Rough country

11

JANELLE WASHINGTON WENT TO WORK in a candy store to pick up extra cash when her husband, a greenskeeper, hopped down off a tractor and tore his ACL. He was out of work for weeks, and they were living on worker's comp payments, and something had to be done.

The candy store barely paid minimum wage, but that was fine. The work wasn't onerous, and they were only bridging the gap between worker's comp and what they needed, so they didn't need a lot. Then, after he got back on the tractor, she decided she liked the contact with other people during the day, and she stayed on with the candy store.

There was a problem, though. Janelle couldn't stay out of the chocolate. She'd always prided herself on her figure, which wasn't perfect, but her husband, James, seemed to like it a lot, and when she gained two pounds in the first week, and another in the second week, then two more… something had to be done.

First, she resolved to eat only two pieces of fudge a day: five hundred calories. Then, during the summer, at least, she'd ride her bike from her house, out in the countryside, all the way into town, eight miles each way, which took her about forty-five minutes each way, and burned, according to an Internet calculator, about five hundred calories. Also, she learned, she'd be building muscles, and more muscles also meant more calories burned.

Now the question was, should she use the extra calories for another piece of fudge? Or really turn herself into a raging piece of super-fit muscle? Staying at two pieces a day was hard, with the owner in the back cooking up all that chocolate…

On this day, she'd finished up, cleaning off the counters, had said good-bye to Dan, the owner, and took off. The first few blocks were stop-and-go, getting out of town, watching the traffic; but once she was on the other side of the river, the traffic disappeared and she started to pump; started to sweat.

She'd never been an athlete, but the bicycle had turned something on, and she was getting addicted to the flow of the thing…

McDILL'S KILLER SAT in a copse of trees that grew on a natural mound at the intersection of the county road and a trail that led back to a canoe-landing on the Mississippi. From a nest at the top of the mound, both the landing and the road were visible. No canoeists had come along in an hour, and none were visible in a half-mile stretch of the river above the landing.

Washington should be coming around the corner at any minute. Shooting her would do two good things. First, it'd confuse the issue. The killer would carefully leave behind a shell, so they'd know that McDill's killer also shot Washington. But since Washington had no connection to lesbians or Wendy's band or the Eagle Nest, maybe they'd go for the idea that the killings were random. Maybe; but if not, it'd at least be confusing.

The other thing the killing would do is get rid of Washington. Nobody would remember it after she was dead, the killer thought, but Washington knew a little too much about Slibe Ashbach Jr. and his father…

WASHINGTON CAME AROUND the corner a mile away, not pedaling hard, but moving right along. The road was smooth blacktop, and she was clear and steady in the four-power scope. She was wearing a scarf, as a babushka, to keep her hair neat. Her face was clear in the glass… four hundred yards, three-fifty, three hundred, and closing…

A truck came around the corner behind her. Not moving fast, sort of idling along, and the killer took the gun down, forehead beaded with sweat, breathing hard from a sudden shot of adrenaline. Not good. Not good.

TOM MORRIS SAW JANELLE pedaling along and thought about what might have been if he'd moved a little faster after high school. They might have hooked up. The possibility was out there, for a while. He knew it, and she knew it, and that made them like each other all their lives, even if nothing happened, and they both wound up happily married to other people.

He slowed, ran the window down, grinned at her, and called, "Still pedaling your ass around town…"

"You shut up!" she said.

"No, I think it's a good thing," he said. "I saw James downtown yesterday. He said you guys were going out to Moitrie's on Friday. We might be out there, we're thinking about seven."

She stopped, straddling the bike, moved it over to the truck, and said, "I'll call Patsy. Maybe we can get a table together."

They talked for a minute about a snowmobile club that wanted to take out some unused field crossings, and the culverts that went with them, and if that would put too many snowmobilers on their road, and about the growing flock of crows that were hanging around, and how Morris had hired an exterminator to get the squirrels out of his attic-routine neighbor stuff-and then he said good-bye: "Talk to Patsy. See you out there."

THE PICKUP MOVED ON, slowly, paced by the bike for a hundred yards or so, and then pulled away. By this time, Washington was opposite the killer, then passing, and the truck was still there, moving slow as white paste down the highway, and Washington was farther and farther down, the crosshairs first on her head, but then the head shot became uncertain, and then on her back, on her white blouse…

The truck went over a low rise and disappeared. The killer glanced back: nothing from the other direction. But this wasn't as clean as the other killings, there could be somebody…

"Ah…"

White blouse in the scope, squeeze…

The shot was almost a surprise.

WASHINGTON FELT AS THOUGH she'd been hit by a meteor. She was down, and bleeding, in the ditch, her bicycle on top of her, and looked down and found blood gushing from her rib cage, and she began to crawl up the side of the ditch, not thinking, not knowing what happened, wondering if she'd been hit by a car. She began to grow weak, understood that she was going to die if something didn't happen.

One last push and she was on the shoulder, and she tried to hold herself together, tried to think, still not understanding, rolling up, blood on her hands, blood on her blouse, no car, what happened? She could hear herself making a growling noise, and felt the gravel on her face and under her hands, sticky with blood…

Some time passed, and she was mostly aware of the blue of the sky above her, and then the wheel of a car was right there by her head, and she heard the crunch of gravel. A face appeared in her field of vision, and she heard the man's voice:

"Jeez! Janelle! What happened, oh, my God," and she focused on Tom Morris's face and he was on his cell phone screaming, "We've got a woman hurt bad… bleeding bad… Get some help out here, my God, we need an ambulance, we need an ambulance…"