Joyride Read Online Free Page A

minutes.
    Ten minutes to kill a guy. It was amazing.
    He waited until they were out of sight, and then he started down.
    There was blood splashed along the rocks where they’d killed him, droplets in the brush and a small pool staining the grass. He pulled this up with his hands. The blood was half-dried and sticky, the color of rust. The grass clung to the palms of his hands. He scattered it and dug up the dirt beneath until no trace was left and rubbed some more dirt into his hands.
    They’d done a piss-poor job on the trail so he finished scuffing it up for them with his Reeboks and a sharply pointed stick. He rubbed some dirt along the rock face. There was nothing he could do about the splattered brush but he had made the whole scene less noticeable. You would have to be looking for something now. You would not just trip across it.
    It took him a while to find the body.
    In fact it was getting on to late afternoon when he finally saw it drifting back and forth in a gently whirling eddy between some granite boulders a quarter mile or so from where they’d killed him.
    He did not approach directly but waited until he was certain there was no one around either moving up- or downstream or coming down the mountain from above.
    At this hour it was unlikely but he did not want to take any chances.
    He waited until he was confident that all he was hearing was rushing water and birds and forest sounds and then he waded in.
    The body floated facedown. The pants, jacket, and shirt were sodden and looked too big for him now. The backpack rode high, almost to his neck, and was skewed to the left. Wayne took hold of a clammy pale wrist and pulled him halfway up onto one of the rocks so that just his legs dangled in the water. The right leg had twisted in its socket during his fall. The knee pointed almost completely behind him now.
    He examined the head wound, washed partly clean but still red and glistening. It looked like a roast or a steak left to defrost too long in its clear plastic wrap on the counter, a deep rich spoiled red, lying in a pool of blood thinned and diluted by water.
    He touched its rim, touched the strands of soft thick brain matter the stream had urged free along the side of the wound, saw small sharp shards of bone poking through the way the broken shell of a clam will embed itself in the soft delicious mantle.
    He touched the hard jagged edge of broken skull, thinly draped with silky flesh and coarse strands of muddy dark hair.
    He picked a twig away.
    He turned the body over. It was the eyes he wanted to see. The body was heavy with water and it was hard to move but he managed to get it over on one shoulder and pulled and finally the legs flopped over splashing in the water, followed by the torso and the head.
    The eyes were not what he expected.
    He had expected shock. Maybe even wonder. Some romantic final gaze into the infinite. A look of startled wide-eyed amazement like they wrote about in all the books. Like you saw in the movies. The look of somebody who’s seen deep into his own mortality. Then past it.
    But the eyes were hardly open.
    Just thin dull slits of gray filmed over. Like the guy was drunk, maybe, and sleeping off a hangover.
    It was boring.
    He turned the body over, let it slide back into the stream. He gave it a push with his foot so that it escaped the eddy, turned slowly into the current and began moving downstream. He watched it drift away. He had done the same with toy wooden boats once long ago.
    He guessed that he had learned something.
    It was the killing—not the death—that mattered.
    It was not the product of the kill, which was nothing but meat and emptiness when you got down to it, though the person you killed wasn’t there anymore and that was something. But the act itself, the moment of the taking and the losing.
    That was classy. That was important.
    He wondered what it felt like.
    No dog, no cat. But a man.
    Maybe one of these days he’d ask them.
    It was getting