Free Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch Page B

hit?”
    “This thing happened in early October. Almost
six years ago. In St. Paul.”
    “But what if it’s just a horrible coin—”
    “I still dream about the orange shoes and
blue shorts, Sue.”
    “Oh God, baby.” She turned over and pulled
her husband down onto her chest, ran her fingernails across the
back of his neck. “What do you think he’s gonna try to do to
us?”
    “I don’t know, but he didn’t come all this
way, follow us up into the middle of nowhere just to talk.”
    “So we just leave? Right now?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can you get us back to the trailhead in the
dark?”
    “I think so. If not, we’ll just hide
somewhere until morning. What’s important is getting out of this
tent and away from our camp as soon as possible.”
    “But he must know where we live, Roger.” Sue
sat up, faced her husband. “He was able to find out we were coming
to North Carolina. What keeps him from doing this when we get back
to Minnesota? Or from turning you in?”
    “I don’t think this is about bringing me to
justice in any legal sense of the word.”
    “We can’t just run away, Roger.”
    “Sure we can. And we will.”
    “He might know where our girls live. Might
decide to go after them. We have no idea what he’s capable of.”
    “So what are we supposed—”
    “You wanna be free of this?”
    “Of course.”
    “Have it never come back to haunt you as long
as you live? Guarantee the safety of me and the girls? Your own
freedom?”
    For a moment, there was no sound but the
weeds brushing against the exterior of the tent.
    “Jesus, Sue. I don’t have that in me.”
    “Well, you had it in you to leave a teenage
girl dying in the street. Now if that man came into this wilderness
to murder us, he probably went out of his way to make sure no one
knew he was coming here, which works out perfectly for us.”
    He heard his wife moving in the darkness, the
separating teeth of a zipper.
    The leather case dropped in his lap.
    “You have to take the bullets out,” she
whispered. “Wipe them down so they don’t have our prints. You
probably won’t be able to find the shell casings in the dark.”
    “Sue, I can’t.”
    “You’re gonna make me handle this? Look, it
breaks my heart that that man lost his daughter, and it makes me
sick that it’s your fault, but I will not live the rest of my life
in fear, looking over my shoulder, calling Jennifer and Michelle
five times a day to make sure they’re okay. That morning, when you
drove away, you decided you weren’t gonna let a mistake you made
destroy our lives. Well, it’s too late to change course now.”
    “I am telling you I can’t—”
    “You don’t have a choice. This night’s been
coming ever since that October morning. You started this six years
ago. Now go finish it.”
     
    He left Sue lying in the tall grass several
hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the
meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need
under the blazing wattage of the moon.
    He reached the gap, moved past their tent and
along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of
which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink
in the month of June.
    On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago,
he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green
leaves, wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent, and how he
would find the man’s camp in the middle of the night.
    He walked off the trail and crouched down in
the grass. Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron
thicket. Roger thought he recalled that piece of red a hundred feet
or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.
    For a while, he lay on the ground, just
listening.
    The grass swayed, blades banging dryly
against one another.
    Rhododendron leaves scraped together.
    Something scampered through the thicket.
    This was his thirteenth summer coming to
Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had
vanished