Kris stops, and I barge right into him. The winter cold makes my nose hurt. “What the hell are you doing?” I yell, and I think I can taste blood in my mouth, but what do I know? After all, most of my face is numb from the cold.
Kris doesn’t answer. He reaches around, trying to grab something. His big hand rams the middle of my chest, and I’m about to topple backward, but he has a good grip on my coat. With his other hand he points at something down in the ditch ahead.
“What? What are you doing?” I ask, when I’ve regained my balance. “You trying to kill me?” It feels as if his hand has left a crater in my chest.
Kris stands completely still. His arm is still stretched out. I follow his index finger.
At first I can’t see what he’s pointing at. I can see the railroad, the rails that disappear around the curve, the noise barrier, the gray sky … what is it he sees? What is he pointing at?
Then I spot it. Right there. In the ditch, all the way down by the barrier, a naked pale foot is sticking out of some sort of bundle; at the opposite end, right at the barrier, a head is visible. Wet hair blocks off the face, but it’s a head. No doubt about it.
We stand, frozen. He still has hold of my coat, and I’m clutching his arms with both hands. The bundle lies motionless. A strange silence. A wrong silence.
“Is it a dead body?” Kris whispers, and he looks at me.
I shrug, I don’t know. He gives me a shove, wants me to go down and look. I shove him back, but Kris is bigger, that means I’ve got to do it.
Dickhead!
“If it’s a body, what are you afraid of?” I ask, and hop down in the ditch. I pull the hammer from my belt just in case it isn’t a body, but some psychopath luring teenage boys down there so he can eat their eyes out.
The brown bundle must be easy to overlook if you ride by on a train. How did Kris even spot it? It’s the same color as the brown stones it lies on. Almost the same color. It must be a body. You can’t lie there like that in this cold without being dead.
I look back at Kris, still on the tracks. He nods toward the bundle, moves his lips, like he’s egging me on to investigate, but not a sound comes out of him. It looks a little bit ridiculous. A boy Kris’s size. Afraid of a corpse.
I take a deep breath. In. And out. Have to remind myself to do even that. To remember to breathe. Slowly I approach, my hand grips the hammer, my teeth are cemented together. If it’s not a corpse, it would be nice if the person stood up now. A homeless person who fell asleep out here. Someone who went to a wild party, or a bachelor’s party. Sit down, boys, listen to this. Something or other. Give me something. Just so he sits up.
I reach the bundle. It looks like a girl. The foot sticking out is way too small and delicate and white to be a man’s. And the face … I still can’t see it from the hair, but it must be a girl.
Kris clears his throat behind me, and I wait, but nothing more comes. He doesn’t say anything. Just clears his throat.
She’s lying totally still, no sign of life from her. I hear myself say, “Hello?”
No answer. Of course.
I lean down and lift a corner of the brown felt blanket and glance underneath. It is a girl. A naked young girl. Small white breasts, chalk-white stomach, light pubic hair below. Hard to tell how old she is. Or was. With one finger I pull the hair off her face as best I can.
Fuck!
“What’s the matter?” Kris yells behind me. He hops down in the ditch and walks toward me.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just that her eyes are still open.”
Not just her eyes, but her mouth too, frozen in an expression her murderer left her with. Because she must have been murdered. Why else would she have been abandoned here?
I try to warm my hands by blowing into the little cave they form in front of my mouth, but it’s no good. Kris is still standing by the body. Leaning over it. It looks as if he’s investigating it. What does he think he’s doing? He must think he’s a detective or something. It can’t be someone he knows. We’ve grown up together here in Vigerslev, gone to the same schools, been around the same people. I’d know if he knew her.
The sound of a train rumbles in the distance. It will be here in a minute, for sure. Kris walks over to me. “It’s a woman. I packed her in again,” he says.
We jump back around the noise barrier. It’s pure reflex. We always hide up here when the trains come by. If the engineer sees two boys on the tracks, the police show up shortly after.
We stand on the slope behind the barrier and look down at the community gardens, while the train roars past behind us. It’s dead down there. Just like everything else in the winter. Like the girl behind us. I realize that I’ve lost my hammer somewhere back there. I have to remember to grab it before we leave.
“Do you think it was him?” Kris says all of a sudden.
“Who?”
“The guy down at the booster station?”
