Dog Eats Dog

by Iain Levison

  Dixon hit the first of eight steps.

  “Where you been, pardner?” Dixon was looking down as he climbed the stairs. Strangely, he seemed to be holding his side, the wound which hadn’t seemed to hurt him in a week. He hit the second step. Elias could see him almost clearly now, in the light from the doorway.

  Third step. Dixon was looking up at him now, seemed to notice something in Elias’s expression, which changed his own, to confusion.

  Elias moved in front of the doorway, and now the pistol was visible to Dixon. He moved his arm up so the gun was pointing straight into Dixon’s chest.

  The plan had been to fire the moment that motion had been completed, but he didn’t. It was as if there was a small, forgotten part of Elias’s brain that wanted to give Dixon another chance. He stood there, the pistol pointed at Dixon, who had frozen on the third step, staring at him. The look of confusion was gone, and Dixon’s face was now impassive.

  They stared at each other for a full two seconds.

  “Fuck you,” said Dixon. He sounded tired.

  Elias pulled the trigger and was immediately surprised by the violence of Dixon’s fall backward, as if he was being jerked back by a giant rubber band. Dixon had disappeared back into the darkness of the basement, and Elias heard some paint cans, which had been in a pyramid three high at the bottom of the stairs, crashing down. He heard Dixon make a noise, almost like a cow mooing, then sigh heavily. A hubcap fell off one of the shelves and began to spiral on the spot, making a noise that reached a crescendo, then was still.

  Elias stood at the top of the stairs, his pistol still pointing at where Dixon had been, suddenly aware of the smoke, the smell of gunpowder. As if waking up, he fumbled for the light switch, and with the basement now illuminated, from his vantage point, he could see Dixon’s feet. One of them was propped awkwardly over a paint can with brown paint dripped all over the side. The word “Whittaker Paints” was still readable.

  Dixon’s foot didn’t move.

  Elias didn’t want to go downstairs and look. He stayed at the top of the stairs for a few seconds, and then sat down, his feet on the second step and his arm still extended, the pistol still pointing at Dixon’s foot. He could hear himself breathing, became aware of how quiet the house was.

  In the street, he heard the low rumble of the kid skateboarding, growing louder as it approached the house, then fading away again. It amazed him that the sounds out in the street were so familiar, while he was sitting at the top of his basement stairs in the middle of such an unfamiliar experience.

  He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. 6:20.

  He stared for a few seconds at the smoke coming out of the pistol barrel, and felt a wave of relief. It was over. His house was his again. He could get on with his life.

  He went down the stairs, and finally looked at Dixon, careful to have the pistol ready. He had seen so many horror movies where, at the end, the monster wasn’t dead. He looked at Dixon’s face, and Elias could recognize death right away. The eyes were half open, the muscles slack, the pose so unnatural. Nobody could fake like that.

  Over on Dixon’s cot, he saw the laundry bag full of money. He exhaled. What had Dixon said? People like money. That would help with the bills.

  There was a science to this, Elias realized, a science that Dixon had probably been well aware of, but which was occurring to Elias only now. A hole in the backyard needed to be dug, and light was fading. The body had to be removed right away, and you couldn’t do gardening at night. The Covingtons would look over the fence and notice. So it had to be done quickly.

  Elias grabbed a rusted shovel that hadn’t seen action since his mother had lived here, examined it, and was pleased to notice that it was of good quality. He rushed out into the yard and began to dig by the four dogwood trees which lined his property. It was the point of best concealment anywhere in his yard, and the logical place for such an undertaking. But the dogwoods had laid down some fierce roots, and he could barely get the shovel an inch into the earth. He started stabbing at the ground, trying to cut the roots with the shovel, and only when the shovel bounced back and injected two long splinters into his hand did he calm down and realize he was acting frantic.

