AN HOUR AND a half later they were coming off of 202 in Malvern. The sky was full of clouds, white and dark blue moving across the sun. Things could go either way, more rain or more sun. There was a breeze, but it was just hot air moving. Ray kept trying Danny’s cell phone number but got nothing. It didn’t mean much. Danny used, and he could’ve lost the phone or had his service turned off or just been bingeing on dope and ignoring the ring. They turned onto a narrow country lane, and Ray began looking at the numbers on mailboxes. Finally they turned into a driveway that wasn’t much more than a trail into the woods.
The house where Danny lived with his mother was speckled with green’some kind of mold or fungus that made it seem as if the house were being reclaimed by the forest. There was a washing machine rusting in the yard and cracked and rotted asbestos tiles on the walls. A pickup truck sat in the carport with blue plastic covering a missing passenger side window. Manny turned off the engine, and they sat for a minute, watching the house. Somewhere far away a dog barked and birds moved in the trees. Ray began to open the door, and Manny put a hand on his arm and reached into the backseat for the vests. They struggled into them, sweat pouring down their backs, and then stretched and shrugged, trying to get used to the bulk. Manny lifted a hip and awkwardly dug a one-hitter out of his jeans, and they both did jolts of brown meth. Ray smacked his forehead while the dope burned in his sinuses like he’d fired a flare gun into his head.
They both got out and left the doors of the 4Runner open. Ray held up his hand for Manny to stay at the car. He nodded to Ray and pulled his shotgun from under the seat and stood with the open door between him and the house. Ray reached over the seat and got his Colt semiauto and worked the slide, putting a round in the chamber. Maybe it was all for nothing, maybe Danny was okay and they could give him some money and send him packing, but the house sat there closed and quiet in the woods, and Manny and Ray looked at each other, feeling wrong.
Manny wiped sweat from his face with the heel of his hand. He flexed his shoulders and whispered, “Christ, I can barely move in this thing. I feel like a fucking astronaut.”
Ray held the Colt behind his leg and walked to the front door. He looked back at Manny and then knocked on the door with his fist. “Danny!”
They stood for a minute. Ray blotted at the sweat at his temple with the back of his free hand. He knocked again, this time banging the butt of the pistol against the door. After a minute he tried the door and found it unlocked. He looked back at Manny, who put the shotgun sight on the door. Ray stood clear and pushed the door open, flattening himself against the outside wall. There was no sound except the door creaking as it opened. Manny shook his head.
Ray moved inside, pointing the gun into the hallway ahead of him. He called Danny’s name again and waited. After a minute with no sound but the birds in the trees and the faraway dog, he moved down the hallway into the kitchen. He circled through the first floor, checking the empty rooms. The place was a mess, and there was a stink of unemptied garbage and mildew. In the living room there was a big new flat- screen TV standing next to the box it came in. This was Danny spending his end of the score he had put Manny and Ray onto before he even got his hands on it. In the living room a few steps from the front door, a suitcase was open on the floor. Clothes were pulled out and heaped on the dirty carpet.
He went to the front door and shrugged at Manny, who came out from behind the car door and moved around the back of the house. Ray went up the stairs, and the garbage smell got stronger. All the doors were open except one, and Ray moved to it and stood in front of it for a moment, adjusting the pistol in his sweaty hand. Finally he pushed the door open and looked for a minute before stepping away and breathing through his mouth, gasping and spitting to keep from throwing up.
He forced himself to look again. An old woman was in the tub. There was blood and vomit on her chin and down the front of her robe. One eye stared, a milky blue. There was a hole in her chest and her throat was open. There were flies walking in the blood on her mouth and a terrible buzzing noise that filled the small room. Ray used the sleeve of his coat to grab the door handle and pulled it closed, wiping it again after it was shut. He didn’t want to see what might be in the other rooms and ran down the stairs and out the front door. He heard Manny calling his name as he wiped the doorknob and pulled the door shut.
He moved cautiously around the house, the gun out and pointing down. He came around the corner into a junk- strewn backyard. Manny passed him going the other way, back out to the car. In the back a Plymouth Fury was up on blocks, the exposed wheels rusted through. There was a woodpile with spiderwebs running down one side and an ancient deflated football stuck in the mud. There was a clothesline strung from the house to a pole stuck in cracked cement. And there was Danny, staring at the sky. Thinning red hair showing white scalp, pale blue eyes. His right arm was broken over a flat tree stump, and there was an axe separating his right hand from his fingers.
