Dead Watch

asked.
    “Pick up all the brass you can find—the shells thrown off by Goodman’s gun. I’ll point you at the spots, and there’s a blood trail going up the hill. You’ll need gloves to pick it up. Don’t touch it with your bare fingers.”
    He showed her where Goodman had climbed the hill. “I don’t think I can get it all,” she said. “It’s all scattered around, in the trees.”
    “Get what you can.”
    While she did that, he searched the two dead men, got car keys, put the bodies in two of the contractor cleanup bags, dragged them to his car, fitted them in the trunk. When they were out of sight, he got a bucket and soap and washed the blood off the porch. That done, he hosed down the places where Goodman had been hit and then had died, eliminating as much of the blood trail as he could find.
    Now would be a time for a good solid rain, he thought, looking up at the sky: and it was possible that he’d get it.
    Madison came back down the hill with a bag of brass and two magazines. Jake counted them: eighty-eight out of ninety shells accounted for, assuming that all three mags had been full.
    “Now what?”
    “Now’s the dangerous part,” he said. They had to move the bodies and the other car.
    “You’re not still going to Norfolk?” she cried. “You said we might be able to do something else. I mean, it’s crazy, Jake, if anything goes wrong . . .”
    “But it’ll work for us, it’s the only thing that’ll really work for us.”

    Madison was adamant, and so was Jake; they snarled at each other as they drove out to the car park. Goodman had been driving an SUV: they found it in the park, just where Jake had thought it would be. When they clicked the remote control at it, the taillights blinked.
    There were no other cars in the parking space, and Jake moved the bodies from his own car trunk, and threw the guns, the empty mags, and some of the clean empty shells in the back with them, then pulled one of the contractor’s bags over the driver’s seat.
    Madison was pleading with him. “Jake: don’t do this. It’s not necessary.”
    “It is,” he insisted. “Just stay on the other route. You’ll get there quicker than I will, because it’s shorter. I doubt that I’ll see a cop all day . . .”

    He did see cops, two of them. Neither one gave him a glance. He saw one near Farmville, and another near Franklin, both on back highways. He stopped only once on his way, to empty the bag of 9mm brass into a creek on a back road. The bag he threw out the window when he was sure there were no cops around.
    Norfolk is a complicated place, and not easy to get around. He took it slowly, ultracautious through traffic, and finally found a spot to dump the truck. He left it on a grimy industrial back street, in a collection of other trucks from a nearby light assembly plant.

    Before he left it, he took the plastic bag off the driver’s seat, stuffed it in his pocket, closed the truck’s doors, and locked them. Madison picked him up at a gas station six blocks away.
    “Still think it was foolish,” she said.
    “It’s not. We’ve given them a story. We’ve given them something they can work with. Darrell was involved in cleaning up the gangs down here, and there are stories about his interrogation techniques. Stories about bodies that went in the Atlantic. We gave them the payback story.”
    “What about the slug in the cabin?”
    Jake shrugged: “Means nothing. First of all, it’d be almost impossible to find. The hole is tiny and I rubbed it over. Neither guy has a slug in him, so there’s nothing to match. Goodman’s full of shotgun shot, but that’s not diagnostic. We’ll get rid of the rest of the shotgun shells, buy new ones of a different brand, clean the guns.”
    She looked at him for a long moment. “I didn’t mean to get on you for driving to Norfolk, but I was pretty scared. I haven’t done this before.”
    “Neither have I. Not like this,” Jake said. “Are you pretty freaked out about the dead guys?”
    She shook her head. “No. They were killers and they were coming to kill us. As for the blood . . . I’ve got two hundred head of angus. They get butchered and sold for meat. Blood’s not a new thing if you raise farm animals.”

    They left Norfolk, headed back to Washington. Jake drove, fast now, seven miles over the speed limit, and after a while, she said, “Actually, we’re pretty good at this.”
    “It ain’t fuckin’ rocket science,” Jake