  Elias forced himself to walk, rather than run, into the house, then walked upstairs and began to change his clothes. In the back of his closet, he found an old T-shirt, some worn-out sneakers, and a pair of gym shorts he had used when painting the kitchen two years ago. They were crusty with white semi-gloss paint chips. Dressed in completely discardable clothing, he walked back downstairs, now humming to himself. He closed the kitchen door to the basement, then opened up the rusted metal doors at the top of a set of four concrete steps that led directly to the backyard. They creaked and groaned as he pushed them upward, and rust chips fell into his hair and got into his eyes. He shook them out and dusted himself off, propping the heavy doors open with the metal bars latched on the inside.

  Perfect. Now he wouldn’t have to carry Dixon up through the kitchen.

  Then he removed the splinters from his hand with tweezers from the kitchen, and washed the blood away. He opened a bottle of wine, grabbed his cellphone, and went back to the yard. Now he looked like a guy who was doing some late evening Sunday gardening.

  He found a new space, completely out in the open, and jammed the spade in. There was resistance in the first few inches, but as he dug down, the ground became soft and pliable. It had rained a lot lately, he figured, making the digging easier. He worked hard and steadily. After two hours, he was working in complete darkness, but he climbed out and looked at his handiwork with a sense of satisfaction he had never known from teaching. He had dug a grave.

  Covered in earth, and with the bottle empty, he went back inside to open another. He swigged from it, went back outside and placed the new bottle beside the first, enjoying the visual image of the proof of inebriation in the scattered dirt. If someone happened upon the scene, God forbid, they would just think of him as a drunk eccentric. If only he had thought ahead and bought some hyacinths or a rhododendron bush from Billick’s, he could actually do some late night planting and have a solid reason to explain this away. Next time this happens, he thought, I’ll definitely buy some plants first. He giggled aloud at his own wit. Next time.

  Back in the basement, he found some sturdy ropes, and fashioned a crude hoist which he pulled around Dixon’s shoulders, going underneath each armpit. When he pulled Dixon’s body towards the steps, amazed at how heavy he was, he realized that Dixon’s head was flopping down at an awkward angle and would trap itself under each step. Aggravated, he cut another piece of rope and tied it in between the armpit struts, forming a workable cradle. He tried again to pull Dixon outside.

  God, this guy was heavy. Were all bodies this hard to move? No wonder serial killers always hacked them up. Every few feet he had to stop and rest. He also had to keep stopping to push old lawnmowers and musty boxes of unread books out the way. The rope was cutting into his hands, and he had to stop to find a pair of gloves. Then he tripped on an unused bottle of motor oil and fell backwards onto the steps.

  Elias picked himself up, scraped and cursing, and kicked the bottle of motor oil. Then, standing at the base of the cement steps, scraped and bleeding, he had an idea. He picked up the quart container of motor oil and dumped it all over the floor and steps, and, holding the rope outside, he yanked Dixon up out into his backyard. With the oil lubricating the process, Dixon slid across the floor and up the steps with ease. He’d remember that for next time, too. He giggled again.

  His pride over this innovation gave him the energy to drag the body across the grass. As he arrived at the grave, panting, he heard his cellphone ringing. Still holding the rope in one hand, he answered it, trying not to sound out of breath.

  “Elias White?” It was a man’s voice. He hadn’t recognized the number on his caller ID.

  “Yes. This is Elias.”

  “Elias . . . this is Jim Skifford. I’m on the select
ion committee for the Harvard Review. We met at your college last year.”

  Elias knew the name immediately. Skifford had got his article. Excellent. Elias cradled the phone and dragged Dixon’s body up to the grave. “Hi, Jim. Of course I remember you. I sent you an article recently.”

  “Yes,” Skifford said, and Elias knew right away there was a problem. “Yes, I got it. I read it.”

  There was a pause. Elias wanted to wait until Skifford started talking again, but he couldn’t contain himself. “And?” he asked anxiously. He lined Dixon’s feet up with the grave. Perfect. It was long enough by over a foot.

  “And, well, Professor, we’ve decided not to publish it.”

  Elias felt the deflation. He stood up straight, felt the tightness in his back from the rare bout of manual labor. “Why not?” he asked, trying to sound professional rather than wounded.

