Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

Dunson as a man rather than a monster.
    “You can’t kill a person you’ve held hands with,” I blurted.
    “Shut up.”
    “You’re not a killer, I know that.”
    “Crazy bitch,” he yelled, but not at me. Looking where his eyes were trained, I saw that a young girl had just loosed her dog, a terrier that looked as if it had ten or twelve hell-bent-for-leather miles in it before it would even start to flag. In half a second the dog was a blur.
    The girl stood transfixed, staring at Dunson.
    “You crazy, crazy, crazy bitch. You can’t let that dog run loose. Don’t you know what can happen on a trail like this?”
    The girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her skin looked as if she’d grown up on the Shetland Islands, perhaps, someplace with heavy fog. Her hair was blond and short. She was slender, almost wispy. I half expected her to flee in alarm, but she only shrugged. “So arrest me.”
    For a moment I thought he would, knew he considered it. I almost encouraged him but remembered in time that he was crazy. The distraction might save my life, but it could endanger hers. He would probably train the gun on her, and might very well shoot. Go! I wanted to shout. Go catch your dog— anything. But get out of here fast.
    I didn’t, though, didn’t dare cause a scene.
    The dog came galloping back, it’s energy not even slightly spent, a force of nature set free, more gale-force wind than animal. There were bicycles on the path, as there had been that other time, but the dog made it safely back to its owner, stopped to be petted, and took off again.
    I had an idea. It was a crazy idea, and dangerous, but I was damned if I was going to walk quietly to my own execution. I looked around for what I needed, and saw it, a few steps ahead. If only the dog would return …
    “Bijou! Here, Bijou.” The girl was calling her pet, who surely must have been a puppy. It turned around more or less in mid-gallop, and came tearing back toward us. Dunson was nearly apoplectic, too intent on the dog to pay much attention to me.
    “Get that goddamn dog on a leash, or I swear I’ll make a citizen’s arrest!”
    I swooped down and picked up the stick I’d spotted. “Bijou!” Hearing its name, the dog inclined its head toward me. I threw the stick, and luck was with me— a bicycle was heading down the path, on a collision course with Bijou.
    Dunson apparently forgot me completely, forgot the whole purpose of the mission, went crazy in an entirely different way. He let go of my hand and took off after the dog, the girl and me chasing him. I tried to stop her. “Call the police! He’s got a gun. Get out of here— please!” She kept coming. But other hikers started to scatter, and the oncoming cyclist began to wobble on her bike. Bijou, completely oblivious, kept galloping, and at that moment, another cyclist came into view, coasting down a small incline, wind in his face, having a fabulous time and suffering absolutely no notion of the pandemonium in his path. The stick landed right in front of him.
    Bijou and Dunson arrived at nearly the same time, with me a millisecond behind. Though I’d never played football in my life, I launched my body at Dunson in what I imagined was a flying tackle; I caught him around the pelvis and we leaned forward … leaned, leaned, and finally fell. Bijou jumped out of the way, escaping so narrowly that I saw her brown paw come down inches from my face. The cyclist flying down the hill ran over us.
    Or at least he would have if he’d been on a motorcycle, but the bicycle overturned as soon as it hit Dunson’s shoulder, and fell on top of us, the rider barely managing not to. Still, it hurt. It hurt me, and I didn’t get the brunt of it. It hurt Dunson more, I hoped, and better yet it pinned him. I groped in his pockets, reaching for the gun.
    “Stop that, goddamn it! This woman’s trying to rob me!” But the bicycle held his right arm, and his own body had pinned his left.
    I pulled the gun out and jammed it into his lower back as hard as I could, exactly as I’d seen in the movies: “Freeze or I’ll blow your ass off.”
    Considering that he was planning to kill himself, it wasn’t much of a threat, but he froze just long enough for me to pick myself up and get to my knees. “Okay, stand back everybody. Somebody call the police.” The cyclist got out of the way. I rose carefully, the gun trained at the middle of Dunson’s back.
    He still couldn’t move without a