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rock. The rock was big and flat and beneath it the man’s head looked like somebody had pushed it all out of shape and painted it red. The man heaved the rock off to one side down the mountain and returned to where the woman was standing, hands fluttering, saying something to him and then looking nervously both ways up and down the trail. She needn’t have worried. Apart from Wayne they were alone there and would be for quite a while. He had a good view of the trail and it was empty.
    It seemed to be just dawning on her that they—that she —had actually just killed somebody. It was not just herhands—he could see even from up here that her whole body was shaking. He noted that it was a very good body. The tight jeans and T-shirt made that clear. He didn’t know which was more attractive, the body or what he’d just watched it do.
    The man seemed calmer. He wrapped his arms around her and held her for a moment.
    Wayne could hear a muffled sobbing.
    After a moment he let go and moved back to the dead man, took each of his wrists and started dragging. The head lolled sideways and left bloody skid marks across the path. The dead man’s expensive-looking running shoes scraped out their own trail.
    And Wayne wondered how in hell they were expecting to get away with this.
    It was going to be hard to clean up the mess up there. Head wounds did a lot of bleeding. This one sure did. And even the most mentally deficient cop was probably going to check the slope above the place a corpse had landed.
    He watched as the man dug a small hiker’s backpack out of the brush beside the trail, turned the dead man over and slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, turned him again and hitched it together across his chest.
    Hiking accident, thought Wayne.
    Sure, maybe.
    But there was still the problem of the bloody trail.
    It was only when the body disappeared down off the rock face and he heard the long silence and then the dim, faraway splash that he realized that these people were smarter than he’d thought and maybe even knew what they were doing—that in fact they’d chosen the site pretty well. There was a stream down below that would berunning deep and fast these days with all the rain they’d been having. He couldn’t see it from where he was but he and Susan had passed it on the way up.
    The body would carry.
    Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all.
    If they were lucky they might even get a little more rain tonight or tomorrow morning to wipe the slate clean altogether. He wondered if they’d checked the weather reports.
    He bet they had.
    He smiled. Watching them was absolutely the best damn time he’d had in years. Even now, as they were getting ready to leave. Even as the man kicked dirt across the path and pulled off his bloody shirt, turned it inside out and wet it from a thermos, used it to wipe the blood off his face and hands and stuffed it into a second, larger backpack he’d hidden with the smaller one in the brush; then took a clean shirt out of it and put it on.
    The woman just sat there on a rock, watching, slack, as though her legs might not be up to supporting her. The man took a roll of plastic wrap out of the pack and wrapped the bat and put that in there too along with the thermos and zipped the backpack shut. He slipped the pack over his shoulders and they were ready.
    And the nicest thing happened then.
    The man turned and looked up the mountain.
    And Wayne knew him.
    The man was a customer over at the Black Locust Tavern. Came in now and then.
    A scotch drinker, he thought.
    He didn’t know his name.
    He watched the woman rise—it seemed as though she was going to be able to walk on out of here after all—andthe two of them move away down the path. Just a pair of hikers out for a walk on a nice sunny day. If somebody passed them and thought that the woman looked a little shaky—well, it was no easy climb.
    The whole thing, Wayne thought, including the killing, had probably taken less than ten