by John Enright
“That carpet is totally ruined. Why don’t you roll Mr. Meriwether up in it and take it somewhere then, if you don’t like my plan? Get Lord Witherspoon to help you. He’s a devious sort. He’ll think of something. He has that big car.”
“No, Lydia, neither I nor Lord Witherspoon will be doing your corpse disposal dirty work for you.”
“Well, be that way,” Lydia said, and she got up to put a kettle on. “If Atticus was here, he’d know what to do.”
Oh, Dominick knew well enough what to do, which was to get out of there, and he would not be taking Lydia with him. Key Largo beckoned. This time he would make his escape. He took a tea towel from the drawer beside the sink and wiped off Atticus’s gun where he had touched it. Lydia put two teacups on the table. “No, Lydia, I won’t be staying for tea, I’m afraid. I have to catch the last ferry to New Jerusalem.” The smell of Agent K’s corpse was still in his nostrils. “But I did bring us champagne for a goodbye toast.”
“I have always despised champagne,” Lydia said, “ever since my honeymoon. But go on, get out, skedaddle, and don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul that you’ve been here.”
Dominick gave Lydia a kiss on the top of her head where she stood at the stove and went out the back door. He stopped at her studio to wipe his fingerprints off the bottle of champagne as well, and then, remembering what Lydia had said, took it with him.
Dominick pushed it hard that first day out. It was going on midnight when he finally pulled off the interstate in the middle of New Jersey. It wasn’t like he was fleeing anything. It was just a relief to be finally on the move again, with a destination, an invitation, a whole new situation to look forward to. He checked into a Motel 6. He didn’t need anything fancy. He was just another trucker, trucking himself south. He didn’t even turn on the TV; he just hit the bed.
Of course, there was a radio in Dominick’s car, but he never turned it on. What was there to listen to? Music, ads, and news—three sets of things he did not need—and the noise would only distract him from the hypnotic meditation of the road. The second day, he drove another five hundred miles, pulling off after crossing into North Carolina. A Days Inn this time. The TV set was on in the small lobby as he waited his turn to check in. It was tuned to a news channel, the volume turned down low.
Dominick was still in his road trance, and the image on the screen didn’t register at first—a female reporter with a microphone standing in front of a yellow crime-scene tape between her and the house behind her. Nothing unusual about it except that the house was, yes, the house was Mt. Sinai. Dominick walked over and turned up the volume, catching the reporter midsentence, “by local and federal authorities, who tell us the property is believed to have been used as a safe house by the terrorist group IGB. We’ve been told that there is evidence that the house and another building on the property have been recently occupied and that the terrorists are the focus of the investigation, but thus far no suspects have been identified in this gruesome execution-style slaying. Back to you, George.” End of story. Dominick turned the sound back down.
“Those crazy Yankees, heh? Killing federal agents who aren’t even revenuers.” It was the desk clerk. It was Dominick’s turn to check in. “I don’t know how people live up there, with all that crime and killings and terrorists.”
Dominick was filling in the registration form. “Ever been up there?” he asked.
“Up north? Nope. No reason to go there. Don’t like Yankees much. You?”
“I have been in and out a couple of times. Different country. Smoking room?”
“Sorry, all full up. But if you open a window you’ll be alright unless you’re smoking a stogie. Can’t get that smell out. Two thirty-seven, that’s around the back.”
In the morning Dominick picked up a USA Today to read over breakfast. The story was there, already relegated to page three. It went into some detail about the IGB and the LNG protest, but did not mention any names. In passing it was mentioned that Hercules Corp had scrapped its plans to build a LNG terminal in Old Grofton, moving it instead to a more secluded and less controversial location at a place called Dogshead Bay, and in a curious development the coroner had determined that body parts recovered after the recent firefight and explosion at Darby Point had belonged to bodies that had been quite dead for some time before the event.
Dominick carefully refolded the paper and left it for the next diner. That would be it for news for a while, especially Yankee news. In Rob and Laurie’s gated world all outside news was unnecessary, and paying any attention to it was déclassé to the point of being impolite. The very rich did not live in the mundane present. No news was the only news. Maybe that was why Dominick liked history so much—it was by definition the opposite of news. The past was a safe place.
