Free Seven Deadly Tales of Terror by Bryan Smith Page B

he cleaned Calvin’s blood off his torso, put on a shirt, grabbed everything he needed, and departed after giving his boys a final affectionate nuzzle behind the ears.
    There was a little creek about ten minutes into the woods. Dragging the body along with him, Luke followed the stream of peacefully trickling water down to a narrow dirt access road primarily used by hunters. That was where he found Calvin’s Ford pickup. Huffing and puffing from the exertion, he got the dead kid’s body loaded into the back. An examination of his wallet gave him his home address, which luckily was in a part of town Luke knew well. He could get there easily enough. A further search of Calvin’s pockets turned up his keys, which was a damn good thing. If the kid had dropped them out there in the woods, Luke’s plan would have been dead on arrival.
    After covering the body with a dirty plastic tarp, he slid in behind the wheel of the truck and jammed the key in the ignition slot. He had a bad moment where it seemed like the engine wasn’t going to turn over, but then it did finally sputter to life. Some kind of heavy metal noise issued from the truck’s tinny speakers. Luke didn’t recognize it. The only rock and roll he liked was from his own youth in the sixties. The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Hendrix, etc. Even Jimi’s famous six-string histrionics had been very different from all this modern-day screaming and yelling over guitars that sounded like they were being tortured. He was more of a Hank Williams and Merle Haggard kind of guy these days, anyway. After silencing the radio, he got the truck turned around and started toward town.
    The access road was a couple of long, curving miles of bumpy, rock-strewn dirt. Luke had to go slow and keep the high beams on to avoid collisions with trees. The narrow road eventually petered out and fed into a stretch of two-lane blacktop. From there it was a mostly uneventful eight mile ride to the outskirts of Murfreesboro. At about the midway point of the journey there was one briefly tense moment when a patrol car from the sheriff’s department went speeding past him in the opposite direction. Luke glanced at the rearview mirror and gulped as he saw the cruiser’s brake lights come on. He had been sure the cruiser would turn around and come after him, even though he was observing the speed limit. It was a late hour in a small town and hardly anyone was out driving around. The lawmen around these parts had a deserved reputation for stopping people for no reason other than sheer boredom.
    But the brake lights winked out again after a ball-shriveling couple seconds, and the cruiser kept heading away from him. This came as a massive relief to Luke, whose gloved right hand had been curled around the grip of his .357 during those seconds. He let go of the gun and listened to the heavy thumping of his heart, wondering how it would have gone down if the sheriff’s deputy had come after him. He saw only two realistic scenarios. Either he would have taken his own life or he would have been forced to kill the deputy. Both possibilities were equally appalling. He didn’t want to die and he had no desire to risk a gunfight with a cop. The only other possibility would have been arrest and he had already decided against letting that happen. Hell, it was the whole reason he’d embarked upon this crazy course of action.
    A few miles after passing a sign welcoming visitors to Murfreesboro, he took a left at Compton Road, experiencing another brief period of uneasiness as he continued down past the VA hospital, where he’d spent some time after his return from Vietnam in 1972. The building was the site of some deeply unpleasant memories, and he didn’t fully appreciate how tense its proximity made him until he had to forcibly unclench his teeth.
    But then the facility was behind him and he was fully focused on the present again. Ten minutes later he took a right at Church Street and shortly thereafter