Hellbent

The cop did not look impressed with that.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” Evan said.

“Forgive me for not taking you at your word.”

The breeze swept a bitter-fresh scent of churned soil and roadside weeds. The cop’s right hand twitched ever so slightly, raised there over the holster. He was the kind of guy who worked hard, helped his neighbors, stayed up late watching westerns on TV.

“Kids?” Evan asked.

The cop nodded. “Daughter. She’s five.” His Adam’s apple lurched with a strained swallow. “I have to look her in the eye every morning and every night and know I did the right thing.”

“Think this through,” Evan said. “Do I seem like a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing?”

The cop’s hand dove for his pistol.

It got only halfway there before Evan fired.

13 Dying Only Meant One Thing

Evan’s shot clipped the rear sights of the cop’s holstered Glock. The force of the round flipped the entire holster back off the cop’s waistband. It made a single lazy rotation and landed in a drainage ditch with a plop, vanishing into the murky brown water.

Evan hadn’t wanted to waste another bullet, but there it was. Down to fourteen.

When the cop blew out his next breath, he made a noise like a moan. He leaned over, hands on his knees.

“Couple deep breaths,” Evan said.

“Okay.”

“You’re gonna radio in that you got me and you’re taking me in.”

“Okay.”

“Right now.”

The cops Evan had left in the wreckage several miles behind them on the road would have called in a rough location for backup already, which meant that Van Sciver would hear, because Van Sciver heard everything.

As the cop leaned in for his radio, Evan stayed tight on him in case he went for the mounted shotgun. But the cop’s nerve had deserted him.

“Unit Seventeen to Dispatch. I have apprehended the suspect and am heading home to HQ, over.”

“Copy that, Seventeen. We will call off the cavalry.”

Evan reached around the cop, yanked the transmission into neutral, and snatched the keys from the ignition. Both men jerked clear as the cruiser forged through the mud, bounced across the ditch, and plowed off the road. Bushes rustled around it, and then it was gone.

Evan said, “March.”

At the point of Evan’s ARES, the cop walked off the road, through a stand of ash trees, and onto the marshy land beyond.

“Kneel,” Evan said.

The cop stopped on a patch of bluegrass. His knees made a sucking sound in the wet earth.

Evan stood behind him. “Close your eyes.”

“Wait.” The word cracked, came out in two syllables. “My daughter? The five-year-old? Her name is Ashley. She waits up, watches for my headlights every night. Plays with her American Girl doll in the bay window by the kitchen. Won’t go to sleep until I’m there.” He choked in a few gulps of air. “I promised her I’d always come home. Don’t make a liar out of me. Please. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

Silence.

“Do you have kids? A wife? Parents, then. Think about them, how they’d feel if you… you… Or if something happened to them. Think about how you’d feel if it was something someone did. Something that wasn’t even necessary. If they were taken from you.”

He fell forward onto his hands. His eyes were still closed, but he felt his fingers push into the yielding earth. He thought about his body landing here, taken in by the spongy ground.

He waited for the bullet. Any second now. Any second.

Would he feel it, a pinpoint pressure at the base of his skull before the lights went out?

He thought about the chewed corner of his daughter’s blankie, the smell of her head, how when she was a newborn her feet used to curl when she cried.

He thought about his wife’s face beneath her white veil, how he couldn’t quite see her, just a sliver of cheek, of eye, until the minister had said the magic five words and he’d lifted the soft tulle fabric and uncovered her beaming back at him.

He thought about how dying only meant one thing, and that was not seeing them again. How lucky he was to have been given that purpose. And how wretched it must be for all the lost souls out there who floated through their years, adrift and alone.

Twenty minutes passed, maybe more, before it dawned on him that he wasn’t dead.

He opened his eyes, peered down at his hands, lost to the bluegrass.

He pulled back onto his haunches, moving as slowly as he’d ever moved, and turned around.

There was nothing there but wind shivering the leaves of the trees.

14 A Pang of Something Unfamiliar

Evan stood at the trunk of the Cadillac. Golden light filtered through the high windows of the ancient barn, lending a fairy-tale tint to the hay-streaked ground and empty stables. He braced himself and opened the trunk.

The girl erupted from inside.

This time Evan was ready. He ducked, and the tire iron strobed by, fractions from his skull. She landed, spun, and came at him again, but it was halfhearted. She knew she’d lost her one good shot.