Even Steven (16 page)

Russell continued, "So, our victim goes through all of his final preparations for this thing he's going to do, and then he sneaks up on our friends down the hill, only all hell breaks loose. They struggle, they douse him with boiling water, and when it's all done, our cop is dead."

"But what about the screaming?"

"Huh? What screaming?" Then, he remembered. The screaming that had brought them up here to begin with. "Oh. Well, shit. I don't suppose that the noise would travel all this way at night?"

Sarah shook her head and made a sympathetic face. "No, I'm afraid not."

"Damn." Okay, so one major detail still didn't fit, but that didn't necessarily trash the entire theory. Maybe the bad guys were having an argument among themselves. There could be a thousand explanations. But suddenly, Russell found himself mentally married to the notion that the victim was the bad guy; more accurately, that he was a bad guy. For all Russell knew, there were no good guys at all. Maybe this was some gang-related druggie shit where the only disappointment was that someone walked away from the fight at all.

If he liked the idea that Officer Stipton was the bad guy, he loved the notion that the mystery campers were the nominal good guys. Russell's mind re-created a crime scene down the hill: A young couple was minding their own business when this guy with a gun came out of the night, threatening to kidnap one or both of them. One of the campers was able to distract the good officer long enough to douse him with the water, and from there, it's all about the ensuing fight. They're on the ground, rolling in the dirt. The good guy gets his hands on Stipton's gun and he fires.

By God, that explained the angles of the wounds, too, didn't it?

Yessir, this was the answer. The campers killed in self-defence. And then they ran. Why on earth would they do that? What did they have to hide? Well, when he closed that little loop, he'd have the whole mystery solved, wouldn't he?

Russell liked being this close. He liked being able to see the mystery solve itself. All he had to do was stay out of the way of the crime-scene techs, talk to the campers on Sarah's list, and he was willing to bet that he'd have this one ready to file by noon tomorrow.

Noise on the trail told him that his team was on its way.

SAMUEL SAT ATOP the big old tractor in the barn, his hand poised over the ignition switch, staring out through the sagging double doors at the house across the hundred yards of turfy, unkempt grass. He had chores to do and he intended to get to them right away, but inside his head he couldn't quite figure out what had gone wrong. Nothing felt right without Jacob around to tell him what to do, and the more he thought about things, the more he realized just how much was left undone.

Sometimes when he thought about things too hard-things he had to do and things he had to remember-the thoughts grew so large in his mind that they seemed to suffocate themselves, and then he'd get so confused that he couldn't do anything. He hated it when Jacob bossed him around, but at least the bossing kept things in the right order in his head. Now, it was all a big clot.

Because Jacob was dead.

Leaving him there in the woods like that was the hardest thing Samuel had ever done. Everybody knows that dead people left outside get eaten by animals. They get torn apart and split up among the herd or the pack or whatever they are, with the strongest getting the biggest pieces, and the weaker ones settling for what is left. When Samuel closed his eyes, he could see the wild animals from those television shows fighting over his brothers arms and legs, and the images made him want to start crying all over again.

And what about those parts? he wondered. What about the private parts? Would they get torn off and eaten, too? And his toes and his eyeballs?

Oh, please, please make the pictures stop.

He felt terrible for leaving him there. Just terrible. And he'd feel terrible every single day for the rest of his life, but what else could he have done? If there was one thing that Jacob had made clearer than anything else, it was that you never, ever touch a body after it's dead. Not without wearing gloves, and Samuel didn't have any of those with him. His brother had told him a million zillion times: "Whenever you touch the bodies, you leave a little of yourself behind, and that's how you end up in the electric chair."

Samuel didn't understand how it worked, exactly, but he knew that the electric chair burned you all up, and he sure as hell didn't want little bits of himself falling off because he had touched someone, even if it was his only brother. He couldn't imagine how badly either one of those things would hurt, and he had no intention of finding out. Besides, it wasn't important that Samuel understood. Jacob had worried about that stuff a lot-a whole lot-and if it was real enough to worry him, then it was real enough to worry Samuel.

So, who was going to do the worrying now? More importantly, who was going to tell him when it was time to worry? Samuel just wasn't good at that stuff. Hell, he'd almost forgotten to undo the burglar alarm before he walked in the front door! The alarm, for God's sake! Think of what might have happened then. Forgetting the alarm was right near the top of the list of worst things you could possibly do.

Stop worrying, you pussy. Jacob's voice seemed to come out of nowhere, making Samuel jump in his tractor saddle.

"Huh? Jacob? Is that you?"

But now the voice wouldn't answer.

"Come on, Jacob, if you're playing one of your jokes on me, I don't think it's very funny. Now come on out!"

You drove the truck home safely, didn't you?

Now whose voice was that? Like out in the woods, it was getting harder and harder to tell.

Maybe you're a pussy, but at least you drove the truck home. Anybody smart enough to do that is smart enough to do house stuff.

"But that was luck, Jacob. That was just pure, dumb luck. I didn't know what I was doing."

But you did it. That's what counts. You'll be fine.

"I left you out in the woods to be eaten." Even as he spoke aloud, Samuel felt stupid. He knew that Jacob wasn't there-he'd seen the body, for God's sake-so why was he talking to him? Samuel's head started to hurt.

What choice did you have? I told you not to touch me. I told you not to touch anybody, didn't I?

Samuel felt his lip start to quiver, and he knew what was coming next.

Stop that crying shit, you pussy. Be a man. You have to be the man, now that I'm gone.

"You're gone because I killed you."

Those nosy nellies killed me, Samuel. That man at the campfire.

"But I watched."

You did what I told you.

"So I did good?"

You did good, Samuel. You did real good. Now, don't you have some chores to do?

