Pressure - By Jeff Strand Page 0,17
it with a bloody finger. “I didn’t do anything to him while he was alive,” Darren said in a whisper.
“Yeah, right.”
“He got hit by a car.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“He did,” Darren insisted. “I wasn’t looking for him; I was just going to walk around town. He was lying on the side of the road. He was already dead. I wouldn’t kill Peter’s dog. I wouldn’t do something like that.”
“But you would chop him up!” Jeremy accused, taking a step toward Darren and looking ready to beat him senseless. As horrified as I was by what had happened to Killer Fang, I also knew that getting into a fistfight over it would greatly increase the chances of our little field trip being discovered.
“Don’t hurt him,” I told Jeremy.
“How about I just cut his head and tail off and hide him in some bushes?”
In other circumstances, the “tail” comment would have been highly amusing, but here we didn’t even notice the logistical flaw. “When did you find him?” I asked.
“Night before last,” Darren said. “That time you saw me go out.”
“Why didn’t you tell Peter?”
“He would’ve been too sad.”
“You are such a liar!” said Jeremy. “You think he’d be too sad to know his dog was hit by a car, but not too sad to know you chopped him up?”
“I wasn’t going to tell him anything! This way, he could always think that his dog was still alive. He’d be happier.”
“Bullshit!”
“You don’t know! You don’t know what I was thinking! You’re not in my head!”
“Good thing or I’d be in a loony bin! Which is where you’re gonna be when people find out what you did!”
Darren looked at the ground. “Do we really have to tell anybody?” he asked in a soft, miserable voice.
“Yeah!” Jeremy sneered. “We’re gonna tell everybody!”
“Please don’t.”
“Everybody at school! Everybody you know! The whole world is gonna find out what you did! Especially everybody in the loony bin with you!”
“Please, I’ll do anything you want.”
“They’re going to put you in a straitjacket and you won’t be able to move and they’ll stick you with giant needles every day and they’ll shock you and they’ll rip out parts of your brain and they’ll laugh and laugh and laugh at you!”
“I didn’t hurt him. If he was alive, I would’ve got help and told Peter, I promise.”
“I think you killed him.”
“I didn’t!” Darren wailed.
“I’m gonna tell Peter you killed his dog.”
“I didn’t!”
“And they’re gonna jab you with so many needles that you’ll look at your arm and it’ll be nothing but holes and then they’ll strap you down and—”
“Leave him alone,” I said.
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re not helping anything. We need to get back to school before they know we’re gone.”
“We can’t just leave Killer Fang out here like this,” said Jeremy.
“I’ll bury him,” said Darren. “You guys go back so you don’t get in trouble, and I’ll bury him.”
“You just want to cut him up some more.”
Darren shook his head vigorously. “I won’t. I’ll bury him. You can take my pocketknife.”
I’d seen Darren use the blade of his pocketknife to clean his fingernails on a few occasions. It was barely an inch long, and while I wasn’t exactly an expert on such matters, it seemed that decapitating a cocker spaniel with such a small blade would be a long, incredibly difficult process. I wondered how many hours he’d spent cutting through the dog’s neck, how much effort it had taken to get through the spinal column.
“Okay,” I told Darren. “Bury him.”
“We have to show Peter what happened,” said Jeremy.
“No way. We can’t let him see Killer Fang like that. He’d die.”
“He would,” said Darren. “He’d have a heart attack.”
Jeremy held up his fist. “Shut up!”
“We’ll let Darren bury him, and we’ll go back to the room, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
“If we let him bury him, then there’s no proof.”
“There’s no proof anyway,” said Darren. “I’ll just say I found him like that.”
“Give me your pocketknife,” I said.
“Are you going to tell Peter?”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do yet.”
Darren picked up the dark red pocketknife, snapped the blade back into the handle, and gave it to me.
“See you whenever,” I said, and then turned and began to walk back the way we came.
I hoped that Jeremy would follow me, but after I’d gone about twenty feet, I stopped and looked back. He stared at Darren for a moment longer, kicked the ground angrily, and then ran over to catch up with me.
“Sick,” Jeremy muttered. “He’s