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Jerry Got Bit

By Richard Dansky

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Linda’s words hung there in the air, a bad omen that had arrived uninvited. Before I could say anything, she looked at her watch, then back at me. “We don’t have long before Vic finishes up with those losers and comes looking for me, so we’ve got to be quick. The only other thing you need to know is that they’re not human. They look human, and they talk human, but they ain’t. They’re faster and stronger than us, they can smell you before you ever see them, and those teeth ain’t for show. They’re predators, we’re prey, and the only advantage we’ve got is that they haven’t figured out yet that serious firepower can even the odds. They’re arrogant, ‘cause they think they’re just better.”

I thought about that for a second. “Sounds like they kind of are, really.”

She threw a wadded-up tissue at me. “Whose side are you on, anyway? Now get ready.”

Lucky for me, she had silver bullets in the right caliber for my piece, and she was generous enough to share. I offered to pay for what I took. She shrugged it off. “Let’s see how many you use. You can pay me on the other side.”

The set of her jaw told me it was a bad idea to argue. I loaded up my gun instead, then watched her gear up to fight werewolves in hopes I might learn something. It was clear she’d done this before, and she had herself a ritual as to what went where, when. Handgun in shoulder holster first, hunting knife in a sheath at her belt left side so she could cross-draw, another knife in her boot, silver chain around her neck, and on and on. 

Finally, she felt my eyes on her and looked up. “You like what you see?” she asked.

“I like watching a professional work. That’s all.” 

She grunted. “That’s good, ‘cause that’s all you’re gonna get. We get through this thing, I don’t want you thinking I’m gonna step out of my panties as a thank you for rescuing me. Ain’t gonna happen, and I want that clear in case you’re doing this for the wrong reasons.”

I gave a snort that might have been a laugh. “I’m not interested in jumping your bony ass. I’m here ‘cause of my truck, ‘cause you can’t let disrespect like that stand. And if we do make it out the other side, bumping uglies with you is gonna be the last thing on my mind.”

“You’d be surprised at how you’re gonna feel after you kill one of them,” she said flatly. “But I’m glad we both know where we stand. Here, take this.” She reached down and handed me another knife from the small arsenal on the bed. It was long and wide-bladed and it was balanced like shit. I took a couple of experimental swings with it, then looked at her. “You expect me to use this piece of crap?” 

“It’s silver plated. Not gonna kill one of them things, but if you’re in a bad spot a couple of pokes from that will at least slow them down. You’re welcome.”

“Thank you, I guess,” I said, and tucked that in my belt. My gun, loaded with the ammo she’d given me, was in its usual place at my back. I stretched, and cracked my knuckles.

Linda finished stashing her stuff, then looked me over. “That’s it? You want anything else?”

“What you say is true, I won’t have time to reach for anything else. Let’s do this.”

She gave a wicked little half-smile. “Your funeral.”

We went out the door. She double-tugged the door to make sure it was locked, and the DO NOT DISTURB tag was hanging from the knob. 

 Then we got in, with her driving, and headed out to the house of werewolves.

On the way, we hit one of the town’s three stop lights. Linda turned to me and asked “You sure about this?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Like I said, it’s not the truck. It’s the disrespect. And the fact that they just let me know they can find me wherever and whenever they want. Better to deal with this crap now. I don’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder.”

“You’re damn right,” she agreed. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re coming with me.”

“Well, let’s not make a habit of it,” I told her. I pulled out my gun and held it in my lap, trying to get focused. She didn’t say anything else til we got there.

The place she pulled up to was way the hell and gone up in those northwest Georgia hills. We had to turn down a couple unpaved roads on the way, kicking up a rooster tail that would have given us away in daylight. There were no street lights out here, though, and the trees rose up tall on either side of the road like the walls of a maze.

 Linda finally stopped the truck by the end of a long dirt driveway that wound uphill over a paved lawn the size of a football field. At the top of the hill, I could see a huge farmhouse with an old orange Cherokee Chief up on blocks out front. There were no lights in the windows, and the whole place looked ramshackle, like it had been built by just slapping new additions on every time another kid got born. There was a tractor and some other farm equipment sitting quietly in a field off to the left, and a barn with a hole in its roof not too far away besides. I didn’t see any fencing, or any livestock either. Hell, there wasn’t even a dog, but when I thought about that for a minute, that kind of made sense.

