Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [78]
After they cut the log away, Kasey drove slower while he and Scooter scrutinized the road above them. He knew there was a chance the cyclists had heard the chain saw, which meant they might be lying in ambush. Kasey sensed the renewed fear inside the Porsche, both from himself and from Scooter, who now fondled the rifle like a compulsive masturbator. It was mind boggling that those maniacs had downed a tree in order to block the chase and that they had done it the night before.
If they had tried to conceal the dog, they hadn’t done a very good job. Scooter saw it first. “Shit! Look what they did to Dozer!”
Stopping close together, the four vehicles idled in the road. Kasey wanted to tell the others to back off, that they shouldn’t congregate, but he was too upset by the dead dog to bother with tactics.
Scooter took a good long look at Chuck’s dog, then peered up the road through the scope on the rifle, shoulders tight, squinting, cursing under his breath.
The others lined up along the road and stared at the skewered cadaver in the ditch.
“Jesus,” said Bloomquist. “He was such a nice dog.”
“He bit me once,” said Perry quietly.
“Shut your fucking mouth.” Fred was near tears. First his brother and now Dozer. “He never hurt anyone.”
“These people are capable of anything,” said Scooter, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the road.
The whole morning had turned into a nightmare. All Kasey wanted to do now was drive back home.
“Damn it,” said Jennifer, bursting into tears again. “Why is this happening?”
“Nothing else is going to happen,” said Scooter, pointing his rifle up the hill. “We’re in control here. They’re running from us. We should take that dead guy and hang him in a tree. Show them we can be brutal, too.” They’d wrapped Morse in a sleeping bag and thrown him into the back of the Porsche. Kasey hadn’t approved but he couldn’t stop them. Nobody thought it was appropriate to leave Morse in the road even though they had been forced to leave Chuck’s body on the mountain.
“We’re not hanging any bodies in any trees,” said Kasey. “It’s bad enough I’m driving him around like he’s a sack of groceries, okay?”
“They left the dog as a message. We should leave them a message. The Indians used to do it. It was a way to terrorize your enemy. You’d be surprised how bad you can scare somebody by pretending to be crazy.”
Kasey walked around to the driver’s door on the Porsche. The rest of them piled into their vehicles and proceeded up the mountain, scanning the slopes that swept up from the left-hand side of the road. When they got to a plateau where the road flattened out, they sped up, hoping to catch the cyclists in short order.
“How fast do you think they can ride?” Kasey asked Scooter. “On a flat road like this? How fast?”
“Thirty-five miles an hour?”
“I was thinking more like ten.”
“Hell, people can run ten miles an hour.”
Their conversation drew to an abrupt halt when they reached an intersection, one branch leading straight ahead, the other veering to the left. Scooter got on the walkie-talkie. “Which way, people? Let’s have some ideas here.”
“Your guess is as good as ours,” said Bloomquist.
“I’m thinking we go straight,” said Jennifer. “It seems like they would stay on the main road.”
“Seems like they would take a side road,” Bloomquist countered. “Remember, they’re trying to be deceptive.”
They ended up taking the road that branched to the left. A minute later Scooter spotted tracks where the bicycles had splashed through a wet spot on the roadway. They stopped and everybody got out except Perry, who was anxiously looking around the woods from inside his Jeep. The woods were deep, one staggered tree trunk after another in the shaded canopy, and Kasey half expected to see somebody in a bright cycling jersey step out from behind the bole of a tree and unleash a flurry of gunshots.