The Bodies Left Behind

woman’s slugs came six inches away from my head. I don’t dodge lead the way you do.”
    “True too,” Lewis said, thinking things over and laughing about the bullet dodging.
    “And wouldn’t be a bad idea to get things finished up now so we don’t have to worry. Especially since she knows my name.” Hart shrugged. “But I don’t know. Whatever you’re up for. Get her or not.”
    A pause. Then Lewis lifted his foot off the accelerator, considering this. “Sure. And Michelle, maybe she’s there too. . . . Fuck her up bad is what I really want, my friend.”
    “Okay, I say let’s do it,” Hart said. He looked around again and then pointed ahead to the driveway at 1 Lake View. “Shut the lights off and head up there. We’ll move around behind. She’ll never guess.”
    Lewis grinned. “Payback. You son of a bitch, Hart. I knew you’d be up for it.”
    Hart gave a short laugh and pulled his pistol from his belt.
    In fact, Hart hadn’t seen anything in the window atNumber 2. Like Lewis, he couldn’t even see the place. But instinct had told him that the cop was there. He knew she’d survived the crash; he’d seen footprints leading from the lake. She’d have gone toward the closest shelter she could find: the second house on Lake View, he’d concluded. None of this he’d shared with Lewis, though. Hart had been taking soundings for the past couple of hours and knew his partner definitely didn’t want to stay here. He wanted to head back to Milwaukee. He talked big about tracking down the two women and taking care of them. But Hart knew it was just that: talk. The man’d get lazy and forget about it—until somebody came for him in the middle of the night. But if Hart had insisted they remain here to hunt the women down, Lewis’d dig his heels in and there’d be a fight.
    Hart did not need any more enemies tonight.
    But seeing Lewis wipe the lip of the bottle, back at the Feldmans’ house, Hart had sized up the younger man and decided he could get Lewis to stay here if he played on the man’s insecurities: complimenting his shooting and making it seem like staying to get the cop was Lewis’s idea.
    Hart was sometimes called “the Craftsman,” a reference to his hobby of furniture making and woodworking, though the term was usually used by people in his profession, the one that had brought him here to Lake Mondac tonight. And the number one rule of craftsmanship is knowing your tools: the animate ones, like Lewis, in addition to those made from steel.
    No, Hart never intended to return to the city without killing these two women, even if it took all night. Orall the next day, for that matter, even if the place was swarming with cops and rescue workers.
    Yes, he wanted to kill Michelle, though that was a lower priority than getting the policewoman. She was the one he absolutely had to kill. She was the threat. Hart couldn’t forget her. Standing by her car. Just standing tall and waiting for him. The look on her face, a flash of gotcha, which might’ve been his imagination, though he didn’t think so. Like a hunter, waiting for just the right moment to take the shot. Like Hart himself.
    Only his instant reflex, diving to the ground, had saved him. That, and the fact that she’d fired one-handed, wisely not letting go of her car keys. He actually heard a bullet near his ear, a pop, not a phushhhh, like in the movies. Hart knew he was closer to death at that moment than when Michelle had snuck up behind him and taken her shot.
    Lewis now continued up the drive of 1 Lake View. At Hart’s direction, he beached the Ford in a stand of brush behind the house. It was well hidden in the tall grass and shrubs. They climbed out and moved west, into the woods about thirty feet, and then started going north, parallel to the private road, moving as quickly as they could toward Number 2.
    Hart led Lewis around a pile of noisy leaves and they picked up the pace, staying in the thick of the forest for as long as they could.
    A snap of branches behind them.
    Both men spun around. Lewis readied the shotgun nervously. The visitor wasn’t human, though. It was that animal again, the one nosing in the grass earlier, or asimilar one. A dog or coyote, he supposed. Or maybe a wolf. Did they have wolves in Wisconsin?
    It kept its distance. Hart sensed no threat other than the risk of noise that might alert someone in the house. This time Lewis paid it no mind.
    The creature vanished.
    Hart and Lewis