Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook Page B

while Wayne and George seemed content with the situation as it had developed, Billy had begun to crack up.
    â€œI want to go home,” he said at last.
    Carl looked at him darkly. “What do you mean, go home?”
    â€œI can’t take this anymore,” Billy said, though already terrified of Carl’s response. Still, he had no choice but to hold to what he’d already said. He’d had enough of Carl’s exploits. The long night of narrow escapes, with Carl increasingly out of control, had entirely unnerved him, and even at the grave risk of his own life, he found himself unable to shore himself up, to keep the outlaw pose which alone ensured his survival. He began to cry. “I can’t take this anymore,” he repeated brokenly. “I just can’t.”
    Carl’s eyes swept over to Wayne, as if for a signal, some sign that he might join him in the murder of their younger brother.
    But Wayne did not give it. Instead, he made a mundane suggestion. “We could put him on a bus.”
    Carl nodded obliquely, his eyes returning once again to the wheel. “Yeah, okay,” he said with a shrug. “We’ll just have to find one.”
    Wayne glanced back at Billy. “That okay with you, Billy?”
    â€œYeah, okay,” Billy said softly, fighting to regain control of himself. “A bus, yeah.”
    â€œThat’s what we’ll do then,” Carl said to Wayne as he hit the ignition and guided the car back out onto the road. “We’ll find a place for Billy to catch a bus.”
    Billy nodded silently, though for the rest of the trip, he believed that his two brothers were not looking for an appropriate bus stop, but a place where they could kill him.
    In any event, they headed north, back toward Baltimore along a random assortment of obscure state and county roads, finally crossing into Tennessee. As they traveled, they tried to keep their ears tuned to the local radio stations in order to keep abreast of whatever news was breaking about the murders. But they were moving so quickly, flying from town to town, county to county, that they could only catch small bits of their own story as it was unfolding over the airways. Hearing only snatches here and there before the story dissolved in clouds of static, they could only grasp that it was a big story, immensely big. It seemed to pervade the very air around them, reports of the murders pursuing them like angry, hissing ghosts down every country road, through every jerkwater town, over the densely forested hills and valleys, extending on and on, it seemed to them, toward the farthest edges of the world.
    Toward noon that same day, ten-year-old Rhonda Williamson went for a walk in the woods around her father’s home in Sumter County, Alabama. The shade kept her cool in the terrible heat that envelops the Deep South by mid-May, but that was not the main reason for her jaunt into the woods around her house. The day before, she’d seen an enormous amount of activity around a blue and white Impala that had been found on the Boyd Cutoff, and since then the neighborhood had been buzzing with tales of a murderous band of escaped convicts. There’d been talk of a body that might have been thrown into the lake or dumped off in the woods. In addition to these sizzling stories, she’d also heard tales of sinister discoveries, guns and ammunition hidden in the tall weeds that grew everywhere in the area. If the escapees had come through the woods near her house, she reasoned, then they might have dropped such dreadful wares in them as well. She decided to find out.
    For a long time, she strolled aimlessly, enjoying the cool as she rambled among the trees, her eyes following whatever attracted them, a play of light, some small movement in the leaves or along the ground. After a time, she came to an old barbed wire fence, its rusty strands just high enough for her to crouch and go under them. As she