Linda got out of the truck. I did the same, taking care to close the door quiet-like. The sky was clear, lots of bright stars shining and a faint hint of the Milky Way. A thin sliver of moon hung up there, too, but it gave the impression of not having picked a side. “We just walking up the driveway? There’s no cover,” I said.

She shot me a look I could feel even in the dark. “You think cover’s gonna help against a werewolf? I told you, they can smell you a mile away. You can duck behind a tree all you want, it won’t do you no good. No, we go in fast, right through the front door, and if we’re lucky, we walk back out of it after.”

 

“We couldn’t have drove up there?” I asked, but she was already gone, moving along that dirt track at speed. I shook my head and followed. Every step I took on that driveway, I expected something to jump out of the dark at me. But there was nowhere to jump from, and nothing jumped out, and the whole thing felt like wasted time and effort.

The outside lights didn’t go on as we got close, which surprised me. Most places would have had motion sensors set up in case a bear or some coyotes or a burglar showed up. Then again, I had to consider who lived there. If a werewolf had to throw down with a black bear, I know where the smart money would go.

Linda crept up to the door, which had been painted dark green before half the paint had decided to flake off into the wind. I didn’t see one of those fancy doorbells with cameras, and Linda clearly didn’t care if they had one. She tried the handle, which was of course locked. I shot her a look, and she shot me a shrug back. “Worth a shot. Folks out here don’t always lock their doors.”

“But these werewolves do. Got it.”

Linda’s expression curled into disgust. “Don’t think about this shit too hard. It’ll just get you killed.” She holstered the silver-plated .357 and took a deep breath. “You ready?”

I nodded.

“Cover me,” she mouthed, and kicked the door in.

It gave easier than it had any right to. Just that one kick, and it swung back on its hinges as Linda and I rushed into an empty mud room. She drew her gun as I looked around, seeing nothing but a washer and dryer sitting silent over by the side.  There was a basket of laundry on top, so I poked through it to make sure nothing was hiding in there. All I found was a couple of tatty old matched Molly Hatchet concert t-shirts, which raised a few questions I decided to ignore.

On the other hand, the door into the house proper was open, though, so we rushed through it like we thought we were bulletproof. I’m sure it looked badass, us swinging our bodies around corners and drawing down on every last shadow we saw. 

Lucky for us, none of them were werewolves. The whole first floor was quiet, empty, and dark. Hell, we didn’t even find anything you’d even call proof. No bodies, no blood, no bones gnawed on or picked clean. There was just cheap-ish furniture, and a big screen TV, and some cheap art prints framed on the walls. The dining room table was set with what seemed like the nice china, all pretty in case invited company came to visit. But that was all, just normal stuff like normal people might have in a normal house where they were a month behind on the payments. 

Doubtful, we stood there in the kitchen after our circuit and listened. There was nothing. No voices, no breathing, not even the sound of an AC unit kicking in. 

“You sure this is the right house?” I asked.

Linda shot me a look, then gestured up. We were going to hit the second floor. 

“We kicked in the door. Anybody’s here, they heard us on the way in,” I said. 

“Fine,” she said. New guy telling her the ropes was not making her happy. “We’re going upstairs. Maybe they’re asleep, maybe they’re drunk, whatever. If they’d heard us, we wouldn’t have gotten this far. But I’m not leaving with the job half-done. Let’s go.”

I thought about that for a minute. If there were werewolves here, why the hell were they giving us the run of the place? They knew the layout. They could have jumped us a dozen times over. Instead, the only thing moving around was us. Was anybody even home?

But Linda didn’t share my doubts. She moved through the kitchen, leading with that hand cannon, and went up the stairs two at a time. These were carpeted, so we didn’t make a sound going up, and then there we were, on a hallway full of closed doors.

“Bedrooms. Gonna have to clear them one by one,” she whispered, and opened the first door. 

It was an office. Not a tidy one, but an office, with a desk and a computer that was a couple years out of date and a whole lot of papers all over the place. No people, though, and no werewolves neither, I stood watch in the hall as Linda thumbed through a few of the papers. After a minute, she tossed them aside in frustration and stalked out into the hall. I shut the door and asked what she had seen.

