Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

2

He supposed they were all thinking the same thing: This can’t be happening. Not again. Not after all these years. But it was happening, only this time they weren’t a bunch of kids with too much Southern Comfort and Thai stick in them. That first time, it was some innocent fun gone sideways. Severely sideways, plunging them into a paralyzing hell with slick, jagged walls from which there would be no escape. None. Not ever. That they were here to kill their old friend proved as much.

They had been given a temporary reprieve, a cruel reprieve, lasting just long enough to fool them into believing they had put real distance between that old evil and the fragile lives they had built in the meantime. Lives that included wives and lovers, children, careers, small successes, and grander failures, but haunted lives just the same. Haunted because distance from evil is a myth of time, because they were never more than one restless night or, worse still, a tainted moment of joy away from it.

The wind rattled the windows and the loading bay door. The plinking of sleet was less urgent now that the snow was falling in sheets and collecting on the corrugated metal roof. Raw, cold air seeped into the maintenance shed like an accusation and made heaving clouds of their breath. Small plumes of breath came from the mouth of the nude man on the floor at their feet. His wrists and ankles were trussed behind him and his sun-streaked brown hair was caked with the drying blood that had leaked from the welt at the base of his skull. His broken lower jaw was unhinged, his mouth a wreck of splintered teeth and bone. After the pipe had been laid into him, the spray of blood had given the air a coppery tang that the two other men could almost taste. But the blood had settled out of the air like silt out of water. Now the place smelled only of burnt black motor oil, gasoline fumes, and antifreeze.

“What’d you do with his clothes?”

“The furnace in the church.”

“His duffel bag?”

“It’s a big furnace. Burnt that up, too. Nothing but old, smelly clothes and a Bible, anyways.”

“Okay, drag that canvas over here and wrap it around his head.”

“You really gonna do this?”

“We are.”

“But that’s Zevon, man. He was our friend once.”

“Friends don’t come back to town to fuck up everyone else’s lives. If he wanted to stay my friend, he should have stayed lost. You may not have anything to lose, but I do.”

“But—”

“But nothing. We talked this through. We all agreed. It’s too late now, anyway. He’s already more than half-dead. Now, get the canvas and do what I told you. The storm’s blowing in faster than we thought and he’s going to be here soon to get rid of the body. C’mon.”

The unconscious man moaned a little as the coarse, mildewed fabric was wrapped around his head.

“What’s the canvas for, anyways?”

“Think about it.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly. You got the tarp ready for him? The rope?”

“Yeah.”

Outside, there was already six inches on the ground and the roads were slick from the layer of sleet that had come before the snow. As he swung around to back up to the bay door, he checked his rearview mirror and saw two quick flashes of lightning and heard two muted claps of thunder. It was done. Zevon was dead. Now the time had come to play his part in keeping the past buried. Yet he understood that this particular episode of thunder and lightning, like their prior sins, was of their own doing and pushed them even further away from heaven than they already were. That the past was unrelenting and that no grave was deep enough to keep it buried forever.