As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  That would be far worse than the unthinkable. If she went down for murder, but if Ravi went down with her. No, this could not touch him, and so he could not touch the scene. If they failed, it would all be on her; that was the deal. Ravi knew nothing. Saw nothing. Did nothing.

  Pip bent to her knees on the other side of Jason, and slowly she reached out, gripping onto his shoulder and his arm. He wasn’t stiff yet, but rigor would start to set in soon.

  She leaned forward and pushed, rolling Jason and his broken-open head onto his front. His face was untouched. Pale and slack, but he almost looked like he could be sleeping. Pip reset her grip and rolled him again, facedown on the edge of the tarp, and again, faceup in the middle.

  “OK,” she said, pulling up one side of the tarp and wrapping it over him. Ravi did the same on the other side.

  Jason was gone, tidied away. The remnants of the DT Killer; just a dark red puddle and a rolled-up tarp.

  “He needs to be lying on his back in the car, for the lividity,” Pip said, positioning herself where Jason’s shoulders should be. “And then when we come back, we turn him onto his front. The blood will resettle, make it look like those hours never happened.”

  “Yeah, OK.” Ravi nodded, bending down and gripping onto Jason’s ankles through the tarp. “One, two, three, lift.”

  He was heavy, too heavy, Pip’s grip under his shoulders awkward through the sheet of plastic. But together they had him, walking slowly out the metal door, Ravi moving backward, glancing down to check he wasn’t trekking through the blood.

  The gentle hum of an engine greeted them outside. They already had Jason’s car up and running, the air-conditioning on the coldest setting, every vent in the car opened fully. Doors closed to keep in the chill. Ravi had found some ice packs in the freezer in the office building, presumably for workplace accidents. But now they were scattered around the inside of the car, close to the vents, cooling it even more.

  “I’ll get the door,” Ravi said, leaning down to place Jason’s feet gently on the gravel. Pip stuck her leg forward, buttressed against Jason’s back to take some of the weight.

  Ravi opened the door to the backseat.

  “Already pretty cold in there,” he said, returning to the other end of Jason and picking him up with a grunt.

  Carefully, half steps at a time, they maneuvered the rolled-up tarp through the car door, dropping Jason onto the backseat and sliding him through.

  It was already cold in here, like leaning inside a fridge, and Pip could see the foggy billows of her breath in front of her as she tried to push Jason farther in. His head, his undone head, wouldn’t fit inside.

  “Hold on,” Pip said, running round the back of the car to open the other door. She reached through the opening at the end of the tarp, gripped Jason’s ankles, and pushed them up to bend his knees, using the extra room to drag him all the way in. Holding him in position as she slowly closed the door, the sound of his feet knocking against it, like he was trying to kick his way free.

  Ravi closed the door on the other side and stepped back, clapped his hands with a tense outward breath.

  “And it will keep running for hours, while we’re gone?” Pip checked again.

  “Yeah, he has almost a full tank. It will keep going, long as we need it to,” Ravi replied.

  “Good, that’s good,” she said, another word she knew to be meaningless. “So, now we go. Back home. The plan.”

  “The plan,” Ravi parroted her. “Feels scary, leaving it like this, invisible traces of you all over it.”

  “I know,” she said. “But it’s secure; no one is coming here. Jason said so himself. He planned to kill me here, and he had all night, all weekend. No cameras, or alarms. So we have the same. Everything will be the same when we get back. And then we remove those traces, plant new ones.” She glanced through the car window, at the rolled-up black tarp and the dead man inside who wasn’t dead yet. Not if everything worked out.

  Ravi removed his gloves. “You taking your backpack?”

  “Yes,” Pip said, pulling her gloves off too, placing them and Ravi’s pair inside her unzipped bag. Her duct tape binds were in here too, removed from the storeroom: ankles, wrists, unwound mask with her ripped-out hair.

  “And you have everything in there, everything you came with?”

  “Yes, it’s all in here,” she said, zipping it up. “Everything I packed in it this afternoon. Now the gloves, the used duct tape. Jason’s burner phone. I’ve left nothing behind.”

  “And the hammer?” Ravi asked.

  “That can stay here.” She straightened up, shouldering the bag. “We can clean my prints off it later. Max will need a murder weapon too.”

  “OK,” Ravi said, taking the lead, heading toward his car abandoned by the open Green Scene gate. “Let’s go home.”

