Blaise stood up, dusting his knees. “Well, the important thing is that you’re okay, and the car ain’t that bad, really. In any case, I’ll have the report ready by tomorrow and you can pick it up at work. Where’d you say you left the deer?... I’ll notify animal control to pick it up.”
“What...” Rueben mumbled, his thoughts unaccountably jumbled, as if he were trying very hard to remember something. “Oh, yes, the deer.”
After the officer left, Rueben placed a call to his insurance company and then to a garage on their approved list. He got the head mechanic after a half-dozen rings.
“Yeah, sure, bring it in today. Things are kinda slow round here. We should be able to get to it over the next few days,” he offered cheerfully.
Rueben couldn’t believe his good timing; he had off the next two nights and wouldn’t even have to make arrangements for a ride to work. “That’s great...” he began, then trailed off. For the second time that morning he felt his thoughts intruded upon, as if something were moving beneath his consciousness, trying to rise from the gray depths into the light. He cleared his throat. “How about Friday? Could I bring it in then?” That would give him two nights.
“Sure,” the mechanic replied in a puzzled tone. “But we might be busy by then. Could take longer.”
“Well, that’ll be fine,” Rueben assured him. “Friday, then.” And he hung up the phone.
What had lain hidden now burst forth: Bits and pieces of the previous night scrambled this way and that, glowing with import. Rueben stood stock-still and forced himself to examine each telling moment — Danny’s halfhearted accusation, his inadvertent (or was it?) revelation that he always closed the Bealwood, and of course, the fawn. Was that just bad luck... or Providence? He could see it as clearly as if it were already done.
As Danny staggered from the bar, Rueben smoothly accelerated from the dim parking lot across the street and glanced at his watch. It read two A.M. “Right on time, Danny, just like you promised,” he whispered excitedly.
Though he couldn’t know exactly what route Danny might take home, Rueben was certain of one thing: The stretch of county blacktop where they had met on the previous night was unavoidable. It was the only link to their subdivision.
Rueben calculated that he had at least fifteen minutes before the drunken Danny could possibly arrive into what he now thought of as the “kill zone.” Rueben’s plan was simple: Drive up and down the road until Danny was spotted, then, if the coast was clear, run him down. The only real challenge, as Rueben saw it, was that the impact must occur where the car had suffered damage the night before. Not that hard, really, and Rueben felt equal to the challenge.
Since Danny insisted on being a traffic hazard and using the wrong side of the road, it would be a simple matter of swerving to the right at the last possible moment, at a high rate of speed, of course, and then just continuing on. If he happened to survive such a head-on impact, the headlamps would prevent him from identifying the vehicle. Even one headlamp, he felt certain, so long as it was set on high-beam. In any event, Rueben did not expect him to survive.
The wait was not long. In far less than the fifteen minutes estimated by Rueben, he spotted the wobbling bicycle approaching. Even in the gray, hazy light provided by the occasional street lamp, Rueben’s flapping, fluttering, scarecrowlike silhouette was unmistakable. Far from the terror it had inspired the previous night, this time Danny’s presence was welcomed — Rueben felt positively elated, not a trace of nerves. In fact, as he began to accelerate, climbing steadily beyond the fifty-mile-per-hour limit, the sense of inevitability and, yes, invulnerability, that he had first felt grow warm during his conversation with the mechanic now positively blazed. He hit the high beams.
If there was such a thing as a God-appointed mission, then this surely was it, Rueben chuckled. Hadn’t the hated, Caliban-like Danny suggested it himself, even to an appointed time and place? Danny knew what he truly deserved, and like the animal he was, should be put down. Was he any better than that poor little deer, beautiful and unoffending, whose only instinct had been to stay with its mother? The speedometer had passed the sixty-mile-per-hour mark and was still climbing.
Rueben was smiling broadly now, and for just a moment he envisioned himself being lofted onto the shoulders of his grateful neighbors, all shouting his name and praises for accomplishing that which another (and surely it was one of them) had failed to do. No, his feat, however heroic, must remain a secret. It would be enough, he assured himself, to simply gaze upon the relieved and happy faces of the newly liberated and know, with the quiet pride of the champion, that all this was his doing.
He leveled the car at sixty-five, not wishing to risk loss of control. Danny could be seen clearly, one arm raised against the intensity of the light bearing down on him. Rueben eased the speeding vehicle to the right, placing the passenger-side wheels onto the shoulder. Danny remained defiantly close to the shoulder line, waving the oncoming car away with imperious slaps at the air, which infuriated Rueben.
The car struck bike and rider with a metallic clack, and Rueben shouted out at the same moment with a loud “Hah!” The rest followed so rapidly and silently that he was unsure as to what had happened. He sensed, rather than saw, that something large and dark had sailed past the passenger side of his car at incredible speed and vanished into the darkness like a thought. That was it.
With only slight difficulty, largely because he was breathing so hard all of a sudden, he regained his lane and began slowing. Not a single other car was in sight. He reached an intersection a mile down the road and executed a careful U-turn. Within moments he was passing what he was sure was the very spot. There was nothing. The undergrowth by the side of the road had swallowed everything — man and bike. With a smile and the satisfying sense of a job well done, Rueben headed for home.
Since he had accomplished what he set out to do on the first night, Rueben now had the second to get through before he took the car to the body shop. After carefully inspecting his car in the security of his garage, he was pleased, though not so surprised really (he had somehow known it would be like this), to find almost no additional damage to his old Ford. The lamp housing was twisted even more to the outside of the car, but not alarmingly so; he doubted whether Blaise would note the difference even after having previously inspected it.
There was one unsettling moment, though, when he discovered a tuft of what was obviously human hair caught between that same housing and the front quarter-panel. With meticulous care and a gagging disgust, Rueben extracted it with tweezers and disposed of it down the toilet, vigorously washing his hands afterward.
There was surprisingly little blood. Besides the smear that had been left by the fawn, wine-colored droplets spread like a ruby constellation across the passenger side of the car. Warm water, soap, and a brush made short work of both.
Now, as night was upon him once more, Rueben found himself at the Bealwood Bar and Grill enjoying a cold beer. He felt flamboyant, though of course no one there could possibly know that he had slain one of their steady, and, he was sure, unwelcome customers. The day’s paper had made no mention of a hit-and-run. Still, it felt deliciously dangerous, and Rueben thought he had never tasted such wonderful beer in his life. He was a little disappointed, though, that not one person in the bar remarked on Danny’s absence.
After several more beers than was his usual, Rueben set out for home, retracing his victim’s ride of the night before. Humming with the radio, he turned left onto the county road and began to accelerate.