Ray heard the car starting and looked around the yard, rubbing his own right arm. He looked everywhere but at Danny. After a minute, he went back to the front of the house.
Manny was on the cell phone when he got in the car. Manny started it up and began to back the car around, pointing the nose down the driveway.
“Sherry? Yeah, hon, it’s me. How you doing?”
Ray looked in the glove compartment, thinking there must be something to drink in this fucking car.
“Good. That’s good.” Manny stopped the car and reached into a green sport bag. He pulled out a pint of something wrapped in a paper bag and handed it to Ray. “Nothing, just wanted to hear your voice.” Ray took a long drink of what he thought was some kind of sickly sweet schnapps. “Listen, Sherry? I want you to take your mom and drive to Atlantic City. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah, I know but just do it right now. Don’t pack, don’t fuck around or call anyone. Just go.” Ray could hear a shrill voice on the other end, but not the words. “Don’t worry about money or anything. Sherry, you can scream at me later. You can scream at me all night long, I promise. Sherry. Sherry. Just hang up the fucking phone and get your fucking mother into a car and go to the Trop. Use the card I gave you for emergencies and get a nice room and take a bath.” Manny put the car back in gear. “I’m hanging up now, Sherry. I love you. I know. I’ll see you in a few hours.” The voice on the other end was still going when Manny folded the phone and dropped it on the floor.
“Will she go?”
“She’ll go. She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s not stupid.”
Ray looked back at the house. His hands were shaking, and he watched Manny’s head swivel, looking around them into the trees. “Why did they do that?”
“Who knows?”
“I mean, you know he gave us up the second they walked through the door.”
“I know.”
“So why do that?”
“They’re animals.”
The windshield shattered with the first gunshot, then a man stepped from the trees with a shotgun raised and the glass went white and blew in. Ray felt shards of glass hit his face and upraised arms. Manny pushed his door open and jumped out with the Remington in his hands, screaming something unintelligible, the 4Runner still moving. Ray threw himself over the backseat, wondering how bad he was cut. They moved fast, amped by the crank and adrenaline, and Ray was more afraid than he could ever remember being in his life.
There was a loud pop and more glass breaking. He flattened himself in the bed of the trunk, yanking the pistol out of his waistband and shooting wildly toward the front of the car at nothing he could see. The SUV smacked into a thin tree trunk and stopped moving, and he cracked his head against the wall. Ray heard the heavy bang of Manny’s pump gun and the cracking sound of the slide working, and he flailed at the hatchback door handle. He pushed it open and let himself fall out onto the driveway. More shots rang off the metal and starred the glass over his head.
He could hear Manny racking the shotgun and firing and the hollow plastic chime of the expended shells hitting the ground. He stuck his head under the car and saw two sets of legs in front of the car, one moving left and one right. He put the front sights of the pistol on the set of legs on the right and pulled the trigger twice while Manny screamed something, burning off the fear and dope. The recoil of the gun stung his hand, and the shells ejected up and pinged off the tailpipe of the 4Runner. Someone screamed, and a guy wearing a black leather jacket fell heavily onto the driveway, grabbing his ankle. Ray fired again and hit the front tire on the right side.
Ray pulled himself out from under the car as it lowered on the flattening tire. He pointed the gun to his left, waiting for the other one to come out into view. The barrel of a long gun appeared at the left, and Ray tried not to breathe, wondering how many shots were left in the pistol. He held himself rigid and watched more of the gun barrel appear as the shooter slowly made his way down the side of the Toyota. Finally the guy made a quick move into the open, raising the shotgun and swiveling to put the front sight on Ray. He was wearing black leather, like the big man down in the driveway, and wraparound sunglasses. Ray could see tattoos on his hands and spiking up his neck from inside his shirt. There was a bang that Ray felt in his chest, and the guy folded up, blood haloing his head. Ray pulled the trigger involuntarily, and the shot pushed the biker onto his back, his eyes open. Ray could hear the other, bigger guy down in the driveway moaning and calling them motherfuckers.