“Homework,” she said, with disgust. I wasn’t sure how to handle that or what she quite meant, so I said nothing. I just followed her lead. 

We took slow, careful steps down to the next door and repeated the process. This was a crafts room, full of yarn and cross-stitch and a low-end sewing machine, but empty of life. There was a rocking chair with homemade cushions on it, and a half-knitted pair of socks sat on those with the needles sticking out at odd directions. 

“You think those are dangerous?” I asked. She kicked me in the shin, and went back into that hallway. I followed, closing the door behind me again. The latch made a sharp click, and then everything was silent for a second.  

That’s when I heard the noise. It wasn’t much of one, just a little sniffle, but in that place it was loud as a gunshot. Linda clearly heard it too, because her head swiveled around and she was on the move in an instant.

I was a step behind her. I knew that sound, had heard my little brother make it a hundred times after we scuffled, and hearing it turned my guts to ice. It was the sound a kid made when they were trying not to cry.

Linda flung the door wide open. Inside was a kids’ room. Bunk beds, cheap low dressers, a mobile hanging from the ceiling and a cheap rug with some Disney characters on it across the floor. A first glance showed no one in there, either.

“Nothing here,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Shut up. You heard it same as I did. Now keep looking.”

Before I could say anything else, movement under the bed gave them away.

“There,” said Linda, and pointed. There were two of them, burrowed in under the bottom bunk with a couple of pillows in front of them for cover. I couldn’t see a lot of them, but what I did see didn’t look like wolves. Didn’t look like werewolves, either.

It looked like kids. One was maybe eight, the other about five. The girl was older, the boy younger, and was holding a well-worn teddy bear out in front of him. They both had brown hair and dark eyes and fair skin, and they were in their pajamas.

“Come on out,” Linda said. When they didn’t move, she shouted “I said out!”

“Easy, Linda, they’re just kids,” I said. “You’re gonna scare them.”

“I’m gonna do more than that if they don’t get out from under there right now!” She waved her gun for emphasis. After a second, the boy came scrabbling out and the girl right after. They made it halfway onto that carpet, then sat up and stared at us with big, scared eyes. 

“Don’t hurt us,” the girl said. “Please don’t hurt us.”

I turned to Linda, who was pointing her piece at the boy. “What the fuck, Linda? They’re kids. Please tell me you did not bring me out here to murder kids.”

“They’re not kids,” she answered, keeping her gun steady. “They’re werewolves. Yeah, they’re harmless now, but you know what? They’re gonna grow up, and when they do, they’re gonna kill people. We put them down now, we are saving lives.”

“You don’t know that,” I said, and turned to the girl. “Where are your parents? Why are you alone here?”

“Dad had to go out. We were supposed to stay in the woods with Mom until he got back, but she fell asleep and Liam forgot his teddy bear. So we snuck back to get it. Then we heard you, so we had to hide. Mister, please.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “I signed up to go after the werewolves that killed your daddy and pissed on my truck. I did not sign up to shoot scared kids in the dark. What the hell are you thinking?”

“Their parents killed my father. I want those fuckers to know what it feels like to lose someone, at least for a little while before I kill them, too. You said you’d come out here to help me. You gonna do that, or are you chickenshit? Because I tell you now, these kids are gonna grow up to be monsters, and if they walk, every man, woman, and child they kill would be on you.”

“That’s crazy talk. Lower the gun and let’s get the hell out of here before Mom and Pop come home and find us here.”

Linda turned to look at me, and her eyes were flat and cold. “I’m not leaving til I’ve finished what I came here to do. You wanna run, run. But it’s a long walk back to town.”

“Don’t do this,” I said. “Come with me. Let’s get out of here before it’s too late.”

“Lady, are you gonna kill us?” The boy spoke this time, the damned teddy bear held against his chest. His sister put a protective arm around him, and pulled him close. Her eyes met mine.

“Yes.” Linda said. “Yes I am. Say your prayers.”

“We don’t say prayers in this house,” the girl said.

“Then goodbye.” She pivoted to aim at the girl, maybe because she was older, maybe only God knew why. Didn’t matter, really. 

