Spilled Blood

26

It was nightfall. Under the barest sliver of moon, the open lands of the Spirit River valley were almost invisible.

Chris pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the road where 120th Street led to the river. His engine ran. He switched his lights off. Trees hung low over the asphalt, draping their branches on the roof of the Lexus. He gripped the steering wheel, debating whether to turn. He had been agonizing all day about what he needed to do. There were certain lines in life that were indelible: if you crossed them you couldn’t go back.

The gun was on the passenger seat beside him.

His daughter was in the hospital. She’d been brutally violated. She would recover, but the stain would be with her for ever, like a tattoo inked into her brain. Like graffiti scrawled on a perfect, beautiful painting. His anger was so deep it left him speechless. Something needed to be done; someone needed to pay. He thought about Marco Piva, who had become his conscience and his compass in the short time he had known him. You want to rage against the world. That was true, but his rage had a focus and a purpose now. Kirk Watson.

Half a mile behind him, headlights drew closer on the highway. He couldn’t afford to be seen here, and he had to make a choice: stay or go. With a tap of the accelerator, he swung into the woods that lined the river road. He coasted toward the water. Acorns and branches popped and snapped under his tires. He squinted, but he was mostly blind. Lights winked through the trees, marking the handful of houses built well back inside the forest. He lowered his window, and he could smell the dankness of the river not far away. Ahead of him, where the lights vanished, the road ended at the water. He was as close as he dared go.

He did a three-point turn and pulled as far to the side of the road as he could. He didn’t get out immediately; instead, he stared into nothingness. Wet leaves clung to his windshield. A crow screamed in the treetops. He took the revolver from the seat and felt its heft in the palm of his hand. He was like Hannah. He’d always hated guns. It wasn’t until this moment that he felt they had a place in this world.

Chris got out silently. He kept the ignition key in his hand and held it apart from the other keys on his ring. Carefully, he laid the key ring on the front seat, so that he could sweep up the ignition key without struggling to find it in the darkness. He eased the door shut with a quiet click. The gun nestled in his hand.

He planted each step softly. His pulse thudded through his throat and made a roar in his brain. Drooping pine branches scraped his face like fingers, startling him. He stopped, listening. Something scurried in the brush, a small animal alarmed by his presence. The river water slapped on the bank. In the still air, he heard a murmur of voices. Someone laughed.

The lights of the last house were twenty yards away. Kirk’s house.

A yellow light bulb flickered like Morse code on one corner of a detached garage. The bulb on the other corner, closest to the house, was burned out. He saw an F-series pick-up truck parked outside. The house itself was small, one story, with peeling white siding. The front porch was dark. So was the deck, overlooking the river. The lights he saw, and the voices he heard, came from the near side of the house, beyond the garage. A square glow framed the window.

Chris approached the pick-up, which was spattered with mud. Between the garage and the house, the wet ground was covered with long brown grass. The flickering light on the wall of the garage cast faint, moving shadows. He veered to the corner and used the sleeves of his shirt to turn the hot bulb until it went black. He was invisible now for anyone who looked into the woods. He crossed to the house and crept toward the rear window. It was a casement window, cranked open, with no screen. The voices got louder. He distinguished two sets of male voices. Kirk wasn’t alone.

Chris peered inside the bedroom. A king-sized bed was shoved against the nearest wall, immediately under the open window, with no headboard. The bed was empty, the sheets and blankets tousled into knots. He saw a high-definition television on the other side of the room; the screen was at least fifty inches wide. An elaborate weight-training system was positioned in the corner. The walls were painted navy blue, and he saw several crushed holes in the sheetrock, the size of an angry fist.

Kirk Watson sat in a leather recliner. His chest was bare, and he wore checkered boxers. His long hair was loose around his shoulders. His arms and legs bulged with well-defined muscles. In the doorway of the bedroom, Chris spotted Lenny Watson, smaller and younger, still with a bandage on his face. Lenny stared straight at Chris, and Chris tensed, expecting the kid to shout. Instead, Lenny kept talking to his brother, unable to see into the darkness outside the window.

‘Six in the morning, man,’ Lenny said. ‘Shit, that’s early.’

‘Well, it’s not the kind of business I’m going to do at noon in front of the courthouse, Leno. Don’t be stupid.’ Kirk reached for a bottle of beer. ‘You want to stay in bed, you lie there and have a wet dream. I don’t need you.’

‘No, I want to come with you.’

‘Just make sure you’re ready. I’m not waking you up, Leno, got that?’

‘I got it.’

‘I want you in place by six-thirty. Sun’s up at seven.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘You remember the deal, right? I drop you at the monument site with the binocs, and you keep your eye on every car heading out of Barron toward the drop site.’

‘I got it, man, it’s not the first time.’

‘All it takes is one mistake, Leno. You tell me when he’s getting close, you tell me when he heads back to town. He does anything funny, you shout. You smell a cop, you give me the emergency signal, and then you keep your head down and stay put.’

