Ray ran over and kicked the guy hard in the ribs. The guy put one arm around his stomach and puked into the grass. Ray dropped onto his hands and knees and smacked the guy in the head with the butt of the pistol again and again. He saw the dead woman in the bathroom and Danny’s staring eyes. He was aware of an animal sound, a snarling wail that was coming out of his own throat but that he had no more control over than if it had been coming from someone else. Manny grabbed him under the arms and pulled him off the guy and threw him into the grass, and Ray lay there, breathing like he’d run a mile. He lifted his pistol and saw that his hands were bathed in red and there was blood and matted hairs on the butt of the gun. He could feel a pounding in his ears and blood ran into his eyes.
He flipped over onto his stomach and put the pistol down. He could hear Manny rummaging around in the car and then his footsteps coming closer. Somewhere insects started a reedy hymn, one note rising and falling.
“Hold out your hands.”
He did as he was told and he felt tepid water being poured over his bloody fingers. He splashed the water into his eyes and blinked, and gradually his vision cleared and he sat back on his haunches. He took the bottle from Manny and poured more of it over his head before he gave it back. Manny upended the bottle and fin ished the last of it, then threw the bottle back into the open door of the Toyota. Somewhere crows made terrible noises, like someone coughing out a last few choking breaths. Ray looked over at the biker, who was staring at something in the grass, his pupils black.
He was wearing colors, a black vest with the name of a club Ray didn’t know and FRANCONIA, NH embroidered on it in red, and blood in, blood out. There were skulls and lightning bolts tattooed on his neck and the exposed parts of his arms. On the back of one hand was a spidery jail house tat of the words lights out.
“Look in his pockets.” Manny called over his shoulder as he went around the Toyota to the other body. Ray got up stiffly and went over the big man, turning out the pockets. He pulled a clip for the pistol, a lighter, a lock knife, a pack of cigarettes, and a set of keys out of the leather jacket and threw them into a pile in the grass. In a back pocket of the greasy black jeans he found an envelope with names scrawled on the back. Danny Mullen, Hoe Down, Manny’s name, and his. His name was underlined.
When he came back around the SUV, Ray saw now that Manny was moving stiffly and he watched as Manny painfully shucked off the vest. He held it up to Ray, and Ray could see a dull slug stuck to the jacket on the right side of the chest. Manny slowly pulled his shirt open, and there was a red welt over his rib cage. He shook his head in a gesture that might have meant anything.
The Toyota started, and Manny pointed it off the road into the trees. He threw their bags and as many of the spent shells from Ray’s gun as he could find out onto the grass and then stuffed everything into one of the bags. Ray got a shoulder under the smaller of the two bodies and pushed him into the back and slammed the door. They each grabbed an arm of the bigger biker and dragged him to the passenger door of the front seat and clumsily dumped him in. He looked at their faces one last time. Neither of them was the young guy with a black goatee. Which meant he was still out there, still looking for them. Ray got behind the wheel of the SUV and began to pull forward again into the trees, leaning forward to look through the hole smashed through the cracked windshield.
He drove as far as he could away from the rutted track and into the woods, maneuvering around trees and over stumps and rocks that crunched against the undercarriage, occasionally stopping to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes. Finally he got out and went around wiping down surfaces in the car with the gray blanket from the trunk. He took the flask out of his pocket and stuffed one end of the blanket into the gas tank and dumped some of the schnapps onto it. He dumped the rest over the bodies, stinking of shit and meat already starting to turn in the heat.
Christ, when things happened they moved fast. Both events, the farm house and now in the woods with the bikers’it was like they were over before they began. Before he could make rational decisions or some kind of plan. Standing there looking at two dead men in a wrecked car, he tried to think how long it had all taken. Three minutes, five? He played things over and over in his head, but all he got was a kind of faulty instant replay that came out different every time.
In the movies they showed gunplay in slow motion, but that wasn’t it, really. It was more like everything was speeded up except you. Everyone was moving fast, coming at you with deliberation and purpose, and you couldn’t finish a thought or get ready for the next thing. He thought maybe it was like being in a hurricane or a tornado, something fast and out of control.
He flicked the lighter he had taken from the biker and lit up the blanket and walked away through the trees. When he reached the drive again, Manny was waiting with a bag over his shoulder and the other one in his hands. He was looking down the rutted trail toward the house and chewing on his lip. His face was stained with dirt cut by lines of sweat from his hairline, and there were bits of broken glass on his shirt and in his hair. Ray turned and looked into the woods, but he couldn’t see the SUV anymore.
“Did it catch?”
“I don’t know. It did or it didn’t and either way we got to go.”
“You have keys?”
Ray held up the set of keys he took off the biker and jangled them. Somewhere nearby was another car. There was a distant smell of smoke, and somewhere the dog started up again, a remote, impotent sound of rage. Ray thought that if there was a God, that was his voice, just a distant complaint that didn’t make anything come out any different.
Flies buzzed, and a fat black bee made a machinelike rumble as it passed by his head. He stumbled down the drive toward the road and thought about the flies in the bathroom and the man he had just killed, his head open in the dirt. He realized this was what he had been waiting for his whole life. All of the beatings he took, every night his father had lunged at his mother or stood at the bottom of the stairs smacking a leather belt into his hand. All the times in Juvie when some hulking lump of shit smacked him down or some guard in a county jail popped him across the knuckles with a stick because he could, because Ray was inside a cage and the guard was outside and he just fucking could. Ray had taken it and stored it up like a battery, all of it, every fucking thing. All for this day, when it would come pouring out of his heart and into his hands. It was something electric, something that gave off an ozone smell and made him dizzy and blind, like being electrocuted by crossed wires in his own brain.
THEY HEADED NORTH again in a black van they found parked in the woods near the end of the drive.
When they got in, Manny handed Ray a cell phone. “I took it off the little guy.”
Ray thumbed through the memory, looking at calls that had come in and gone out and stored numbers. One of these, Ray thought, was probably the guy in the Charger.
They stopped at a pharmacy in Malvern, and Ray stayed in the car while Manny went in and bought a bunch of bottled water, alcohol, and Band- Aids. Ray looked at the cut on his forehead, glued over with dried blood and bits of grass and dirt. When Manny came back they drove to a remote corner of a shopping center parking lot, and Ray sat on the edge of the seat, pouring water over the cut to get the dried blood and dirt off and then dabbing at it with the alcohol. Cleaned up, it wasn’t that bad. Deep, but not wide. He put a Band- Aid on and smoothed it down clumsily, looking into the side mirror. With his hair pushed forward it was pretty much invisible. Manny had torn his jeans and had a scrape on one elbow where the shirt was ripped away. Ray dabbed at it with alcohol, and Manny made a fist and swore. He kept touching the tender place on his rib cage and pulling his shirt back to look at the welt.