The Hardest Thing

it all—the one thing that really made me suspicious—that old couple that booked into the next-door
room. You probably think I’m crazy, that I’m about to hole up in the woods and form a private militia, but that was the final detail that convinced me we’d been set up. Two convenient credible witnesses just the other side of the wall. Not in the room down at the end of the block, where they’d have spent an undisturbed night. Slap bang next door. “Yeah, we heard them fighting, we were too scared to go around and intervene, the guy looked dangerous, and then at 4:15 we heard two shots.” Police find our bodies in room three at the Starlight Motel. Murder-suicide. Signs of recent sexual activity. A dangerous ex-marine, sacked from his security job for beating up an innocent young man, on the run with a known prostitute—oh, yes, it all made perfect sense. Nothing to connect me to Ferrari or Marshall. Jody Miller—or Stirling McMahon, the witness of Marshall’s unpleasant business practices—silenced forever, slain by a psychopath. I hadn’t been hired as a bodyguard. I’d been hired as a murder suspect. Sentence passed posthumously. A gun that matched the ballistics report, my prints all over it. History of violence. Perfect.
    Try telling that to the police.
    But what the hell—we were still innocent. We’d done nothing wrong. If my assailant was dead, whose fault was that?
    Do the right thing, Dan, and face the consequences. Turn yourselves in—you’re important witnesses, Jody can bring down Marshall and his cronies, the people who would have killed you if your reflexes had been a fraction of a second slower. That was the game-changer. When I left New York City I was just a hired man, happy to take the money without questioning
motives. Now someone had tried to kill me—and I had no doubt who was behind the assassin. Julian Marshall had set the whole job up to silence Jody, getting him out of town—out of New York State—with a plausible promise of love and money. Jody, greedy and gullible as he was, went along with it, a lamb to the slaughter. Well, he’d just had a rude awakening, that’s for sure.
    But what was Marshall’s real game? I needed to think things through. If we were going to hand ourselves in, we had to be sure we were safe. If there was anything that Jody wasn’t telling me, now was the time to find out.
    He barely spoke a word as we drove out of Lincoln. That suited me; I was busy checking my rearview for signs of pursuit, sifting the data whirling through my head. The adrenaline was leveling off a little, my rational mind getting back in control, and I was able to plan.
    Get out of Lincoln.
    Get rid of the car.
    Hide.
    We were heading south around the base of the first big mountain, taking a quiet access road. Nobody was following us, although our headlights would be easy to spot if you knew what to look for. At the end of the road, where the blacktop turned into dirt, was the entrance to a big old wrecker’s yard. Piled up, parked at crazy angles, wheels removed, jacked up on bricks, rusting and smashed and covered in weeds, were maybe two hundred old cars.
    Where better to hide a hot rental vehicle? The place looked abandoned. It could be days—weeks even—before anyone noticed the shiny Chevrolet behind the
rusted hulks. And by then Jody and I would be far away. Out of Marshall’s reach. Somewhere he hasn’t paid the cops. Somewhere they’ll listen to the truth.
    I drove across the yard, negotiating potholes, and tucked the car between a high-sided Ford van and a pile of stripped chassis. No sign of a night watchman; what was there to guard? Anything of value had been removed years ago. As a final precaution I threw a half-rotted tarpaulin over the roof of the Chevy—just in case they got the helicopters out.
    All was quiet as we started to climb the mountain. It was hard work, and dark. We both fell a couple of times. When I judged we’d gone far enough, we stopped to rest. Jody was shivering. Shock was setting in. He was silent, his face pale in the moonlight, eyes unfocused. I needed to find shelter, or I was going to be in trouble. More trouble, that is.
    I warmed him as best I could, speaking words of encouragement, and he responded like a robot. Before long I was getting cold, too—no point in both of us going into shutdown. It’s not difficult to die in the woods. Back at the trailhead I’d seen some friendly warning signs posted by the Forest