I stare at a cottage in the community gardens, a small green house with red shutters and wide flagstones set in herringbone, all the way through the garden to the door, which has a row of potted plants on each side, and hidden underneath one of them is a key, but I can’t remember which one. I think that the owner must switch them around to confuse potential burglars, to confuse me, and yeah, fuck yeah, it makes sense. The guy we saw down at the booster station.
“Of course it was him!” I say. “If he was an electrician or a guard or had something he was supposed to be doing down there, he would have been in something his company owns. He’d be driving some lousy van and not that shitty little car.”
“He had these big dark sunglasses on,” Kris says. “I figured it was because of the sun in his eyes, but there wasn’t any sun down there.”
I don’t think Kris is right. It was sunny, but I don’t say anything.
“The license plate! Did you get his number?” I ask, even though it’s a dumb question.
He shakes his head. I do the same. The idea was good enough: call the police and tell them about the body and hand them the murderer at the same time. Just like that! Heroes of the day. TV and newspapers. Local boys find dead body. How much pussy could a guy score from that at school? Or in town?
“Have you seen anything in the news? Anything about reports of missing girls?”
I shake my head. I don’t watch much TV and don’t read any papers, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any girls missing. Not right now, anyway.
We’re back with the body. I lift the blanket up again. It’s soaked, heavy. It hasn’t rained for several days. Must be the night frost or something. She is so white, there’s nothing on her that isn’t white. She looks like a doll. Almost so much that it’s hard to believe she’s a corpse.
She doesn’t look very old, maybe a few years older than us, but no more.
Kris reads my mind. “She’s not a day over twenty.”
“How do you think she died?”
There is no visible sign of violence. Her body, her arms and legs, are the way they should be, there aren’t any broken bones, no bruises. She looks so perfect that it’s strange she isn’t.
“There,” Kris says, and points. There are marks on her throat. I lift her chin up a little, exposing a hand-sized dark spot that stretches around her throat. Kris shakes his head. “Twenty minutes. If we’d just been here twenty minutes earlier.” He has brought the screwdriver out again without me noticing it. “Just twenty minutes. It’s typical, why do bastards like this always get away with it? It would have been cool to catch him up here when he threw her off. Caught in the act. Fuckhead!”
I’m about to pull the blanket around her again when Kris grabs my wrist. He points the screwdriver at her stomach. “What the hell is that?”
“What? Her stomach?”
“No, on her stomach.”
I lean down a bit. Small white spots dot her stomach and breasts. It’s hard to see them because her skin is almost the same color, but they’re there. Sperm.
“Fucking sperm! So that fucker stood up here in broad daylight and came all over a girl he just killed?” Kris’s grip on the screwdriver turns his fist white, and he starts talking through clenched teeth. “Twenty minutes, man. Just twenty minutes earlier.”
I cover her with the blanket as best I can, and I try to throw up. But nothing comes.
It’s getting darker. We lean against the noise barrier. Even though I’m wearing three layers of clothes, I can feel the cold metal on my back. Kris is cooling off, but he’s still gripping the screwdriver. I can’t see the hammer anywhere. It won’t be easy to find now. But our little trip out into this residential area isn’t going to happen.
I try to pack her in better. The blanket really isn’t big enough, surely that’s why her head and foot were sticking out. I try to fold it around her anyway. It’s wet and heavy, and the tips of my fingers start to ache. It comes to me that she’s been out here longer than we thought.
“What if he comes back?” I say.
Kris looks at me. “What? Who?”
“Him. The killer. What if he comes back tomorrow to get off again? Isn’t that what they do, these sex killers?”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” I say. “That blanket is soaking wet, and it hasn’t rained a fucking drop for several days at least. So it’s the frost at night that made it wet.”
“Wouldn’t the blanket be frozen stiff?”
“Not for sure. It’s warmer in the daytime. So she’s been laying here since at least yesterday, and he came up here again today to get off.”
We stand there for a second, looking at each other under the railroad lights. Our breath forms small clouds of steam. Kris comes closer. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head.
“So you think he’ll come back?”
“Don’t they always? They have to admire their work, or whatever. That’s how they get caught. Kris, we saw him down on the street. If we wait till tomorrow and catch him there, we’ll be fucking heroes.”
We look down at the girl. “So we just let her lay here till tomorrow?” he asks.
