“What really happened to my sister?”
Theo Raycevic sat perfectly still with the Winchester barrel-down in his lap. He kept his head down, his breaths glacial, and just listened. He knew, based on the volume and bearing of Lena’s voice, that her question was directed at Ray-Ray.
Listening is everything.
Eyes? Overrated. Most boas have near-useless daytime vision, relying instead on an almost supernatural awareness of smell and vibration. Theo understood this. His best moments are in the dark, when he’s draped in painter’s tarp and standing like a hanging coat inside a motel closet. Ignore your vision and your other senses take over. The tiny room becomes an intoxicating tactile buildup. The woman’s gentle breaths. The jingle of her purse. Her padding footsteps from the bed to the bathroom sink, blithely unaware that she’s sharing oxygen with her killer.
This was almost like that.
Ray-Ray must have hesitated, because Lena’s voice rose: “Talk, Ray.”
Her breaths were hitched, shivery. Theo reminded himself: This wasn’t a Super 8 unit, and she wasn’t a dumb stray with heroin needles in her purse. Lena was a fighter, a scrappy little Asian like her sister, and she was still high on the adrenaline of the shootout. In her world, she’d survived the O.K. Corral. But Theo had gained some breathing room by playing dead, and now he would choose his moment to counterattack. She’d already made a cardinal error by not confirming her kill.
You don’t have the instincts for this, he thought. Not like Cambry did.
You’re just a shadow of her.
He smelled the girl’s sweat. Green apple in her shampoo. Maybe a deodorant of some sort, something breezy and floral. They always did smell nice.
Finally, Ray-Ray spoke. “He’s . . . he’s not a good man.”
“Your dad?”
“I know he’s not a good man.”
Speak for yourself, Ray-Ray. This was like listening to his own eulogy.
“He, uh . . . he murders people.”
No shit.
“Not just people. He targets women.”
Oh, is that worse? So much for gender equality.
“He’d take them . . . uh . . .” Ray-Ray’s voice quivered with discomfort. “Off the roads. He haunts the highways, from Chicago to Austin to Memphis, like a roving demon in an eighteen-wheeler. He’d offer to help stranded girls, hitchhikers, drunk kids who just needed a ride home. If he couldn’t get them inside his truck, he’d find out where they were sleeping that night. He called them his strays. Anyone young, tormented, living in her car, outrunning a rough past . . . who could easily disappear without a last known location.”
Don’t shit in your own backyard. I taught you that.
“I remember once when I was five or six, my brother and I were playing Nintendo and he walked in from his workshop. And he was cloaked in this big raincoat. Head to toe, like a walking corpse in a body bag. Terrifying us both. I asked him what he was doing. And without missing a beat, he beams this huge crocodile smile through his respirator and says in a goofy voice: Why, son, I’m the Plastic Man!”
Theo barely remembered this. But it was oddly heartwarming that Ray-Ray did.
“Like a superhero,” Ray-Ray said. “Like Clark Kent disappearing into a phone booth. It became normal to me, that sometimes Dad would disappear because he was being the Plastic Man.”
His tone darkened. Like the sun passing behind clouds. “My brother and I learned the extent of it later, when we were eighteen. We each coped differently. He put a Mossberg under his chin, like I told you. And meanwhile, I’m about to start the academy in Missoula, my lifelong dream, and I’ve just lost my twin brother, and my father—my only surviving family—is a pathological killer. What do I do?”
Theo sensed motion. Three feet away, the girl was adjusting her stance in the doorway. She was focused on Ray-Ray outside and not on the slumped corpse down in the floor space.
This was as good a time as any.
He slid open his good eye. Breathed through his nose. Slowly, he crawled his right hand down to the Winchester’s polished walnut stock. A reassuring familiar shape, sticky with blood and iced tea. He mentally rehearsed his attack: He would raise his head, lift the rifle, and blow the girl’s lungs out. All in a microsecond, before she turned her pistol on him. He could do it now, if it weren’t for one problem.
One major problem.
A round wasn’t chambered. He would need to first crank the rifle’s lever action to cycle a fresh .30-30 round, and that would make a distinctive noise. Lena would hear it.
Shit. He’d forgotten about that.
“I offered my father a deal,” Ray-Ray continued. “That if he promised he would never, ever do it again, I would . . . help him cover his tracks.”
“He did it again, didn’t he?”
You bet I did.
“He relapsed, yeah.”
“Poor guy.”
As they spoke, Theo applied slow, constant pressure to the rifle’s action. Opening the scissor jaws, millimeter by millimeter, to cycle the weapon as quietly as possible.
Then he would thrash up and shoot her.
“Seventeen years,” Ray-Ray continued. “I’ve cleaned up my father’s messes. Everything he’s needed. Any hour. I’ve made bodies disappear. I’ve torched evidence. Buried vehicles. Misfiled records. For my entire career, he’s been my ugly secret and I’ve been his guardian angel in blue.”
