Paul Brickhill was pale and covered with dirt. His nose had been broken and there was dried blood on his face, and he was taking halting steps, as if his legs and maybe his ribs were hurting him, but he was alive. He was alive.
Arlen said, “Paul, come here and take these handcuffs.”
He shuffled past, looking at Arlen with a face caught between amazement and horror. Arlen had a sense that anyone who saw him would be horrified. Covered in mud and water and with blood flowing freely along his neck and down his chest, a rifle in his hands and a pistol tucked into his belt. Arlen kept the rifle pointed at the McGrath boys as Paul took the handcuffs. The McGraths watched with sullen hatred.
“You’ll want to tend to your brother,” Arlen said. “But I don’t mean to leave one of you to do that and the other to follow us. Paul, you fasten that one’s right hand to the other’s left. That’ll leave them moving well enough, but it won’t make things easy on them.”
He held the Springfield on them as Paul did as instructed.
“Get in the sheriff’s car now,” he told Paul.
Paul said, “All right,” the first words he’d spoken, and then he was out of sight and it was just Arlen on the road facing the McGraths.
“Davey isn’t going to die,” Arlen said. “But he’s bad hurt. Do what you can for him. There will be men headed this way soon. The law. They’ll see to your brother, but I expect they’ll have some reckoning to do with you as well.”
Neither of them answered. They looked every bit as mean as the water moccasins that had sunk fangs into their father’s corpse.
“You want to know who’s responsible for it all,” Arlen said, “you need look no farther than Solomon Wade. Your daddy thought of him as a friend, I’m sure. But he’s the one who dug your daddy’s grave. Remember that.”
He backed up, keeping the gun on them, and fumbled the door open. Fell in beside Paul and said, “Time to drive the hell out of here, wouldn’t you say?”
He put the sheriff’s car into gear, backed it up, and then turned it and drove away. The McGrath brothers were paying no mind to the car, busy instead with climbing down into the ditch to find their eldest. Once he was cared for, they’d go after their father, Arlen knew. They wouldn’t like what they found.
“There’s blood all over this car,” Paul said.
“Yes,” Arlen said. “The sheriff didn’t want to let me borrow it.”
The rain had begun to fall now, steady but quiet, and Arlen got the wipers going, then removed a waterlogged handkerchief and pressed it to the wound on his shoulder. Paul looked over at him.
“Owen is-”
“I know,” Arlen said. “We found him. They’d hung him upside down from the roof.”
Paul shuddered.
“How bad did it go?” Arlen asked. “You’ve taken a beating, clearly.”
“Went fast, that’s all. One minute it was only Tolliver out in the yard and the next they were on us.” His voice was close to breaking when he said, “It’s all on me, Arlen. It’s on-”
“Stop,” Arlen said. “There’ll be no more of that. It’s on Wade and these bastards who work for him. None other.”
“Where’s Rebecca?”
“Driving north,” Arlen said. “I sent her alone. Then I came for you.”
“How?” Paul said. “How did you do this?”
“Wasn’t easy” was all Arlen could answer. He thought of those gray trances and the harsh whispers of dead men and the snakes coming at him through the water, and he shook his head. The idea that he was in this car now with the boy at his side was incredible. Because he’d known from the start that he was going to die out there, and yet…
He looked up then. Raised his eyes and shifted his face to the mirror. What he saw chilled even the searing pain of the bullet wound in his shoulder.
There was still smoke in his eyes.
How? He dropped back into his seat, lips parted and mind spinning. How in the hell could it still be there? He’d survived every challenge, taken every comer, was driving toward safety. The wound in his shoulder throbbed, but it wasn’t a killing wound.
“What?” Paul said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Arlen said. He was remembering the battlefields of France, though, remembering the Belleau Wood and what he’d discovered there. The dead couldn’t save themselves. He could help those men with smoke in their eyes, but they couldn’t ever help themselves.
He said, “Hey-look at me.”
Paul turned to face him. He was a wreck, all right, covered with dirt and dried blood, but his eyes were clear. Nothing but deep brown. Not even a hint of those gray wisps.
“All right,” Arlen said softly. “Let’s keep driving, son. Let’s not stop.”
It was no more than a minute later that they rounded a bend and the bridge came into view and they saw the roadblock. The convertible was parked where Arlen had left it, and Tolliver’s body still dangled from the trees, but another car had been pulled in sideways on the other side of the bridge, blocking any attempt at exit. It was a steel-gray Ford coupe.
55
FOR A MOMENT they sat in silence and stared ahead. Arlen was squinting to see through the fractured windshield, and finally the bullet holes rang a bell in his mind and he said, “Get down, Paul. Get real low, out of sight.”
The shots Arlen had taken at Tolliver had been clean and simple. He didn’t want to leave Paul exposed to the same.
“Pass me that rifle,” he said.
Paul handed him the Springfield. It felt good to have it in his hands again, but hard in his mind was the knowledge that he had one cartridge left. The other rifle was still in the weeds down there with the McGraths. In the moment he’d seen Paul, he’d forgotten it. All he’d wanted to do then was move, get the hell away from this place and do it fast. Now he was wishing for those extra rounds.
No one was in sight, though. The rain fell gently and pattered off the hood of the sheriff’s car. Paul was crouched low, keeping his head below the dash.
“That’s Solomon Wade’s car,” he whispered.
“Yes, it is.”
“And that body in the trees, that was the sheriff.”
Indeed it was. Tolliver’s body was swinging more vigorously now.
Paul said, “Did you-”
“Yes,” Arlen said. He was still staring at the Ford. It didn’t look as if there were anyone inside. The headlights were on, pointing down at the swollen, swift-running creek, but inside there was nothing but shadow. The rain was falling harder, making visibility difficult. Arlen’s left side was wet and warm. Blood.
He was feeling a touch dizzy and nauseated, the pain working at him, and when he thought of the three McGrath boys back there, with vengeance in their hearts, he knew that he didn’t want to wait this game out. Wade had come down and parked his car in a way that blocked the bridge, but he didn’t appear to be in it. Perhaps he’d gone ahead on foot, or maybe he’d had a boat in the creek. Maybe he’d been accompanied by someone in another car and they’d taken that one and headed back up the road. Arlen wasn’t short on maybes. Just on time.
The smell of blood was heavy in the car, his own blending with Tolliver’s. He wiped a hand across his mouth and then looked in the mirror again. The smoke was storm-cloud gray now, dark and dense.
“I may need your help,” he said to Paul, watching the smoke waft from his own eye sockets. “I may not be able to do this alone.”
“Okay. Just tell me what to do.”
That was the question. And when he looked back at Paul and saw his clear eyes, he found himself shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “Actually, you just sit here, all right? You sit low. Even lower than now. I don’t think they know you’re here. My guess is, anything happens out there, they’ll drive on by you.”
He hadn’t been sure of this until he said the words. Now that they were out of his mouth, though, he could almost see it, was so certain that he found himself nodding slightly. If Wade thought Arlen was alone in this car, he’d drive on by and head toward McGrath’s. There was nothing about a bullet-riddled car that was worth his time. Not with the situation he was trying to handle today.