The Fool's Run

moved. He was hurt, all right. His face was covered with blood, one leg was apparently twisted at the knee, but he still had the gun. He dragged himself up beside the roadbed opposite my ambush site. I waited until he was fully in the open and brought the M16 down on him. At the last second he apparently sensed me behind him, because he twisted and threw out a hand and, like Dace, said, “Wait.” I unloaded the M16 into his side and back. He was dead before the bullets stopped shuddering through him.
    “LuEllen!” I shouted across the road. “Two down.”
    “Are there more?”
    “I don’t think so. I didn’t see a backup.”
    “Maggie.”
    LuEllen started running along the hill parallel to the road, an awkward galumphing in the camouflage suit. I followed on my side. We came through the bend and saw Maggie running back toward her car.
    “Shoot her,” LuEllen screamed.
    I dropped to one knee and put the scope on her back. She ran so well. I watched as she took five steps, ten, long, lithe strides like a college runner . . .
    “Shoot,” LuEllen screamed again.
    “Ah, shit,” I said, and took the gun down.
    LuEllen looked at me, looked at Maggie, close to her car now, put up her MAC-10, and sprayed out the whole clip. A MAC-10’s effective range must be about thirty yards; she was shooting at more than two hundred. I saw one slug hit the dirt road perhaps fifty yards behind Maggie. The rest must have gone into the woods or the hillside. Maggie got back to the car, climbed in, and cranked it around in a circle. She stopped abruptly, a bag flew out of the window, and she was gone.
     
    GRAVEDIGGING IS BRUTAL work.
    With Maggie gone, I ran back to the bridge, dragged both bodies into the brush above the ravine, and scuffed dirt over the bloodstains, while LuEllen picked up the brass from the M16. If a car came down the road—an unlikely occurrence—nothing would be visible. That done, LuEllen and I climbed the hillside together, all the way to the top, toward the lower end of the road. Once over the ridgeline, we doubled back toward the top end. We found a good clump of trees above the road and crawled into it and lay there for three hours, and never a thing moved. Later on, we walked back down the road and looked at the bundle Maggie had thrown out of the window. It was the rest of the money.
    “Maybe she wanted to deal,” LuEllen said doubtfully.
    “If she had to. If we’d come up with something she couldn’t fight,” I said.
    “We did, I guess,” said LuEllen. We looked at the money for a while, glumly shuffled through it, and carried it back to the cabin.
    “Let’s get the shovel,” I said finally.
    We buried Ratface and his large friend a hundred feet up the hill, in a small natural hollow where I could work out of sight. LuEllen sat on the hill above me with the MAC-10. I first cut out the clumps of sod and put them to one side and then threw the dirt on a tarp. I dug for two hours in the yellow, sandy soil before I was both satisfied and too tired to dig anymore.
    Getting bodies up the hill was as bad as the digging. I checked their pockets, found car keys and wallets, kept the keys but left the wallets with the bodies. I dragged Ratface up the hill by his coat, but the big man was too heavy, so I tied three loops of rope around his waist to use as a handle. Their heads and hands rolled loosely and their skin was as white as candle wax. When I dropped them in the grave, they made an untidy and unholy pile. I tossed the M16 and both of their guns in on top of them.
    It took another half hour to get the dirt in, and the sod tramped into place.
    “Should we say a prayer?” LuEllen asked as I fitted the last of the sod back in place.
    I said nothing and finally she said, “Ah, fuck it.”
    There was some extra dirt left on the tarp, and I dragged it down to the ravine and dumped it in the creek. LuEllen loaded the car and shut down the cabin. I found her wiping the table, the stove, and the woodwork.
    “I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said.
    “Remember what Maggie said? Why take a chance?”
    We left the cabin, going out the back way, at seven o’clock. The red Buick was parked near the intersection of the all-weather road. I checked the front seat and trunk as LuEllen waited, and found a box with fourteen thousand dollars in it. I took the money and drove the car out to the main highway, with LuEllen following. We eventually left it at a turnoff by a historical marker, fifteen