As always, Jacob was right on all counts. Samuel did have chores to do. And he did drive the truck back safely, and all by himself. Without so much as a scratch. Not everyone could do that, you know. No, no, not just everyone. Not for the whole fifty-five minutes without a scratch. You have to be a little special to drive the truck all the way home by yourself.

He'd been sitting there in the barn for a long time with his hand just hovering over the ignition switch, and when he finally moved his arm, his shoulders felt stiff. He kicked out the clutch, opened the choke, and turned the key. For a few seconds, it seemed that maybe the battery hadn't survived the winter, but finally, the starter turned and the big engine coughed to life. It was like this every year for the first cutting of the season. Certainly, it had been this way for the twenty-odd years that Samuel had been doing it. The big old engine ran rough as gravel for the first minute or two, belching thick, blue exhaust out of the tall stack that rose like a tree from the cowling, filling the whole barn with the smell of poorly burned gasoline.

Every year when Samuel would start up the motor, Jacob would be out there to make a big show of coughing and gagging at the smell, swearing that he was going to put a bullet into the beast one day. Actually, Samuel sort of liked the smell, and he knew that Jacob was only kidding about the bullet. He'd never shoot an old friend like his tractor. Not even Jacob would shoot an old friend.

Checking once over his shoulder to make sure the mower deck was still attached (and who would have taken it off in the past fifteen minutes?), Samuel gently eased the throttle forward, engaged the transmission, and lifted his foot off the clutch. The big John Deere moved forward smooth as melted butter. Samuel forced himself to concentrate on the view straight ahead. This was the hardest part, getting the big machine through the opening of the barn. With only about three feet to spare on either side, you had to be careful not to pull the big wooden doors clean off their tracks. He'd done that once, a long time ago, and lordy, lordy, that wasn't something he ever wanted to do again. He'd learned years ago that if you look to one side or another when you're trying to squeeze through a tight spot with the tractor, you're bound to hit exactly where you're looking. The only way to go straight was to look straight.

As he broke out into the cool sunshine, he brought the machine to a halt again. What pattern should he cut today? And where should he start? Way off to his left, up on the top of the hill, the little graveyard beckoned him to come and cut up there first. While the rest of the lawn had gone only about six months without a mow-and truthfully didn't need that much of a trimming, this being early April and all-that little patch up there hadn't been cut in the better part of nine months, and the grass had reached the top of the rotting white pickets. The tombstones themselves would probably be completely invisible by now.

For sure, that was where he should start. He should just climb off the tractor and drag the push mower all the way up the hill and through the narrow gate and just start cutting there first. Give his mama and daddy a chance to see the world around them again.

But he didn't want to. He never much liked going in there, not for as long as the graves had been dug. It was okay when it was just mama, he supposed. He sort of liked talking to her about the things that happened during the day. But once they'd planted his daddy-well, once

Samuel had planted his daddy (Jacob would have nothing to do with it. "Let the son of a bitch get picked apart by birds" is what he'd said)-it just wasn't a happy place to go.

Besides, he wasn't ready yet to tell them about what had happened to Jacob. His brother was always Daddy's favorite, and when he heard that Samuel had got him killed, Daddy was going to be some kind of pissed off. The graveyard could wait.

Instead, Samuel decided to concentrate on the bigger yard-the twenty acres that spread all around everything. Even with a mower this size, it'd take the better part of six or seven hours to do it right, and Samuel needed to do something that would kill the time.

There was a time-Samuel could even remember it-when their twenty acres was more like a hundred, and they used to keep animals. Once their folks passed away, though, Jacob said that farming work was for suckers, and he let everything but the fields closest to the house and the barn just go to hell. Once, those other fields grew corn and soybeans and all other kinds of farm goods. Now, to look at them, you'd think that nobody even owned them.

Somewhere out there in all that mess was the old chicken coop, with its low roof, wire cages, and little wood-frame doors. It's just a pile of charred sticks and greasy feathers now, of course, but sometimes he swore that he could still smell the stink of that place; usually at night, after he'd had his eyes closed for a while. He still laughed when he remembered the sight of Mama chasing those birds through the yard as they made the mad dash to save themselves from the dinner pot. She always made it look a lot harder than it really was because she knew how much it made him laugh to watch.

Samuel felt a kind of affection for chickens, though for the life of him, he could never say why. Maybe it was like his daddy used to say: that they were the only creatures on God's earth that were stupider than him. Jacob, on the other hand, always hated the squawking, stinking animals and enjoyed being the one to wring their necks and dress them for dinner. Samuel could never bring himself to watch that part. He didn't mind eating them, but he didn't like to watch them die.

He used to name them, even after his mama told him to stop doing it. She thought it was terrible to name a creature you were planning to eat, but Samuel saw it more as an issue of dignity. It wasn't as if he made friends with them or anything-they weren't dogs, for crying out loud. It simply seemed nicer to call something Gracie or Agamemnon than to just say, "Here, chick, chick, chick, chick ..."

Hey! Wack-job! You're wasting time again!

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm getting to it." He engaged the PTO, and the whole vehicle shook as the blades came up to speed.

Sometimes, Samuel knew things that Jacob didn't, and this was one of them. He wasn't wasting time. He was planning his cut. Mowing was Samuel's job, and he was good at it; maybe the best there ever was. He liked to make perfectly straight diagonal lines across the open spaces and to finish them off with a flourish of perfectly symmetrical arcs at the corners where he made his turns. Sitting up high like this, dragging the bush hog behind him, the hours would fly by in mere seconds. Six, seven hours at a time-more, if he decided to do a diamond pattern, instead of the simple straight lines-and no one ever yelled at him or called him names or even tried to get him to stop doing the one thing to start another. Those hours on the tractor were his and his alone, and things just didn't get much more perfect than that.