one of the sandwiches out of the backpack, unwrapping it and eating it along the trail because he’d worked up an appetite by then with all this stress when he heard voices—shouts—coming from below. He walked over to the edge again and peered down through the trees.

  He saw movement there, shifted to a more open area and saw the three of them clearly in a tight little circle moving in and then outward, back and forth like a rough awkward dance slightly off the trail in the brush.

  He felt a tingling. Something scuttling crablike down his spine.

  He saw what they were doing and forgot all about Susan and all about his notepad and the dream of his mother and all about his sandwich. He knew suddenly that his life had changed forever and he let it flow over him.

  He watched.

  Between the first and second strokes of the Louisville Slugger, Howard Gardner had time to entertain a number of notions, think a number of thoughts—none of them too deep but most of them important.

  You little bitch you’re not gonna get me was the first thought and probably the most significant. Because that gave him anger, and anger gave him fight.

  Wrong! I’m gonna get you was the second most important simply because it was so utterly wrongheaded. His immediate concern was the man with the baseball bat. Not the woman. At the moment the woman was just a distraction. And that was too bad, because Howard did not need any distractions.

  Move and tuck, he thought. Come on. You can get this guy. You’re bleeding, dammit! He could feel it rolling down the side of his face. Fuck it! Get the bastard. You’ve got the reach and you’ve got the weight.

  I’ll kill the little bitch.

  He should have known in the first place.

  Something was wrong with the whole setup. Why in hell would she want to be alone with him after all this time, and alone in the woods no less. For what? Old times’ sake? Because they used to climb up here and picnic once in a while? Those days were long gone and since then she’d taken the house from him and the car and half the business and even had the Barstow PD on his ass, had a restraining order out against him the little fuck so that he wasn’t even supposed to come near her, his own ex-wife! But there was no restraining him then—no way—and there was no restraining him now.

  The dizziness wasn’t good, though.

  The guy Lee had been standing behind him. He’d never even seen the guy. Carole had simply stopped to admire the scenery and suddenly bam! lights bursting in his head but Lee had misjudged the reach. Caught him midway through the wood instead of at the thick end of the bat so that it slid off his ear and the side of his head down to the collarbone. The collarbone felt broken. But Howard was standing. He was by god standing!

  He feinted left and came in right, beneath the blow—boxing the guy, just like in the Navy. Planted a right fist in a surprisingly tight belly while the bat rolled harmless off his shoulder. The guy fell back into the bushes and Carole made a choked-off screaming sound behind him. Some woman-scared little shriek.

  You bitch.

  You fuck me, and then you fuck with me and now you want to get rid of me. Is that it?

  What’s the matter?

  Am I too much trouble for you?

  He turned to her, to maybe quite fucking possibly throw her the hell off the mountain—he could do it, they were that close to the edge right here—and he was wondering if he would feel like doing it to her when he got over there because it was completely up to him, it had always been up to him whatever he wanted to do with her, stepping toward her thinking oh to hell with it, to hell with the running after her and the hassle and jerking her around, trying to make her life fucking miserable, it would be easier just to end her nasty little life right here and now, he was thinking this when the guy got up out of the bushes and let him have it again.

  He’d screwed up bad, turning toward her. Going after her.

  And the guy was good this time. Much better. His head split open really bleeding now so that he had to wipe the blood pouring down off his forehead out of his eyes in order to see, and he realized that he was on his knees. He didn’t remember falling.

  But something was queer. Something was wrong. What the hell was happening?

  The guy should have hit him again by now.

  Sure. That was it.

  What the hell was wrong with the guy?

  The guy had hesitated.

  Asshole.

  His vision cleared enough to see a pair of legs standing in front of him and he grabbed them, jerked them toward him and hugged tight and lifted and Lee fell, flailing at him with the bat, smashing down across the middle of his back to his hip, the bat coming down so hard that he could feel the hip bone crack. Not like the head wound. Hell the head wound hardly hurt at all. Pain like a bulldozer now.