Manny moved out of the woods to the left. He gestured with the shotgun toward the front of the car, and Ray wheeled and pointed the pistol down the passenger side of the 4Runner. The big guy was pulling himself along the driveway, leaving a trail of blood in the wet grass and gravel. Ray ran to the front of the car and pulled the door open. He thumbed the magazine catch, dropping the clip. He pulled another clip from the sport bag and pushed it into the Colt and racked the slide, his hands shaking and blood dripping from his face onto his hands. He closed the door as the big biker pushed himself to his feet and began to limp down the driveway.
Manny said, “Hey!” and the big man pointed the gun clumsily behind him as he tried to hobble faster down the trail. Ray pulled the trigger, holding the gun low, and the biker’s legs went out from under him and he screamed again. He dropped his pistol and kept moving, crawling hand over hand and moaning into the dirt.
Ray ran over and kicked the guy hard in the ribs. The guy put one arm around his stomach and puked into the grass. Ray dropped onto his hands and knees and smacked the guy in the head with the butt of the pistol again and again. He saw the dead woman in the bathroom and Danny’s staring eyes. He was aware of an animal sound, a snarling wail that was coming out of his own throat but that he had no more control over than if it had been coming from someone else. Manny grabbed him under the arms and pulled him off the guy and threw him into the grass, and Ray lay there, breathing like he’d run a mile. He lifted his pistol and saw that his hands were bathed in red and there was blood and matted hairs on the butt of the gun. He could feel a pounding in his ears and blood ran into his eyes.
He flipped over onto his stomach and put the pistol down. He could hear Manny rummaging around in the car and then his footsteps coming closer. Somewhere insects started a reedy hymn, one note rising and falling.
“Hold out your hands.”
He did as he was told and he felt tepid water being poured over his bloody fingers. He splashed the water into his eyes and blinked, and gradually his vision cleared and he sat back on his haunches. He took the bottle from Manny and poured more of it over his head before he gave it back. Manny upended the bottle and fin ished the last of it, then threw the bottle back into the open door of the Toyota. Somewhere crows made terrible noises, like someone coughing out a last few choking breaths. Ray looked over at the biker, who was staring at something in the grass, his pupils black.
He was wearing colors, a black vest with the name of a club Ray didn’t know and FRANCONIA, NH embroidered on it in red, and blood in, blood out. There were skulls and lightning bolts tattooed on his neck and the exposed parts of his arms. On the back of one hand was a spidery jail house tat of the words lights out.
“Look in his pockets.” Manny called over his shoulder as he went around the Toyota to the other body. Ray got up stiffly and went over the big man, turning out the pockets. He pulled a clip for the pistol, a lighter, a lock knife, a pack of cigarettes, and a set of keys out of the leather jacket and threw them into a pile in the grass. In a back pocket of the greasy black jeans he found an envelope with names scrawled on the back. Danny Mullen, Hoe Down, Manny’s name, and his. His name was underlined.
When he came back around the SUV, Ray saw now that Manny was moving stiffly and he watched as Manny painfully shucked off the vest. He held it up to Ray, and Ray could see a dull slug stuck to the jacket on the right side of the chest. Manny slowly pulled his shirt open, and there was a red welt over his rib cage. He shook his head in a gesture that might have meant anything.
The Toyota started, and Manny pointed it off the road into the trees. He threw their bags and as many of the spent shells from Ray’s gun as he could find out onto the grass and then stuffed everything into one of the bags. Ray got a shoulder under the smaller of the two bodies and pushed him into the back and slammed the door. They each grabbed an arm of the bigger biker and dragged him to the passenger door of the front seat and clumsily dumped him in. He looked at their faces one last time. Neither of them was the young guy with a black goatee. Which meant he was still out there, still looking for them. Ray got behind the wheel of the SUV and began to pull forward again into the trees, leaning forward to look through the hole smashed through the cracked windshield.
He drove as far as he could away from the rutted track and into the woods, maneuvering around trees and over stumps and rocks that crunched against the undercarriage, occasionally stopping to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes. Finally he got out and went around wiping down surfaces in the car with the gray blanket from the trunk. He took the flask out of his pocket and stuffed one end of the blanket into the gas tank and dumped some of the schnapps onto it. He dumped the rest over the bodies, stinking of shit and meat already starting to turn in the heat.
