Hellhole

by Gina Damico

  “What happened?”

  Max twisted his head. Lore had sat down at the table behind him, her back to his.

  “No, don’t look at me,” she scolded. “Look straight ahead. Pretend we’re not talking.”

  “We’re not talking. I have nothing to say to you.”

  She paused. “Don’t be like that. Don’t blame me because I made a smart move and you didn’t have the sense to follow.”

  Max gripped the edges of the table. He didn’t know what his hands might do if he let them fly of their own accord. “You left me there,” he said through clenched teeth. “You left.”

  “I told you to run!” she hissed. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because he was pointing a gun at my head!”

  “Shh!”

  “What was he doing there, anyway? I thought you said he was just going to let the house ‘sit there and rot’!”

  “Well, lesson learned: funeral home directors aren’t the most reliable sources of information.”

  “You think?”

  “Max, keep it down,” Lore said, her voice dropping.

  “No.” Max swiveled around to look at her. “I am done taking instructions from you. It was a huge mistake to bring you into this. Every time you try to help, things get worse. You’re the one who insisted we break into a house. You’re the one who dragged us up to Honeybrook Hills—”

  “I’m not the one who keeps treating my mother’s life as a bargaining chip,” she shot back, turning around to glare at him. “And I didn’t dig up the bastard in the first place, so maybe you should stop wasting your time on blaming me and start using it to figure out how to save your own ass!”

  Max angrily flared his nostrils as he breathed, but she was right. This was his responsibility, even if he’d brought her onboard. Especially since he’d brought her onboard.

  “Tell me what happened,” Lore said. “After I ran out. Which I am sorry about. I hid in the garage and waited until the cop got there. I saw him leave with you. And since you were smiling and not wearing handcuffs, I knew you were okay.”

  “Okay?” Max let out a bitter laugh. “Guess you didn’t hear the crash.”

  “Crash?” For once, she sounded concerned. “What crash?”

  Max told her the whole story. He relayed it calmly, in a detached manner, as if reporting the news. As if it had happened to someone else and he’d merely heard about it secondhand or watched it on CSI.

  Lore was quiet as he spoke, her eyes wide, terrified.

  “He’s . . . dead?” she said. “Burg killed him?”

  “He says it was an accident,” Max said. “But who knows if he’s telling the truth. Not that it really matters at this point.”

  She was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was a whisper. “Do you believe me now, Max? That you’re never going to beat him—that he’s going to keep manipulating you and getting you into deeper trouble? Or are you still trying to figure out a way to keep that house, still pushing for that goddamn cure?”

  He gave a helpless shrug. “What choice do I have? I’ve come this far.”

  For a moment Lore looked crestfallen. Then her face hardened, back to business. “Where’s O’Connell now?”

  “Still on the porch, I assume.”

  “Okay. I doubt Burg’s going to do anything about it himself. So we go there after school. We—”

  “I can’t. I’m supposed to be back at work today.”

  “Then we skip out early again. We go to the house. We clean up the mess. We assess the situation. And we move on from there.”

  “Move on?” Max said. “How so?”

  “Well, O’Connell left the city to come up here and sell the house, right? So it’s not like anyone back home will notice that he went missing.”

  “But what are people going to think—that he had a change of heart and decided not to sell it?”

  “Uh, yeah. That’s exactly what they’ll think.”

  Max frowned. “But he already listed the house. There have got to be real estate agents involved, people who will be trying to get into contact with him. What if—” A sudden fear rose in his chest. “What if they’re showing the house to prospective buyers?”

  Lore turned around, her back to his. “Like I said, we go there after school,” she said. “And we clean up the mess.”

  As he’d ridden home in Chief Gregory’s cruiser the night before, Max had sworn to himself that he was never going to set foot on that property again. And here he was, fifteen hours later, doing just that. With two bags of stolen snacks in tow.

  Lore turned the doorknob—Chief Gregory had left it unlocked, “in case O’Connell returns too drunk to find his house keys”—and carefully stepped inside. Max followed her, putting every ounce of his concentration into not blacking out.

