Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [25]
“Live with myself? I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
“Are you sure it’s him? That Donald’s the father of the girl you hit?”
“This thing happened in early October. Almost six years ago. In St. Paul.”
“But what if it’s just a horrible coin—”
“I still dream about the orange shoes and blue shorts, Sue.”
“Oh God, baby.” She turned over and pulled her husband down onto her chest, ran her fingernails across the back of his neck. “What do you think he’s gonna try to do to us?”
“I don’t know, but he didn’t come all this way, follow us up into the middle of nowhere just to talk.”
“So we just leave? Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Can you get us back to the trailhead in the dark?”
“I think so. If not, we’ll just hide somewhere until morning. What’s important is getting out of this tent and away from our camp as soon as possible.”
“But he must know where we live, Roger.” Sue sat up, faced her husband. “He was able to find out we were coming to North Carolina. What keeps him from doing this when we get back to Minnesota? Or from turning you in?”
“I don’t think this is about bringing me to justice in any legal sense of the word.”
“We can’t just run away, Roger.”
“Sure we can. And we will.”
“He might know where our girls live. Might decide to go after them. We have no idea what he’s capable of.”
“So what are we supposed—”
“You wanna be free of this?”
“Of course.”
“Have it never come back to haunt you as long as you live? Guarantee the safety of me and the girls? Your own freedom?”
For a moment, there was no sound but the weeds brushing against the exterior of the tent.
“Jesus, Sue. I don’t have that in me.”
“Well, you had it in you to leave a teenage girl dying in the street. Now if that man came into this wilderness to murder us, he probably went out of his way to make sure no one knew he was coming here, which works out perfectly for us.”
He heard his wife moving in the darkness, the separating teeth of a zipper.
The leather case dropped in his lap.
“You have to take the bullets out,” she whispered. “Wipe them down so they don’t have our prints. You probably won’t be able to find the shell casings in the dark.”
“Sue, I can’t.”
“You’re gonna make me handle this? Look, it breaks my heart that that man lost his daughter, and it makes me sick that it’s your fault, but I will not live the rest of my life in fear, looking over my shoulder, calling Jennifer and Michelle five times a day to make sure they’re okay. That morning, when you drove away, you decided you weren’t gonna let a mistake you made destroy our lives. Well, it’s too late to change course now.”
“I am telling you I can’t—”
“You don’t have a choice. This night’s been coming ever since that October morning. You started this six years ago. Now go finish it.”
He left Sue lying in the tall grass several hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need under the blazing wattage of the moon.
He reached the gap, moved past their tent and along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink in the month of June.
On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago, he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green leaves, wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent, and how he would find the man’s camp in the middle of the night.
He walked off the trail and crouched down in the grass. Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron thicket. Roger thought he recalled that piece of red a hundred feet or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.
For a while, he lay on the ground, just listening.
The grass swayed, blades banging dryly against one another.
Rhododendron leaves scraped together.
Something scampered through the thicket.
This was his thirteenth summer coming to Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had vanished completely from memory—more impression than detail. But