“Now!” Al Stanger said. He snatched up the carbine and vaulted the fence with an agility that astonished me. By the time we were over the fence, he had a twenty-yard lead. As the green Ford began to roll, picking up speed, Stanger stopped, went down onto one knee, and fired four spaced, aimed shots. At the fourth one the back end of the car bloomed into a white-orange poof of gasoline, and as the car kept moving, Broon tumbled out the driver’s door, somersaulting in the grass. He got up and started to run at an angle toward the far side of the pasture but stopped quickly when Stanger fired his fifth shot.
He turned, hands in the air, and began to walk slowly toward the tree. The car had stopped in tall grass, tinkling, frying, blackening. He walked more quickly. And then he began to run back toward the tree.
“Head him off, Lew. Grab him.”
Lew had good style. He loped in that loose deceptive stride of a good NFL end getting down for the long bomb. Stanger and I headed for the tree. He jogged. I started to run by him and he blocked me with the barrel of the carbine extended.
Thus we all got to the red wagon at about the same time. Nudenbarger was taking no chances with Dave Broon. He had one meaty hand clamped on the nape of Broon’s neck and had Broon’s arm bent back up and pinned between Broon’s shoulderblades by his other paw.
Broon was hopping up and down, grunting, struggling, yelling, “Cut him down! Al! Hey, Al! Cut him down!”
We looked up at Tom Pike. He turned slowly toward us. His clenched fists were on either side of his throat, fingers hooked around the strand of rope that crossed his throat. He looked like a man chinning himself, face blackening with total effort.
I saw that I could swing him over and up onto the roof of the station wagon and get the pressure off his throat immediately. As I moved toward him quickly, Stanger clanked the carbine barrel against the back of my skull. The impact was exquisitely precise. It darkened the day without turning the sun out completely. It loosened my knees enough to sag me to a squat, knuckles against the turf, but not enough to spill me all the way. I turned and stared up at Al, blinking away darkness and the tear-sting of skull pain.
“Don’t go messing with the evidence, boy,” he said.
“Don’t do this to me, Al!” Broon begged. “Please, for God’s sake, don’t do it like this.”
Nudenbarger, with Broon firmly in hand, was staring slack-mouthed at Tom Pike. “Jesus!” he said softly. “Oh, Jesus me!”
And Tom Pike continued the slow turn. He lifted his right leg slowly, the knee bending. Classic shoes, expensive slacks, navy socks of what looked like brushed Dacron. The leg dropped back.
“See him twitching any, Lew?” Stanger asked mildly.
“Well… that leg moved some.”
“Just reflex action, Lew boy. Posthumous nervous twitch, like. Doesn’t mean a thing.”
Broon said, “You’re killing me, Al. You know that.”
“You’re all confused. You killed Tom Pike, Davey.”
“You’re miserable, Al. You’re a mean bastard, Al Stanger.”
Slowly, slowly, Tom Pike turned back to face us. He had changed. The look of muscular tension had gone out of his fists and wrists. They were just slack hands, pinned there by the loop, fingers pressing into the flesh of the throat. His chin had dropped. His toes pointed downward. His face had become bloated and the eyes no longer looked at anything at all.
“See now how it was just the nerves twitching some?” Al asked gently.
“You were right, Al. He’s dead for sure,” Lew said.
I pushed myself up and fingered a new lump on the back of my head. “How long would you say he’s been dead, McGee? All things considered.”
“I’d say he must have been dead by the time Broon started to drive away, Al. All things considered.”
“Guess we shouldn’t touch a thing. Get a reconstruction by the lab people to match up with the eyewitness account.” He handed me the carbine and went over and took handcuffs out of a back pocket. He snapped one around Broon’s wrist, told Lew to bend him over a little, and snapped the other around Broon’s opposite ankle. Lew let go and Stanger gave Broon a push. Broon sat in the grass, knees hiked up.