"He tried to stab me with a knife," Weston said. "I kind of stumbled backward, and he got my shoulder." He touched his shoulder as he spoke. "I ran outside, threw myself in my car, and drove away.
"He was standing outside on the porch as I pulled out, and he just said, as calm as can be, he said: 'You know I'll get you. Sooner or later, I'll get you.'
"And I just ran and ran. And I hid. Here."
I asked, "Why didn't you just go to the police?"
"I know, I should have," Weston said. "After four years I just ask myself, 'Why the hell didn't you go to the cops?' Well, for one thing, I had had some trouble with the law before. A couple of drug possession charges, one in high school, one later. The local cops knew me and didn't like me, and I didn't think of them like someone you'd go to with a problem. Even a normal problem. This wasn't normal, this was a story about my big brother who had never got into any trouble, and now he thought he was the next Messiah and was killing of my whole family slowly and mostly making it look like accidents."
"Why'd he try to stab you, then?" Sammy asked. "That doesn't look like an accident."
"I dunno," Weston said. "Maybe he was going to make it look like a break-in or a burglar. That worked for Grandma and Grandpa. Actually, he was probably just going to wait for Mom and Dad to come home and kill them right then, too. Then we'd all be dead, and he'd have his powers from God, so there he wouldn't need to be sneaky anymore."
"So," I said, "he's eased off these last few years, waiting to see if you were going to show up and cause trouble. Maybe he had been planning to save your parents for last anyway. But when it became clear that you weren't going to pop up on your own..."
"He got tired of waiting and killed Mom and Dad, then came looking for me." Weston fell silent and massaged the bridge of his nose. "That doesn't seem real yet. Mom and Dad. They're dead. I guess I thought..."
There was a knock at the door. All three of us jumped. I motioned Weston into the bathroom, and Sammy against the wall out of sight of the door. I crouched against the right beside the door, gun at the ready.
"Who is it?"
"Pizza," said a bored voice.
Oh. Right.
I holstered the gun before opening the door. A skinny man with the logo of the local pizza shop on his hat handed over a pizza box in exchange for my twenty.
We opened it on the bed and ate.
"Let's turn on the news," I said. We flipped through the channels until we hit a local news broadcast. We watched it to the end. There was no mention of a shootout in a remote lot on a mountain road.
When the news ended and a Simpsons rerun started, I clicked it off.
"Weston," I said, "You really ought to call Christine if you know where to reach her. I'll go in the other room and call the police, see if they've got your brother in custody."
He nodded. I motioned Sammy to follow me into the adjoining room to give Weston a little privacy.
I looked up the sheriff's office in Richlake and dialed.
"Hi," I told the dispatcher. "I was driving south on one of the routes southwest of Snowcrest earlier this afternoon, and I heard a lot of shooting in the woods. Was there anything going on there?"
The dispatcher was silent for a moment. "Ma'am, you'll have to speak to the sheriff or one of the deputies in charge about that," she said in a sober and strained voice.
I declined the offer nonchalantly and hung up.
"They don't have him," I told Sammy. "And it sounds like they're taking it pretty damned seriously. Which is good. But they don't have him, and that's bad."
Sammy cracked his knuckles. "Rennie," he said, "I want this sonofabitch."
"I know," I said. "I saw the bullet holes he left in your tailgate."
He shook his head. "It's not that. I was born again once. I dunno, I guess I still am. Some people say once saved, always saved. I don't know if Jesus works like that; seems to me if you leave God, you're no better off than you were before you found Him. And I've pretty much fallen away. But dammit, Jesus is still my Lord. And this shithead, twisting scripture around, talking about how Jesus failed and how he's gonna do it better, by killing people so he can be the Messiah with a sword..." He shook his head again. "I guess I'm not thinking very Christian-like, am I?"
"Don't worry," I said. "We'll get him fair and square. And when we do, I'll stop you before you do anything really unchristian, like smash his head in with a tireiron."
Sammy smiled and rolled his shoulders, trying to work out some tension. We had left the door between the adjoining rooms open a few inches, and we could still hear the low mutter of Weston's voice on the phone.
"So, how you want to handle the sleeping arrangements?" Sammy asked.
"A girl's gotta maintain some decorum," I said. "You sleep in there with him, I'll sleep in here. You take the bed closest to the window."
"You think Joshua's going to come gunning tonight?"
"I can't rule it out," I said. "Since I don't know how he followed us up the mountain in the first place."
"Maybe he... Hm."
"Exactly."
Sammy chewed on the inside of his lip as he puzzled. "I don't have an ideas. Good thing you're the brains of this outfit."
"Great. I've got no more answers than you do."
What I didn't tell him was that I did have one idea. Half an idea, maybe. I kept pushing it out of my mind because it brought a lot of baggage with it, a lot of possibilities that I didn't want to consider.
"And then what, tomorrow morning?" Sammy asked.
"We check with the police again," I said. "If they still don't have Joshua, we may just have to think about taking Weston in and having him tell his story."
"He'll be in a load of shit," Sammy said. "What with the fake identity, fake ID's, all that stuff."
"And then there's Christine," I said. "How'll she react when she finds out that the guy she's been living with isn't who she thought he was?"
We both listened for a second. We couldn't hear Weston's voice anymore. I wasn't embarrassed to have been talking about Weston's love life, but it's always odd to realize you've been talking about someone in the third person's within in his earshot.
I heard something else in the silence, too. A truck engine. There had been motors coming and going in the motel parking lot, but this one sounded like it was revving up instead of slowing down.
I looked to the front windows and saw a pair of headlights through the curtains, growing larger and closer too damned fast with no sign of slowing.
"Out!" I shouted and pushed Sammy. We dove toward the adjoining door as the truck smashed into the window, bringing the whole front wall into the motel room.
