But they were on top of him now. There wasn’t enough time for him to move. Charles let out a deep, almost orgasmic, breath of air as the car lifted.

Richard heard the crunch beneath them.

“Oh my God, Charles…Charles, what the fuck did you do?”

The car glided, slowly, with Charles’s foot off the gas.

“Death,” Charles said. “Is so striking.”

As the Oldsmobile came to a natural stop at the foot of a gravel hill, Richard felt sick. The violence of it…the reality of it…the fact that he’d only put his hand on the wheel but had not turned it. It felt as if he’d assisted Charles somehow, helped aim the car.

Charles put the car in park and turned the engine off. Dust from Christmas settled like small storm clouds by the doors.

Birds sang in the trees. Richard imagined one of Goblin’s Great Owls. An endangered species.

But not more endangered than that dog.

Breathing hard, Charles turned to face his friend. “Let’s go look at it.”

“No. I wanna go home.”

“Home?” Charles looked ahead. “This is Goblin, Richard. You are home.”

He got out of the car. Richard watched him in the side mirror. Saw it as Charles walked with his hands in his pant pockets. He made such an innocent profile in the glass, but Richard imagined the slow-moving, zombielike Goblin Police approaching him all the same.

How wrong was this? Richard wondered. Exactly how wrong?

Murder wrong?

He saw Charles looking right and left, over his shoulder, up ahead. Hope rose in Richard’s chest.

He got out of the car.

“Can’t find it?” he asked.

Charles turned to face him, and the disappointment Richard saw was enough to tell him never to speak to this man again. They were only sixteen years old. Richard could do it. Could get out right now. College was a year away. He could leave the state, leave the country, slowly but surely never speak to Charles again.

“I don’t get it,” Charles said. “He’s not here.”

By the time Richard reached him, hope was past rising, it was afloat.

“He’s gotta be in the woods,” Richard said. He spoke to himself. But when he searched the scant trees lining the woods, he saw no body.

There was no blood in the dirt, either. No mark. No sign that they had hit anything at all.

Richard was electric with exhalation as he searched the woods more deeply. No broken sticks. No fur. No blood.

No dog.

He returned to the car. Charles was kneeling at the grille.

“I don’t understand,” Charles said, his brow darkening in step with the Goblin sky above. He looked up at Richard. “Not a nick.”

Richard checked for himself to make sure.

“What a shame,” Richard said. And by then the hope he felt had turned to joy. “Looks like he got away.”

Charles frowned at the grille of his new used car for a beat before he broke out into a deep, rich smile.