Only when he was nearly parallel to the car could he distinguish a silhouette in the passenger seat. Bonnie was sitting with her head laid back against the headrest. Awfully relaxed for a murderer, he thought. Maybe she doesn’t know what her boyfriend was up to.
He raised his weapon to a ready position and moved forward. She did not turn his way. He moved closer and looked at her through the passenger window. Still she did not move. She’s sleeping, he told himself. He tapped the barrel against the glass. No response. He tapped again, harder. No movement from within.
With his weapon aimed at her now, DeMarco put his free hand on the door handle, then swung the door open. The dome light had been turned off, and in the predawn darkness she remained no more visible than a shadow, but he was able to see that she did not move in any way. He leaned forward and put a finger to her cheek. Her skin was not cold, but it was cool enough that he felt something catch in his chest. “Oh fuck,” he said.
He slid his hand down the jawline to her carotid artery. Instead of a pulse, he felt the sticky smear of blood that had flowed over her blouse, and immediately the coppery scent reached him too.
He leaned away from her, softly closed the door, stood there breathing deeply. “What a fucking mess,” he told the last dim stars overhead. He hunkered down low to rub his fingers clean in the wet grass.
He knew he should not proceed on his own now, knew that if he did he could end up manning a radar gun the rest of his career, or putting in long hours doing traffic control at a construction site, sitting on his hemorrhoids and trying to stay awake. But he also thought he knew what Huston had planned. The cement blocks were probably to slow Inman down should he attempt to run. In all likelihood, Huston intended to take Inman’s life exactly as that psychopath had taken away Huston’s family. And then to use DeMarco’s revolver on himself.
What Huston did not know was that the first three shells in the .22’s cylinder were filled with birdshot. What would a load of birdshot do to the inside of a man’s head? DeMarco didn’t want to think about it.
He hurried around the car and climbed into the driver’s seat. Inman had not locked the car because he’d had no intention of returning to it. The keys were in the ignition. The smell of blood was thick, its scent of rusty metal. DeMarco turned on the dome light and looked at Bonnie. The front of her white blouse was soaked with drying blood. The blood had run over the top of her jeans and soaked her to the thighs. Her hands were bloody and there were bloody handprints on the dashboard.
DeMarco leaned over her body, pulled the seat belt harness across her chest, and buckled her in.
? ? ?
Twenty minutes, he told himself. Twenty minutes to the clearing near Schofield Run. Huston had a twenty-minute jump on him. But Huston would be driving cautiously. He wouldn’t want to get pulled over in a stolen car with a man in the trunk. DeMarco, on the other hand, had no such concern. He drove through the graying morning as fast as the turns allowed. He knew there would be no troopers hiding along the highway for another two hours. So maybe he could make up a few minutes on Huston by speeding.
“Then the hike to the campsite,” he told Bonnie. “He’ll have to cut Inman’s legs free. Then he’ll either make a second trip back to the car for the cement blocks or he’ll make your boyfriend carry them. That’s what I would do.”
The seat belt straps across Bonnie’s chest and lap kept her upper body tight against the seat, but her head jounced forward and back, side to side. Her feet slid over the floor mat, sometimes kicking out violently in reaction to a hard turn. She was wearing a pair of straw-colored mules but soon both feet were bare. DeMarco wished he could stop long enough to put her shoes back on, but he could not.
“Why did he kill you?” he asked. “Did you balk when you realized he was coming for me? Did you try to talk him out of it?”
He wondered if she had even known about the Huston murders before the fact. Probably not. Hard-timers like Inman learn to trust no one. They impart information on a need-to-know basis only, and even then it’s usually a lie.
“Why did he come after me?” he asked. “Why not just get away as far and as fast as you could?”
Her head rolled side to side with the movements of the car. Her bare feet scraped the floor.
Sixty-Two