“Shoot it,” I blurted. LuEllen was still looking through the viewfinder and fired a last shot just as the pistol hit the water. I tried to mark the spot in my memory and then said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. If they even get a smell of us or decide to check this place out

“

We ran back down the hill, down the road, and off onto the track.

“They’d know the car,” LuEllen said, looking back toward the hill as we got in it.

“They were a hundred yards away, and they’re both heavy guys, and they had no reason to run. Even if they’re going up the hill, they wouldn’t be more than halfway yet,” I said. I turned the car around, rolled it back to the road, and went out the opposite way.

We argued about the killings.

“We can’t tell anybody,” LuEllen said urgently. “I don’t want to quit, but I don’t want to get involved in any kind of murder investigation. That’d blow me, that’d blow you.”

“We can’t just sit on it,” I argued. “They fuckin’ murdered them.”

“So we handle it ourselves,” she said. “We did once before.”

I thought about the two bodies and what would be the now-rusty guns piled in the unmarked grave in West Virginia. Yeah, by God, we had handled it before, and it made me sick to think about. Not that we could have done anything different.

“I gotta think,” I said. “We can’t just let it go.”

“OK, but please, please, we don’t tell Marvel or John what happened. We don’t tell anybody. This is for us, man.” She was looking up at me and it occurred to me how small she was. “An investigation would drag us out in the open.”

“For us.” I threw an arm around her head and tightened up in a wrestler’s headlock. She wrapped her inside arm around my waist. Not your basic Gone With the Wind clinch, but it felt right.

“Bobby will talk to them, tell them he called us.”

“So we tell them that we went out to Dessusdelit’s house, saw no sign of Harold’s car, so we just kept going,” LuEllen suggested. “We looked around for a while, checked animal control, but there just wasn’t anything to see.”

“Jesus.” I ran my hand through my hair. There was an impulse to go out on the bow, take off the lines, and head south. That was impossible now.

LuEllen looked at me closely. “Kidd, sometimes you have these

impulses

to do the right thing. You’ve got to keep them under control. There’s not a goddamned thing we can do for Harold or that woman. Nothing that would be worth going to prison for.”

“I’d better call Marvel.”

“What for?”

I shrugged. “To start working both ends against the middle.”

Marvel was frantic.