Chuck Logan - After the Rain

Calmer now, more in control, Joe came forward, covering her as Dale grabbed the body of his brother by a limp arm and dragged it aside. “Now look what you went and did,” Dale said. Not to Joe, but to the corpse. And Nina, who felt the first lift of a rearing narcotic wave, noted the homicidal marker of not owning the motivation of one’s violence, of assigning it to others.

She was being swept away. Out of herself completely. She’d mourn Ace and Janey later. Right now gotta work on having a later.

Deadly efficient, Joe covered her.

“No need,” Dale said. “She going in the K-hole. Be a couple minutes.”

Nina going slack, shook words from the fog enveloping her: “Not Ojibwa…” Joe just smiled. She tried again. “Where did you train?”

The smile broadened. He shrugged. “In the Bekaa Valley.”

“Not Afghanistan?”

“Fuck Afghanistan and their religious bullshit,” Joe said.

That was all. The last thing she saw was the contempt in Joe’s chilly eyes. And blood, Ace’s blood, on her chest. Then Dale roughly grabbed her hair and jerked her head back in a gesture of acquisition.

The thought that she’d never see her daughter again…

Her eyes rolled up. A soft nothing rose up on a flutter of euphoric wings and banished the dread.

Joe stood at the window talking on his cell to George as he nervously kept checking the road and motioning with his free hand for Dale to be quiet. But Dale had a very different reaction to the shootings, and the capture of Nina. He couldn’t keep still. Stepping in the blood, tracking it around. “Look,” he said, “it’s okay. Nobody heard. We can just leave the bodies. We plan to disappear, right? We won’t be coming back.”

Joe spun furiously, yanked the pistol from his waistband, and waved it in Dale’s face, then at the floor. “Just shut up, okay? And clean up your shoes and the tracks on the floor.” He turned back to the window and the phone.

Dale didn’t care for that, Joe pointing a gun at him. But he removed his work shoes and washed them thoroughly in the bathroom sink. Then he took Gordy’s mop and pail from the closet and removed all trace of his footprints. Dale was thinking as he worked, and the more he thought about it, the more he decided Joe should be punished for sticking a gun in his face. Uh-huh.

By the time Joe ended his phone conversation and approached Dale, stepping carefully around the bodies and the remaining blood on the floor, he’d settled down. “George and I think it’s best to change the plan. After this, what happened here.”

Dale shrugged. He didn’t care. He had the woman to be with all the way to Florida. “Sure,” he said.

“Good, so I’ll get you over to Camp’s Corner to hook up with George. Then I’ll split back over the border. George will go with you to the target.”

“Fine,” Dale said, “let’s get going.”

While Joe went across the road to the equipment shed for his van, Dale dragged Nina’s unconscious body to the back storeroom and lay her down next to the door. He returned to the barroom and picked up her purse. It did not particularly surprise him that he could look at the dark-haired woman’s body and Ace’s without feeling anything, other than a certain satisfaction that he was finally succeeding in life, despite all the obstacles he had to overcome-while Ace, who was gifted from birth in every way, who had always squandered his potential, had failed.

“You lose, asshole,” Dale said.

He stooped down and rubbed Nina’s purse in the pool of blood that spread around Janey Singer’s torso. Then he came back and studied Nina, watched her labored breathing. But he wasn’t real worried. He’d given her 100 mg. Usually enough to put even him into a K-hole for an hour. And he outweighed Nina by almost a hundred pounds.

He couldn’t resist removing her wallet from the purse and carefully fingering out the Minnesota driver’s license. Holding it by the edge, he took the Sharpie from his chest pocket and blackened out the eyes on the photo. Then he inserted the ID back in the wallet and put the wallet back in the purse.

He heard Joe’s van pulling around the building. “Asshole,” he said under his breath. “Pointing a gun at me …” Like Gordy, trying to boss him.

Joe backed up to the loading dock, got out, and then checked to make sure there were no cars on the highway, no one in the fields. Then they lifted her off the dock and put her on the cargo floor in the back of the van. Dale folded her arms across her stomach and put her purse on her chest. He stayed with her, in the back, out of sight, as Joe drove west on Highway 5, took a turn to the south.

Right through town. That took some balls.

Yeah, well, so does this.

Dale hunkered down behind the driver’s seat so Joe couldn’t see him in the rearview. Okay. He removed his pocketknife and studied his open left hand. The crisscross lines in his palm were supposed to predict things about his life. Damned if he knew what.

What the hell.

Keeping his hands low, he drew the sharp blade along the heel of his left hand and watched the blood drip onto the floor of the van. He flexed his hand so the blood made a small pool in his palm and then he grabbed at the spare tire mount, then the back door latch, leaving a red spongy pattern of his hand and fingerprints. He searched in his back pack, took out some Kleenex and a surgical glove. He wadded the tissue over the cut, applied pressure. Not the greatest, but it would do for now. Then he pulled on the Latex glove, one he’d worn last night.

With Gordy.

“How you doing?” Joe called back.

“Fine. Just drive.”

“We’re really going to do this,” Joe said.

“Drive,” Dale said as he sat back and watched Nina’s chest rise and fall. Later, when they were alone together, she’d be awake and he could watch her eyes when he told her what he was going to do. Watch her think about it.

He looked up, at the back of Joe’s head. Joe was relieved to think he would soon be free of Dale. He’d head north, cross into Canada. Joe Reed would vanish. He’d be Joseph Khari again. Smiling all the way, a rich man. A big man in Winnipeg.

They came to Camp’s Corner. Immediately one of the doors on the garage bay opened and George stepped out and waved them in. Dale got out, looked around, saw nothing but flat green and the anomalous bulge of the Nekoma pyramid floating in a blur of ground thermal.

George looked haggard, dressed in a dirty shirt and shorts, unshaven, and blinking in the sun. He and Joe made quite a pair, both looking so grim and nervous. Joe shifted from his good foot to his bad foot and licked at the scars around his lips. Dale wasn’t sweating drop one. They were just foot soldiers in a war, same as Nina. He felt more like Truman-cool, calling the shots.

Hiroshima? Fuck it. Just drop that sucker.

“We gotta do this fast,” George said as he looked searchingly at Joe and Dale. Dale made his face stolid and obedient. Like George would expect.

“No one saw us. We’re good,” Joe said.

“We have to do this fast,” George repeated. Dale saw he was antsy now, so near the end. And keyed up about all the things that could still go wrong.

The Roadtrek was parked in the baked shadows, gassed up, with the new Minnesota plates Joe had stolen off a car in long-term parking at the Winnipeg International Airport. Hopefully they wouldn’t be missed for the next few days. Dale planned to ditch the camper and be in Florida by then.

If the prevailing wind patterns didn’t change.

George and Joe averted their eyes as Dale carried Nina from the back of the van into the Roadtrek and placed her on the bed that filled the rear compartment. The bungee cords were waiting, laid out on the sheets with a pliers. He used the cords to secure her wrists and ankles to the bed’s side boards. He used the pliers to crimp the hooks together. Just a formality. Ketamine would control her.