I shrug my shoulders. “She won’t be any less dead from laying there. And nobody’s coming up here, so she won’t be found.”
“So your plan is,” says Kris, and looks around, “we pretend we haven’t even been here today, and we just happen by tomorrow and catch a sex-crazed psycho?”
“Yeah, we won’t even have to overpower him or anything, if he has a gun on him. We just get his license plate.”
“But don’t you think he saw us down on the street? I mean, since we saw him, he must have seen us.”
I think that over a second. “We’re just a couple of boys out drinking some beer to him. It doesn’t mean we found the body. Especially since he hid her so far in from the rails.”
On the way back we agree that he’ll return to the body at the same time of day. He’s been afraid of drawing attention to himself in the daylight, so he’ll want to come late in the afternoon when it’s nearly dark. Nighttime is no good because it’s too dark for him to enjoy his work. He needs enough light to get off on it. He might also come at sunrise, but people are more alert at that time of day, before going to work. We don’t dare take any chances, though, and we decide to meet here early tomorrow morning in case he shows up.
“He’ll for sure be coming from the same direction,” Kris says. “It’s the only place he can park in private. He’ll definitely be coming from the booster station.”
Kris is already there when I return at eight the next morning. He’s waiting at the end of the barrier, but I see him sticking his head out once in a while.
“You’re early,” he says, then bursts out: “What? What is it? What are you laughing at?”
“I’m early? How long have you been here?”
He doesn’t answer, he just looks at me as if he needs a few seconds to think. “So okay, I’ve been here ten minutes, fifteen at the most. I couldn’t sleep last night, how about you?”
I shake my head, even though it’s not true. I have slept, not much, but long enough to dream something weird, where I was chasing someone who was constantly just out of reach. Just when I was about to grab him, he disappeared around the curve of the railroad tracks.
The bundle is exactly the way we left it yesterday. And yet something is different. Not with the blanket. With her. Her head. And her foot sticking out. Is it just me, or has she turned gray?
“Kris, is she starting to stink? Does she stink?”
Kris shakes his head. “My nose is stopped up, I can’t smell for shit.”
I take a deep breath in through my nose, and even though we’re several meters from her I can smell it. A weak odor of rot. Apparently that’s how death smells.
It’s completely light now, and we hide behind the noise barrier. We settle in to wait. We stand on the slope, shivering from the cold, but we don’t leave. We both thought the only times he might show up were morning and evening, but we stay anyway. Neither one of us suggests we go home and come back later. We stay.
The trains pass by. Those from Sydhavn roll toward Roskilde, the ones from Roskilde toward Sydhavn. We stay hidden, counting them. Two pass by toward Sydhavn. Then nothing happens. A third toward Sydhavn, then one toward Roskilde. When it’s totally quiet on the tracks we can hear traffic down on Vigerslev Allé. The cars and buses driving by. We can hear people down there. Kids yelling at each other.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I say. “Let’s get something to eat somewhere.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We can’t leave now, what if he shows up?”
“Kris. I’m freezing my ass off. He’s not coming now, it’s too light. Come on, let’s go down and get something to eat. We can be back in an hour.”
He shakes his head. “I’m staying right here.”
I turn and walk down the slope. “I’ll pick something up for you.”
“Let’s call the police.”
Kris stuffs the last of the burger in his mouth and washes it down with soda. “Why?”
He’s pissed at me because it took longer to bring the burgers back than he’d expected. Incredible, how paranoid you can get when you’re on surveillance. All the way to the pizzeria and back I tried to find a route where I wouldn’t be seen. In case the killer was on his way. I crawled along the slope by the community gardens, looking for the hole in the fence, and when I couldn’t find it I had to climb over. It was harder on the way back because I had a big bag of food with me.
It’s already getting dark. We eat the last of the french fries. “A whole day’s gone by since we found her,” I say. “And there’s no sign of him showing up.”
Kris shakes his head. “No way. You said he’d come back. Maybe he couldn’t make it today. The bastard might have a wife and kids and all that. Maybe he’ll be here tomorrow. He’ll come.”
“Let’s just call the police, we’ll still be the heroes of the day ’cause it’s us who found her.”
“Maybe, but we’ll be even bigger heroes if we catch the guy too,” Kris says.