Christ, when things happened they moved fast. Both events, the farm house and now in the woods with the bikers’it was like they were over before they began. Before he could make rational decisions or some kind of plan. Standing there looking at two dead men in a wrecked car, he tried to think how long it had all taken. Three minutes, five? He played things over and over in his head, but all he got was a kind of faulty instant replay that came out different every time.
In the movies they showed gunplay in slow motion, but that wasn’t it, really. It was more like everything was speeded up except you. Everyone was moving fast, coming at you with deliberation and purpose, and you couldn’t finish a thought or get ready for the next thing. He thought maybe it was like being in a hurricane or a tornado, something fast and out of control.
He flicked the lighter he had taken from the biker and lit up the blanket and walked away through the trees. When he reached the drive again, Manny was waiting with a bag over his shoulder and the other one in his hands. He was looking down the rutted trail toward the house and chewing on his lip. His face was stained with dirt cut by lines of sweat from his hairline, and there were bits of broken glass on his shirt and in his hair. Ray turned and looked into the woods, but he couldn’t see the SUV anymore.
“Did it catch?”
“I don’t know. It did or it didn’t and either way we got to go.”
“You have keys?”
Ray held up the set of keys he took off the biker and jangled them. Somewhere nearby was another car. There was a distant smell of smoke, and somewhere the dog started up again, a remote, impotent sound of rage. Ray thought that if there was a God, that was his voice, just a distant complaint that didn’t make anything come out any different.
Flies buzzed, and a fat black bee made a machinelike rumble as it passed by his head. He stumbled down the drive toward the road and thought about the flies in the bathroom and the man he had just killed, his head open in the dirt. He realized this was what he had been waiting for his whole life. All of the beatings he took, every night his father had lunged at his mother or stood at the bottom of the stairs smacking a leather belt into his hand. All the times in Juvie when some hulking lump of shit smacked him down or some guard in a county jail popped him across the knuckles with a stick because he could, because Ray was inside a cage and the guard was outside and he just fucking could. Ray had taken it and stored it up like a battery, all of it, every fucking thing. All for this day, when it would come pouring out of his heart and into his hands. It was something electric, something that gave off an ozone smell and made him dizzy and blind, like being electrocuted by crossed wires in his own brain.
THEY HEADED NORTH again in a black van they found parked in the woods near the end of the drive.
When they got in, Manny handed Ray a cell phone. “I took it off the little guy.”
Ray thumbed through the memory, looking at calls that had come in and gone out and stored numbers. One of these, Ray thought, was probably the guy in the Charger.
They stopped at a pharmacy in Malvern, and Ray stayed in the car while Manny went in and bought a bunch of bottled water, alcohol, and Band- Aids. Ray looked at the cut on his forehead, glued over with dried blood and bits of grass and dirt. When Manny came back they drove to a remote corner of a shopping center parking lot, and Ray sat on the edge of the seat, pouring water over the cut to get the dried blood and dirt off and then dabbing at it with the alcohol. Cleaned up, it wasn’t that bad. Deep, but not wide. He put a Band- Aid on and smoothed it down clumsily, looking into the side mirror. With his hair pushed forward it was pretty much invisible. Manny had torn his jeans and had a scrape on one elbow where the shirt was ripped away. Ray dabbed at it with alcohol, and Manny made a fist and swore. He kept touching the tender place on his rib cage and pulling his shirt back to look at the welt.
The cell phone rang. They both looked at it on the seat for a minute, then Ray picked it up and held it a few inches from his face.
“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound indistinct.
“What happened? You said you were going to call or come back in an hour.” The voice was different than the young guy in the Charger. The voice on the phone was another New En glan-der, but he sounded older and rougher- edged than the young guy from the car at the farm house.
Ray moved the phone away from his mouth again to talk, trying out an imitation of the accent. “I’m all turned around out here. How do I get back there?”
“Did they show up?”
“No, but we can’t stay here.”
“Well, the man here needs his money. You come back here and get cleaned up, you’re going right back out to work, got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Tell the truth, I don’t know where the good Christ I am down here either.” There was a hoarse laugh, a sound like someone gargling stones. “Let me ask Scott.” Scawt. There was shouting and calls for Scott and music in the background. A bar, maybe, or a party going on. He heard the older guy saying that the knuckleheads were lost and needed directions back, and then the noise of the phone being passed around, and then the Voice. The guy from the Charger.
