Brian Freeman: The Bone House

'Goddamn you, Bolton,' Reich said. 'You couldn't let it go, could you? What the hell did you do?'

'I found him, Sheriff,' Cab replied, i found him in that hole where the two of you left him to rot. Harris Bone never escaped. He never ran. You and Peter Hoffman killed him.'

In the miles since they left the county courthouse in Sturgeon Bay, Harris Bone hadn't said a word. He sat silently in the back of the squad car, his balding head hung forward, his hands and ankles cuffed. His jail clothes were baggy on his frame. Harris had never been a large man, but he'd shrunk inside his skin in the months since the fire, until he was almost a skeleton.

Reich watched his headlights tunneling through the night. He was south of Kewaunee in the midst of flat, dormant farmlands. It was January, during one of the frigid winter stretches, with temperatures falling into the teens below zero when the sun went down. The season had been mostly snowless, leaving the ground barren and hard, swept clean by the bitter wind.

He glanced in the mirror with hard eyes.

'You should look outside, Harris. You won't be seeing open country again for the rest of your life. Just eighty square feet of concrete for twenty-three hours a day.'

Harris didn't acknowledge him.

'I'd watch my back in there if I were you. Big-ass gang killers don't like a man who burns up his wife and family.'

Harris finally looked up with sunken eyes. 'Shut the hell up, Felix.'

'Oh, don't start mouthing off. That's a bad lesson. You shoot off your mouth in there, and bad things are likely to happen.'

'Thanks for the advice.'

Reich heard the sarcasm, and he didn't care. 'A lot of people think you're getting off easy, sitting on the taxpayer's dime for the next forty years. That doesn't feel like justice.'

'Is that right? What do you think, Felix?'

'If it were up to me, we'd gather volunteers and stone you.'

'Too bad it's not up to you.'

Reich nodded and studied the empty highway. 'Yeah. Too bad.'

Behind him, Harris closed his eyes, and his head fell back against the seat.

'I always felt sorry for you, Harris,' Reich called to him. 'Nettie was a bitch. Not that I'd ever say so to Pete. But there are some lines a man doesn't cross, no matter how much he hates his life. There are some things that when you do them, you stop being human.'

Harris leaned forward until his weary face was pressed against the steel mesh. 'What does that make you, Felix? How many babies did you kill during the war?'

Reich gripped the wheel fiercely. His lip curled into a snarl. 'Are you suggesting I'm the same as you? Is that really what you want to say to me?'

'I'm saying you can spare me the morality shit. I don't need it.'

Harris sank back and pretended to sleep. Reich studied the man's face and saw tears slipping down his cheeks. It didn't matter. He felt nothing for him. It was just as he'd said: there were lines a man doesn't cross. There were also things a man had to do when justice demanded it.

He was close to the rendezvous. Through the headlights, he spied the intersection at the county road, and he checked the odometer to count off one point seven miles. There was nothing but frozen land on either side of the vehicle. He and Pete had scouted the terrain weeks earlier as they made their plans.

Where to meet. Where to stage the escape.

Reich spotted the driveway leading to the farmhouse, miles from anything else around it. He slowed sharply and turned. In the back seat, Harris felt the change in direction and opened his eyes.

'What's going on?'

Reich said nothing. He drove into the rutted cornfield bordering the house and steered around the rear of the detached garage, where he parked the squad car with its right-hand door butted against the wall. From the highway, the car was invisible. It would be days before anyone found it.

'What the hell are you doing, Felix?'

Reich heard it in Harris's voice. The first tremors of fear. The first horrified realization of what was about to happen to him.

Justice.

Reich got out of the car. The wind was ferocious, and the cold bit through his coat like a maneater. He opened the rear door and dragged Harris Bone into the night by the cuff of his shirt. Harris, who wore nothing except his prison scrubs, howled as the frozen air knifed his skin. The bound man hunched his limbs together. Reich yanked a billy club from his belt and swung it across the man's skull. Harris collapsed to his knees. Reich laid a boot on the man's back and crushed him forward on to the rock-hard dirt, where he twitched from the pain and cold. Harris tried to crawl, but Reich held him down.

'Hello, Felix,' Peter Hoffman said. He was waiting for them beside the garage.

'No mercy tonight,' Reich replied.

'None.'

The house and land belonged to a retired couple who were away in the sunshine of Mesa and wouldn't be back in Wisconsin until after Easter. Reich had checked the house and garage three weeks earlier and found the couple's Accord parked inside for the season. Keys on a peg board by the door. He loved Midwesterners.

'Let's get it over with,' Pete said.

Reich marched to the side door of the garage. He didn't notice the cold, other than the prickly bite of ice crystals in his nose when he breathed. He cocked his leg and smashed the door inward with a swing of his boot. Just like Harris Bone would do. Inside, he pushed through spiderwebs and heard the scurry of rats in the rafters. He returned to find Harris on the ground, curled into a ball, and he lifted him bodily with both hands and threw him toward the garage door. Harris tripped in the shackles and fell with a whimper. Pete stepped over him into the garage, started the engine of the Accord, and popped the trunk. Reich grabbed Harris, pulled him on his heels, and dumped him into the rear of the car.

He slammed the trunk shut, locking Harris inside.

'Come on,' Reich said. He dug in his pocket for the keys to his squad car and threw them on the ground. He held out the keys to the cuffs and shackles to Pete, who stood by the driver's door with his hands in his pockets. 'You having second thoughts?' he asked.

'You know me better than that, Felix.' He took the keys.

Reich stared into his friend's face for a long time in the shadows. 'OK then.'

Pete drove. They headed north on the deserted roads, back toward Door County. Ten miles from the farmhouse, they passed a bar with a handful of pickups parked outside the door. Pete continued past the bar for a quarter-mile until no one who ventured into the winter air would see them, and then he pulled on to the shoulder. Both men got out.

The wind poured over their bodies with an unforgiving fury. Pete dug his chin into his neck and pulled down his wool hat. Reich simply walked down the gully from the road into the dirt of the field. He wasn't even wearing a hat to cover the steel wool of his hair. His skin was already numb and white, but he didn't care.

Pete followed. 'You sure about this, Felix?'

'Just do it.' Reich squatted and found a fist-sized clump of earth that had frozen into jagged edges. 'Here.'

'I wish there was some other way,' Pete said.

'Hit me. Hard. You only get one try.'

Pete reared back with the rock and swung his gloved hand into his friend's forehead. The frozen spikes cut through Reich's skin, erupting in blood. Reich stumbled back at the force of the blow and nearly fell. He staggered. Pete dropped the rock and reached for his friend, but Reich shrugged him away.