I’m not happy about this, especially since her smell has gotten stronger all day. If we let her lie until morning, how much worse will it get? I wonder. “Kris, we can’t just keep standing here, waiting for someone who might not even come back. She’s not getting any prettier to look at.”
“The man’s a psychopath, maybe it’s what turns him on.”
“Okay, but if he’s a psychopath there’s not a lot we can do …” There must be something I can say to convince him.
“Just leave it to me,” he responds, and suddenly he pulls a knife out from the inside pocket of his coat.
“Fuck! Kris, goddamn! What are you … Fuck!”
“Take it easy, I’m not about to kill anybody or anything. We just need to scare him, maybe cut him a little.”
“Kris, no, fuck it, we’re calling the police.” I pull my phone out, and I’m about to punch numbers when I get hit hard. Kris falls on me. His hands are on my shoulders, pushing them down, holding me against the cold ground. I can’t see the knife. I try to catch my breath.
“Kris, goddamn. Get off, you’re crushing me.”
He leans over and looks me right in the eye. “You’re not calling the police!”
“Get off me, goddamnit.” There’s a branch or something under me, he’s pressing my backbone into it.
“I said, you’re not calling the police. Right?” He presses my shoulders even harder. I can’t get the bastard off me.
“Okay, okay. I’m not calling the police.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“YES, GODDAMNIT! I promise.”
He lets go, and slowly I get to my feet. The tree limb has poked a hole in my coat, down at my lower ribs. My phone is halfway down the slope. Even from here I can see the number 1 on the display. That’s as far as I got. Kris offers a hand, and I shove it away. I can get up by myself. I just have to catch my breath.
“Kris, you fat bastard!” I stick a hand in under my sweater. My back is sore, but it’s not any worse than that. Fucking asshole.
“He’ll come back,” he says, and looks away.
I can smell her long before I reach her. It hasn’t left me, the smell, it followed me yesterday when Kris and I left her. I tried washing it off but it was still there. My mother didn’t seem to notice anything, maybe it was just me. When I got up this morning it was still there. It was worse on my coat. The hole in the back is bigger than I thought at first, or else it’s ripped out more, but it’s the only coat I have. I put an extra sweater on to keep warm.
I meet Kris on the lawn by the booster station. We haven’t planned to meet here. We didn’t make any plans at all after yesterday. He’s smiling strangely. Both his hands are in his pockets. I can practically see from his look that the knife is back in his inside pocket. “Morning,” he says, and smiles.
I say nothing, just walk past him, farther up toward the booster station and the railroad behind it. Why is he so happy? He follows, I hear him a few meters behind me. We keep moving along the path. He says nothing, but I can feel his smile knifing me in the back. Why is he smiling this way? He would have said if the killer had been here. I could ask him, but I don’t want to. I don’t turn, I just keep walking. And he follows a few meters behind.
“Get the hell out of here!” I yell, while I run toward the crow with a rock in my hand. I don’t even come close to hitting it, but it’s enough to scare the crow. It flies over to the other side of the body for cover. I pick up another rock. The crow takes off again. This time it lands on the edge of the barrier. It looks down at us. Kris plods along over to me, his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t seem especially surprised. He’s not smiling anymore, but he’s not mad or all worked up.
“Shhh,” he says abruptly. “People can hear you when you yell that way.”
“Yeah? Fuck them. How many people you think yell ‘Get the hell out’ in one day in Valby?”
He shrugs and plods on, over to the body. The smell is much worse now. It feels warmer too. That, or else it’s because I’m wearing an extra sweater. The crow still sits there. I throw the rock, but it sees it coming. It flies up and away, disappears between the trees. If it has found her, other crows will for sure be coming along too. I look up. There are a few dark spots high up in the gray sky. But they fly away.
“Fuck! Look at this!” Kris is standing at the body. I stand beside him and look down. Her eyes, which had been staring at us before, staring at nothing, are punctured and almost gone.
My hand flies up to cover my own eyes, but I lower it immediately. It still smells like death here. The dark spots up in the sky are back. How well do crows see? Can they smell her from up there?
“Kris,” I say slowly, afraid that my voice is shaking.
“We’re not calling yet,” he says. “First he’s got to come, we’ll grab him, then we call.”
“Kris, if we let her lay here much longer, there won’t be anything left. Those crows are coming back as soon as we leave.”