“Which one is this?” Ray was about to speak when he heard the question answered at the other end of the line. It’s Eldon, the older guy said, and called him Knucklehead One.
“Eldon?”
“Yeah,” Ray said, trying to keep it quiet.
“Can you find 202?”
“Yeah.”
“Just come up 202 to 422, keep going north.” Nahth. Ray was making mental notes in case he was called on to say more. The young guy gave them directions to a place in the woods between Kulpsville and Lansdale. A place with a long driveway, probably another farm house meth lab.
“Got it, knucklehead?” said the Voice, and laughed.
“Fuck off. Later.” He hung up.
MANNY DROPPED RAY off at his apartment. He showered, put his clothes in a plastic bag and threw them away, and then opened the new things he had bought himself at Wal- Mart. He was still alert, unsure, kept jumping up at every slammed door on the street and looking out the window at the traffic. He looked around and realized he’d have to stop coming back here, find some other place to be. When he looked at the clock he realized it was almost seven, and he sat on his bed in his underwear and thought for a minute if it was smart to put everything on hold while he went to meet Michelle. Thinking of her name knocked it over in his mind, and he quickly got dressed. He pulled the dirty Band- Aid off his head and put on a smaller one, a round dot that was almost covered by his hair.
Outside, the sky ran from bright blue in the east to dark clouds and flashes of lightning in the west, but he couldn’t tell if things were going to get better or worse. Going north toward Doyle -stown he felt weirdly relaxed again, his guard down, as if it were possible to take a time- out from his game and just be a normal human being. He put the radio on and found a station playing a Matt Pond PA song, upbeat music that reminded him of old Moody Blues. The wind picked up, trying to pull the car out his hands and rolling leaves and bits of paper across 611.
It was almost seven twenty when he reached the little coffee shop. He stood outside and watched her through the glass, sitting at a small table, reading a newspaper with a mug of coffee in front of her. The shop was tiny, just a few tables, a counter with ice cream. It looked cool and quiet, and he wanted to go inside, but he just stood and watched her. He could see the lines by her eyes. What could he have been thinking, coming here? Maybe it was just that she looked a little like Marletta. Some quality in her face. The same honey- colored skin, familiar brown and sympathetic eyes. But who was she? He was falling from the top of a building, and she was someone who looked out a window, catching a glimpse of him on his way to the sidewalk.
He put his hands up in front of him. They were mottled with bruises and traced with old scars. He stuck them in his pockets, but he could still feel them, swollen from what he had done. He watched her for a long time. She sipped at the coffee and looked at her watch, but she never looked up. There was something about the way she looked around her, something he recognized. Stealing glances at people and avoiding eye contact. He had taken it for flirtatiousness, but it was something else. He became conscious of the sun going down, of the street darkening. He willed her to look up and wave to him, wave him in so he could go inside and sit down, but she kept her eyes on the paper.
A couple with a baby sat down at the table next to her in a shower of pastel- colored toys and diaper bags, and she turned to look at the back of the baby’s white head. Michelle’s eyes were blank and unreadable, and Ray got that she was seeing things that weren’t in the room.
He looked up the street to his left, and when he swung his head right there was a young guy wearing sunglasses just past his elbow. He had one of those complicated- looking goatees with skinny lines of hair running alongside his mouth and down along his jaw. Ray could see a pimple under the kid’s ear and could smell his breath, fruity and sour from what ever he’d been drinking. The guy was smiling, his head cocked, and he had a jacket on and his hand in his pocket. Ray stepped back, away from the window, hoping that now wasn’t the moment Michelle would finally look up. The guy leaned into him and shook his head, and Ray turned toward him. He sensed someone move behind him, then felt a big hand on his left shoulder and heard breathing close to his ear. The kid raised his eyebrows and nodded as if Ray had asked a question.
“I seen a lot of stupid people, but you’re right up there.” The kid looked up and down the street and kept his voice low. “Man, you walk around like you got no cares. Are you really brave, is that it?” The kid moved the bulge in his jacket where his right hand lay and nodded toward the street. “You Bruce Willis, is that the thing?” The hand on his shoulder squeezed, and Ray flinched. They got closer to the curb, and Sunglasses put a hand up and gestured to someone down the street. Ray heard a throaty engine. He watched a van creep along the curb toward them.
