A Single Shot (9 page)

“I’ll jis’ go up to the trailer,” says John. “Dive in the pond.”

“You sure?”

“Pos’tive.”

Nobie tosses his skivvies on the porch. “I hear Ira’s sister
lives down in Philadelphia inher’ted the place and ain’t set foot on it since the murders.” Nobie walks over to the spigot, turns on the water, then bends down and picks up the hose. When the water starts coming out the end, he brings the hose up to his mouth and drinks. Then he aims the spray at his feet. “You let yourself think about it, it can give you the creeps knowing whoever done it could still be living hereabouts.”

“Why would they be?”

“Gotta be living somewhere, ain’t they?”

“Yeah,” says John. He turns, starts walking toward the front of the house, and is stopped by Nobie’s voice.

“Maybe you’ll think ’bout it, huh, John? ’Bout the job?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. Think it over. There ain’t no hurry.”

Glamorous women in nightgowns, underwear, bathing suits. Marble-skinned, haunted-eyed women. Women dressed in striped ties and suits. Starved-looking women. Women with sour pouts, bored frowns, mad, toothless smiles. Women with weight-trained muscles and gnarly-looking breasts coiled like jack-in-the-boxes beneath their skin-tight outfits. Women who beckon alluringly. Laugh haughtily. Jut out their chins, asses, elbows. Shave their heads. Wear tattoos. Show their nipples beneath their shirts. Dance, sing, stride like racehorses around tartan tracks. Who look right through him as if he is the air they breathe.

Dozens of Moira’s old
Redbooks
and
Glamours
lie among empty beer cans on the front deck beneath where John sits leafing through them, searching for a look similar to the
dead girl’s, a face to recall hers, with its novelties and nuances. Straining the limits of his memory, he seeks to contradict his unconscious, nightmarish revelations from the previous night. But he can’t make her complete. She is inchoate in his mind—a pretty face, an adolescent’s evolving body, pale blue eyes, dirty-blond ponytail.

The sun sits straight over the mountain. Puffy white clouds, shaped like beanbags, rest above both horizons. The heat from the last several days is unabated. There is almost no breeze to temper it. John thinks he might not recognize her were she to walk this very minute into the trailer, so intent had he been after killing her not just to conceal her death from the world but to expunge her life, to act as if she’d never been. That, he realizes, was a worse crime than shooting her. People who loved her—her parents, her two girlfriends, Tools and Germ—even now must be wondering where she is. And Waylon? Maybe he’d loved her also.

He stands up, walks inside and over to the kitchen wall phone, not sure whom he intends to call, until he picks up the receiver and dials the county sheriff’s department.

“I’m calling ’bout that girl,” he says, then, thinking he ought to disguise his voice, jerks the phone from his ear and reaches above the sink for a dish towel.

“Hello?” says a woman’s voice.

“Just a minute,” says John. He puts the towel over the phone’s mouthpiece. “ ’Bout that girl…”

“What girl?”

“The one lost.”

“Please speak up, sir. I can’t hear you.”

“The girl.”

“I heard that part. What girl?”

“The one reported missing—the runaway—I’m calling ’bout her.”

“About who?”

“The missing girl.”

“Which one?”

“Ain’t somebody reported a girl’d run off recent?”

“We’ve got an envelope full of flyers, sir. In country and out.”

“Flyers?”

“About missing kids. Runaways. Are you talking about a particular girl.”

“One ’bout sixteen? Blond ponytail? Blue eyes?”

“Does she have a name?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“What?”

“I don’t know her name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to call you something.”

“You ain’t got to call me nothin’.”

“How do you know she’s run away?”

“Was in her pants.”

“What?”

“Was a note in her pants pocket. Said she’d run off.”

“Note from who?”

“Her.”

“To who?”

“Somebody else.”

“Do you know who she ran from?”

“If I did, I w’udn’t be calling the goddamn sheriff.”

“How’d you happen onto the note?”

“What?”

“What were you doing in her pocket?”

“Somethin’ bad happened her. An accident.”

“What sort of accident.”

The phone starts shaking in John’s hand.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Does she need an ambulance?”

“What?”

“Does the girl need medical assistance?”

“No.”

“Would you hold on for a minute, please, sir?”

“What for?”

“I’m going to let you speak to an officer.”

“I’m just tryin’ to find out her name. That’s all.”

“Hello?” says a male voice.

John hangs up the phone.

Paralyzed by his predicament, he sits in one of the plastic deck chairs, with the beer cooler resting at his feet, and watches through binoculars for the black Chevy Blazer to descend from Hollenbachs’.

The kitchen clock ticks loudly behind him. Mutt endlessly stalks a woodchuck at the upper edge of Nobies’ pasture. The sun slowly heads for the horizon. John gets drunker. His thoughts fragment. Waylon, the dead girl, the money, Obadiah Cornish, Moira’s leaving him—each, alone, is horrible to consider. Their combined weight is staggering.

He thinks about Ira and Molly Hollenbach’s murder, how the police had questioned about everyone in the area, including John, who’d ever heard Ira brag that hidden in his house was a safe containing over twenty years’ worth of undeclared profits from the quarry and farm that Ira would retire on. Like most of the county’s populace, John theorized that being a blowhard is what got Ira killed. He figured that whoever had cut up Molly to get Ira to open that safe was so enraged at discovering its piddling contents he’d slit both their throats. Now, though, he wonders if Ira really had been loaded and the money John has found was his. But why would the robber have hauled it all the way up to the quarry and buried it? And why would he have left it there for five years?

