The Bodies Left Behind

light it might have been hard to see the drama unfolding in the grass on the other side of the road. Soon the car was gone and the highway was empty.
    “Comp?” Hart asked, his eye on Brynn.
    The skinny man glanced over, kneading his earlobe. “Yeah?”
    “Stay right in front of them.”
    “Here?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You bet,” the partner, “Comp” apparently, said. “You want me to cover ’em?” He started to reach for the silver automatic pistol in his jacket.
    “No, that’s okay.” Hart stepped directly in front of the man, facing him.
    Comp gave an uncertain smile. “What is it, Hart?”
    Only a moment’s hesitation. Then Hart lifted the gun to his face.
    Smiling uncertainly, Comp touched the blue-and-red tattoo of a cross on his neck, then his earlobe. He shook his head. “Hey, what’re you—?”
    Hart shot him twice in the head. The man collapsed on his back, left knee up.
    Amy screamed. Brynn could only stare as Hart turned and, keeping his gun on the women and girl, stepped backward to his partner’s body.
    Michelle’s eyes went cold.
    Hart bent down and pulled Comp’s SIG-Sauer 9mm from his waistband and wrapped the dead man’s limp fingers around it.
    So this was to be the scenario, Brynn understood. With the man’s hand around the Sig, he’d shoot the women, leaving telltale gunshot residue on the partner’s skin. He’d then stand over Brynn’s body to do the same, putting a second gun in her hand—Munce’s Glock, probably—and fire a couple of rounds into the trees.
    The police would reason that the partner had killed the three of them and Brynn got off two final shots to take him out before she died.
    And Hart would disappear forever.
    A curious feeling, having only minutes to live. Her life wasn’t replaying itself. But she was thinking of regrets. She gazed at the woods, the smooth edge of trees and brush severed by the shoulder and highway, tamed. She nearly expected their wolf friend to stick its head out and look their way before vanishing into the woods again.
    Then Hart was twisting the dead partner’s arm up and to the left, aiming at Brynn first with the SIG-Sauer.
    Michelle pulled Amy even closer in front of her, and was reaching into her leather jacket, perhaps for theirlast Chicago Cutlery knife. She was going to fling it at Hart, it seemed.
    A final, desperate gesture. And futile, of course.
    Joey, Brynn thought, I—
    Then came the shout, startling them all.
    “Don’t move! Drop it!”
    Breathless and limping, Graham Boyd pushed from the woods behind Hart, holding a small revolver.
    “Graham,” Brynn cried in astonishment. “My God.”
    “Drop it. Now! Put it down.” Her husband’s clothes were streaked with mud—and blood too, she could now see—and torn in several places. His face was bruised and filthy too and through the mask his eyes shone with pure anger. She’d never seen him like this.
    Hart hesitated. Graham fired a round into the dirt at his feet. The killer flinched, sighed. He set the gun on the ground.
    Brynn recognized the pistol; it was Eric Munce’s backup, which he kept strapped to his ankle. She remembered mentioning to Graham that he kept a second gun there. There were mysteries here but at the moment Brynn wasn’t speculating about how her husband and Munce had come to be at the Snake River Gorge. She stepped forward, took the pistol from her husband, verified that it was loaded still and motioned Hart out of the grass and onto the shoulder, where he’d be more visible. And a better target.
    Control  . . .
    “Kneel down. Hands on the top of your head. If a hand comes off your head, you’ll die.”
    “Of course, Brynn.” Hart complied.
    More vehicles were hissing past now, drivers off late shifts or hurrying to early ones. If anyone inside the cars or trucks saw the drama unfolding on the shoulder, nobody was stopping.
    “Graham, get his Glock and the other gun.” Indicating the ostentatious silver SIG-Sauer that Comp had been carrying. “There’s one weapon unaccounted for. Eric’s. Search him.” Keith had taught her always to count weapons at scenes.
    Graham did and found the deputy’s service Glock. He put Hart’s black gun and Comp’s silver one on the grass beside Brynn.
    But he kept Munce’s pistol. He looked at it closely. There are no safeties as such on Glocks. You just point and shoot. Graham knew this; Brynn had instructed him and Joey about how to load and fire hers. Just in case. He fired a shot