And I brought up my gun and shot Linda three times center mass before she could pull the trigger. Her body jerked sideways and the muscle spasms squeezed off a round, but it went wide and took out a window instead. Then she dropped, hitting that rug with a cold, wet sound. 

The boy screamed. The girl didn’t. “Get out of here,” I told them. “Go lock yourself in your parents’ bathroom or something and don’t come out, no matter what.”

The boy got up and ran out. The girl got up more slowly, then looked at me. “Thank you,” she said, before walking off after her brother.

“Shit,” I said after they were out of earshot, before I knelt down next to Linda. I was half-expecting her to still be breathing, and maybe to have some pissed-off last words about the whole deal. But she was dead, and probably had been before she hit the floor. 

Me, I was in that bedroom next to a corpse on a Lilo and Stitch rug that was half-soaked in blood, and I didn’t have any good options. No way I was going to be able to haul her body out of there, not without leaving a ton of evidence behind. I could leave the body there, but bodies had a way of turning into evidence, and I didn’t want to be running from a murder rap, either. And I sure as shit wasn’t going to burn the house down to hide the evidence, not with the kids inside.

I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. It was still sinking in; I’d shot a woman dead. A woman I maybe didn’t know well, but we’d shared a drink and a talk and a couple of truck rides, and Jesus fucking Christ, she was dead and I was the reason. Maybe she deserved it, maybe she didn’t, but “deserved” is a word that don’t mean shit when there’s a body on the floor that you put there.

I took a deep breath and made sure my finger wasn’t on the trigger. “You were right, Linda. I do feel different now. Shitty, but different.” I thought about doing that thing you see on tv when someone closes the eyes of the dead body, but she wouldn’t have wanted me touching her after what I’d done. 

Instead, I got up and turned around, still trying to figure out my play. 

And there was Vic, standing in the doorway and staring at me. At least this time he didn’t punch me in the nose.

“Get out of my way, Vic,” I said, and brought up the gun. 

He didn’t stand aside, but didn’t throw hands or reach for a piece, either. Instead, he said, “I told her.”

“She was gonna kill those kids! I couldn’t let her do that! And where the fuck did you come from, anyway?” None of this was making sense. All I knew was that I needed to get out of there, immediately.

“Easy,” Vic said. “I’m not gonna hurt you, and I’m not gonna call the cops. You did the right thing.”

“Did I? Cause it seems to me like I just broke into a house, threatened some kids, and then gunned down a woman who didn’t mean me no harm.” I took a step back and I heard the squelching of the blood under my boots. “I’m leaving now. Don’t make me make it a double, Vic.”

“Like I said, I mean you no harm. Matter of fact, I want to thank you. I knew Linda was headed down this road, and I thought I’d get here in time to stop her. I didn’t, but I’m grateful you were here to save those kids.” He paused. “My kids.”

“Your…” I felt my head spinning. “You’re one of them? You killed Linda’s dad?”

He nodded, once. “Linda’s dad was a piece of shit who beat her on the regular, and did a whole lot worse to other folks besides. There’s still some cold cases in that town they’re from that won’t ever be solved, because he’s the only one who knew where he buried the bodies. A few of us decided to deal with it, but he could tell something was up and brought Linda along as a shield that day. Didn’t work, but…” He shrugged.

I felt like the floor was dropping out from under me. “This don’t make sense. You let her go, then you let her hunt your kind and you watched over her while she did it?”

Vic reached out until the tip of his index finger was on the barrel of my pistol. “You mind pointing that somewhere else?”

“I surely do,” I replied. “Gimme answers, or I’ll pull the trigger and draw my own conclusions.”

The son of a bitch actually yawned. His teeth were big and white. Human, but big and white. “We both know you’re not gonna do that. And yeah, I did watch over her, because even if her daddy was a worse monster than I’ll ever be, it’s still a hard thing to make a kid see what she saw. I figured I owed her, so I tried to keep her safe and steer her toward folks who, frankly, needed killing.”

I lowered the gun, a bit. “You couldn’t just tell her instead?”

Vic snorted. “And say what? ‘Sorry I ate your dad but he totally deserved it, now go to community college?’ You knew her for all of six hours, and even you know how that would have gone.”

“Yeah.” The gun came the rest of the way down. “So what happens now? Are the kids going to be OK?”

