The Ford came to a stop fifty feet down the road. The man and woman got out and walked up the road to where he lay. As she passed the front of the car the woman stopped, stooped and lifted out the heavy elbowed crank and carried it with her. He was on his side in the road, one arm torn off his jacket and a splinter of bone showing through. Bloodfoam seething around his lips. A hand lying open on the gravel as if waiting for something to fill it, the hand a broken thing with a broad wound crusted over. Some feet away a stiffened towel. The turned-up side of his face was cut and scraped away where he’d struck the gravel and then turned or rolled over with the momentum. The man leaned close, his hands on his knees. Leaned and then stood quickly. Speaking, the peak of bile rounding and thickening his voice.

“He’s done.”

With the voice the head seemed to bounce up, the other arm raised away from his side where it had laid slack, the arm led up by the hand a short distance into the night, the hand opening and closing as if trying to grasp the night and draw it back.

The woman said, “Jeeter, he’s not.”

The hand fell back down.

“I guess maybe he is.”

“No,” she said. “We won’t risk the chance. Someone might come along.” She tried to hand him the crank.

“No Amy,” he said. “I won’t do it. The man is dead. Can’t you see?”

She looked at him then. The both of them shaking a little with the night. She hated him for the shaking, his and her own. She said, “You’re piss-poor of a man.” And she stepped the final step and raised the crank with both hands and brought it down once and then a second time on the head of the man on the road. Each time feeling the skull break and the crank pierce through and stick before she wrenched it free. Each time she brought it down and felt it first break into the skull she said Oh.

The middle of the afternoon Patrick Jackson turned off the road and drove down the dirt track through the hemlocks and tamaracks to the house, another marshal following behind in the Chrysler found in the parking lot of the Forest Hills, empty of gas but with a small patch still reeking in the sand below the gas tank where someone had siphoned it out. One of the details he was choosing to overlook. The sky was piled up with clouds, the sun bright. The clouds would continue gathering as the heat built and sometime around nightfall it would storm.