They took secondary roads across the narrow chimney of New Hampshire and into Vermont. Freddy drove the Chevy Biscayne, which was old and unremarkable. Morris rode shotgun with a Rand McNally open on his lap, thumbing on the dome light from time to time to make sure they didn’t wander off their pre-planned route. He didn’t need to remind Freddy to keep to the speed limit. This wasn’t Freddy Dow’s first rodeo.
Curtis lay in the backseat, and soon they heard the sound of his snores. Morris considered him lucky; he seemed to have puked out his horror. Morris thought it might be awhile before he himself got another good night’s sleep. He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn’t the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?
‘So you really think we’ll be able to sell those little books of his?’ Freddy asked. He was back to that. ‘For real money, I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘And get away with it?’
‘Yes, Freddy, I’m sure.’
Freddy Dow was quiet for so long that Morris thought the issue was settled. Then he spoke to the subject again. Two words. Dry and toneless. ‘I’m doubtful.’
Later on, once more incarcerated – not in Youth Detention this time, either – Morris would think, That’s when I decided to kill them.
But sometimes at night, when he couldn’t sleep, his asshole slick and burning from one of a dozen soap-assisted shower-room buggeries, he would admit that wasn’t the truth. He’d known all along. They were dumb, and career criminals. Sooner or later (probably sooner) one of them would be caught for something else, and there would be the temptation to trade what they knew about this night for a lighter sentence or no sentence at all.
I just knew they had to go, he would think on those cellblock nights when the full belly of America rested beneath its customary comforter of night. It was inevitable.
In upstate New York, with dawn not yet come but beginning to show the horizon’s dark outline behind them, they turned west on Route 92, a highway that roughly paralleled I-90 as far as Illinois, where it turned south and petered out in the industrial city of Rockford. The road was still mostly deserted at this hour, although they could hear (and sometimes see) heavy truck traffic on the interstate to their left.
They passed a sign reading REST AREA 2 MI., and Morris thought of Macbeth. If it were to be done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. Not an exact quote, maybe, but close enough for government work.
‘Pull in there,’ he told Freddy. ‘I need to drain the dragon.’
‘They probably got vending machines, too,’ said the puker in the backseat. Curtis was sitting up now, his hair crazy around his head. ‘I could get behind some of those peanut butter crackers.’
Morris knew he’d have to let it go if there were other cars in the rest area. I-90 had sucked away most of the through traffic that used to travel on this road, but once daybreak arrived, there would be lots of local traffic, pooting along from one Hicksville to the next.
For now the rest area was deserted, at least in part because of the sign reading OVERNIGHT RVS PROHIBITED. They parked and got out. Birds chirruped in the trees, discussing the night just past and plans for the day. A few leaves – in this part of the world they were just beginning to turn – drifted down and scuttered across the lot.
Curtis went to inspect the vending machines while Morris and Freddy walked side by side to the men’s half of the restroom facility. Morris didn’t feel particularly nervous. Maybe what they said was true, after the first one it got easier.
He held the door for Freddy with one hand and took the pistol from his jacket pocket with the other. Freddy said thanks without looking around. Morris let the door swing shut before raising the gun. He placed the muzzle less than an inch from the back of Freddy Dow’s head and pulled the trigger. The gunshot was a flat loud bang in the tiled room, but anyone who heard it from a distance would think it was a motorcycle backfiring on I-90. What he worried about was Curtis.
He needn’t have. Curtis was still standing in the snack alcove, beneath a wooden eave and a rustic sign reading ROADSIDE OASIS. In one hand he had a package of peanut butter crackers.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Morris. Then, seeing the gun, sounding honestly puzzled: ‘What’s that for?’
‘You,’ Morris said, and shot him in the chest.
Curtis went down, but – this was a shock – did not die. He didn’t seem even close to dying. He squirmed on the pavement. A fallen leaf cartwheeled in front of his nose. Blood began to seep out from beneath him. He was still clutching his crackers. He looked up, his oily black hair hanging in his eyes. Beyond the screening trees, a truck went past on Route 92, droning east.
Morris didn’t want to shoot Curtis again, out here a gunshot didn’t have that hollow backfire sound, and besides, someone might pull in at any second. ‘If it were to be done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,’ he said, and dropped to one knee.