“That doesn’t matter,” said Steve. “That’s not the point.”
I lunged for the door and Steve shot me in the hand. I screamed. I writhed in pain while the tip of my finger spouted blood, but all my writhing and screaming made the car rock a little beneath me, so I stopped, afraid of sending us over the edge. I whimpered. I clutched my hand.
Steve spoke. With agonizing slowness, he spoke. “It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you, because there was someone like you in Indiana too. Someone that Vance and Vance’s friend were working with. I couldn’t figure out who that was. But you, you and your friends, you’re less careful, I guess.”
Graham, I thought while my finger pulsed blood. Fucking Graham!
“But it doesn’t matter. It’s not you, but it’s you. The world is full of you. My state, your state. Everywhere. The world is full of you. Scheming and taking. Grasping. Cheating. Pulling strings, taking shortcuts. And what is at the end of it? Far off at the other end, where you can never see? My family. My boy. My girls. My beautiful girls. Dead in the road.”
I didn’t want to die. I thought I could hear an engine starting, close by, maybe at the top of the road. Any second a car would come tearing up or come roaring down.
“What do you want, Steve? What do you want?”
“I want my family back.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I know.”
He pushed the barrel of the gun into my temple. I gazed out into vast smoggy sprawling twilight Los Angeles and knew it would be the last thing I’d ever see. There was definitely a vehicle coming down the hill; I could hear it clearly now. A gardener, I bet. Done for the day. Gardening truck, flatbed. I could picture it. In another ten seconds it would be on top of us. It would cut the Odyssey in two or send it spiraling over the side of the hill, and it wouldn’t matter, not to me, because Steve was going to shoot me first.
But I had to try. I had to keep trying—right? That’s what you do?
“Listen, Steve, I’m sorry. I admit it. I’m bad. I see that now. I admit it. Is that what you want? For me to admit it?”
“Admit it? Why would I care if you admitted it?” He gave his head a little shake while he dug the gun tighter into my sweaty forehead. “No, no. I want you to die for it.”
I closed my eyes and the city disappeared and I waited. But nothing happened. I tasted the cigarettes and Starlight mints on my breath. I heard the engine of the truck coming down the hill. I felt its rumble in my butt cheeks.
I heard Steve crying. I cracked my eyes open, one at a time, and the gun was still pressed against my skull but Steve’s head was lowered and his cheeks were red and wet with tears. His shoulders shook. The gun slowly came down, dragging along my forehead, my cheek, my chin. He was no killer after all. He was just a man, a poor sad man—lawn-mower dad, widowed husband, middle-aged and alone and out of his mind with grief.
And then I heard them and I turned and I saw Sean in the middle row in jersey and cleats, earbuds in, gazing out the window. Angie with her nose in a children’s novel, one lock of dirty-blond hair wound around her index finger. The twins in the back, mewling and yelping, the happy little shouts of infancy. The floor of the car was littered with snack crackers and granola crumbs, splattered with spilled juice, the discarded cellophane wrappers of cheese sticks like shed skins beneath the seats.
Angie looked up and gave the small shy smile of a curious kid, and in the center of her forehead was a bullet hole. Sean had two through his chest, and the babies a half a dozen each, a spray of holes in their tiny bodies.
“I am so sorry,” I whispered to those kids, to Angie and Sean and the babies. I had opened the shotgun door, and I was half in and half out, saying sorry like saying good-bye, and the children opened their mouths, maybe to forgive me and maybe not, but the horn of the garden truck was blaring by then and it was too late.
POWER WAGON
C. J. Box
A SINGLE HEADLIGHT strobed through a copse of ten-foot willows on the other side of the overgrown horse pasture. Marissa unconsciously laced her fingers over her pregnant belly and said, “Brandon, there’s somebody out there.”
“What?” Brandon said. He was at the head of an old kitchen table that had once fed a half dozen ranch hands breakfast and dinner. A thick ledger book was open in front of him and Brandon had moved a lamp from the family room next to the table so he could read.
“I said, somebody is out there. A car or something. I saw a headlight.”
“Just one?”
“Just one.”
Brandon placed his index finger on an entry in the ledger book so he wouldn’t lose his place. He looked up.
“Don’t get freaked out. It’s probably a hunter or somebody who’s lost.”
“What if they come to the house?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we help them out.”