Cheeon stood before the painting, once again inspecting the moose in wig and lipstick, somebody’s idea of a gag in a morgue, this abomination he could not comprehend. When Russell Core began snoring in the armchair all four men turned to look at him.
In the lampless parking lot behind the morgue, Slone and Cheeon stood at the detectives’ truck and watched the wolf man drive off into whatever night awaited him, whatever fate was ready to claim him. His headlights showed sideswept flurries that by first light would thicken into a scrim of snow.
They turned to piss shoulder to shoulder in the plowed berms at the edge of the dark lot, streams of yellow slapping into hardened snow. Slone could see the white and orange lights of town, the blinking red eye of the radio tower beyond the rails.
The fat one spoke behind them. “You boys wanna follow us on over? We have coffee waiting there, good coffee, warm you right up. Put a splash of bourbon in there and you’re all set.”
Slone zipped his fly and took the .45 from Cheeon in the dark. He turned and shot the fat one through the face from a yard away.
He shot the other through his forehead.
They dropped near their car and Slone stood above them and shot each again through his earhole, then braced the handgun in his belt. Cheeon passed him a flashlight and Slone saw fragments of skull and brain stuck frozen to the side door of their car. He bent with the light to gather the fallen papers on Medora—a black-and-white photo of her face drizzled with blood and specked wet with snow—and slipped them back into the file folder. He looked again at the bodies, hardened blood like rubies scattered across a canvas of white.
Cheeon took the flashlight and folder from him and started the truck. Slone reentered the morgue through its rear loading door—inside an unlit hallway and the red glow of an exit sign. Minutes later he emerged with a body bag in his arms like a bride. At the back of the pickup, tailgate lowered, Cheeon held one end of the boy. They set him lovingly into the bed of the truck, where he sank several inches into a one-foot pad of snow.
An hour’s drive to Keelut and the men did not speak. Cheeon smoked and drove as Slone reclined, his head turned to the bleached world he knew: houses, cabins, buildings, outside of town the numberless acres of land, not even the pledge of light in miles of such sable stillness.
The memory of alien sand, that slamming sun, the sheer exhaustion of those memories. Slone slept, the truck’s tires a lullaby on asphalt.
Those first days towns or sectors of the city were always in smolder. Planes gave ruin. After, teams wheeled in block by block to find what still had breath. They crept door to door while buildings burned, smoke like night that made moon of sun. The men they sought seemed never to be where they should. Most were not in uniform. It was hard to know who should be shot, who would shoot. Families huddled in basements. Street dogs deafened and concussed, their ribs hunger-sharp. Gunfire on the next block, east or north, impossible to know.
Slone turned and found himself separated. Ducked into a doorway, squatted there for air. He swilled from a canteen, wiped sweat and filth from his brow. Voices, American, in a rubble-packed alley. Smoke like walls in the street.
When he stood in that entranceway he saw into the glassless window, through one rounded room into another: a soldier with a scalp of honey down, wearing Slone’s own colors, his flag, from his company or not—his eyes still burned from sweat and smoke. A girl beneath this man’s weight on a table, her bottom garb twisted aside. Slone watched him, a tattooed piston between her legs.
He entered the house with a voyeur’s crawl. And he watched. The girl was very young, he saw now, sixteen or seventeen. Umber skin aglint with both her sweat and his. She did not struggle. She did not yell. She could not look away. She studied the soldier’s face as if needing to remember it for some future use. Or else stunned by this adder, astonished that this shaitan could have honey-colored hair and such straight teeth. But for the quiet drip of tears she seemed almost partner to this.
More gunfire on the street. Rapid explosions nearby that sent a tremor through the floor of this house. The hissing of steam he could not guess the source of.
And then Slone was behind them. He saw nonsense hieroglyphs etched into the soldier’s biceps. A medieval cross inked into his nape, and inside the cross a question: Why hast thou forsaken me?
He unsheathed the knife from his belt. The hand, the forearm, the shoulder—they can know their aim independent of mind. He stabbed this soldier through the right ear. A centimeter of the knife’s tip poked through his left temple and Slone felt the body go limp on the blade. He held the man’s drooped form upright with the knife so he would not topple onto the girl. He then thrust him quickly back and yanked free the blade in the same even motion. The serrated side of the knife was crammed now with bone and brain. On the dusty stone floor the man’s blood puddled about his head more in black than red. His tattoo’s useless question died with him.
Why has he forsaken you? Ask him yourself.
The girl sat up, leaking blood from her center. She covered her bottom half, crossed her legs on the table, wide-eyed at Slone not two feet from her. The bleeding blade still tight in his grip. He hadn’t thought light-colored eyes a possibility among these people, but the girl regarded him now with a teal astonishment. Unsure what else that blade would thirst for. Unsure if another yellow-haired man would pry into her now too.
I can’t hurt you, he thought. I won’t. Do not fear me. And she seemed able to read these thoughts, to find in his face something she could not find in the other’s. She did not tremble or flee—her tears had abated—and she could not look away from him. On the inner thigh of his pants Slone wiped the matter from the blade and held out the knife hilt first.
She was ready to read his expression: Use this next time. Kill any man, any person who tries to bring you harm. And she took the knife from him then. This gift. For a reason known only to her, she brought it to her nose to sniff its metal and hilt. She stood from the table and tucked the knife into her unclean garb. She looked to the body at her feet and spat onto it. She reached for Slone’s right hand, tarry with the soldier’s blood, and turned it over to inspect his palm. With her index finger she traced an invisible letter or sign no one but she would ever know.
Then she limped barefoot from the rear of the house and disappeared into roving smoke.
Russell Core’s motel room smelled of two weeks of sickness, a DO NOT DISTURB tag warning away eager maids from the doorknob. Take-out food plastic from the one Chinese restaurant in town. Damp towels over chairs, a bed disrupted. Newspapers fallen on a floor more concrete than carpet, crinkled bottles of springwater in the trash. Torn packages of flu medicine, balled tissues, mugs of tea for the burn in his throat. On the dresser a chipped ceramic figure of a grinning Hawaiian girl in grass skirt and lei—Core could not decide if this was a joke or not.
For three days after the hunt his legs and back had ached, painful even to step to the toilet—an insistent reminder of his unfitness and age. His sleep was long and hazy with sickness. He’d wake not knowing the day, fight to recall which month this was. After several minutes not moving he’d remember: the dead boy, Medora Slone, his own wife no longer herself. A daughter he needed to see.
Since finding the boy he’d waited for two weeks for the return of Vernon Slone. He waited for a call that would finally tell of his wife’s death. But no one knew where he was. He slept away those shortened days, mildly frightened of a sky that gray, of whatever impulse had led him to this place.