Vic stepped into the room and stared at Linda’s body for a moment. “Damnit.” He turned to face me. “They’ll be OK. Their mom’s on her way. Shouldn’t have left them, but like I said, I thought I had time. And for what it’s worth, the whole werewolf thing’s complicated. Some of us are monsters. Some of us are just folks and wouldn’t touch long pig if you served it pulled on a bun with slaw.”

He stepped over to the corpse. “As for what happens next, I’d appreciate help getting her out of here, and maybe dealing with the rug as well. Those stains ain’t coming out. Gonna have to scrub the floor, and buy the kids a new one.” Vic paused for a moment in thought. “Probably a different pattern, though.”

“Blood’s hard,” I agreed.

“It ain’t the blood lingering that I’m worried about,” he said. Then he gestured me over.

I shoved the gun back in my belt, then moved to get my hands underneath Linda’s shoulders. Her gun fell out of her limp hand as I did so, flopping onto the floor. Vic kicked it to the side, then instructed me to help heft her fully onto the rug. Once that was done, he rolled her up in it. Her feet and head stuck out like she was the world’s worst burrito. “Grab a side,” he said, and I did. With him leading, we carried her downstairs, and out into the back field.

As we walked, I asked him, “So explain this to me. Why’d you have the kids hide in the woods, instead of just driving them somewhere?”

He gave a snort of laughter. “Jerry, we’re werewolves. Hide in the woods is what we do.”

I shut up then, and tried not to think about how much blood was getting on my hands.

Once we got far enough from the house, Vic put his end of the burden down. I did likewise, but when I looked up, he was gone.

I looked around, frantic. There was no sign of him, just a field half-lit by moonlight with some buildings too far away to be cover. “Vic?” I called out, and pulled out the gun once again. “Talk to me, man.” 

An evil suspicion started boiling up in my brain, that Vic had fed me six helpings of bullshit back in the house and now I was going to be item number two on his werewolf hunter combo platter. I started backing toward the house, just to avoid standing there like a damn fool, and found myself wishing for a flashlight.

In the distance, a wolf howled. Another wolf answered. 

There aren’t any wolves in that part of Georgia. I knew that for a fact. At that moment, it all got real, in a way it hadn’t before. Even shooting Linda, even that crazy story Vic had told, it hadn’t really felt real, just a crazy wrapper on some crazier shit. 

But now, I could hear the cold hard proof. Maybe I hadn’t actually seen a wolf-man with my own eyes yet, but I didn’t need to. Those howls, they told me it was all truth, or at least enough of it was to get me killed.

The first wolf howled again, closer this time. 

My nerve broke. I turned and ran. 

I didn’t know where I was running to. No way I could make it to town before I got run down, but there’s times when the caveman part of your brain just says run, there’s a sabertooth tiger coming for your ass. So I ran.

And I made it maybe twenty feet before something heavy landed on my back and took me to the ground. My right arm got flung out and the impact with the dirt sent my .38 flying. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck, could feel claws digging into my flesh. This was it, I realized. But I wasn’t going down without a fight.

A heavy, clawed hand came down and pinned my right wrist. That left my left hand free, and I reached down for that piece of shit silver-plated knife Linda had given me. Before Vic could react, I’d pulled it and tried an awkward, weak backwards swipe. There was nothing behind it, but I guess I must have nicked him, because he jumped back and let out a roar.

I took advantage of that to roll over and hold the knife out in front of me. “Fuck you, Vic! You want me, come get me!” I could see a thin line of blood running down his left hand. Score one for the werewolf hunter, so at least it wasn’t going to be a shutout.

Vic didn’t say anything. He just leaned forward and swatted that knife right out of my hands. It went spinning off into the night, catching the moon at odd angles as it went. I tried to put up some kind of defense, but he just went through me and clocked me one on the side of the jaw. My head snapped back and hit the ground, and I saw all the wrong sorts of stars for about five seconds. Then the view changed, and Vic’s hairy snout was looking down on me from way too close. 

“This is gonna hurt,” he said, the voice mostly recognizable as his. 

“Fuck you,” I told him, though the last word kind of got choked off as his jaws closed around my throat. I could feel teeth punching through my skin, and warm blood running down, and then he pulled back, and stood up, and walked away.

