Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [56]
After they were gone, the four remaining men stood in a semicircle. Nobody wanted to gaze down the mountain at the body. Kasey couldn’t get over the idea that he was going to be a witness in a murder trial. Nor could he get over the niggling notion that Scooter wasn’t telling it exactly the way it happened. There were a lot of things Scooter might have said when he came back to camp, but telling them the two men on the bluff murdered Chuck wasn’t even close to what Kasey had expected.
When Kasey analyzed the maneuvers he’d seen on the bluff, he realized it might have been an accident—Chuck might have bumped into Scooter, causing him to lose his balance. Or it might have been that Hugh and Polanski had pushed him. It had all happened so quickly.
Kasey knew Scooter had never been nervy. His interest in karate stemmed from his mortal fear of getting hurt. Moreover, his karate instructors had consistently chided him for his inability to spar effectively and for his reluctance, out of fear that he might hurt himself, to practice falling on a mat. For Scooter, karate was all about injuring other people, and that was what he’d planned to do up there on the bluff.
Kasey popped a bottle of Bud, started to swig from it, and then thought better of the idea, setting the bottle on Chuck’s truck with the other empties. It was going to take awhile for Fred and Jennifer to reach the body, longer for the return trip, and Kasey wondered if they shouldn’t start somebody heading toward town. Get the police out here. They needed to spiff the place up first. Ditch all the empties. The last thing they needed was to look like a troop of drunken hooligans.
Kasey and Scooter had been friends their whole lives, so Kasey knew the story Scooter told this morning hadn’t been delivered with his customary conviction, the shaky narrative coming more as an experiment than a straightforward chronicle, yet the more he repeated it, the more solid it became. Maybe if Kasey could watch the event over again like a slow-motion video or even if he could listen to Polanski’s side of it…Or talk to the retard…
Kasey wondered what would happen if they found Hugh guilty in a court of law. Would they spare him because he was mentally challenged? Would they execute Polanski and spare Hugh? When you killed somebody, you deserved to die. It was simple, actually…even if you were an idiot. The more he thought about it, the more Scooter’s story began to jell. Of course they’d pushed him. Scooter swore by it, and he’d been inches away. It was the sort of thing a retarded man might do. Not only that, but Polanski had been in a foul mood the night before and was no doubt in a foul mood when Scooter showed up that morning.
“I’m going for help,” said Scooter.
“I’ll go with you,” said Ryan Perry.
“No. We need people here in case they try something.”
“I don’t like guns. Let me go with you.”
“I’ll move faster on my own,” said Scooter, jumping into Kasey’s Porsche Cayenne.
24
As soon as he got out of sight of the camp, Scooter realized he was agitated and needed to calm down if he didn’t want to kill himself in Kasey’s Cayenne, if he didn’t want to die of a heart attack. His father and uncle had both incurred heart attacks at a young age, and even though he was only nineteen, for years his mother had been nagging him to change his diet. He wasn’t sure what it was—the beer, the sleepless night, or the drama on the bluff—but when he held a hand out to check his nerves, it trembled like a cello string toward the end of a crescendo.
He didn’t know where he was headed, but he knew he had to skedaddle before a horde of angry cyclists came swarming down the hill. By now it had to be obvious he’d gone up there intending to do Polanski harm. All that attempted grabbing he’d done after Polanski took his hand back had to have made it obvious.
Why had Chuck sneaked up on him from behind? And why had those bastards tried to blame him? All Chuck had to do was stand still and look big and tough, but he tried to squeeze past Scooter on that narrow