Two

He drags Jillie from the truck by her hair. She kicks and claws and fights like most ranch girls would. He admires her spunk.

He throws her hard onto the hood, the head-to-metal sound echoing in the hot night air. She bounces off the hood and tries biting him. He backhands her. She slumps, and he violently shakes her awake. It’s not her time yet.

He rips her blouse—not because he has a desire to have sex with this woman, but because her humiliation will add to the pleasure of what he’s about to do. As it always does.

She screams. Loud enough that someone might hear her, and he clamps a hand over her mouth. She sinks her teeth hard into his hand. Sticky blood runs down his forearm. He punches her in the pit of the stomach, and she lets go with a whoosh of a drunk’s putrid air.

The fingers of one hand wrap around her throat. She sucks in a breath as she tries breaking his grasp. Fingers claw at his bloody hand, the fingernails of her other hand gouging furrows on his neck, but he only increases pressure. He takes a leather bootlace from his back pocket and wraps it around her neck. He twists the lace, and it digs into the flesh of her neck as he lifts her off the ground. She gasps, coughs, a deep rasping comes from her collapsed windpipe, legs flailing in the empty air beneath her. At death’s doorstep, he lets up. She sucks in great gulps, seeming to recover, when he tightens the bootlace again. Her eyes bulge, her legs slowly kick the empty air, when …

A dog barks.

The attacker’s head jerks around to where the noise came from. A cowboy hat just peeks up over the hill. A panting dog sits beside the hat.

He drops the woman. She falls lifeless on the ground as he sprints toward the hill, to the sound of a truck kicking up dirt speeding away. He makes it to the edge of the bank and looks down: the truck and trailer are like most others in Wyoming. Except this one has sheep tumbling out the back of the trailer as it races for an open gate.

Even if he raced after the truck, he wouldn’t catch it. Besides, he has a body to dispose of.

He walks back to the corpse and bends over her when headlights illuminate the truck. The rancher is approaching from the gate where he entered, coming on fast.

He abandons the body in the tall grass and jumps in his truck. He slaps the lever into four-wheel drive and bounds over the hill, making a run toward the gate where the witness fled moments before.

As he starts through the gate, his headlights reflect off something red on the ground beside the fence: a broken taillight from the witness’s pickup.

He stops long enough to pick up the broken piece before speeding away. He looks back toward the hill, but the rancher has turned around, driving the way he came from, leaving the woman’s body unfound. For now.

Later this morning—when the excitement of the kill has worn off and he can once again think straight—he’ll go hunting the witness. And dispose of the body.

He shakes anew at the thought of finding the driver of that truck. He just hopes the witness has as much spunk as this last one did.