I put my hands to my throat, still on the ground. I was bleeding, but not too bad. There were a half-dozen places where his fangs had drawn blood, but he hadn’t gone deep and he hadn’t torn my throat out, and—

And I remembered what Linda had said back in the hotel room about getting bit, and scrambled to my feet. Vic stood, arms crossed across his werewolf chest, and regarded me like I was a car he’d just been working on.  

“Motherfucker. You bit me!”

Vic nodded, “I did. It was my way of doing you a solid.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” I backed up a couple more steps, one hand to my neck to try to stop the bleeding. “You bit me! I know what that means! You played with me and you jumped me and you fucking bit me!”

“Hold that thought,” Vic said. “You’re about to feel like shit.”

“Fuck you,” I said, and then my knees buckled. I dropped to the ground, my vision suddenly blurry and my skin too tight. My mouth felt dry and my head was pounding like a Sunday morning hangover. Every sound was suddenly too loud, every smell too sharp. I screamed and put my hands over my ears, and as I did so I could feel the meat on my bones shift in ways meat’s not supposed to move. My fingernails sharpened into claws and dug into my skull behind my ears, sharp enough to draw more blood. My teeth – sweet Jesus, you are not supposed to be able to feel your teeth grow and change like that. 

I leaned forward and pressed my face against the grass and the dirt, hoping that touching something solid would anchor me. Then, Vic was there, and he was holding me while I shuddered and shook and screamed. 

“It’s OK,” he said. “You’re not gonna change, not all the way this time. And this time’s the worst, I promise. Hang in there, and it’ll be over soon.”

He lied. It was not over soon. I remember my hands, halfway to not human, scrabbling at the dirt until my fingers bled. I remember biting through my tongue with teeth sharp as steak knives, and tasting my own blood. And I remembered feeling the flesh I’d bitten through grow right back, even though I did it again and again and again.

Eventually, though, it was over. I stopped shaking, and the claws went away, and Vic let me go. He stood up and looked at me. “You all right now?”

“What do you think?” I said raggedly, and struggled to my feet. “What the hell? I don’t even know where to start.” I looked around wildly. “Where’s my gun?”

Vic gestured off to his left vaguely. “Over that way. But I’m guessing you want some answers.”

I stared at him. “You think? So talk to me. Try and make me understand any of this shit. Gotta tell you though, I don’t like your chances.”

“Bear with me,” Vic said. “Here’s the thing. Linda had friends, folks in the same line of work. Sooner or later, word’s gonna get out that she’d been seen with you just before she disappeared, and those boys know what disappeared means. It means they’ll be coming after you, and they ain’t gonna be nice. Me biting you, that makes you one of us now. And being one of us, that means you got that much better a chance of surviving a little longer.”

I opened my mouth to say something but he held up a, I don’t know, a hand, to stop me. “That’s all I can give you, but if you’re smart, it’ll be enough. And no, I can’t train you, and no, I won’t be watching over you. Lone wolf’s gotta find his own way, at least in the beginning. You dig?”

I cocked my head, then realized it was exactly the sort of thing a dog would have done. “God damnit. No, I don’t dig it. You did this to me, and you’re telling me there are people out there who are gonna want to kill me, and you’re just gonna let me go? Man, I hope you take better care of your actual kids than that.”

That one hit home, and I could see him wince. “Look, Jerry, I owe you. You saved my daughter and you saved my son. But in doing that, you showed me something, that I’ve got to stay a little closer to home and keep an eye on them. Linda’s friends might come this way, and I need to be ready if they do.”

“So let me stay for a while,” I found myself asking. “Teach me what I need to know to stand a goddamn chance out there. And then you’ve got someone else to watch your back if they do show.”

“Wish I could, but here’s the thing. Our kind, we’ve got rules we all gotta follow, the best of us and the worst of us and everyone in between. And one of those rules is, like I said, lone wolf’s gotta find his way. You need to prove you can survive and figure out who you are now that you’re what you are.” 

He shook his head. “In a lot of ways, it’s harder for folks like you, who come into it by the bite and not by being born. But I’ve got faith in you. You seem like you’ve got your head screwed on straight, not gonna go tear up a sorority house or get yourself caught on camera. And when the time is right, you’ll find your place. Or maybe you won’t. The future ain’t written yet.”