  “Well, the . . . the diaries are, in some parts, interesting . . .”

  Elias rubbed his dirt-covered hand across his brow. He leaned over again and rolled Dixon into the grave, where he landed with a thunk. “But?” he asked impatiently.

  “But, Professor White, you can’t honestly think we’d publish this.”

  “Why not?”

  Jim Skifford sounded annoyed at having to explain himself further. “Because you seem to side with the people who wrote the diaries. I mean, for Pete’s sake,” he said, “there’s a piece here from a German housewife who expresses joy that all the Jews in her neighborhood have disappeared.”

  “That’s real,” said Elias, grabbing the shovel. “That’s history. She really wrote that.” He pitched the first shovelful of dirt onto Dixon’s body.

  “Yes, but it’s hardly illuminating,” said Skifford. Then he asked, “Professor, are you busy now? Should we talk another time?”

  “No, why?”

  “You sound out of breath.”

  “Oh, no. I’m just working in my garden.”

  There was a pause, which Elias could only see as awkward.

  “Ah, well,” said Skifford. “Anyway, I just called to tell you the article has been rejected.”

  Elias didn’t know what to say. Thank him for the consideration of a phone call? “Well, do you think it could be . . . worked on? And re-submitted?”

  Skifford cleared his throat. “Not to us,” he said.

  “I just wanted to present a different point of view,” Elias said, lamely, hoping to keep the conversation going, to elicit a word of encouragement or praise from this man. Nice effort, but no thanks, or excellent work, but we can’t risk it. Skifford just sounded like he had hoped to leave a message, and wanted to get off the phone.

  “There’s a handwritten notation on one of the diaries that says ‘Throw these away’. Where did you find these diaries? In the trash?”

  “They were . . .” Elias had not anticipated being asked this question, had merely expected that the uncovering of the diaries would be hailed as a glimpse into the Nazi mind. He really should have taken the time to figure out what those handwritten notations meant, and who had written them. “They were in a library.”

  “Yes, well, be that as it may,” Skifford said, his voice heavy with skepticism. “We thank you for your submission. I’m sorry.”

  The phone went dead. Elias looked down into the grave, where Dixon lay face down, his back glistening with motor oil in the moonlight. He tossed his cellphone to the ground and it clinked off one of the wine bottles.

  He tossed another shovelful of dirt into the grave. No thank you – hardly illuminating. The truth was they just didn’t have any balls. What did they write about when they did anything on the Second World War? Fucking Normandy. Like that was the only battle. Millions of people fought that war, there were dozens of different governments, each with its own point of view. Wasn’t it illuminating to present the point of view of people who lived during the war?

  Guess not. Guess history really was written by the winners. The losers didn’t even get a mention. Now he’d have to start on something else. Maybe something to do with crime. He had learned a little bit about it lately. Crime. What could he do on crime? Was there a lot of crime in Germany between the wars? Other than the obvious ones, committed by Hitler and the Brownshirts?

  Who’d want to read about that? What kind of attention would that get him? Unless, of course, he admitted that he himself had killed someone. Or pretended that he’d robbed a bank. Maybe he could do an article, leave the country and disappear, then admit there was a body in his backyard. That would get him noticed.

  He pitched more dirt into the hole, which was almost full now. He felt energy returning.

  Crime. He could definitely do a piece about that. The criminal mind.

  The possibilities were endless. He loved being an educator.

  13

  Denise put the coffee on the corner of her desk and stared at her blank computer screen. She had to have a report about the whole Tiburn investigation, or lack of it, on Carver’s desk by lunchtime, and she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The report only had to be a page of step-by-step on what she and Kohl had done when they were there, but Denise was drawing a blank. The vague sense of discomfort about her Tiburn experience was enveloping her mind, and now she could not form specific images and details, as if she was trying to block them out. Something was wrong. She never had trouble writing reports.

  Dick Yancey stuck his head into her cube. “Hey, sweetie. We got a Monday morning meeting in five.”

