Liars & Thieves by Stephen Coonts

upward.
    The corpse in the back with the broken neck was jammed down between the seats, and I wasn’t in the mood to try to get him out of there. I doubted if he had any more ID on him than the man lying in the mud.
    I was about to give up when I saw a bulge in the driver’s shirt pocket. Jackpot! A cell phone. I pocketed it and the two-way radio.
    The rest of it I left—corpses, weapons, ammo, and the comatose dude lying in the mud in the rain.
    Kelly hadn’t been gone three minutes when I finished and climbed the bank back up to the road. I was a royal mess, mud from the knees down, soot and fire filth from the knees up. And I was wet, tired, and pissed off.
    As I inspected the skid marks in the gravel, I put Fred’s pistol behind my belt in the small of my back and made sure my jacket covered it. Someone would see those skid marks and investigate, sooner or later.
    I set off down the mountain, plodding along. Two more vehicles passed, both descending the grade. The rain continued to fall.
    Twenty minutes after I left the wreck, when I was almost at the bottom of the grade, a farmer in an old pickup stopped and waited for me to catch up. He was white-haired, wearing well-worn overalls and a John Deere cap. And he was dry.
    “You look like you could use a ride,” he said when I opened the door.
    “Car slid off the road back up the mountain,” I told him. “I’m a real mess. If you don’t mind, I’ll ride in back.”
    “Hell, son, you won’t hurt this truck. It’s about as old as you are. Hop in and I’ll give you a ride to Staunton.”
    “Thanks,” I said gratefully. I climbed in and pulled the door shut.
    ***
    He walked through the dripping forest, around rotting logs and broken limbs, over boulders and piles of dirt where trees had been uprooted by some ancient wind. The going was hard in the wet, slippery leaves on the forest floor, last autumn’s rotting collection. And he wasn’t wearing enough clothes.
    His thoughts were all jumbled up, memories that flashed through his mind in no particular order. His wife’s face haunted him.
    She was dead —he was sure of it.
    Murdered.
    Like his mother and father. His very first memories as a toddler were of the night the NKVD came for them, took them away. He remembered the cold . . . and his mother sobbing, hysterically denying something. He had been but a tot. Lord, that was a long time ago . . . over sixty years. Stalin had purged the military and the party of his enemies, who were executed or sent to slave labor camps.
    He didn’t know what happened to his parents. They had disappeared into the great vastness of Soviet Russia and were never seen or heard from again . . . leaving only ghosts to haunt the thoughts of those who remembered them.
    Tears ran down his face as he worked his way aimlessly through the forest, scrambling over slick, rotting logs, avoiding thickets and steep places, going more or less in one direction . . . perhaps.
    In truth, he no longer cared.
    All his life he had known they would come for him eventually. Just as they came for his parents.
    He remembered sitting on the floor of the apartment crying after they took his parents. How long he had waited there for his parents to return he couldn’t recall —he had been too small and it happened too long ago. Years later the woman who took him in said that he had been without food or water for three days when she found him, huddled on the floor, nearly dead of dehydration and hypothermia. She had picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and taken him home with her . . . at the risk of her own life.
    Evil maims or kills, and good saves us. Sometimes. When he became a man he often contemplated the contrast between good and evil. The world was full of people who didn’t believe in moral absolutes, people who could rationalize whatever course of action they wished to pursue, usually one that benefited them. They cheated, stole, lied, temporized, apologized, explained, and assured