I spat down on the ground. It still tasted just a little bit like blood. “Fine, whatever. But tell me this: You wanted to bite me, what was with the flying tackle bullshit? You could have just told me face to face.”

He smiled, a big wolfy smile. “Yeah, but doing that was more fun.” He sobered a bit. “And this way you don’t forget, everyone’s someone’s prey sooner or later. You carry that with you, you’ll live a lot longer.”

I nodded, once. “I hear you. Thank you, and fuck you.” I walked back to Linda’s body, and unrolled the rug around her..

“What are you doing?” Vic asked. 

“Taking the first steps in my new life, unless you’ve got an objection,” I answered. Linda’s body came free and I dug in her pockets. I took the cash out of her wallet and the keys to her truck, and the various bits of gear she still had on her person when I killed her. Then I stood back up, and stared Vic in the eye.

“Before I go,” I said. “You and me, we understand each other. I get what you did, and why you did it, and maybe someday I’ll thank you for it. But right now, not so much. Just answer me two questions, and then I’m gone, just the way you want me.”

He dropped onto his haunches, his legs bending the wrong way at the knee. “Ask away. Hell, I’ll give you three.”

I raised one bloody finger. “Fine. What’s gonna happen with Linda and the cops?” 

Vic gave an easy, sad smile. “Nothing. A body out here, critters gnaw it down to nothing in no time. Coyotes and the like do for the meat, and the porcupines go after the bones. This ain’t the city, in case you hadn’t noticed. And the cops from town? They don’t look too hard for drifters who skip out on paying their motel bills.”

With a wince, I nodded. “Fine. Two, my truck. Was that you? Someone you know? Trying to push me into something?”

He shook his long, dog-faced head. “Not me, not anyone I know. It wasn’t those punks from the alley neither – don’t know what she told you, but they were independent contractors, if you take my meaning. Your truck, though, hell if I know. It’s a big world you just became a part of, and there’s a lot of mean folks in it. Maybe someone wanted to point you in a particular direction. Maybe they were just fucking with you. God’s honest truth, I can’t tell you more.”

I took a deep breath. “Fair enough. Third question.”

“Yes?”

“Is there a pump or a hose or something around here so I can wash up before I get blood all over my new truck?”

He leaned back and gave a laugh that was a howl that was a laugh. I didn’t wait for him to answer, as I could see for myself there was a pump round the side of the house from where I stood. I made for that, nice and slow, walking like a predator instead of prey. The keys to Linda’s truck, and whatever this new life was gonna be, jingled in my hand. 

And behind me, I could hear Vic say, “Jerry, I think you’re gonna be just fine.”

---

Host Commentary

That last line of Kat’s host spot is fantastic:

 

But right is not the same as easy.

  

And while he’d hate to admit it, is probably Jerry’s unofficial motto.I love that he doesn’t flinch when he needs to defend the kids. Not in that macho way loud guys with awful neck tattoos yell about on instagram, but in the simplicity of the moment. Jerry needs to stop some kids being murdered. His feelings come second. He stops it. It’s not easy. But it is right.

Dansky’s prose is laden with moments and language like that, and it feels like Jerry would look across the bar at Mike Hammer or VI Warshawski or Gromit and share an exhausted nod. Doing their best despite the world, continuing despite everything. Knowing it’s not easy. Doing it anyway because doing nothing is so much worse for everyone. This line:

‘You did the right thing?’

 ‘Did I?

Reads at first as snarky and there’s an element of that to be sue. But there’s also a sincere question. Jerry’s just done something really hard. He can’t undo it and he honestly needs the outside perspective. Just like he rest of us. I love too that he reaches for obvious cultural touchstones and is good naturedly disgusted when he finds out a lot of it’s wrong.

 

‘If you couldn’t trust comic books and Stephen King novels for shit like this, what could you trust?’

Steering via pop culture has some resonance for me. Try and act surprised.

Jerry’s adrift, as we all are, but he’s also got a good bearing or two. He knows when to do the right thing. He knows that often it’s the last thing he wants to do. He does it anyway because in the end that’s always the best call. It’s hard. It’s thankless. Do it anyway, because Vic’s right Jerry. You, and we, will be just fine.