The Bodies Left Behind

baseball bat taking out plate-glass windows in Southland Mall and terrorizing customers. It was a potential disaster but she’d defused it with a brief face-to-face, smiling at his mad eyes while her heart thudded just a few beats above normal.
    “You watch yourself, Brynn. Check the place out from a distance. Don’t go stumbling in. Anything looks funny, call it in and wait.”
    “Sure.” Thinking: as a last resort maybe. Brynn snapped her phone shut and set it in the cup holder.
    This reminded her she was thirsty—and hungry too. But she pushed the thought aside; four of the roadside restaurants she’d passed in the last ten miles were closed. She’d check out whatever was happening at Lake Mondac, then get home to Graham’s spaghetti.
    For some reason she thought of dinners with Keith. Her first husband had cooked too. In fact, he did most of the cooking in the evening, unless he was working second-shift tour.
    She pushed the accelerator down a bit harder, decidingthat the difference in response between the Crown Vic and the Honda was as noticeable as that between fresh Idahos and instant potato buds out of a box.
    Thinking, as she had been, about food.

    “WELL, BOY, YOU got yourself shot.”
    In a downstairs bedroom of the Feldman house, shades drawn, Hart was looking at the left sleeve of his brown flannel shirt, dark to start with but darker now halfway between wrist and elbow from the blood. His leather coat was on the floor. He slouched on the guest bed.
    “Yep, lookit that.” Tugging his green stud earring, skinny Lewis finished making obvious, and irritating, observations and began to roll up Hart’s cuff carefully.
    The men had taken off their stocking masks and gloves.
    “Just be careful what you touch,” Hart said, nodding at the other man’s bare hands.
    Lewis pointedly ignored the comment. “ That was a surprise, Hart. Bitch blindsided us. Never saw that coming. So who the hell is she?”
    “I don’t really know, Lewis,” Hart said patiently, looking at his arm as the curtain of sleeve went up. “How would I know?”
    “It’ll be a piece of cake, Hart. Hardly any risk at all.The other places’ll be vacant. And only the two of them up there. No rangers in the park and no cops for miles.”
    “They have weapons?”
    “Are you kidding? They’re city people. She’s a lawyer, he’s a social worker.”
    Hart was in his early forties. He had a lengthy face. With the mask off, his hair came well below the bottom of his ears, which were close to the side of his head. He swept the black strands back but they didn’t stay put very well. He favored hats and had a collection. Hats also took attention away from you. His skin was rough, not from youthful eruptions but simply because it was that way. Had always been.
    He gazed at his forearm, purple and yellow around the black hole, from which oozed a trickle of blood. The slug had gone through muscle. An inch to the left, it would have missed completely; to the right the bullet would have shattered bone. Did that make him lucky or unlucky?
    Speaking to himself as much as to Lewis, Hart said of the blood, “Not pulsing out. Means it’s not a major vein.” Then: “Can you get some alcohol, a bar of soap and cloth for a bandage?”
    “I guess.”
    As the man loped off slowly, Hart wondered again why on earth anybody would have a bright red-and-blue tattoo of a Celtic cross tattooed on his neck.
    From the bathroom Lewis called, “No alcohol. Whisky in the bar, I saw.”
    “Get vodka. Whisky smells too much. Can give you away. Don’t forget your gloves.”
    Did the thin man give an exasperated sigh?
    A few minutes later Lewis returned with a bottle of vodka. True, the clear liquor didn’t smell as much as the whisky but Hart could tell that Lewis had had himself a hit. He took the bottle in his gloved hands and poured the liquid on the wound. The pain was astonishing. “Well,” he gasped, slumping forward. His eyes focused on a picture on the wall. He stared at it. A jumping fish, a fly in its mouth. Who’d buy something like that?
    “Phew . . .”
    “You’re not going to faint, are you, man?” Lewis asked as if he didn’t need this inconvenience too.
    “Okay, okay . . .” Hart’s head dropped and his vision crinkled to black but then he breathed in deeply and came back around. He rubbed the Ivory soap over the wound.
    “Why’re you doing that?”
    “Cauterizes it. Stops the bleeding.”
    “No shit.”
    Hart