“I don’t know.”
Probably not. Deer season didn’t open till next month.
Merritt picked up the garbage bag. Inside were a half-dozen others, clear plastic. They contained packets of meth and opioids.
“This’s mine now.” Merritt stepped back, to put more distance between him and the tweaker, and slipped the bag into his backpack.
“Oh, man...”
“The minute I leave, you going to go running to daddy?”
The kid’s eyes were disks. “No, sir. No, sir! I promise. I’ll just stay here. An hour. Two, you tell me. I don’t want to do this shit. My aunt makes us. You can’t cross her. I want to be a mechanic. It’s a righteous skill and one I’m good at. I’m leaving this behind soon as I get a real job.”
Ramble, ramble, ramble...
The kid eyed Merritt’s gun, which was waving back and forth like wheat in a soft summer breeze.
“Oh, Lord, man, I got a girlfriend. She’s gonna have a baby. I think it’s mine.”
What Merritt was wondering: Would a gunshot give away his position or would the sound bounce around confusingly on the nearby rocks?
The second one, he decided, and pulled the trigger.
The young man cried out briefly as the slug tore through flesh and bone. His limp body dropped hard to the ground, on a pile of leaves that represented all the colors of autumn.
74
A gunshot.
Shaw waited.
No others.
How far away? A mile or two.
Had the Twins had a run-in with the tweaker family? Or had the shooter been Jon Merritt?
The shot was something to be aware of. But another priority loomed.
Allison Parker’s wound.
She lay on a bed of pine needles as Shaw examined it and Hannah held her hand.
The slug had missed the femoral vessels. Hitting one would have been fatal by now. He improvised a tourniquet with a strip of lining torn from his jacket. But they were always a stopgap; constant pressure, then surgery, were preferred to field tourniquets. Not options now.
He used a branch to tighten the strip and helped her to her feet. He found a larger length of wood to use as a crutch and handed it to her.
She winced but said, “Okay. I’ve got it.”
“Look,” Hannah said. She’d found what seemed to be a logging trail, running north. If the mills that gave the town its name were for sawing and not grain, maybe it ran all the way there. They couldn’t make it by nightfall but he wanted to narrow the distance to the town as much as they could.
Shaw glanced behind them. No pursuit that he could see.
They started along the wide path, Parker relying on the oak staff and her daughter. She asked, “Did it go through? The bullet?”
“No, it’s still in there.” This was good and bad. Bullets leave the muzzle of a pistol at over 400 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time they strike flesh, they’re cooler but they still cauterize many blood vessels. The large hunk of lead and copper also puts pressure on the arteries and veins. The bad part was that the tweakers’ guns and ammunition probably were not very clean, which upped the risk of infection.
“So.” Hannah was looking down, partly to check their route for roots and rocks, partly to avoid looking her mother’s way, it seemed. “I kinda was wrong. About Dad. I was a shit. Sorry.”