After finishing his burger and fries, Edmund shrugged into his jacket, paid his bill, and headed out.
The air outside was chilly, but not unpleasantly so. While it wasn’t going to win any awards, the food here, he thought, might be worth the drive by itself, once or twice a month—not much more than that, though, if he wanted to stay in fighting form.
Okay, next would be a stop at the grocery, frozen stuff into his cooler, and then back home.
Just as he started opening the door of his truck, he heard a voice behind him, “Edmund Dantent.”
Edmund froze with his hand on the door handle. No one here should know that name. He turned around slowly and saw Molly standing there about 10 yards away. She stood between an old Chevy pickup much like his and a shiny new green hatchback. She was clearly frightened and looked tensed to run.
Obviously, if Edmund prepared ahead of time, he could pull off some pretty great lies, but he’d never been good at lying on the spot.
“How do you know that name?”
Slowly, as if she were testing uncertain ice on a lake, Molly took a couple of steps closer to him. “I know who you are, Edmund Dantent. And I know what you’ve been doing. I don’t know how, but I know it was you.”
He felt the chill first in his lower arms, then it worked its way up and into his core. He stared at her open-mouthed. This was nowhere in his plans. He had provisions for if law enforcement caught onto him, both for fleeing the country or, if that failed, making his trial one hell of a show. He’d thought through what he might do if one of his targets got away, or managed to strike back.
But…an innocent girl catching onto him? That was nowhere in his mental map.
Improvise. Improvise, he commanded himself.
Edmund took a couple of steps towards her. He tried adopting a condescending, paternalistic air. “Molly, what is it you think that I’ve been doing?”
Molly looked around to make sure nobody was nearby, then said, just loud enough for him to hear. “The lawyer. The judge and her husband. You killed them. You made it look like a carjacking, but you shot Leonard Clump. It looked like a malfunction of their heater, but you killed the Leibowitzes.”
Edmund bent forward just slightly. It felt like his burger was about to come back up.
He straightened up and turned his face up to the sky for a long moment with eyes closed.
Then he strode right up to Molly and grabbed her right arm.
“Let’s say,” he hissed, “that I did these things. In that case, I would be a Very. Dangerous. Man. And the smart move would be to walk away and do your best to forget all about this.”
He realized his grip on her arm must be painful, and loosened it.
A pot-bellied man in grease-stained jeans and a leather jacket came out of the diner just then. Heading for a motorcycle, he happened to look their way.
“Hey, is there a problem here?” He started purposefully striding in their direction.
Molly looked over at him and said in a calm, level voice, “No, no problem, sir.” She gave the biker a perfunctory smile.
Edmund let go of her arm and stepped back a pace.
The biker walked about two car-widths away and looked between the two of them.
He sized up Edmund. “You sure, darlin’? Because I could fuck this guy up if he was hurting you.”
Considering his current fitness, Edmund would have bristled at this most times, but he had much bigger problems to focus on right now.
Molly looked at Edmund carefully a long moment and appeared to be making some kind of calculation about him. The result must have pleased her, because she turned a genuine smile on the biker now. “Thanks, but I’m not so sure you could. I’ve been informed he’s a very dangerous man.”
She smiled at Edmund now, and suddenly, it became difficult to focus on those much bigger problems.
The biker turned and headed back towards his bike. “Have it your way.” Then, barely audible, “Crazy bitch.”
Edmund was not entirely sure he disagreed. He turned back to Molly. “We need to talk, seriously.”
Molly’s smile faded. She looked down at her feet, then back up at Edmund and nodded.
She said, “What about tomorrow afternoon at Caras Park, by the big playset? We can meet there about 4:00. There will be plenty of people in sight, but we can still have privacy for a conversation.”
Edmund considered this and nodded back, and his estimation of Molly rose.
Molly pulled out her order pad from her back pocket and wrote quickly.
“Here’s my number. Text me if something comes up.”
Edmund took it, exhaled slowly, and walked back to his truck.
That smile, though.
* * *
Molly ducked back inside to grab her purse and waitress apron that she’d left on the table inside the door.
Alexis, carrying a tray of drinks to a table of her own, paused to ask, “So what happened? Did you get a date?”
Molly frowned at her. “N—uh, yeah? Yeah, I guess.”
* * *
Edmund scrapped the grocery store trip, and got a room for the night at a cheap motel in town where he could pay cash. He habitually kept a gym bag with some changes of clothes behind the seat of his truck. He changed into some gym shorts and went running. Six miles today. Nothing like pounding your feet on the open road for most of an hour to clear your head.
Afterwards, he showered at his hotel room, attempting to find that one or two degrees on the shower control dial that was between scalding and ice bath. He mostly ended up with ice bath. He got himself a carryout pizza for supper (cash again) and then settled down to try to distract himself by reading a pulp paperback for a while.
He did not sleep well that night. At 1:36 AM, he woke from a dream where he was in Gunnar’s room, just as it had been, with the Mario bedspread and the shelves with plastic buckets full of carefully sorted toys and the big box of legos in the corner, but on the wall, mounted like deer’s heads, were the heads of Leonard Clump and Judith and Saul Liebowitz. And next to them, Edmund was hanging the mounted head of Molly. And when he finished, he surveyed his work, and smiled.
An hour later, the dream was that it was not he, but Molly kneeling in the street holding Gunnar as his life bled away. Edmund woke and wept.
The Mayor of Christ Mountain 
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