The Dreeson Incident(185)

"You going to keep shooting him?" Minnie asked.



Denise thought about it. "I guess there's not much point, any longer."



Minnie shook her head. "No. He's dead. I don't think anybody in the history of the world has ever been deader."





Shots, in the distance. One, two. Then another two. Then another two. Then a whole fusillade.



They came around a curve. From this direction, it was easy enough to see where Bryant had driven the truck off the road. The spring growth of the plants along the way was still a little squashed.



Better to be cautious. They stopped and cut the engines. Nathan and Chandra got off. Missy and Ron pushed the cycles. When they reached the cutoff, each of them followed one set of the truck tracks.



Not just the truck. Another motorcycle.



A motorcycle, pretty obviously, whose rider had been more skilled than Ron and Missy. And who had a second rider on the pillion who had spotted the truck on the way into Frankfurt. Who had stopped to investigate.





Denise and Minnie were, quite calmly, putting Bryant Holloway's body into the cab of the truck, behind the steering wheel.



With Denise, in a most businesslike manner, advising Minnie to use a handkerchief to roll down the window. "Just in case they've heard of fingerprints or one of the Grantvillers in town tells them, we'd better not leave any. There's probably not a lot of crime detection going on. We can hope, anyway."



"What about his gun?" Minnie asked.



"Take it. No reason for anyone to know he dropped it here, and one more can always come in handy."



That was about the time they saw the others coming.



They didn't panic in the least. Just finished what they were doing and waited until the others came down toward the truck.



They gave a quick description of what had happened.



Ron looked into the truck. There wasn't as much blood as you'd expect in there. Probably because Holloway had already bled out before they muscled him into the cab, as many times as he'd been shot.



You could recognize him, but just barely. Two of Denise's shots had hit him in the face.



Ron and Missy looked at one another. It was perfectly clear that the girls were of the opinion that they had not done anything wrong. As they saw it, Bryant Holloway had helped bring into Grantville the demonstrators who killed Denise's dad, had helped the people who arranged the killing of Mayor Dreeson, who gave Minnie her eye.



Minnie was pretty Old Testament herself. She reached up into the socket, popped it out, and held it out for them to look at. None of the others had ever observed this phenomenon before. It did have the effect of taking their minds off Holloway's death for the time being. "I owed him," Minnie said.



"No different from killing a mad dog," was Denise's summary.



The four others stood there, wondering if there was any way to salvage the situation.





Minnie and Denise looked at one another. There was no telling how long the others were going to stand around. With the possibility that someone else could come along any minute and find them there. Shots tended to attract attention. Since they were of the opinion that the papers were now available to the people who had gone looking for them and that they had already taken care of the rest of situation quite adequately, they climbed back on Buster's cycle and started for home.



"See you later!" Denise called over her shoulder.



For one thing, they were cutting school. They saw more of the truant officer than they wanted to even without side trips to Frankfurt. Mrs. Dreeson and Mrs. Wiley would be pissed. Mrs. Dreeson and Mrs. Wiley had a tendency to compare their behavior at considerable length to the far more responsible and thus infinitely preferable manner in which Annalise Richter and Idelette Cavriani approached life.



Having a mentor could be a real pain.





"I don't believe it, quite," Missy was saying, "but he has Dumais' papers thrown in the back here. Just tied up in bundles with red tape around them. Without so much as a camper cover. What if it had started raining?"



"He wasn't thinking straight when he left Grantville," Ron answered. "That's pretty obvious. Reach over the edge of the truck bed and lift them out. Try not to snag your sleeves or anything. Pack them into the sidecars. I hope there's not more than will fit."



"There's more than will fit into one. I think that we can put the rest into the bottom of the other one and then the full gas cans on top. But we can't leave the empty gas cans here."



"Give the empty cans to Nathan to carry," Chandra said. "He might as well be of some use, for a change."



"That's it, then. Let's get out of here before someone shows up to investigate those shots. Prickett, we're going back to your place." Ron started his cycle. On the way out, he was once more careful to follow one of the tracks that the truck tires had made on the way in. Missy followed the other one.