  The house was just as he’d left it, with the exception of Deerzilla, which Burg had restored to its rightful position above the fireplace, proudly displaying its red-stained antlers. Max cowered under its watchful glare as he made his way inside. The bathroom door was slightly ajar, releasing the sounds of a streaming shower and of Burg’s voice belting “Gimme a BREAK! Gimme a BREAK! Break me off a piece of that KIT! KAT! BAR!”

  Lore crossed the living room to the sliding glass door and turned to face Max. “Aren’t you coming?”

  Max hugged himself tight and looked at the rugs, beneath which lay approximately three pints of Mr. O’Connell.

  Lore opened her mouth to protest, but she reconsidered when she followed his gaze to the floor. “Okay,” she said, stepping outside. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Once she closed the door, Max busied himself with little things. He pulled the rifle out from where he’d stashed it under the couch and put it back on the gun rack. He swept up a few more crumbs of rubble that the deer had knocked off the fireplace; he’d thrown out the big chunks the previous night, before Chief Gregory got there. He headed into the kitchen, which, as Lore had attested, was enormous. A huge granite slab, probably mined from the family quarry, formed an island in the center. Wooden cabinets and pantries lined the walls, their surfaces stained the same shade as the deck. Two stainless steel refrigerators begged to be opened, but Max ignored them. Seeing the man’s food would make him more human, more real, and Max needed to run in the opposite direction when it came to that stuff.

  The man was no longer a man. The man was an obstacle that needed to be overcome. A problem that needed solving.

  He looked through some drawers but found nothing other than silverware, kitchen gadgets, and old clipped recipes. No address book, no phone numbers. No family photos, for which Max was supremely grateful. Seemed the O’Connells, both Junior and Senior, weren’t especially beloved. With luck, no one would miss them.

  He leaned against the island and scratched his scalp. He’d showered after Chief Gregory had brought him home, scrubbing until his skin turned pink and raw, but it still felt as though insects were crawling all over him. His lips were chapped, bloody from his near-constant biting and picking.

  Burg, meanwhile, had moved onto yet another verse of the Kit Kat jingle. How many verses does that song have? Max thought, annoyed. It wasn’t fair. Why was Max the one who had to go through all of this, do all these deplorable things just so that asshole could have a nice house to lounge in and sing commercials?

  Max sighed and accidentally looked at the refrigerator again. Reflexively, he started to look away, but he ended up doing a double take. Something sat in the upper-right corner, a magnet—

  He heard the glass door slide open. “Max?”

  “In here.”

  Lore entered the kitchen, face pale and hands shaking. She looked at Max, then quickly lowered her eyes and put her elbows on the counter. “It’s done. I took care of it.”

  “You . . . took care of it? What’d you do?”

  “I got rid of the body.”

  “How?”

  Still not looking at him, she held her hand up above her head, then sw
ooped it downward, as if miming a dive.

  He gaped. “You threw him off the balcony?”

  “Did you have a better plan? There aren’t any beaches for him to wash up on. The water is super deep. Plus, it’s a meromictic lake, remember? The water doesn’t turn over, so there’s almost no chance of any evidence surfacing. No one will find him.”

  “Well, great. Science saves the day.”

  But despite his sarcasm, Max had to admit it was a decent plan. Icky, unnerving, and disrespectful, but a decent plan.

  “Next, we have to clean up the blood.” Lore opened the cabinet beneath the sink and began to remove cleaning products.

  “No, the blood can wait. Actually, Burg would probably prefer if we left it where it was.”

  She dropped the sponge in the sink and crossed her arms. “All right. Then what do you propose we do next?”

  Max crossed to the refrigerator, unpeeled the magnet, and held it up for her to read. “We call Flossie Powell, Eastville’s Most Recommended Real Estate Agent.”

  Went Berserk

  THERE WAS SOME DEBATE about the best way to proceed.

  “Can you do an impression?” Lore said. “Like, imitate his voice?”

  “I don’t know,” said Max. “He didn’t say much. I can’t really remember what he sounded like.”