‘I won’t let you down, man.’

Chris heard the eagerness in Lenny’s voice. Brothers picked older brothers for heroes, even when they didn’t deserve it. He didn’t know what scam they were planning, but sooner or later, he was certain that Kirk’s manipulation would lead Lenny in only one direction. Jail or worse.

Kirk stretched his arms over his head and yawned. He climbed out of the recliner. ‘I could use some pussy.’

‘Who?’ Lenny asked.

‘I don’t know. Who do you think?’

‘What about that freshman, Sammi?’

‘The punk one with the nose ring? Yeah, why not? Toss me the phone.’

Lenny tossed a cell phone to his brother, and Kirk dialed.

‘Sammi? It’s Kirk Watson. Hey, gorgeous, I’m having a party. Booze included. You want to come? Yeah, bring a friend, fukyeah. Absolutely. I’ll have Leno come get you in my truck. Twenty minutes, and dress like you want it.’

Kirk switched off the phone. It was that easy, like ordering a pizza. Chris was horrified.

He also realized he was running out of time to kill.

‘Take the pick-up, Leno,’ Kirk told his brother, ‘and don’t get pulled over, doofus.’

‘I have to take a dump first.’

‘What, girls give you diarrhea, Leno? Sammi’s going to have another girl with her, so don’t go squirting inside your pants, okay? You want seconds when I’m done?’

Lenny shrugged. ‘Nah.’

‘Shit, Leno, you’re not queer, are you?’

‘No!’

‘So why are you always saying no when I get you pussy? Oh, I forgot, the only girl you want is Olivia Hawk.’

Chris’s whole body went rigid. He waited, like stone, for what happened next. All he wanted was hard proof. Some kind of admission, some kind of confession. He wanted to hear from Kirk’s lips what he had done. He wanted no doubt whatsoever that it meant justice to pull the trigger.

The words flowed out of Kirk as easily as river water. The meaning was unmistakable. ‘Well, you had your chance, Leno, and you blew it.’

Chris wanted to scream. This man had just told him what he’d done to his daughter. He didn’t want to use a gun; he wanted to wrap his fingers around this beast’s throat. He wanted to watch his eyes bulge and his blood vessels burst and the oxygen drain from his skin. Kill him.

Lenny Watson said nothing in response to Kirk’s taunting, but the boy’s face screwed up in what looked like impotent frustration. Then his legs squirmed, and he held his breath as he let out a monster fart. He swore loudly, and he turned and ran for the bathroom.

Kirk grabbed his knees, because he was laughing so hard. His laughter followed Lenny down the hallway, and Chris heard the bathroom door slam. This was his one chance. Kirk was alone. It was just the two of them. He could pull the trigger and be gone, and no one would know. They would all suspect, but they would never know.

Silently, he eased the hammer back on the revolver. He slid his finger onto the trigger.

Kirk turned on the television and rolled onto the bed. He launched a DVD and groaned with satisfaction. It was girl-on-girl porn. A blond with dangling, inflated breasts hiked her ass in the air and buried her mouth between the legs of a brunette who moaned in exaggerated pleasure.

‘Shit, yeah,’ Kirk murmured. His hand slipped inside his boxers. A tent developed in the cotton.

Chris took a step closer to the window. It was the perfect opportunity, a frozen moment in time. Lenny was occupied. Kirk was distracted. The back of the monster’s head was only inches away. All he had to do was fire one shot and watch Kirk’s skull explode in a sticky mass of bone, blood, and brain. He raised the gun. Kirk had no idea what was happening behind him, no sixth sense that death was so close.

He thought about Olivia. Images of her prone body in the train car, battered and abused, popped in his head like flash bulbs. He breathed faster, so loudly and raggedly that he feared Kirk would hear him, but Kirk’s mind was focused on the naked bodies intertwined in high definition on the big screen. In Chris’s head, Olivia cried. She begged for help.

The gun was steady in his hand, and his arm didn’t tremble. It would take almost no pressure on the trigger at all. He thought to himself: On three.

One.

Two.

Thr—.

He tried to fire, but he couldn’t. He thought about Olivia and Ashlynn in the park. Olivia holding the gun. Olivia, desperate for revenge, angry, upset, confused, hurt, alone. His daughter, on the verge of taking an innocent life.

Kirk Watson wasn’t innocent. It wasn’t the same, and yet it was.

Chris wanted nothing more than to kill him, but with each second, the opportunity slipped away, and he knew it was irreversible. Tick tock, tick tock. Lenny would be done soon. Time was running out. It didn’t matter. It could be a second or an hour, and he would still be standing here, unable to fire.

His arm buckled.

He removed his finger from the trigger. He disabled the revolver.

He did just what Olivia had done. He walked away, recoiling in horror at how close he’d come to joining the ranks of the evil.