Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,109
Same hand that held the gun that ushered Chris up onto that hill. Same hand that gave him the rope. Same hand that shot my dog in the head. A dog that lives, by the way. Hey, let me ask you something while you’re here. They found a note in Chris’ pocket. Where’d that come from?”
“His journal. Open on his desk the night I took him from his house. I ripped it out. Seemed a good enough suicide note.”
“Fine. Now put out that hand.”
Petry hesitates.
She jabs him between the shoulder blades with the barrel. “Either the hand or the back of the head. Your call.”
“Please,” he says.
“Pleading, now? That doesn’t seem like you.”
“I have a wife and kids.”
“How sad for them.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hand. Or head. I’ll count down to five.” She starts. “Five… four…”
His arm moves. The right hand—already with a bleeding wrist from where the cheap katana lacerated the skin—creeps out like a pale spider, fingers walking it along.
“Extend your arm all the way,” she says.
He tenses, then does just that.
“Chris was my friend. He was Shane’s friend. He was a lot of people’s friends. He lit up a room like a birthday cake stuck with Fourth-of-July sparklers. And you took that away from all of us.” She blinks back tears. “This doesn’t end for me. But it does for you.”
She pulls the trigger.
Gun’s loaded with half-ounce birdshot. Six BB’s in each crimped shell. The .410 is a squirrel gun. Doesn’t blow a squirrel apart, and it doesn’t blow apart Petry’s hand, either. That’s not to say it’s pretty, either; the range is close and the birdshot stays in a tight pattern. The back of his hand blooms red; the skin flays, opens up like a torn bag of chips. His hands curl inward. Blood spatters the earth, gleaming in the light from the moon-and-stars.
The hand may not be ruined. But it’ll never again work the way a hand is supposed to.
Petry screams. Rolls onto his side. Fetal position.
She takes the second shell from Shane, ejects the first and replaces it.
Hammer back.
“Now you run,” she says. “You run or the next shot opens your neck.”
Petry tries to stand—foolishly plants his hand, his shot hand, on the ground in a panic and wails again as he falls over. But somehow he manages to get his legs up under him and spring forward.
Sure enough, he runs. Down the driveway. Toward the road. There’s no car here—must be parked somewhere else, somewhere on the road. Or maybe he walked. It doesn’t matter.
Atlanta breathes in the warm air. Fireflies orbit one another.
She collapses, crying. Shane wraps his arms around her and he cries, too.
In the corn, she sees Chris standing there. Just for a second.
He looks fabulous.
And then he’s gone.
Epilogue: The Message
“Is this how I do this?” she asks. “I just point the—“
Shane comes over, tilts the laptop up. With his finger he taps a tiny pinhole over the screen. “Look here when you talk.”
“That’s a camera?”
“That’s a camera.”
“Ain’t technology grand?”
He smiles. “Yep.”
It’s her laptop. Her first computer. Bought with the extra money Jenny gave her. Was pretty cheap, all told, and she doesn’t really know how to use it.
Poor Jenny. Girl still doesn’t have it all together. Atlanta reminds herself to try to hang out with her once school starts up again.
Atlanta leans back. Steels herself.
Goes over the speech in her head, nervous as she does so.
Sun comes pouring in through the window, illuminating a plate of cookies on the bed. Cookies Mama made—meaning, cookies you don’t want to eat lest you plan on chipping a tooth. Mama’s been baking a lot recently. Nervous habit ever since she got home from Virginia. It’s late summer and they’re going to lose the house. A house that now has a few bullet holes hanging, plus two broken picture frames. That was a tough one to explain. Atlanta went with it, told it true—or, part of it. Said they were bullet holes from when a ‘coon got into the house. Arlene was either too dumb to figure differently or too smart to not look any deeper than that.
She said it didn’t matter anyway, what with the foreclosure coming.
But Atlanta has a recording from a couple months back that suggests the foreclosure might not come after all. Soon as Orly Erickson has a listen.
Orly. Must be wondering where his beloved enforcer got to. Atlanta wonders, too. Thinks maybe she shouldn’t have let that sonofabitch go. Hoping against hope Petry doesn’t pop his head back up out of