part0021

“HEY , Lee, are you OK?” Jack shouted through the closed door, after he had waited for fifteen minutes until he was as sure as he could be that Palmer had left the immediate area. There was no reply, and he couldn’t hear any buzzing of the insects that had escaped from the nest before he’d torched it with the oil lamp.

Opening the bedroom door just a couple inches, Jack could only see by the thin, horizontal shafts of sunlight ‒ filled with swirling dust motes ‒that shone through the narrow gun ports in the walls to only partially and dimly light up the living room. He could make out the shape of Lee curled up on the floor and thought that he had passed out again, due to his injuries and the booze he had drank to kill the pain.

After checking the ports to see if Palmer was visible, he lit another lamp and carried it over to set down next to Lee. Jesus. It was hard to even recognize him. His face had ballooned up, was almost purple, and his distended tongue protruded from his rictus, gaping mouth.

As Jack stared down at his now late friend, a wasp crawled out of the corpse’s mouth, over his bottom lip, to be followed by another and then another. It was at that point in time that Jack had the urge to unlock the door and rush out into the fresh air. Cabin fever came to mind. He needed to get away; to just pick up the bag full of money and make a break for it. The man that called himself Palmer couldn’t be everywhere at once, but may still be in a position at the side of the cabin from where he was able to watch both front and back doors. He took deep breaths, counted to ten, and then grunted and slapped his face hard as one of the few remaining wasps drove its stinger into his cheek. Fuck Palmer. He would do a deal with him, any deal, and then hopefully kill the bastard, before fleeing the area and starting over with a new life and a bag full of money.

He made coffee, laced it with Jim Beam and then covered Lee’s body with a blanket. They say that tomorrow never comes, but it always did, and so within a few more hours he would resolve the shit situation he was in and be on his way, free as a bird. He decided to head east and drive to Chicago, which was the best part of fifteen hundred miles away. It would probably be a three-day road trip, but he was in no hurry, and once he reached the Windy City he could regroup, change his identity and start over. He had no one else to consider. Will had brought trouble to the door of the cabin in the shape of Palmer and so was of no further consideration. Gil, Joel and Lee were dead. All he had to do now was kill Palmer and drive away with enough money to live out his life with no worries. Everything had been sweet until the fucking rocks had taken them out, but that could prove to be a blessing in disguise. He was on his own now and didn’t have to share any of the stolen money. You had to face up to the negatives, turn them into positives and move on.

Without removing the blanket, Jack grasped hold of Lee’s ankles and dragged his body into the bedroom and closed the door on it. Being in the same room with a corpse ‒ that would all too soon begin to stink the place up ‒ was not something he intended to endure. With the doors and windows closed, the cabin would soon heat up come morning, to hasten the onset of decomposition.

Checking the ports at regular intervals, hoping to see Palmer and be able to shoot him, Jack became more jittery and irritated as time seemed to stand still.

“Palmer,” Jack shouted after a couple hours had slowly ticked by. “Are you still out there?”

No reply. Perhaps the big guy had gone back to the house up the trail, confidant that uncertainty would keep Jack pinned down.

Katy went out into the hall and came back cradling the Remington rifle and said, “Perhaps this will be of some use, Joe.”

Logan took the weapon from her, checked it and discharged the five rounds from the internal magazine. The old rifle seemed to be in good order and was clean and had been oiled.

“It was my father’s,” Katy said. “I have a box of shells that are probably the best part of fifty years old.”

Logan took the rifle out into the backyard, reloaded it and triggered a shot into the sky, and then took aim at a wooden post which was approximately forty yards away and put a bullet through the top of it. The weapon was sighted in and hit what it was aimed at.

The moon looked big and full as Logan rounded the curve at the bottom of the trail and approached the cabin. He knelt down, took aim and put a bullet from the rifle into one of the window shutters.

Jack dropped out of the chair next to the table, spilling the glass of bourbon he had been sipping as the whine of the bullet passing less than a foot in front of his face startled him.

An instant later the sound of the shot seemed to catch up with the slug, and he knew that Palmer was out there, reaffirming that he was trapped and under siege.

“Did I get lucky and hit one of you?” Logan said as he jacked another shell into the breech.

“Hell, no,” Jack shouted. “You were a country mile off. How about we do this deal and go our separate ways?”

“I don’t trust you or Roche, Mitchell.”

“That works both ways, but it’s in your interest and mine to do a deal, do you agree?”

“Yeah, I’m getting bored. We need to resolve this and move on. Have you any idea how we can do the trade and get the hell away from here without trying to kill each other?”

“I want to be on my way before lunchtime tomorrow, Palmer. This stalemate is fucking pointless. You can have three hundred thousand, as long as you let me drive out of here.”

“I’ll have Will with me. If you play it straight, you’ll be safe. He wouldn’t want me to shoot you down in cold blood. You and Roche will be able to come out unarmed with the money, leave my cut in plain view and take off.”

“Sounds like a plan. But it’ll just be me. Lee didn’t make it. Those fucking wasps you put down the chimney stung him to death. That makes you a murderer, Palmer.”

Logan put another bullet through the shutter, then backed off and once more hiked up the trail to Katy’s place. He supposed that Mitchell was in a bad place, sharing the cabin with a corpse and desperate to get the hell out and as far away from it as he could. The guy would not expect him to just take the vehicle and drive away without any money, and would probably still be inside the cabin when the police arrived.