Child, Lee – Without Fail

the stairs and out into the night. It was bitter cold and the

snowflakes were blowing in faster. They looked wet and heavy.

The weather was moving east. Which was good, he guessed.

There was no light. All the town’s windows were dark, there

were no streeflights, there was no moon, there were no stars.

The church tower loomed up in the middle distance, faint and

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grey and ghostly. He walked in the middle of the dirt road

and crossed the graveyard. Found the church door and went

inside. Crept up the tower stairs by feel. Found the ladder in the

dark and climbed up into the bell chamber. The clock ticked

loudly. Louder than in the daytime. It sounded like a mad

blacksmith beating his iron hammer against his anvil once a

second.

He ducked under the clock shaft and found the next ladder.

Climbed up out of the darkness onto the roof. Crawled over to

the west wall and raised his head. The landscape was infinitely

dark and silent. The distant looming mountains were invisible.

He could see nothing. He could hear nothing. The air was

freezing. He waited.

He waited thirty minutes in the cold. It set his eyes watering

and his nose running. He started shivering violently. If I’m cold,

they’re nearly dead, he thought. And sure enough after thirty

long minutes he heard the sound he had been listening for.

The Tahoe’s engine started. It was far away, but it sounded

deafening in the night silence. It was somewhere out there to

the west, maybe a couple of hundred yards distant. It idled

for ten whole minutes, running the heater. He couldn’t fix an

exact location by sound alone. But then they made a fatal

mistake. They flicked the dome light on and off for a second. He

saw a brief yellow glow deep down in the grass. The truck was

down in a dip. Absolutely concealed, its roof well below the

average grade level. A little south of west, but not by much.

Maybe a hundred and fifty yards out. It was a fine location.

They would probably use the truck itself as the shooting

platform. Lie prone on the roof, aim, fire, jump down, jump in,

drive away.

He put both arms flat along the wall and faced due west and

fixed the memory of the brief yellow flash in his mind against

the location of the tower. A hundred and fifty yards out, maybe

thirty yards south of perpendicular. He crawled back into the

bell tower, past the hammering clock, down to the nave. He

retrieved the long guns from under the pew and left them on

the cold ground underneath the Yukon. He didn’t want to put

them inside. Didn’t want to answer their flash of light with one

of his own.

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Then he walked back to the boarding house and found

Neagley coming out of her room. It was nearly six o’clock. She

was showered and dressed. They went into his room to talk.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ he asked.

‘I never sleep,’ she said. °They still there?’

He nodded. ‘But there’s a problem. We can’t take them down

where they are. We need to move them first.’

‘Why?’

q’oo close to home. We can’t start World War Three out

there an hour before Armstrong gets here: And we can’t leave

two corpses lying around a hundred and fifty yards from the

town. People here have seen us. There’ll be early cops up from

Casper. Maybe State troopers. You’ve got your licence to think

about. We need to drive them off and take them down somewhere

deserted. West, where it’s snowing, maybe. This snow

will be around until April. That’s what I want. I want to do it far

away and I want it to be April before anybody knows that

anything happened here.’

‘OK, how?’

q’hey’re Edward Fox. They’re not John Malkovich. They

want to live to fight another day. We can make them run if we

do it right.’

They were back at the Yukon before six thirty. The snowflakes

were still drifting in the air. But the sky was beginning to

lighten in the east. There was ,a band of dark purple on the

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