A Single Shot Read Online Free PDF Page A

ooze a moldy dampness. The back wall is dry; in the floor in front of it, John sees a rectangular hole surrounded by freshly dug dirt, gravel, and a long, flat rock. One side of the rock is earth-stained, as if it has recently been removed from the hole, which looks to be slightly bigger than the metal box full of money in the lean-to. A nervous twitch starts in the muscles of John’s injured shoulder. He tries to fathom the man who had crawled into a snake-filled cave with a pick, shovel, and Luger to unearth a box of money, and how the money had come to be there in the first place. A rattle sounds to his right.
    He flashes the light that way and sees, three feet from him, two eyes like hot coals inches from the ground, and behind them, above a coiled, thick body, a tail rapidly vibrating its cacophonous clatter. He could back out of the cave. The rattler wouldn’t bother him. But he thinks of the girl, trapped there with it, and his pent-up emotions from the previous hours coalesce in blind rage.
    Keeping the snake lit, he moves the pick in a silent arc through the dark air in front of him, stopping it a foot above, and a few inches behind, the diamond-shaped skull, before swiftly bringing it down lengthwise. He slams one foot on the pick, pinning the reptile to the floor, then lifts and forces down hard the heel of the other on the snake’s head and grinds until he hears a dull pop. The rattler lies still. After a minute, John picks it up by its tail. He holds it that way while shining the light around the rest of the interior, searching for more snakes and not finding any. He exits the cave, holds the rattler out like a trophy toward the dead girl, hollers, “That there’s the last of ’em,” and tosses its body next to the first one.
    Then he grabs the cadaver by the shoulders and drags it head-first into the cave. After laying the sleeping bag along the driest wall, he places the body on it, folds its hands beneath one side of its face, and gently tucks its knees in at the waist. For a minute or so, he crouches there, studying the girl’s body in the flashlight’s beam, seeing on her cherubic face a child’s peeved, forlorn expression. Then he runs back across the quarry and retrieves her satchel with its contents, and the stuffed lion. He lays the satchel near her feet and the lion on the sleeping bag next to her. Still not satisfied, he unzips the bag, then spends several minutes wrestling the cadaver and the lion into it, so that, when he’s done, just their two heads stick out. Even now, he has trouble leaving the girl. On his knees over her, he prays:
    “As you seen, God, her dyin’ was an accident. Maybe Ishot too quick and now I gotta live with it. I ain’t figured it all out yet. Even ’bout the money, which I could dearly use. Anyway, here she is for you to watch over. Thank you. Amen.”
    He emerges from the cave into the midday sun covered with the girl’s blood and feeling like some misunderstood, tragic figure—a latter-day Frankenstein—who’s rapidly evolving into the monster he’s widely believed to be. The buzzards are on the deer carcass again and he chases them off, screaming maniacally, then runs straight from there to the lean-to, where he enters, grabs the metal box and the pillowcase, hauls them outside, and transfers the money from the former to the latter, tying the case, when he’s finished, with a granny knot.
    He looks around at the carnage in the field and thinks if he doesn’t clean up the trail of blood and dead bodies even a moron stumbling on the scene could draw a pretty good picture of what’s happened and maybe even who did it. He buries the shot rattlesnake beneath a slag heap, then, not wanting to waste good meat, wraps the other up in a pair of men’s dungarees that were in the lean-to and brings them and the money over next to the dead deer. Knowing he can’t lug back the entire carcass, especially not along with the money and rattler, he decides to make