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In one of those grim quirks of fate, the Dog Villain, Joey, the least brainy of the bunch, was the last to be picked up. As it turned out, it would have been better for everybody if he had been scooped up first.
It hadn’t taken much sleuthing by the cops to come up with their three suspects. Everyone had always known those three would come to a bad end, and this was just the proof. The worst of the bunch, Jim Thompson, already had his DNA on file and it would only be a day or two before it was matched to the physical evidence found on the poor, dead girl. For the town’s people, it was an open and shut case, their only worry at the moment the fact that the three bad seeds had yet to be apprehended. But they stuck together- like rotten apples do- and when one was found, all would be found.
Completely unaware, the three of them had gone fishing during the morning and it was just after four in the afternoon when they came over the hill that led down to Joey’s house. What they saw there caused Joey to push the brakes to the floorboard and bring the car to a tire-smoking halt.
“Oh, God,” Joey moaned. “Do you see what I see?”
There, parked in the driveway of Joey’s house, was a big police cruiser. Not terribly bright, Joey could still see the headlines: “Case solved. Three Local Boys Make Good in the Big House.”And if Joey had made the connection in a couple of seconds, the others had got it in a flash.
“Come on,” Jim said calmly. “Let’s get out of here.”
Joey backed up and turned around, headed for the highway and out-of-town.
“Not the highway,” Jim said. He motioned at a side road. “Here. Turn here. Stay on the back roads and don’t speed.”
“Why,” Joey asked.
“There’s two things you can’t outrun,” Jim said. “A bullet and a radio. Cops got both. We’ve gotta be smart. Give me your cell phones.”
Unquestioningly, Charlie and Joey handed their phones over.
“What are you doing,” Joey asked.
Jim didn’t look up when he answered, concentrating on prying the battery covers off the cell phones.
“Cops’ll check our houses and hangouts first, but it won’t be long ‘til they get some Ma Bell geek to ping the GPS in the phones, then we’re dead meat.”
Jim popped the battery packs out of the cell phones.
“We’ll hold onto them in case we need them.”
“We can’t run forever,” Charlie said, trying against all hope to be the sole voice of reason. “For all we know, the cops are there for something else.”
“If they are,” Jim said, “a few hours away from them where I can think ain’t gonna change that, is it?” His tone was deliberately caustic and Charlie decided to be quiet. For now.
“Jesus, Jim,” Joey babbled. “We can’t get away. They’ll have road blocks and APB’s all over the place.”
“Not yet,” James said. “It ain’t like we’re John Dillinger’s gang.”
“I told you Charlie would rat us out. I told you he was pissed….”
“What the fuck you talkin’ about,” Charlie interrupted. “I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody.”
“I want both of you to shut the fuck up and listen to me.”
Joey and Charlie looked at each other, then at Jim. He sat as calm and cold as a carved Adonis. They felt the ruthless heat in his eyes boring into them even from behind the lenses of his sunglasses.
“Is there anywhere we can hole up until tonight? Somewhere where the cops won’t come snooping around?”
“Yeah,” Joey said, calming a little. “There’s my uncle Aster’s farm. It’s got a lot of dirt roads running through it and out into the woods. We’ll be out of sight and I don’t think the cops’ll even think about uncle Aster for a couple of days.”
“Can you get to it on the back roads?”
“Sure,” Joey said. “Sure I can.”
“Okay,” Jim said. “Just get us there. If John Law happens to get on your ass, you’ve got two options: you can pull over and get hauled in like a pussy, or you can kick this thing in the ass and go out with a bang.”
Perhaps sensing before the others, because of his own cold and twisted intellect, where this was going to end, Jim had escalated from his knife in his personal arms race. Unseen until now by either Joey or Charlie, Jim reached behind him into the waist band of his blue jeans and pulled out a Luger 9 mm, a weapon which his grandfather had liberated from a dead Nazi officer and had left to Jim.
“Me,” Jim said, “I’d choose to go out with fireworks.”