A Single Shot Read Online Free PDF

the rest disappear.
    He kneels down next to the body, pulls out his hunting knife, and with its serrated edge starts sawing just in front of the buck’s hind legs. The torso is hard-boned, gnarled, and muscular from years of fighting and just living and, for nearly thirty minutes, resists John’s efforts to sever it. Afterwards hecuts out the deer’s tongue and wraps it with the snake in the dungarees.
    When he’s finished, his muscles are burning; he’s sweat-soaked and drenched with gore from a half-dozen bodies; his mouth is parched; and he’s weak from hunger and adrenaline overdose. He glances at his watch. Nearly three o’clock. He worries that maybe Waylon will come back early—though if he comes in a vehicle, as he will almost surely have to, it will be a four-wheel drive that John will hear winding up the steep, potholed road a good ten minutes before it arrives, but even that will be cutting it close. He’s concerned, too, about somebody else, a hiker maybe, wandering into the quarry, though the likelihood of it seems slim. Mostly, he just wants to be gone.
    He hoists the buck’s head and upper torso onto his shoulders, walks over to the pond of algae-black water, drops the three-quarters carcass onto the bank, and stuffs it with several pounds of stone. Following the task he is so hot and thirsty that he takes off his pants and shoes, walks into the tepid water, and laps at it. After taking two steps, he drops in over his head. He stays beneath the surface, scrubbing himself, seeing only a few suspended weeds inches in front of his face, until his lungs threaten to burst. He emerges, screaming out the air still in his chest, sucks in some more, then goes down again. He goes down and comes up half a dozen times, before swimming over to the water’s edge to retrieve the rock-laden torso. He hauls the body into the pond with him, then sinks with it to the bottom. When he’s satisfied it will stay there, he swims to the top, climbs from the water, dries himself, and dresses.
    Using the T-shirt he found in the lean-to and a fallen spruce branch, he spends several minutes cleaning up, then smoothing over the grass around and beneath the dead deer, then the path made by the human cadaver from the briars to the cave. When he looks at the field afterwards, he has to remind himself that the girl or the deer ever existed.
    With the sleeping-bag cover he ties the shotgun around his waist; then he drapes over his shoulders the buck’s hindquarters and the snake-and-tongue-filled dungarees, whose combined weight is maybe sixty pounds. He carries the money by his side, on the long walk home alternating the heavy pillowcase between his left and right hand every few minutes.
    He hangs the deer’s hindquarters and the rattlesnake from the rafters in the woodshed, then, carrying the money sack and a length of bailing twine, slithers on his stomach into the crawl space beneath the shed and lashes the pillowcase to the top of one of the heavy foundation beams.
    Too exhausted to move afterwards, he lies there, imagining the girl doing likewise in her dank tomb, and wondering if at the quarry he left unattended some minor detail that, like a loose thread in a suit, could lead to a mass unraveling. The wondering, he knows, will end only with his surrender, capture, or death, which leads to his feeling that events are being orchestrated by some higher force and that, like a caged rat, he is the subject of some bizarre experiment.
    Halfway down the mountain, Cecil Nobie begins loudly calling in his cows for evening milking—“Cow-bossie! Cow-bossie!”—just as John’s father used to do years ago from thesame rear open doorway in the barn. Though it’s fourteen years since he bought the Moon farm at auction from the bank, Nobie’s hollow shout can still give John chills, especially when the foliage blocks, as it does for half the year, his view below the treeline, so that the spectral voice floating up through the heavily