“This was your idea. We find the killer and we’re heroes. It was your idea.”
“I know it. But fuck it, hey, I was wrong. If he doesn’t come back now, he’s not coming back.”
“No way. He’ll be back. It’s like you said. He’s got to get off one more time.”
I don’t know why he keeps going on about what I said. He doesn’t usually do that. But I don’t dare say anything more. Not after yesterday. Instead I bend over, and without looking too closely at her messed-up face I grab the blanket and wrap it around her head. Close and tight. I don’t want to take chances.
“What are you doing?” Kris asks. Again, that nice and easy voice.
“I’m covering her up. He doesn’t have to get as far as taking his dick out or anything. We just need to get him, right? It doesn’t really matter about her. If she lays here much longer, the crows will eat her. If we get the guy, the police or their fucking CSI team or whatever will take care of the rest. Okay? You’ll still get to be the hero.”
Kris doesn’t answer, and I take that to mean it’s okay. I feel him staring at me while I wrap the blanket around her. The blanket isn’t nearly big enough, and after I’ve wrapped her head up I notice her legs sticking out from the knees down. I think about starting over, but I leave her like she is. Protecting her head is the most important thing right now. Protect the open wounds. Crows’ beaks aren’t strong enough to rip holes in skin. Only eagles and vultures and that kind of bird can. Crows need an open wound. Or an eye.
I take three steps away and throw up. Kris laughs at me. I squat down, lean against the barrier. Stay sitting, stare up at the sky. At the black spots. They disappear after a while. A train goes by. We hide behind the barrier. The slope is slippery. I kick the branch away. The one I landed on yesterday. Kris laughs again. Something is wrong about this. Something deeply, deeply wrong. I don’t say anything. We wait. We listen. Trains pass by. Cars drive along down on the road. Buses. Kris goes for food. He hands me a burger. I don’t eat it. I’m not hungry. I wait and listen. Stay crouched down with the burger in my hands. Kris takes a look. It’s getting dark, getting dark fast. I did a good job with the blanket. The crows don’t come back. The guy doesn’t either.
I go home. Kris stays behind. “See you tomorrow,” he says. “Get a good night’s sleep and come back ready to go.” The smell sticks to me. My clothes. My hair, my skin. I breathe through my mouth, but I can taste it on my tongue.
I don’t eat dinner. Take a long bath, but the smell is still there. I go right to bed. I see her half-eaten eyes in the dark. There is something deeply, deeply wrong here.
I breathe icy air, and it hurts all the way inside my chest, but I keep going. I don’t know if anyone at home saw me run out, and I don’t care either. I run, slip on the ice a few times, fall, and brush myself off with my hands. It hurts, but it’s not that bad.
I’m thinking: crows and their fucking beaks, they can’t do what eagles and vultures can, but what about foxes? What about fucking foxes and their teeth?
From where I live it’s easiest to get up on the tracks from Vigerslev Allé. From the station. There’s nobody on the street this time of night anyway. I fly up the steps, onto the platform, and down to the tracks.
There. Right there. I see two, maybe three, before I trip over a crosstie. They look up at me. “Hey, goddamnit!” I throw a rock. They run off, flee. I go down to the girl. They’ve been eating her.
They’ve been eating her. Her foot. Feet. They’ve eaten her feet. Her legs. All the way up to her thighs. Big chunks of meat bitten off. I start to cry. I can’t help it. The tears stream out.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I got here as fast as I could. I’m sorry, sorry.” I wrap the blanket around her legs as tightly as I can. Just like I did with her head yesterday.
The foxes, they’re still here. They’re waiting at a distance, quiet. They’re staring at us. At me and the girl. What should I do? I realize I left my phone at home. I can’t leave her here. The foxes will be back on her as soon as I leave.
“Hey,” I say. “We can’t stay sitting out here.” The blanket is wrapped tight around her. It’s cold and wet and heavy, and my fingers hurt, but I can’t stop now. I can’t leave her here. “You’re safe now,” I say, and lift her up on my shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not anymore. I’m going to take care of you.”
At first it’s surprisingly easy to carry her, but slowly I feel the weight of her dead body. The first time I slip on a crosstie she almost falls. I can’t carry her all the way to the street. It’s too far. But I can’t leave her here, either.
The community gardens, the cottages. There’s a hole in the fence there somewhere, I know there is.
