School Days

Chapter 41

THE MESSAGE on my answering machine was simple: "Meet me at the Rocks. Nine o'clock in the morning. I got stuff to tell you about Jared. Come alone. I'll be watching you."

Which is why, alone, at 8:20 A.M., I was parking along the street by the park that led to the Rocks near the lake. It had begun to rain again. Still light, but with the promise of heavy in the low sky and the tumescent air. I didn't put on a raincoat; I wanted quick access to my gun.

I was pretty sure Animal had nothing to tell me about Jared. But the only way to know that was to show up and ask him. My guess was he wanted to even things up a little, which surprised me. Maybe he was spunkier than I gave him credit for. Or crazier.

Dowling was pretty quiet at this time on a rainy weekday morning. A car moved past the park now and then, carrying somebody to work somewhere. But to the extent that Dowling had a rush hour, it was over by now. Everybody else was sleeping in. The ground was soft from the wet summer, but the current rain was only a bit more than a mist. The park was empty as I squished through it. The trees that screened the Rocks deflected the light rain so that it seemed almost to have stopped. There was no wind. I could smell the lake. There was no sound. In the clearing where the Rocks started, lying on her back on the ground, was George. I stopped. She was dead. I'd seen too many bodies not to know. I jumped to my right and dropped flat on the ground behind the thick trunk of a big maple tree, and three shots tore through the low branches of the trees where I had been.

On my belly in the soaking leaf mold, I wriggled farther right, toward the big rock formation where the shots had come from, and nestled as flat into the muddy forest floor as I could. There was no sound. I took my gun off my hip and cocked it and waited. The rock formation he was behind was a good place to shoot from. I knew how it was supposed to go. I see George. I rush to her side and kneel beside her. He puts three slugs in me at close range and walks away. But it hadn't gone the way he thought it would, and now he was stuck. The rocks were isolated, and there was no way for him to leave them without exposing himself. I could wait. So could he. He did. I did. The silence of the woods once the gunshots had receded was smothering. It had begun to rain harder. I could feel the drops now, hitting my back as I lay in the mud. Doesn't get much better than this. I could outwait him. I could outwait Methuselah. I lay still. The silence pressed in on us. And the small rain down did rain. I smiled to myself. Ah that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. Yes, I was a poetic devil, but at issue here, actually, was how well could I shoot. My gun had a two-inch barrel. And the cylinder held five rounds. I carried it because it was light, and because I had little need for distance shooting. But my guess was that he had a nine-millimeter with a longer barrel and maybe ten more rounds in the magazine. My gun would have to do. It's a poor workman who blames his tools. The rain was pounding down now, and there was lightning in the distance followed apace by the roll of thunder. I took my Pirates hat off and put it over my gun hand to protect it from the rain. I didn't need to keep my powder dry. The thing would probably fire under water, but I didn't want it slippery wet in my hand. The lightning came again, and the thunder followed it more quickly. The rainwater plastered my hair to my skull, and the rain ran down over my forehead and into my eyes. I wiped it with the back of my wet hand. When I finished wiping, he was out from behind the rocks. No surprise. It was Animal, and he couldn't stand the waiting.

"Come out, motherfucker," he said. "Stand up and face me, tough guy."

He had a nine-millimeter and was waving it around. "Come on, cocksucker. You think you so big, you man enough, you come out here and stand up to me."

He was probably fifty feet away.

"No sucker punching now," he shouted, "no cops around, motherfucker, just you and me."

It was hard to tell because he was yelling, but I thought he might be crying, too.

"Step out, you yellow cocksucker!" he said.

At fifty feet, I was pretty good with the little Smith and Wesson. The smart move was to drill him where he stood. I shook my hat off, which did no good, and put it on. I got up, screened by a low spread of white pine.

"One chance, Animal," I said. "Put the gun away."

He turned toward my voice. I moved left, and as fast as he could squeeze them off, he put five bullets through the white pine, tearing clumps of needles in their passage.

I stood sideways, aiming carefully, and squeezed off three shots at the middle of his mass, trying to group them around the lower end of his sternum. He yelled once, the way a weight lifter does when completing a lift, and stepped back. The gun dropped from his hands, and he fell sideways onto the wet earth. I stood for a moment, listening. Only the rain and the sporadic thunder. Nothing moved. There was no one else with him. I walked to him and looked at his gun. It was some sort of Italian nine-millimeter. I left it where it had landed and squatted beside him. He was dead. I moved over to George. She was dead, but less recently than Animal. I stood and looked down at both of them while I opened the cylinder and ejected the spent rounds and reloaded. I put the gun back on my hip and snapped the holster strap.

He'd killed George for talking to me. And he wanted me to see that before he killed me for slapping him around. I thought I'd scared him enough. I hadn't. I guess he was spunkier than I'd thought. And the miscalculation had cost George her life and Animal his. Animal was bleeding from his chest. The rain was washing the blood pinkly away. When eventually I found out why Jared shot up his school, what would I have? The truth. Was that worth two bodies? The world had probably lost more for less. But they were alive, and now they weren't. Maybe the truth wasn't worth dying for. Or killing for. Maybe it never had been.

Too late now.

I looked at them some more. End of the line at, what, seventeen for her? He was maybe twenty-two. Then I stopped thinking and just looked at them as they lay in the mud, mindless of the rain.

After a while I went back to my car to call Cromwell.