Constable Molly Smith 01 - In the Shadow of the Glacier

holding nothing.
    Her face slammed into the side of the truck. “You will not call the cops on me, Molly. I’m sorry I tried to kiss you. I won’t do that again, promise.” He held his hand on the back of her head. “I’m going to let go, okay? You can sit up and we can talk.” The pressure eased. A branch broke under Duncan’s foot.
    Smith turned around. “Let me make the call, Duncan. You don’t have a record, do you? You said your dad got charges dropped?” What those charges were for, she could guess. Football team, things getting “a little out of hand.” Dad intervening to make it all right.
    Duncan shook his head. The moon was rising over the tops of the forest behind him. “A few small charges, but I’ve never been convicted of anything.”
    So good old Dad had finally had enough, and cut his son adrift. “Then you’re looking at a short sentence,” she said, “maybe not even that. They might give you probation if my mom testifies that you have a good job. But you assault a police officer, or restrain her, and that’s a whole other story.”
    “You’re not a police officer now, Molly. You’re my girlfriend.”
    She swallowed her indignation at the idea that he figured he could get away with beating her up because tonight she was his date. “You know I’m a cop. Makes all the difference.”
    A car approached, illuminating his face. Then the light was gone. How could she ever have considered sleeping with him?
    She stood up, keeping her back against the warm metal of the vehicle. “I’m reaching into the truck, Duncan. I’m getting my phone and calling for help. You let me do that, and I won’t tell them that you hit me and groped me.” She lied without a qualm. “Bike theft’s nothing. You’ll probably get probation.”
Not if I have anything to say about it.
    She’d seen her bag, half under the seat. She kept her eyes on Duncan while her fingers felt for it.
    He fell to his haunches. “They won’t find out about that guy, will they, Molly?”
    “What guy?” She wrapped the strap of the bag around her hand.
    “I just punched him. I didn’t even know he was dead till I heard about it on the radio the next day.”
    “Oh, fuck. You’re telling me you killed Montgomery.”
    Duncan straightened up with such speed she wasn’t ready. He knocked her backward into the truck and threw the weight of his body onto hers. He pressed something into her throat. For a moment she thought it was a knife, but it was only the broken end of a branch in his hand.
    He stepped back, the branch against her throat. With one hand he unfastened his belt. “I didn’t actually kill him,” he said. “He had a heart attack or something.”
    Duncan hadn’t noticed Montgomery’s brains leaking out of his skull?
    “I don’t want to hurt you, Molly. I’m going to leave you here and go. I can snatch a car and be across the border in half an hour. Turn around.” He grabbed her arm and flipped her. Her face smashed into the hard metal of the truck.
    She spat blood. Keep them talking, that’s what she’d learned in police college. “Tell me about Montgomery. It was a clean killing, but we thought it was an accident.”
    “Jerk saw me snatching a bike. He wanted me to, like, put it back. As if.” He pulled at her bag and the strap broke. “You won’t be needing this.” She heard it crash into the undergrowth. He pulled her arms behind her and wrapped one end of his belt around her left wrist.
    Another car. It slowed down, and she could see the driver checking them out. Then he pressed the gas and drove away. They must look like nothing but a couple who couldn’t wait long enough to get to a motel and were having a quickie up against the truck.
    “I started to leave, but he pulled out a phone. He was gonna call the cops. I couldn’t have that, so I put the bike up against the wall, said he could have it, started to walk away. Then I turned and punched him good. Too damned stupid to go down, he grabbed at my head. So I hit him again. He was dumb to keep fighting, wasn’t he?”
    “The dumbest. Why’d you stop him? I was the beat cop that night, I’m guessing you knew that. I’d have been the one on the scene.”
    “I wasn’t ready to end our game, Molly. We were still having fun.”
    Yeah, great fun
. “What’d you hit him with? We’ve been looking everywhere for the weapon.”
    Duncan chuckled. “I had a propane cylinder in my pack that I needed to fill. I’d just gotten off a