Cow-Tippers by David Rachels

     The cow was standing on the side of the hill behind Mr. O’Leary’s house, and we thought if we ran down the hill and rammed it, we could tip it. We were right. The problem was, when we hit the cow, Cody slipped underneath so the cow landed on top of him, which was sort of like a brick landing on a tube of toothpaste. The cow acted just like a brick too, laying there like it was knocked out or maybe dead–though I was pretty sure the dead one was Cody.
     Sometimes panic is smart. I started to run away, which would have been the smart kind of panic. If I’d done it right then, everything would’ve turned out just fine. Cody would’ve died and nobody would’ve known what happened. I would’ve been in the clear. It’s not like somebody was going to get my fingerprints off a dead cow.
     But I froze. And then, right when I was ready to run, damn Cody if he didn’t ask me for help. Sort of. The moonlight was shining on his face, and he looked at me bug-eyed with blood bubbling out of his mouth. He started making this raspy sound, which made it seem like he wanted me to do something. I tried to push the cow off him, but it was like trying to push your house down the street. There was only one other thing to try. I grabbed Cody’s head, which was the only part of him sticking out from under the cow, and I yanked as hard as I could. Cody didn’t react any way at all, and after a second yank, I knew I was wasting my time, so I stopped.
     Now the bad panic hit. I knew I couldn’t save Cody, and even though it was an accident, I thought people would blame me for what happened, so how could I make sure I didn’t get into trouble? The smart answer hadn’t changed. I needed to run. But I was thinking so hard that I forgot how to be smart. I thought I had to make it look like something had happened other than the truth, something nobody would think I had anything to do with. I thought I would make it look like some kind of real crime had happened. Like some kind of gangsters had been here or something.
     There’s not much crime around here to the point that people leave their houses unlocked, so I walked right through Mr. O’Leary’s back door without making a sound. It was late enough that everyone was in bed and the lights were out, but there were night lights around so I could see where I was going. I’d been in Mr. O’Leary’s house once before when I was selling light-bulbs to raise money for Cub Scouts, and I remembered that his gun cabinet was in the den. It wasn’t locked either. I took his 12-gauge and a box of cartridges.
     I went back to Cody and the cow and got to work. The cow still looked to be dead, and Cody looked the same, which made me feel a lot better about doing this. I wasn’t going to kill anything. I was just going to re-kill some things to confuse people about how they got killed in the first place. No idiot cow-tippers here. This was the work of some stone-cold killers.
     I used up all the cartridges. It was a whole lot of racket, but I was too busy to think about that. I made the cow look like a burger you’d never want to eat, and I made Cody look like he’d never had a head in the first place. 
I was wiping my fingerprints off the gun and looking around for some place to stash it when I saw Mr. O’Leary coming down the hill from the farmhouse to see what all the noise was, yelling my name and asking me what I thought I was doing. If I hadn’t used up all the cartridges, I might have shot him too, but now I couldn’t think of anything else to do other than what I should’ve done in the first place. I ran.

About the author:

David Rachels is co-editor of the publishing imprint Staccato Crime, which resurrects forgotten noir and true crime from 1899-1939. As well, he has edited four volumes of short stories by the classic noir writer Gil Brewer.​