Page 10 of Girl, Remembered

One shot. Two shots. Keith had only fired at target dummies before, and he found it felt the same. He felt no sympathy for the man before him, and continued to unload round after round until the shutters were stained with blood and Dean Coyle’s body was reduced to a punctured, heaped mass of contorted limbs.

There was one thing left. He knelt, opened the briefcase again, and took out the small coil of hair, mouse-brown, tied with thread. The color his own had been at twelve, before the grey had intruded.

You leave the boy at the scene, but don’t use your own hair. Take this. It’s symbolic of shedding your skin.

CHAPTER FIVE

Even the hairs on our heads are numbered.

Nathaniel Pruett’s grandmother had stitched the verse onto a sampler that hung above his boyhood bed, and for forty years he had taken it as a comfort, as it was doubtless intended.

It had required one remarkable woman to show him what those words actually meant.

Nathaniel had been telling her about his brother’s senseless overdose, and she’d asked him a question no pastor had ever dared:

What if it wasn’t senseless? What does a shepherd do when the flock outgrows the pasture?

He’d had no answer, so she had given him one, gently, over the weeks that followed. Disease was a shepherd. Famine was a shepherd. War was the busiest shepherd of all. Every age of the world had its appointed instruments moving through the flock, thinning it back to what the pasture could carry, and Scripture was one long ledger of the practice. The flood, the plagues, the firstborn of Egypt. Modern man had simply grown too proud to see the shears at work. Man called it tragedy, and the flock swelled and starved and trampled itself at the fence line.

Some men were vaccinated against that pride. Some men were made to serve.

Nathaniel Pruett was crossing the parking lot of the 24-hour Washbasin Laundromat in Langley Park at 3:10AM on a Thursday morning, and inside his coat pocket, wound in a figure eight around a wooden dowel, was thirty inches of galvanized wire.

The laundromat sat in a strip mall between a shuttered check-casher and a shuttered carryout, and it glowed. At night, laundromats glowed like aquariums. They were visible for a quarter mile to anyone who cared to look.

But nobody cared to look.

He had scouted eleven of them across the county before the woman ever asked him to. Habit, he’d told himself, but she had smiled when he confessed it, because she said God prepared His instruments long before He explained them. The laundromats were where the surplus gathered. The people who came in the early hours were the people the pasture had already failed: men washing their only work clothes between shifts, women feeding quarters they couldn’t spare into dryers, souls too poor to purchase their own machine, or perhaps had no home to go to.

These people were the flock’s outermost animals, straggling at the tree line, already half separated from the herd.

A shepherd took from the edge. Everyone knew that. Even the wolves knew that.

Through the glass, Nathaniel could see tonight’s provision.

A man, fiftyish, sitting alone on the plastic bench with his back to the door, watching a single dryer turn. Nathaniel clocked his outfit of work boots, baggy black trousers and blue fleece. He had a reflective vest folded beside him on the bench, so he was perhaps road maintenance or overnight warehouse. His head nodded and rotated. This was a man fighting sleep at the far end of a shift, keeping vigil over the only clothes he had.

There was no one else in the place. There was no car in the lot but a rust-eaten pickup with a county parking sticker.

Nathaniel stood in the dark and gave it a minute, as he’d been taught. The woman had been strict about this: an instrument does not choose, an instrument is aimed, and the aiming showed itself in the circumstances. He ran the inventory. One empty lot. One dead camera. He’d noted the severed cable on his second visit; some previous vandal’s work, never repaired. The man’s solitude. The hour.

Every gate stood open, one after another, all the way to the bench.

The Lord had counted, and the count was one.

Nathaniel went in. The door chimed and the man didn’t stir; the dryers made a rolling thunder that swallowed everything, buttons and zippers turning over and over like weather. Warm air, bleach, fabric softener. Nathaniel walked down the aisle of machines unhurried, took the wire from his pocket, and let it unwind to its working length.

He came up behind the bench at a walk, and then the world sped into double speed. The wire went over the man’s head and Nathaniel pulled, crossing his fists the way he’d practiced on the sandbag in his garage, and everything he had rehearsed evaporated in the first second. The gentleman came off the bench and began to thrash. He was a strong man, which Nathaniel should have prepared for. However, Nathaniel had stockiness on his side. Panic and adrenaline enlivened his nerves and Nathaniel used that cocktail to power through.

The instrument doesn’t falter. The instrument is held.

He was not doing this. Someone else was using him to do this.

The shears did not weep for the wool, and God did not ask the flood how it felt. Nathaniel set his feet, held, and the man’s struggling passed its peak and slackened by degrees.

The dryer thundered on, and at some point that Nathaniel didn’t register, the work was finished.

He lowered the man down along the fallen bench and stepped back, shaking. His hands throbbed where the dowels had bitten. He looked at what he’d done and waited to feel damned, and instead felt only sudden exhaustion.