The Inn(62)

“Tell … who? What are you talking about?”

Nick raised his pistol and shot the body on the bench twice in the chest.





CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE





MY EARS WERE ringing. The shock I had already been experiencing suddenly ramped up, the volume cranked high, all my nerves electrified. I snatched the gun from Nick, but he was in a dream state, yawning, rubbing his head, turning and murmuring to people who weren’t there. The body had bucked twice as the bullets entered it and now slowly flopped to the ground before the fire like an oversize doll. I felt a wave of nausea, the lifelike twitch of the body for an instant making me think of zombies, monsters, dark things.

Susan came running out from the house at the sound of the gunshots. I ran and grabbed her before she could get to the body.

“No, no, no, no.” I turned her around. “Stop them coming out. The others. They’ll have heard the shots.” I grabbed the body and dragged him out of the light of the fire. In the searingly cold night, I could hear Angelica’s frantic questioning in the wind, Susan’s placations. I saw Nick’s tall, straight frame walking around the side of the house.

It seemed an age before Susan joined me. There was blood on my arms, my hands. I stiffened to try to stop the shaking in my limbs, but that only made matters worse.

We were both thinking the same thing, but neither of us wanted to say it. In time it was she who broke the silence.

“The shots—they’ll know they’re postmortem,” she said. “But they’ll want to check every gun in the house, and that’ll mean any registered to Nick.”

“There’s blood all over the firepit area now,” I said. “Drag marks in the dirt. They’ll know he was here and that he was already dead.”

We looked at the body. Without speaking, Susan took Stanley Turner’s arms and I took his legs.





CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX





DOGTOWN. OUR HEADLIGHTS picked out the winding roads. Now and then the gold beams flashed on an ancient stone foundation of a house long gone. On huge boulders by the roadside, carved and painted with black letters. They were supposed to be motivational slogans for the unemployed and desperate in the failed town, but their meanings changed as I watched them roll by.

Never try, never win.

I shouldn’t have tried to stop Cline. I would not win against him.

A local vandal had spray-painted a boulder with his own words: Save yourself.

“Cline wanted us to come into his world,” I said. Susan glanced at me. She looked sick. I couldn’t blame her. In the trunk of the car, a body lolled and shifted as we drove through the night.

“What do you mean?”

“If we’d reported the body, we’d have had the house searched. Our people would have been questioned and our home invaded again, not with his men this time but with cops. If we didn’t report the body …”

She looked out the windshield at the night.

“This,” she said. “The night. Dogtown. Cline’s own dumping ground. His guys were out here only days ago dumping a corpse, and now we’re here. He must have known we’d be forced to choose the same spot. It’s the best place for a mission like this, isn’t it? We already know it’s been scouted out!” She laughed, a crazed, angry sound. “He wants us to sympathize with him. To understand we’re not that different. He’s sure pulling out all the stops to get us to back off.”

“I’m not backing off.”

“Look at us.” Susan jerked a thumb toward the trunk of the car. “That’s someone’s son back there. We’re Cline right now. We’ve become him.”

“We’re not him,” I said. “We’re nothing like him. He did this to us. We’ll move the body and then call it in. There’s no sense in sacrificing Nick because of what Cline did. He’ll never pass a psych evaluation, not in his current state. He’ll be implicated in the shooting, and who knows where it will go from there?”

Susan was quiet for a long time. “We have to do something about him.”

“Cline will—”

“I don’t mean Cline,” Susan said. “I mean Nick.”

“What exactly are you proposing we do with Nick?”

She didn’t have an answer. “He’s not safe to have around the house.”

“He’s not a dangerous dog, Susan. He’s a person.”

“I get that,” she said. “Don’t you think I get that? I’m here, aren’t I? Doing … doing this. Nick needs treatment. He needs to talk to someone about what happened over there, on his deployment. He can’t keep it locked away anymore. It’s killing him.”

We drove on in silence. I watched the roadside as I drove, looking for a discreet trail to dump our evil secret.





CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN





I HADN’T SLEPT after Susan and I returned from Dogtown. The former FBI agent had lain awake beside me, the warmth and love and security of our connection at the beginning of the night soiled and forgotten. At sunrise I gathered up our bloody clothes and bagged them, and she stood watching, numb.

“We had no choice,” she said. “But I’m still disgusted with us.”