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Especially not when he saw the kid’s slipping hand reach for the glove compartment. He jabbed at it until it popped open, and inside Pete saw something he didn’t want to see. It was black, and about palm-sized, and it gleamed under the dome light.

“No way,” he said, and he brought his own revolver up. “Don’t do it, kid, don’t you fucking do it! Or I’ll shoot!”

But Ryan didn’t hear or didn’t listen, or he didn’t care. He pushed his fingers into the glove box.

So Pete fired.

The kick surprised him. He hadn’t fired a gun since before he went into the joint, and the little leap moved his wrist, sending the shot wild. He’d been aiming for the boy’s hand, or the box itself—anything inside it.

What he hit instead was the side of Orin’s neck.

Orin reeled back, releasing Ryan’s feet and clutching at the bloody spray that gushed from beneath his ear.

“Holy fuck!” the kid in the truck exclaimed, and he sounded more panicked than before, when he was only hurt from the wreck. “Holy fuck!” he said again, like he couldn’t believe whatever he was seeing.

“Stay there!” Pete insisted, pointing the gun at the kid but keeping his distance.

He approached Orin, who dropped himself down against the fender, then the tire, until his rear hit the pavement and he was forced to stop his descent. Orin was panting, and holding his neck so tight he was choking himself with the effort.

Pete didn’t even know a body could hold so much blood, much less lose it in such a quantity and at such a speed. Orin’s clothes were saturated; he could’ve wrung them out and filled a bucket. Pete pulled off the hurt man’s mask and used it to try to wipe the spot. But the spot was everywhere.

Orin gagged, and sighed, and his grip on himself loosened.

“Holy fuck,” Ryan said again.

He’d removed himself from the cab by then, and was hobbling backwards away from the pair. In his hand the boy held a cell phone, which was surely what he’d been reaching for in the glove box.

Pete swung the gun around, and in the dim light of the overhead cab bulb, he saw that the kid was bleeding from the thigh. Pete had only fired once, but what had grazed Orin in the wrong spot must’ve kept going and landed in Ryan.

“You stay right there,” he commanded.

The kid hesitated. He checked to see how far he was from cover, and from his truck. He glanced down at the phone in his hand.

“Hold it right there!”

Pete was frantic with rage and fear. The gun wasn’t holding steady, and the DJ on the too-loud radio had a voice like a jack-hammer. Orin was dead, or if he wasn’t, he would be. Everything had unraveled. Everything had come undone. So much for Pete and his ideas. So much for getting help. So much for his first accomplice.

“Don’t you try it! I said, don’t you try it!”

Ryan tried it.

16

The Recovery

“We’d better do it quick,” Dana said. “I’ve got to head back to Greensboro tomorrow afternoon. With or without Tripp there are contractual obligations to be met and work to be done. ”

We all got quiet, because anything else seemed disrespectful. None of us knew how to respond, but she tried not to keep us on the spot about it.

“Look, stop looking so morose every time I bring him up. This isn’t your problem, your grief. Don’t feel like you need to share it with me. You’re not going to make it better. ” She pulled her hands up to her face and breathed into them for a minute, collecting herself or simply hiding from us temporarily.

“Okay then,” I said, mostly to break up the awkwardness. “This afternoon. We’ll go out to the Bend and see if we can find him. ”

Jamie was dubious. “Shouldn’t we wait until tonight? Doesn’t all this spooky stuff have to go down after sundown?”

Benny butted in so I didn’t need to. “I don’t see why. Didn’t the ghosts that started all this—I mean, the ones that came out on Decoration Day—didn’t they appear in the middle of the day?”

“Correct, my friend,” I told him.