My guardian angel in blue. Theo remembered saying that—those exact words—one morning while they poured cement. Father’s Day, it had been. You can’t make that shit up. Under his belly, he felt the Winchester’s hinged mechanism open farther, farther, the firing spring’s tension building—
“But,” Ray-Ray added, as if this was important, “I only did the cleanup. Only the aftermath. I never had the stomach for the . . . you know.”
This was true. How shattering it must have been for his young son, who’d idolized the boys in blue, who’d dreamed of being a cop ever since he’d first arrested his brother with plastic handcuffs—only to find himself grown up and playing for the wrong team. Life comes at you fast, huh?
The rifle’s action opened to its apex and pushed out a spent .30-30 casing, which Theo silently guided out into his palm. He couldn’t let her hear it hit the floor.
“You didn’t try to stop him?” Lena asked.
“I-I always tried to stop him,” Ray-Ray stuttered. “I threatened to turn us both in. Many times. But he always called my bluff, because he knew I was as committed as he was. And I had more to lose.”
This would be the risky part.
Theo adjusted his two-handed grip and closed the lever a fraction of a degree at a time, slow and steady pressure, sealing a fresh round into the Winchester’s chamber like closing a vault. Finally finishing with the faintest, most muffled click.
A whisper of motion. It was Lena, turning her head to face him.
She heard.
Theo sat in jagged, sweaty silence. His pierced belly clenching, the hairs prickling upright on his skin. He wondered if she’d recognized the sound as a lever action closing. She knew her way around guns, didn’t she? Unusual in a female. The temperature inside the cab seemed to change, hanging on a knife’s edge. If Lena leaned in and inspected closer, she’d notice that the corpse’s bloody fingernails were now clasped suspiciously inside the rifle’s trigger guard.
A second passed.
Two seconds.
He waited in darkness with his good eye clamped shut. A drop of sweat trickled down his nose and hung from his nostril. It faintly tickled.
Finally, he heard the girl exhale and speak again. Back to Ray: “That’s it? I’d been so fixed on you. But you’re not even the killer.” She sounded disappointed, like this whole shootout had been a waste of her time. “You’re the killer’s little cleanup boy.”
His son sighed, audibly hurt.
Theo felt an amused chortle well up from his gut, somewhere near where her 9-millimeter round was lodged. Maybe he did like her. Maybe she was worthy of Cambry’s DNA after all. Not that it mattered: the Winchester was now cocked and ready between his knees. His index finger crawled around the trigger.
Lena hesitated, as if she dreaded saying it: “Was she . . .”
“What?”
“Was my sister one of his victims?”
This was a big question. It would receive a devastating answer, so Theo knew this was his moment to attack, to snap open his eyes, thrash upright, and raise the now-loaded .30-30 to fire into her chest. He waited in his private darkness for Ray-Ray to clear his throat and respond, and then he would give this little bitch the biggest surprise of her—
* * *
Lena shot the old man in the face, just to be sure.
He thrashed, a thin spray of blood filling the cab like sunlit powder. His skull thudded off the radio and he slumped against the stick shift, cranking it forward. The rifle clattered. Maybe it was Lena’s imagination, but she swore she saw a split-second expression flash over the corpse’s face.
It looked like surprise.
The gunshot reverberated in the confined space. Raycevic cried out in shock.
“I had to be sure,” she said. “He could have been playing dead.”
She’d fired the revolver bullet right through the man’s upper lip. A little low on her usual deck of fifty-two, because she’d drawn and fired left-handed. But a solid hit nonetheless. She thumbed out the revolver’s cylinder—all primers punched now—and dropped the empty weapon.
Raycevic stared with baffled horror. “Why . . . why would you do that?”
Gut feeling, she almost said.
And now her gut sensed something else—an uneasy motion. She realized the truck was moving. Below her footrail, the pavement inched under. Like standing over a receding tide.
Raycevic noticed it, too.
The old man’s body slumping against the gearshift must have kicked the rig into neutral. Ten tons of machine and cargo now rolled down the slight decline of Hairpin Bridge. Air brakes whined softly—fighting, but not hard enough.
Lena decided this was fine. She’d spent enough time perched in the doorway of this vessel of sun-cooked sweat and snake shit. They would continue this conversation by the cars, near the Shoebox, so the rest of Raycevic’s confession could be captured for history. If this rig had a date with the bottom of the valley, she sure as hell didn’t want to be there for it.
“Back up, Ray.”
As he obediently stepped back from the rolling truck (“Back . . . back”), Lena kept him at gunpoint and descended the footrail, jumping the final few feet, landing hard and twisting an ankle, squinting in the blazing daylight. Raycevic stared transfixed at something in the distance. She saw it, too.
East of Hairpin Bridge, the nearest hill—and its bristly coat of pines—was now consumed by a roiling wall of apocalyptic flames.
The Briggs-Daniels wildfire was here.