Ray looked up and down the street. There were people around, but no one was closer than a half block away, and it was almost dark. He saw a young couple standing in front of the movie theater, the boy with curly brown hair, the girl gesturing toward a poster. They began to sort money out in front of the ticket booth, and Ray thought that by the time they got out of the movie he’d be in a hole in the woods somewhere and this kid would be kicking dirt and leaves over his face.
“You’re like a goldfish in a bowl, you know it?” The kid shook his head at Ray. “You don’t even hide from us? Come right back to your house, drive around in your own car?” The van pulled up, and Sunglasses put his free hand on Ray’s arm. He was conscious of the big man behind him moving, and then the guy stepped into view, reaching for the sliding side door of the van. He was big across the shoulders and had a shaved head, a black T-shirt, a shelf of gut over his jeans. The kid was still talking. “Eldon called me, told me your name, I figured we’d never see you again.” He started to laugh and swung his head up and down the street. “Is this, like, your job? Nine to five you’re a scumbag thief, then what? You like, punch out, go home, go see a movie?”
The big guy was turned to the door, standing in a gap between two parked cars. The kid was crowding Ray into the gap, trying to jab him with the gun hidden in his coat. There was a buzzing noise and the streetlights came on. The kid reached up and grabbed his sunglasses and began to lift them off his eyes. Ray dropped almost to his knees and then snapped up straight, cracking the top of his head against the kid’s chin and knocking him off balance. The big guy with the bald head was still turned to the van, and Ray pushed with both hands against the kid’s head, smacking it against the hood of the car behind him. The sunglasses rattled onto the car’s hood, the kid blinking, stunned.
Then he ran. He didn’t turn to look behind him, he just took off running as fast as he could down the street, past the theater. He heard the kid’s high voice, yelling something, a low grumble from someone else, and then the squealing of the van’s tires as the driver gunned the engine. He felt like his back was a target a mile wide under the lights. He saw the faces of people down the street and wanted to call to them, signal them somehow, but his throat was frozen and he couldn’t force any sound out of it.
He saw a gap between the stores on his right that resolved into an alley as he got closer, and he pivoted as he reached it and poured on as much speed as he could as he made the corner. He was a few steps down the alley when the van screeched its brakes and stopped on the street behind him. Then he could hear it bumping over the curb, trying to jockey into the alley. He could hear the footsteps, too, the kid’s lighter ones and the heavy clomp of the big guy’s boots farther back.
Ahead of him the alley emptied into a small parking lot with meters. Past the lot the town was dark and he tried to move faster. He was about five yards from a white Lexus SUV trying to make up his mind which way to break at the end of the alley, the van’s engine getting louder, when he heard a popping sound and the side window of the Lexus blew in. Two more shots smacked into the car, leaving black holes the size of quarters, and he involun-tarily jumped left, away from the shots, and cut between a Mer-cedes and another SUV, a Lincoln Navigator big enough to give him some cover as he kept going, the air burning in his mouth and lungs.
He heard a roar behind him, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see the van two feet behind him hit the massive Lincoln dead on the rear end with a popping noise of breaking glass and grinding metal. The Navigator rocked on its springs, and Ray dropped and clawed his way under the Mercedes. He could smell oil and metal and fried food from the kitchens of restaurants. There was shouting now and the sound of feet scraping along the asphalt, a civilian getting into it with whoever was driving the van.
“What the fuck?” he heard a raspy voice say, a man, maybe in his fifties. “That’s my fucking car.” Ray shimmied back and forth, trying to see what he could from under the Mercedes. It was a tight squeeze. His hair caught on something; flecks of rust drizzled into his eyes. The older man was loud, and his voice echoed from different points around the small, boxed- in lot.
“What the fuck are you doing?” To his right he saw oily black boots and then a pair of white bucks, probably the guy with the raspy voice. He heard someone hitting the buttons on a cell phone. “Don’t go anywhere,” he heard the guy say. He heard two low voices conferring, then a pop and a scuffling noise. The white bucks tilted, and a face slapped the ground, inches away from his, and Ray almost shouted. It was a man with white hair slicked back from his face. The face was tan, freckled, the eyes blue. The features were empty and slack, and a red arc of blood poured out of his temple and hit the ground. Ray had to cover his mouth with his hands to keep from making some kind of sound.
