He stood rooted where he was. Why had Mason looked at him like that? What was it he wanted to say?
Josie began screaming at him. “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”
Distracted from his reverie, he took stock of his surroundings. Right. Mason had been dealt with. Josie was his. That was all that mattered. He found that he was able to move, that he was even calm, detatched.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Just get in the car. It’s over. It’ll be a long time before anyone finds him.”
He became a different person after that. He was much stronger, more confident. Josie was his girlfriend. She was such a source of encouragement, always pushing him to assert himself, to stand up to everyone and everything.
He found the change somehow disturbing, though. He was vaguely aware that he was becoming more like Mason, that the person he had been was gone.
He shrugged mentally. So what? It was better to be an aggressor than a victim.
It was almost a month before they found Mason’s body. Jerrold felt an eerie sort of confidence that they would not discover that he was the killer, and he was right. The police had decided, apparently, that Mason had been hanging around with the wrong type of characters, which he had been, and had paid the price.