The foxes keep their distance. More have shown up, but they stay away. I slip on the slope, fall backward, and hit my head on the barrier. Lose her when I fall. I look around. She’s lying at the bottom of the slope, by the fence. I crawl down to her on all fours. No more falling. If something happens to me, who will save the girl?
I manage to get her through the hole in the fence and carry her down a gravel path, alongside hedges and past garden gates. Which cottage is it? The little green one. I look back at the slope to judge just where we are. A fox stands there staring at us. Fucking shitty animals.
I turn around. The cottage must be right along here on the left. Up a wide garden walk. I grab the doorknob. Locked. Try the potted plants. One after the other. At first I put them back carefully, but it gets to be too difficult with the girl on my shoulder. So I kick the pots over with my foot, one by one. Finally. The key. It’s under the fifth or sixth one. I unlock the door and glance back quickly. No one in sight. Nobody has followed us. No foxes. No sex murderer.
I carry the girl inside and close the door behind us. Lay her on a small sofa, farthest back in the room to the left. I sit on the floor beside her. “I just need to rest a little,” I say, to the air. “I just need to catch my breath, then I’ll go out and call the police. I just need a break.”
I open my eyes and immediately begin to shiver. The cottage is like ice. It’s getting light outside. I must have slept, I feel stiff all over. I stand up slowly and look at the girl on the sofa. She’s lying there like some kind of gift, wrapped up tightly in a much-too-short blanket. The bite marks on her legs stand out. They’ve taken quite a bit of her calves.
I turn and step over to the door. Through the window I see Kris standing up on the slope, looking out over the community gardens. No doubt about it, he’s looking for us. I open the door, but he’s already disappeared again behind the noise barrier. I run down the walk. My legs hurt. Through the hole in the fence and up the slope. I run around the barrier. And smack into Kris.
I fall over. He looks at me for a moment, puzzled, then recognizes me. “She’s gone. He’s been here and took her.” I can see he’s been crying.
“No. She’s down in the community gardens,” I say, getting back to my feet.
“You moved her?”
“Yeah, the foxes—”
“You moved her. How are we going to catch him now?”
“Kris, it’s too late. He’s not coming back anymore.”
He takes a step closer. His fists are clenched, and he nearly snarls at me. “How are we going to catch him now? How are we going to—” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead he attacks me. I hit the ground hard, it knocks the breath out of me. He straddles me and shakes me by the collar.
“We were supposed to wait for him!” he screams. “That was the deal we made. Don’t you remember?”
I’m hurting. Really bad. All over my body. My legs. My hands. My head. I can’t take anymore. I moan: “She’s down in the house. She’s safe.” But he can’t hear me. He’s crying, it’s flooding out of him, his words come in short bursts. How I’d promised that the murderer would show up again, that we would be heroes. Tears drip down on my face, and I try to push him away. His hands press down on my throat.
Kris, stop!
Not a sound gets past my lips. I try to push him off but he’s way too heavy. My hands reach around for something, anything. I get hold of a rock and hit him with it, but it glances off his arm and gets knocked out of my hand.
I can’t breathe.
My fingers close around something long. A handle. The hammer. The one I lost that first day. It’s heavy, but I lift it and swing it at Kris. Hit him in the temple.
Kris loosens his grip. He looks at me through his tears, surprised.
I swing at him once more, hit the same spot, harder this time. He lets go and holds his temple, gapes at me. He crawls away.
“Are you okay?” I gasp. Cough, spit mucus out.
“We just had to wait one more day,” I hear him say as he moves off on his hands and knees. “Just one more day, he’s on his way now, for sure.”
Slowly I get to my feet, the hammer in one hand, rubbing my throat with the other.
“He’s coming,” he murmurs, and sits back against the barrier. “He’s coming. Wait and see. He’s coming.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, goddamnit. We’ll wait for him. I’ve had enough of your goddamn shit, but okay. We’ll wait for him. We’ll wait till afternoon, then we call the police. Okay?”
Kris nods. He’s still holding a hand against his temple. “Yeah. He’s coming. Just wait.”
I walk over and sit beside Kris, lean against the barrier. Even though it’s cold, it feels nice to rest. I’ve been on the go for too long. Too tired right now to continue. I lift the hammer and dry the blood and hair off on my pants, and then we start waiting for the man.