  This was patently untrue. Max remembered exactly what he sounded like. It was seared so deep into his memory, he doubted it would ever fade.

  But he couldn’t have done it convincingly; O’Connell’s voice had been deep and gruff, while Max’s was nothing of the sort. “What if we got one of those voice modulation things? Like serial killers use in movies to talk on the phone?”

  “Yeah, ’cause the more associations we can draw between us and serial killers, the better,” Lore said dryly. “And where would you propose we get such a thing? Is there a spy store on Main Street that’s so covert I’ve never seen it?”

  “No, but online . . .” Max frowned. “Would take too long. Forget it.” He drummed his fingers on the granite. “Maybe I can just call as me. I already told Chief Gregory I was helping him out. It’s plausible that he’d ask me to make some calls for him.”

  Lore twisted her mouth as she thought. “I don’t know. Adults don’t usually rely on kids to handle things like, you know, selling property.”

  “True.” And Max knew it probably wasn’t a good idea to reconnect his presence back to the scene of the crime. Better to create as much distance as possible, take himself completely out of the equation . . .

  “Why,” Lore asked, narrowing her eyes, “are you looking at me like that?”

  Max picked up the kitchen phone and handed it to her. “How good are your acting skills?”

  “Eastville Realty, Flossie Powell speaking.”

  Max and Lore huddled around the phone, which was set on speaker. It sat on the granite countertop, growling “Hello? Hello?” and glowing impatiently.

  “Say something!” Max mouthed.

  Lore grimaced. “She sounds like my chain-smoking grandmother,” she whispered.

  “Talk!”

  Lore steeled herself and pinched her nose between her fingers. “Yes, hello?” she chirped in a nasal, secretarial voice. “Is this Flossie Powell?”

  “Yes. Can I help you?”

  “Oh, Flossie, I do hope you can,” Lore drawled in a thick accent. “This dang house is fixin’ to be quite the hair in my buttermilk biscuit!”

  Max covered the mouthpiece. “Why are you southern?”

  “I don’t know!” Lore whispered, flicking her hands. “It just came out that way!”

  Flossie was too busy hacking up a cancerous-sounding lung to hear them. “Which house? Who’s calling?”

  “Oh, forgive me, this is . . .” Lore looked around the room, as did Max. Panicked, he pointed at the nearest cookbook, and Lore, equally panicked, read the title aloud. “Betty. Crocker.”

  Max ducked from the roll of paper towels she threw at him. “Sorry!” he mouthed.

  “I’m Mr. O’Connell Jr.’s secretary,” Lore continued.

  “Oh, of course, of course!” A pause. “Mr. O’Connell has a secretary?”

  Lore giggled, a high-pitched blubber. “That’s me!”

  Flossie grunted. “Didn’t know Home Depot employees had it so good.”

  Lore slapped a hand over the phone. “He works at a Home Depot?”

  “I didn’t know that!” Max whispered. “I thought he was rich! But I guess . . . if they had a falling-out, then maybe his father cut him off . . .”

  Lore scowled, practically blowing steam out of her nose. “Well,” she droned back into the phone, “it’s on a trial basis. If it goes well, maybe all the hardware professionals will get one!”

  “Oh,” Flossie grumbled. “I guess they do things different in the city, eh?”

  “Indeed!”

  “So, Miss . . . Crocker, what’s this in regards to? Would Mr. O’Connell like to start showing the house? I can bring some prospective clients by this afternoon—”

  “NO!” Lore screamed. She put her hands flat on the granite. “No. In fact, that’s why I’m calling, in fact. It’s the darnedest thing—Mr. O’Connell has decided not to sell the house!”

  Now it was Flossie’s turn to yell. “Why not?”

  “Well, see, he’s taken quite a shine to life in the countryside. The view, the privacy. Loves the lake.” She cringed. “It’s a far cry from the hustle and bustle of the city, and he’s fallen noggin over toboggan in love!”

  Flossie muttered something that sounded like “son of a bitch.” “Are you sure?” she pressed. “Is he sure?”