  But by then he was up on top of him pounding at the blurry oval that he knew was Carole’s lover’s face, watching it turn red suddenly, red with the guy’s blood or his own he wasn’t sure which and didn’t care because he was connecting, he could feel teeth jab into his fist and then something soft that was probably his eye and he was howling, Howard was howling dousing his pain with the blind ecstatic glee of manslaughter when he sensed—not saw—her step up right beside them standing above them and sensed—not saw—her lift the rock.

  He smelled the new fresh dirt off the rock. It smelled like the blood-smell only richer. Thicker.

  And then for a moment he felt some kind of amorphous contact, some sudden enormous pressure from above snapping down his head and his neck, Lee sliding off to one side, the earth and grass looming.

  And then felt nothing at all.

  Wayne lay low over the rocks. No vertigo now.

  No.

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  They fucking dared!

  He almost felt like shouting, like whooping up there in sheer delight. My god! At first he hadn’t been sure what he was seeing, it had looked like maybe nothing more than a fight down there, maybe over the woman. One of the men had a baseball bat but he’d seen worse in the parking lots of bars at night with jacks and tire irons so that it was only at the end of it when the woman picked up the rock and brought it down on the taller, bigger man that Wayne knew what he was seeing.

  Murder.

  He felt like calling down to them. Hey! Guys! Hey! Include me in! He felt like going down there. See this thing up close. Hell—maybe even help out a little. Who the hell were these people? Where the hell did they come from? He couldn’t remember being this excited. Not by anything! He was aware of his heart racing and a pounding in his ears.

  They dared!

  God damn! he wanted to go down there.

  But instead he did the smart thing, he guessed it was the smart thing, he watched silently as the man wiped the blood off his face—he was bleeding from the mouth—and then bent down and lifted off the rock. The rock was big and flat and beneath it the man’s head looked like somebody had pushed it all out of shape and painted it red. The man heaved the rock off to one side down the mountain and returned to where the woman was standing, hands fluttering, saying something to him and then looking nervously both ways up and down the trail. She needn’t have worried. Apart from Wayne they were alone there and would be for quite a while. He had a good view of the trail and it was empty.

  It seemed to be just dawning on her that they—that she—had actually just killed somebody. It was not just her hands—he could see even from up here that her whole body was shaking. He noted that it was a very good body. The tight jeans and T-shirt made that clear. He didn’t know which was more attractive, the body or what he’d just watched it do.

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nbsp; The man seemed calmer. He wrapped his arms around her and held her for a moment.

  Wayne could hear a muffled sobbing.

  After a moment he let go and moved back to the dead man, took each of his wrists and started dragging. The head lolled sideways and left bloody skid marks across the path. The dead man’s expensive-looking running shoes scraped out their own trail.

  And Wayne wondered how in hell they were expecting to get away with this.

  It was going to be hard to clean up the mess up there. Head wounds did a lot of bleeding. This one sure did. And even the most mentally deficient cop was probably going to check the slope above the place a corpse had landed.

  He watched as the man dug a small hiker’s backpack out of the brush beside the trail, turned the dead man over and slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, turned him again and hitched it together across his chest.

  Hiking accident, thought Wayne.

  Sure, maybe.

  But there was still the problem of the bloody trail.

  It was only when the body disappeared down off the rock face and he heard the long silence and then the dim, faraway splash that he realized that these people were smarter than he’d thought and maybe even knew what they were doing—that in fact they’d chosen the site pretty well. There was a stream down below that would be running deep and fast these days with all the rain they’d been having. He couldn’t see it from where he was but he and Susan had passed it on the way up.

  The body would carry.

  Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all.

  If they were lucky they might even get a little more rain tonight or tomorrow morning to wipe the slate clean altogether. He wondered if they’d checked the weather reports.

  He bet they had.

  He smiled. Watching them was absolutely the best damn time he’d had in years. Even now, as they were getting ready to leave. Even as the man kicked dirt across the path and pulled off his bloody shirt, turned it inside out and wet it from a thermos, used it to wipe the blood off his face and hands and stuffed it into a second, larger backpack he’d hidden with the smaller one in the brush; then took a clean shirt out of it and put it on.