Field of Prey

18

R-A and Horn were watching the news at the same time as Lucas. R-A was down four half-glasses of bourbon, and feeling a little wobbly.

“Those fuckers are all over town,” he said. “They’re not exactly going door-to-door, but it’s pretty close. They’ll be knocking here anytime.”

“Well, don’t let them in,” Horn said. “They get a look at me, and it really is all over.”

“Can’t take a chance of that, no way,” R-A said. He stepped toward Horn, and then Mattsson was on the TV screen, and R-A said, “Ohhhhh. . Jesus.”

“Run back to the bathroom, stroke boy,” Horn said. “Run-run-run-run.”

“Shut up.”

“You still think you’re gonna get her? Looks like she’s hanging out with the state cops now.”

“I’ll get her,” R-A said. “Too bad you won’t be here to see it.”

“C’mon, R-A, are you-”

He stopped talking because R-A stepped behind him and snapped his head off.

Nobody came to the door the first night of the big Holbein-Zumbrota hunt. R-A was keeping his pickup in the garage for the time being, and was getting around in his ten-year-old Suburban. After pulling on some plastic kitchen gloves, he loaded Horn’s mummified corpse into the back of the Suburban, on a plastic sheet, tossed the head on top of the pile, and tied up the bundle. Horn was still wearing the clothes he’d been killed in, though you couldn’t see much blood after fifteen years of rot.

Horn’s wheelchair, which had once belonged to R-A’s father, he carefully washed, out behind the garage, with the Scrubbing Bubbles. When it was clean and dry, he folded and put it in the garage’s storage loft.

At nine-thirty, he drove out of town, heading east. He thought about dropping the bundle on top of the Black Hole, which would be funny, but too risky. After driving around for a while, down narrow and narrower country roads, watching for headlights and nearby farm lights, he said screw it, spotted some tall weeds in a ditch, and threw the bundle into the ditch and the head after it.

He didn’t particularly try to hide it. He was familiar with the countryside, and the way isolated neighbors watched out for each other. The thing that would create the most suspicion was a car parked on a road for a while, without good reason. He really didn’t need somebody wondering whose car that was, and what was going on.

And he didn’t really care if Horn was found: what he really needed to do was get him out of the house.

With Horn in the ditch, and no lights in sight, R-A turned around and headed back into town. Instead of going home, he drove a loop through it, a block over from the police station. There were all kinds of lights on, and a half dozen cars in the parking lot. Cops were still at it.

He stopped at the K-Bar, run by a former marine who’d never gotten over it, had a couple of margaritas, and listened to the other guys at the bar talk: all of it was about the cops in town, and speculation about who they were after, and that the same guy had killed the O’Neill family.

“Tell you what,” said one of the local blowhards, “if the town gets ahold of the guy before the cops do, I wouldn’t be surprised we had our first lynching. If they catch the sonofabitch, and if they don’t kill him on the spot, and if he gets convicted and doesn’t pull some technical shit on the court, then he’ll get life. He’ll be living better than a lot of the street people you see up in the Cities. Way better. Good medical care-”

“Wouldn’t want to spend all my days locked up,” said another guy.

“Either would I, but that’d be better than going to the chair,” said the blowhard. “But he’s gonna wind up in one of our country-club prisons, when what he should get is about four feet of rope up in a tree.”

A couple guys nodded, but a couple more said, “Don’t know about that,” so it wasn’t entirely unanimous.

R-A finished his second drink and left. Nobody said good-bye, because R-A was not especially well liked.

Back home, he found Horn sitting in the living room, in the wheelchair. He no longer had the duct tape around his neck, which had held his head upright for the past decade and a half. R-A was not especially surprised.

“You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easy, did you?” Horn asked.

“No, I really didn’t,” R-A said.

“So what are we doing?”

R-A said, “Mattsson.”