  “Yes. Positive.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Flossie then went off on a hacking, emphysemic rant, during which Max made big sweeping motions with his arms.

  Lore shrugged, lost.

  Max made the motions bigger, adding little hops for emphasis.

  Lore jutted out her jaw in irritation. “Three syllables. Sounds like—”

  “Tell her not to bring anyone over here!” Max shouted.

  “What was that?” Flossie demanded.

  The finger Lore gave Max was delightfully incongruent with the honeyed voice that came out of her mouth. “Sorry, darlin’. Seems this house has a bit of a pest problem. I was just saying, please make absolutely sure to cancel any appointments with prospective buyers. If you bring anyone ’round here to look at the place, Mr. O’Connell will be mad as a wet hen, I can tell you that!”

  “He’s mad?” Flossie made a noise that might have been a cough. “That place could have sold for well over a million.”

  That certainly explained why O’Connell was willing to put his daddy issues aside to sell the thing. “Oh, but you can’t put a price on happiness,” Lore said into the phone, gritting her teeth. “Anyway, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. You’ve been a huge help. Mr. O’Connell sends his thanks as well.”

  “Yeah, well, he can thank me himself when he comes down to the office to terminate the contract.”

  Lore blinked. “The what now?”

  “And to pay the withdrawal fee. Couple hundred dollars, give or take. Tell Mr. Fancypants to come on over, we can get it taken care of by the end of the day.”

  “Um—” Lore looked to Max for help, but he was plumb out. “Today’s not great for Mr. O’Connell.”

  “Well, I’m leaving for Boca Raton tomorrow. How’s the week after next?”

  Max gave his head a vigorous shake. “It can’t wait!”

  “Then we’ll . . . take care of it today!” Lore blurted, while Max chanted Shit, shit, shit, shit to himself.

  “Splendid,” Flossie hacked. “Goodbye.”

  “All right, darlin’, thank you so much again for your—she hung up.” Lore hit the End button on the phone and threw it into the kitchen sink. “Goddammit. Now what?”

  Max leaned his back against the island, sank to the floor, and buried his head in his arms. “I do
n’t know. Where are we going to get a couple hundred dollars, give or take?”

  “I think our bigger problem is figuring out how to get a dead guy to terminate a contract. Any thoughts?”

  There was a knock at the door.

  They both froze, as if the visitor might go away if they stayed still long enough. Finally Lore broke free of the trance and went into the living room. “Uh, Max?” she said, peeking out the window. “It’s the police?”

  Smacking himself in the head, Max joined her at the window. “Shit, shit, shit! Chief Gregory said he was going to stop by. I completely forgot!”

  She crossed her arms and glared at him. “You forgot.”

  “Sorry.”

  “See, this is one of those things you want to write down on a sheet of paper and staple to your forehead.”

  “Just hide, okay?”

  Lore ducked behind the curtain with a grunt while Max got into position at the door. He took a deep breath and opened it, trying not to react when a piece of wood splintered off the doorjamb, courtesy of Mr. Crowebar.

  “Chief Gregory!” he exclaimed with all the jolliness of a shopping mall Santa Claus. “Hello!”

  Chief Gregory raised an eyebrow. “Max? You’re here again?”

  “Yes, well, Mr. O’Connell offered me some more work, and I couldn’t pass it up.” He made a sad, pitiable face. “You know, because of my mother.”

  But the chief wasn’t buying it. His eyebrow bent at a more skeptical angle. “Don’t you already have a job at the gas station?”

  “Yes,” said Max, nodding vigorously. “Yes, I do.”

  “And don’t you work there after school?”

  “Right again!”

  “Then why—”

  “Because I’m paying him double,” answered a gruff voice.

  Mr. O’Connell, wet and naked except for a towel wrapped around his waist, appeared in the doorway. He propped his elbow up on the wood and sneered at Chief Gregory. “Afternoon, Officer. Anything I can help you with?”

  Relief visibly washed over Chief Gregory’s face. “Just following up on the call you made yesterday. When you reported an intruder?”