On toward dawn of that Tuesday, July 3, Randolph Welby walks out of his shack, down a hill, and to the edge of a thirty-foot cliff. The multiflora rosebushes and the berry briars that are growing on the face of the cliff have already begun to straighten, to repair the damage that’s been done to them. And at the foot of the cliff, where the patrol car ended up, it’s such a jungle of brush down there that you can barely see the car’s roof. To keep the smell in, Randolph made sure all the windows were up. The car’s interior will reach one-twenty in this July heat. Randolph too easily imagines how the sheriff’s body will look — what’s left of his body — in a few days. It’ll swell up and burst and splatter all over the insides of that car. Even if you could winch the car back up the cliff and repair the damage to its engine and frame, you couldn’t drive it — never be able to get the smell out. Don’t think about such things, he tells himself. In ten days’ time the roses and briars will obliterate the patrol car from sight, which is how it will remain until come autumn.
Not that Randolph thinks he’s gotten away with anything. Oh, he knows they’ll be coming for him. Whole bunch of ’em, Carl too. Fat Carl.
Got to go see that TV man now, even if he does do nasty things to a black woman he keeps in a box. There’s too much in the outside world that Randolph doesn’t understand, can’t explain, and now it’s going to have to be up to the TV man to explain everything.
Randolph returns to his shack and prepares for the hike.