“What? No. Geri, no. The house is right here. No one else needs to die. The house is right here. There’s no fucking way you’re going to pull some kind of movie bullshit and try to lead them—”
“Maybe they don’t want you, Paul,” she said. Her chest heaved slowly and steadily, her T-shirt plastered red and wet to her skin. “You didn’t do anything. We did. Maybe they’d let you go.”
“What did Nancy do?” I cried.
“She drank the beer,” Geri said, as if it were obvious. “We took the money, she spent it, and we all shared the beer—all except for you. Jake stole. I slashed up a horse. What did you do? You took the old guy and put him on his side so he wouldn’t choke to death.”
“You’re aren’t thinking right. You’ve lost all kinds of blood, and you saw Jake and Nan get trampled, and you’re in shock. They’re horses. They can’t want revenge.”
“Of course they want revenge,” she said. “But maybe not on you. Just listen. I’m too light-headed to argue with you. We have to do it now. I’m going to get out of the car and run to the left, first chance I see. I’ll run for the trees and the lake. Maybe I can make it to the float. Horses can swim, but I don’t think they could reach me up on the float, and even with my chest fucked up, I think I can paddle out there. When I go, you wait until they’ve rushed after me, and then you get inside and you call every cop in the state—”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“Besides,” she told me, and one corner of her mouth lifted in a wry smile, “I can still cut a motherfucker.”
And she opened her left hand to show me the carousel operator’s knife. It rested in the center of her palm, so I could see the scrimshaw, that carving of stampeding horses.
“No,” I said. I didn’t know any other words. Language had abandoned me.
I reached for the knife, but she closed her fingers around it. I wound up only placing my hand on hers.
“I always thought that stuff about going to New York together was crap,” she said. “The stuff about how I was going to be an actress and you were going to be a writer. I always thought it was impossible. But if I don’t die, we should give it a shot. It can’t be any more impossible than this.”
Her hand slipped out of mine. Even now I don’t know why I let her go.
A horse wheeled in front of the Corvette and jumped, and his front hooves landed on the hood. The car bounced up and down on its coils. The great white saddle horse glared at us, and his eyes were the color of smoke. A snake’s tongue lapped at his wrinkled black gums. He sank onto his haunches, ready to come right through the space where the windshield had been.
“Bye,” Geri said, almost softly.
She was out of the car and on her feet and moving before I had time to turn my head.
She ran from the screened-in porch, past the back of the car, heading for the corner of the house and the pines. I could see the lake between the black silhouettes of the tree trunks, faintly luminescent in the night. It wasn’t far to the water’s edge. Twenty-five yards maybe.
The horse in front of me snapped its head around to watch her flight, then leaped away from the car and followed. Two other horses joined the chase, but Geri was fast, and the brush was close.
She had just made the edge of the woods when the cat vaulted from behind a chest-high screen of bushes. It was the size of a cougar and had paws as big as baseball gloves. One of them batted her hard enough to spin her halfway around. The cat came down on top of her with a strangled yowl that turned into a high-pitched animal scream. I like to think she got the knife into it. I liked to think Geri showed it she had claws of her own.
I ran. I don’t remember getting out of the car. I was just out, on my feet, booking it around the ruined front end of the Corvette. I hit the screen door and threw it open and launched myself at the front door beyond. It was locked, of course. The key hung off a