  “Shit. I forgot about that.” She put her head in her hands.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “Damned Monday meetings.” A year ago, Mondays had virtually been a paid day off, but now that so many banks were open on Saturdays, and some even on Sundays, there were always three or four new cases to assign. “Let’s go, or we’ll get the window seats.”

  “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine, Dick.” She tried a warm smile. “Thanks for asking.”

  Every seat in the conference room was already taken except the two seats by the window, which required a minute or two of everyone else shifting around to even reach.

  “Nice of you two to join us,” Agent Carver said after the shifting was finished and Dick and Denise were seated. It was two or three minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start and Denise had noticed that upon her entrance, Carver, Walker and Toney had been talking about golf. She was too distracted this morning to bother fighting back with one of her usual underhanded comments, so she just opened her file and looked at them expectantly, saying nothing.

  “How was your vacation, Denise?” Carver asked. It was not a polite question. Kohl was sitting next to Carver, and had obviously expressed his concern to the squad supervisor about why Denise had wanted to stay up there.

  “It wasn’t a vacation,” she said, trying to keep hostility from her voice, looking down. “I stayed an extra day because I liked the town.”

  Carver nodded, then opened his file. Denise figured that even he could sense that she seemed a little darker than usual today, and though he probably attributed it to women’s troubles, or some such shit, he knew better than to pursue anything with her.

  “Busy weekend,” Carver said, now speaking to everyone in the room. “We’ll do it in order of amounts taken. A bank manager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, has disappeared, along with three million. Locals found blood in the vault. Doesn’t look good for that fellow.”

  Carver rambled on, and Denise found herself drifting, alert only to the sound of her name. The First Something or Other Bank in Elizabeth. The locals figured the perpetrators had entered the manager’s apartment on Saturday night and forced him to drive to the bank and open the vault. They had then emptied . . .

  “Apartment?” asked Denise.

  Carver stopped reading the file and looked up. “What?”

  “He’s a bank manager. He lives in an apartment? Why not a house?”

  Toney snickered
. Carver put the file down and looked at her. “It doesn’t mention that in the locals’ report, Denise.”

  “Presumably his bank offers house loans, right? Didn’t he qualify for a housing loan at his own bank? How many bank managers live in apartments?”

  “This is not an uncommon form of bank robbery,” Carver said. “We see these once or twice a year. What are you saying?”

  “Usually, when we see them, it’s the bank manager’s whole family kidnapped at his house.” She said the last word with emphasis. “I’m saying this guy is single and he lives in an apartment. That would make me wonder.”

  “Maybe he’s divorced,” said Toney, smirking.

  “Then his ex-wife would be the first person I’d look at,” said Denise.

  Carver shrugged, turned to Toney. “Agent Toney,” he said, sliding him the file. “You take this. And I want the bank manager to be your first choice. I want you to find out about the blood. I want a DNA match to determine whether the blood belongs to the bank manager, and I want to know how much of it there was and where it was found. Until you find something indicating otherwise, I want this treated as an embezzlement.” Carver opened the second file. “Portland, Maine,” he said.

  That was satisfying, at least. Carver wasn’t a complete dick all the time. Denise tried to pay attention, but drifted off again, the vague sense of unease returning. It was starting to focus in her mind into something tangible. Bank this, bank that, she heard Carver say. Banks banks banks. Bank robber. I wanted to ask you about the bank robber, Elias had said, when she had been driving back, trying to forget her one-night stand. I wanted to ask you about the bank robber. How’s the investigation going?

  Elias knew he was a bank robber . . . and she had never once mentioned it to him.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Denise aloud, feeling the hairs on her skin stand up as a chill went through her. Elias had known Dixon was a bank robber and she had never told him. She had shown him a picture of Dixon and asked about the missing nurse, and yet he had known Dixon was a bank robber. And he had been talking about banks all during dinner, about where they got their money. And he had been flashing hundred dollar bills, had even given her a hundred dollar bill to HOLD IN HER HAND AND LOOK AT. That must have been one of the bills from the robbery. Oh Jesus. Oh, Christ.