Through the glare of the late-afternoon sun, he follows the slow descent of the black Chevy Blazer. A quarter mile above Nobies’, it passes by the treeline on that side of the hill and disappears. Why was it up there so long? wonders John. Did he—or they—find the deer carcass? Maybe even the girl’s body? If so, now what? John remembers how, in front of Puffy’s, Waylon and Obadiah Cornish had suddenly changed their minds about crossing the street in front of a police car. Could one—or both of them—be wanted by the law? The phone’s ring makes him jump. He knocks a half-filled beer bottle onto the deck.

“My lawyer’s going for an order of protection tomorrow, John. From now on, you’re to stay away from the house.” Moira’s calling from a pay phone. John hears voices in the background. “You can’t just go around breaking windows and leaving rancid meat in people’s—John?”

“Yes?”

She lowers her voice some. “Are you in trouble?”

“What?”

“Did you…?” Her voice becomes a whisper. “John, for God’s sake, where did all that money come from?”

“It’s for you and Nolan.”

“There’s over four thousand dollars there!”

“A few months’ advance.”

“Advance?”

“There’ll be more.”

“More?”

“We can buy a new home if we want, Moira.”

“What’s going on, John? Are you all right?”

“You at school?”

“Yes. Look, John—I can’t spend this.”

John watches out the window as Mutt makes a blind rush for the woodchuck, which whistles harshly, then dives into its hole. Mutt puts its nose to the hole and starts sniffing.

“Some son of a bitch looks like Ichabod Crane was fucking the babysitter when I showed up.”

“Carla told me…”

“I had every right to call the social services.”

“You can’t believe I knew about it!”

“I could go for a change in custody.”

“You don’t want custody, John. You don’t even want to babysit!”

“Who’s Obadiah Cornish?”

“Some friend of Carla’s. I didn’t ask him over.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know what else. I only met him a few days ago. He used to live around here, he said.”

“He ask about me?”

“Just chitchat—about hunting, that sort of thing. He said he remembered you were quite a hunter—made some joke about your poaching.”

“What do you know about the guy he hangs around with?”

“Who?”

“Heavyset guy, dark—they came out of Puffy’s together.”

“I don’t know anything about him.” A recorded voice comes on the line and tells Moira to deposit another twenty-five cents. “John—I’m giving the money back.”

“I won’t take it.”

“I’ll put it away someplace, then. I don’t know what you’ve done, John, but…”

“What’s it like there?”

“Where?”

“School?”

“I don’t know. It’s school, John. That’s all. A lot of work…”

John hears what sounds like a rifle shot outside. He watches Mutt’s body lift a foot in the air, fall to the ground, and lie still. “Jesus…”

“John?”

“I got to go. They shot Mutt!”

John cries when he sees him. Half his head’s been blown off. He’s got a mouthful of grass and foam and lies on his side like he’s been thrown there. The bullet’s buried itself in the dirt
or flown off into the woods. The shot looks to have come from down the hill, on the town side of Nobies’.

Cecil answers John’s call on the barn phone. John hears mooing, buckets clanging, the whir of milking machines. “He leave?”

“What, John?”

“The son of a bitch shot Mutt!”

“Who shot Mutt?”

“Who was there?”

“The one in the black Chevy Blazer. Had a picture of some girl. Wanted to know if we’d seen her.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Long drink a’ water. Said he was a private investigator hired by the girl’s family. Her boyfriend’s from these parts. S’posedly they was seen two days ago headin’ into the east entrance the preserve. That’s why he’s been nosin’ round.”

“He show ya a badge?”

“Somethin’ in plastic. Said the parents are offerin’ twenty thousand dollars to whoever helps find the girl. I said he ought to talk to you, seeing as how half your life’s lived in the woods round. He didn’t come see ya?”

“No.”

“If the girl’s found—dead or alive—with all her b’longings, the twenty thousand, he said, ’ll be paid no questions asked.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Go figure.”

“He involve the law?”

“Weren’t my bus’ness ta ask.”

“Bastard killed my dog, Cecil! Didn’t ya hear the shot?”

“I can’t hear nothin’ ’bove this racket. Why would he shoot Mutt?”

“I’d like to know. You watch him leave?”

“Had better things to do. I saw him walk out the barn, get in his car, and head for the hollow road’s all. You gon’ call the sheriff?”

“I ain’t. Don’t you neither.”

“I got nothin’ ta say to him.”

The first time he showed up at the trailer he had a faceful of porcupine quills. Moira and John had been married less than a year. They spent two hours with pliers, pulling the quills out. Mutt, who was only half grown, never even whimpered. “You’re one tough mutt, Mutt,” Moira kept telling him.

He was a fighter. He fought for fun—raccoons, foxes, even a bobcat once. Following his bouts, he’d drop in at the trailer, showing off his wounds, looking to be patched up, fed, patted, bedded down for a few nights on the living-room floor. Then he’d get restless. He was a good dog. Never caused any problems. Just lived his life. Someone had house-trained him once or he’d learned himself. Moira was real impressed with his cleanliness. She called him “a mannered rogue.”

John picks the dog up in his arms, carries him over next to the garden, lays him on the grass. He digs a hole in the soft loam there, places Mutt in the hole, then slowly covers him with dirt. Afterwards, he sticks a large flat stone vertically into the soil. Standing above the grave, he folds his hands, closes his eyes, and thinks about Mutt’s wagging tail causing
his whole body to whip side to side like a rod yanked by a hooked fish. He thinks of the three of them—Mutt, Moira, and John—lying together in front of a fire on cold winter nights. He says a short prayer. He asks God to let Mutt fight in heaven.