The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [93]
“Shit, hard to tell what’s in that mud hole,” Carl said. He opened another beer, tried to enjoy being out of the stinking car for a while. Eventually though, his patience with the swimmer wore thin. He had been out there playing over an hour. He went to the edge of the beach and started yelling and motioning for Danny to come in, and each time the man dove under and came back up whooping and splashing water like some schoolboy, Carl got a little more pissed. When Danny finally walked up out of the lake grinning with his dick hanging halfway to his knees and the evening sun sparkling all over his wet skin, Carl pulled the gun out of his pocket and said, “Are you clean enough yet?”
“What the hell?” the man said.
Carl motioned with the gun. “Goddamn it, get over there on that blanket like we talked about. Shit, we’re losing the light here.” He looked back at Sandy and nodded. She reached behind her head and started to undo her ponytail.
“Go fuck yourself!” Carl heard the man yell.
By the time he realized what was happening, Danny Murdock was already bolting into the woods on the other side of the road. Carl fired twice wildly and took after him. Slipping and stumbling, he went deep into the woods, until he was afraid he’d never find his way back to the car. He stopped and listened, but couldn’t hear a thing except for the sound of his own raspy breathing. He was too fat and slow to be chasing anyone, let alone a long-legged prick who had bragged to them all afternoon about outrunning three squad cars on foot through downtown Spartanburg the week before. By then, it was near dusk, and he suddenly realized that the man might have circled back around to where Sandy was waiting at the car. But even with blanks in her gun, he should have heard a shot, that is, unless the fucker took her by surprise. Goddamn that sneaking sonofabitch. He hated going back to the car empty-handed. Sandy would never let him hear the end of it. He hesitated a second, then pointed the pistol up in the air and fired twice.
She was standing by the open driver’s door holding the .22 in her hands when he came crashing through the brush at the edge of the road, red-faced and panting. “We got to get out of here,” he yelled. He grabbed the blanket they had spread on the ground behind the car and hurried over and scooped up the man’s clothes and shoes out of the grass. He tossed them in the backseat and climbed in the front.
“Jesus, Carl, what happened?” she said as she started the car.
“Don’t worry, I got the bastard,” he said. “Put two through his stupid head.”
She looked over at him. “You chased that fucker down?”
He heard the doubt in her voice. “Be quiet for a minute,” he said. “I got to think.” He pulled out a map and studied it for a minute or so, tracing his finger back and forth. “The way it looks we’re maybe ten miles from the border. Just turn around and make a left where we came in, and we oughta run into the highway.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“What?”
“That guy took off like a deer. Ain’t no way you caught up with him.”
Carl took a couple of deep breaths. “He was hiding under a log. I damn near stepped on him.”
“What’s the hurry then?” she said. “Let’s go back and take some pictures.”
Carl laid the .38 on the dash and pulled his shirt up, wiped the sweat off his face. His heart was still beating like a hammer in his chest. “Sandy, just drive the goddamn car, okay?”
“He got away, didn’t he?”
He looked out the passenger window into the darkening woods. “Yeah, the bastard got away.”
She put the car in drive. “Don’t lie to me no more, Carl,” she said. “And another thing, while we’re on the subject, if I hear about you messing around with that little cunt at the White Cow again, you’re gonna be sorry.” Then she pressed her foot to the accelerator, and twenty minutes later, they crossed the state line into Georgia.
45
LATER THAT NIGHT, SANDY PARKED at the edge of a truck stop a few miles south of Atlanta. She ate a piece of beef jerky and crawled in the backseat to sleep. Around three AM, it began to rain.