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away. He found the school janitor polishing brass, and told him to knock it off and go home. The janitor went.
    “We’re clean,” he said, when he came back, locking the meeting room door behind himself.
    Jennifer Barns, the big-haired chairwoman and one of three Jennifers on the five-person board, said, “I guess you all know what’s going on. The fact is, if something’s not done, we’re all headed for disgrace and prison. Anybody disagree?”
    Jennifer Houser said, “Clancy came around to see me this afternoon. He was threatening me. He said if I didn’t talk to him, he’d put me right down with the rest of you. He seems to think that . . . I’m a little more honest than the rest of you.”
    The other four board members, the school superintendent, the financial officer, the security chief, and the fat man all chuckled; Houser was crooked as a sidewinder rattlesnake.
    “So what are we going to do?” Bob Owens asked. He was the senior board member, and one of the founders of the retirement-now scheme.
    “We all know what’s got to be done. The question is, can we sustain it?” the third Jennifer (Gedney) said. “I’d rather go to prison for embezzlement than first-degree murder.”
    They all went hum and hah, and wished she hadn’t put it quite so starkly. She persisted: “We know what we’re talking about here. Randy?”
    “Yeah, we know,” Kerns said. “We could do it right now. Tonight. But you’re right: once we do it, we can’t go back.”
    “How would you do it?” Barns asked.
    “Been scouting him. He runs right after dark, when it starts to get cool. I’ll come up behind him, shoot him in the back. He won’t suffer.”
    “What about his trailer?” Owens asked. “We never did develop a consensus on that.”
    “I been thinking about it,” Kerns said. “I know some of you think we should burn it, but that worries me. If they find his body in a ditch, it might have been some crazy kid with a gun. A random killing. If we kill him, and burn his trailer . . . then it’s obviously covering up something.”
    “What if he’s told somebody about us?” Houser asked.
    “He hasn’t,” said the ninth man in the room, the fat man, the only one who wasn’t directly involved with the schools. “I told him to hold the whole thing close to his chest. Not to tell a soul—and he doesn’t have any close friends. No: the biggest problem would be if he’s written a lot of it down. What I’d suggest is, Randy takes careof him, in the dark. He won’t be found right away, and I could say I got worried and went up to his trailer looking for him. Give me a chance to go through the place, and clean it out.”
    “But what if he is found right away?” asked Larry Parsons, the fifth board member.
    “Tell you what,” the fat man said. “I’ll get up on top of the hill about first light, and watch. And at eight o’clock, I’ll go on into his trailer. I got a key.”
    Kerns said, “That’ll work. If there’s nobody around, I’ll get him right at the bottom of that last hill before he goes back up to his place. The ditch is deep and all full of cattails. Nobody’ll see him down there.”
    Barns, the chairman, looked around the room and said, “Okay. We can do this. Let’s see a show of hands. It’s unanimous, or it’s prison. Do we kill Clancy Conley?”
    They all looked around at each other, each of them reluctant to go first. Then the fat man raised his hand, and then Kerns, and then the rest of them.
    “It’s unanimous,” Barns said. She unconsciously picked up her gavel and rapped it once against her desk.
    —
    C LANCY C ONLEY WAS a human train wreck. He hadn’t started out that way, but he’d discovered speed halfway through journalism school, and that started his slow slide to hell, if hell can be defined as being a reporter/photographer/paste-up man on a small-town weekly newspaper.
    In his twenties, he’d moved around, going from the
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