“Dumb fuck!” He heard a young voice, out of breath, probably the kid with the sunglasses. “You are the dumbest dumb fuck I ever saw.” There was more of the other voice, low, and then running steps and the van engine roared. He saw the van tires backing up and heard a sound of tearing metal and plastic, and the rear bumper of the Navigator hit the ground. There were sirens now and more running feet and screaming somewhere away to his left.
He could see the van tires arcing away to his right, and then it vanished from view. He began shimmying again, pushing with his feet against the tires of the Mercedes and slowly extracting himself from under the car on the driver’s side, away from the body of the man with white hair and his terrible blank eyes. He got free and lay there for a second, his chest scraped raw, his heart hammering.
There was a guy in a white apron holding a meat cleaver standing a few feet away who jumped a little when he saw Ray trying to pull himself upright. “Jesus Christ, are you all right?”
Ray made a dismissive wave with his right hand. “Okay,” he finally got out.
“Did you see them shoot that guy? Jesus Christ. They just shot him.”
“I, uh.” Ray was suddenly dizzy, out of breath, the words hanging somewhere in his brain he couldn’t get to. “I just…” He made a diving motion with his hand: himself crawling under the car. “When I heard the shots.”
“No shit.” The cook nodded; he’d have done the same thing. “Who needs that shit? That big fuck must be crazy.” A crowd was starting to form, people coming out of a restaurant, a bar, a candy store and taking tentative steps toward what ever was going on in the lot.
Ray moved toward them, bending over, trying to look as stricken as possible. “I have to…” He pointed vaguely toward the bar door he could see open.
“Sure,” the guy in the apron said. He waved with the knife. “The cops are on their way. Fucking shot, over a fender bender. Christ.”
Ray walked through the crowd. The first few people he passed looked at his face, but farther back in the crowd people were just trying to see past him, craning their necks, moving around him. He picked up the pace as he reached a sidewalk, a path between some shops that led toward the street. He walked faster, then began to jog. Where was his car?
He moved north along a tree- lined street, looking for a way to cut back toward where he had left the Camaro. He walked a long block and turned left and there was a police car, its lights on, stopped at the curb. Ray’s breath caught in his throat. A young kid with long hair was bent over, hands in his pockets, talking to the cops through the open window. Ray tried not to react, walking purposefully, trying to look as interested as any passerby would be in a cop car with its lights on, slowly blowing through his nose to keep his breathing under control. The block was short, and he kept moving up a hill as if he knew where he was going. He kept his eyes straight ahead and resisted the urge to turn and look at the cops. He passed a low building, some kind of club or lodge or something. One of those places that Ray imagined was full of dark paneling and leather chairs where men smoked cigars and talked about business. Past that he came to where another small alley opened out to the street. He turned left and saw the cop car coming out of a three- point turn and then heading up the hill toward him. No siren, but the lights going; blue, red, white.
When he was out of sight of the cops Ray began to run, his steps echoing between the close- set houses, and he looked for a place to disappear. He passed two low stone houses and jogged left and pushed through a waist- high wood gate and followed a cement path green with mildew into the dark behind a three- story Victorian haunted house, the windows dark and empty. He stopped and listened but didn’t hear the cop car or see its lights. They might not even be looking for him, might not know he was involved in what had happened in the parking lot. He stood for a while in the dark, listening to faint sounds from other parts of town. Sirens, kids shouting, music from a house somewhere nearby. A party maybe. He took his time threading his way through an abandoned garden of flattened tomato plants, gray and dead in the heat. He stepped over a low fence of iron bars and came out into a small space between two massive hedges. It was full dark, the street in front of him lit orange- white by a streetlight.
He was standing in the shadow, trying to orient himself to the street he had parked on, when Michelle appeared two feet away. She was walking uphill, a book under her arm. Her head was down, and she looked lost in thought, her lips moving silently. He put his hand out but didn’t touch her or speak, just watched her pass slowly, inches away. If she had raised her eyes, turned her head, anything. If he had made a sound, cleared his throat, moved suddenly…
Then she was past, and he stepped out. He watched her move up the street and turn a corner, the light catching in her hair, her face in silhouette for a moment. Then she was gone.