  One last check.

  Ravi leaned in close across the parking brake, studying her, his breath sweet but sharp on her face.

  “There’s still some on your face that’s dried. And on your hands.” He glanced down. “And there are spots on your hoodie. You’ll have to get upstairs quickly, before they see you.”

  Pip nodded. “Yeah, I can do that,” she said.

  She’d laid her spare T-shirt out on the seat so no blood would transfer onto Ravi’s car. And she’d used her spare pair of underwear, pouring a little water from her bottle, to try to wipe the blood from her face and her hands while Ravi drove the back roads. It would have to do.

  Pip pushed open the car door with her elbow and stepped out, leaning back in to stuff the T-shirt she’d sat on into her bag too, zipping it up. House keys in the other hand.

  “Are you sure?” Ravi asked her again.

  “Yes,” she told him. They’d gone over the plan again. Over and over in the car. “I can do this part on my own. Well, you know what I mean.”

  “I can help,” Ravi said, a hint of desperation in his voice.

  Pip looked at him, took in every inch and left none behind. “You’ve already helped, Ravi, more than you know. You helped me stay alive in there. You came to get me. I can do this part alone. What will help me is you being safe. That’s what I want. I don’t want any of this to come back on you, if it goes wrong.”

  “I know, but—”

  Pip cut him off. “So, you’re going to go establish your alibi now, for the whole evening. In case our timing doesn’t work out and we don’t delay the time of death by enough. What are you going to do?” She wanted to hear him say it again: airtight, ironclad.

  “I’m going home to grab my phone, then driving to Stamford to pick up my cousin Rahul,” Ravi said, staring ahead. “Use the highways, so the traffic cams pick me up. Going to take out some cash from an ATM, so the camera there also gets me. Then we’re going to go to IHOP, or another chain, and order food, pay with my card. Be loud, draw attention to us, so people remember us being there. Take photos and videos on my phone, showing us there. Make a call too, probably to Mom to tell her what time I’ll be home. I’m going to text you and ask you how your evening is going because I don’t know you lost your phone yet and we haven’t seen each other all day.” He took a quick breather. “Then we’ll go to that bar where all my cousin’s friends hang out, lots of witnesses. Stay until eleven-thirty. Then I drop Rahul home, and I drive back, fill up with gas on the way, so another security camera gets me. Go home, pretend to go to bed.”

  “Good, yes,” Pip said, glancing at the clock on the car’s dashboard. It had just turned 8:10 p.m. “Meet me at midnight?”

  “Meet you at midnight. And you’ll call me?” he asked. “From your burner phone, if anything goes wrong.”

  “It won’t go wrong,” Pip answered, trying to convince him with her eyes.

  “Be careful,” he said, tightening his grip on the wheel, a substitute for her hand. “I love you.”


  “I love you,” she said, another last time. But it wouldn’t be the last; she’d see him in a few hours.

  Pip closed the door and waved to Ravi as he turned on his blinker and peeled off down the road. She took one deep breath to prepare herself, and then she turned and walked up her driveway to the front door.

  She saw her family through the front window, the frames of the TV dancing across their faces. She watched them for a moment, from out here in the twilight. Josh was folded up on the rug in his pajamas, awkward and small, playing with his Lego. Her dad was laughing at something on TV, and Pip could feel its vibrations even out here. Her mom tutted, slapped a hand against his chest, and Pip heard her say, “Oh, Victor, that’s not funny.”

  “It’s always funny when people fall over,” came his booming reply.

  Pip felt her eyes prickle, a catch in her throat. She thought she’d never see them again. Never smile with them, or cry, or laugh, never grow old as her parents grew older, their traditions becoming hers, like the way her dad made mashed potatoes, or the way her mom decorated the tree at Christmas. Never see Josh grow into a man, or know what his forever-voice sounded like, or what made him happy. All those moments, a lifetime of them, big and small. Pip had lost them, and now she hadn’t. Not if she could pull this off.

  Pip cleared her throat, dislodging the lump, and unlocked the front door as quietly as she could.

  She crept inside, shutting the door behind her with a barely audible click, hoping the noise of an audience clapping from the TV would cover it. Keys gripped too hard in her fist so they wouldn’t make a sound.

  Slowly, carefully, holding her breath, she passed the living room doorway, glancing at the backs of their heads against the sofa. Her dad moved and Pip’s heart dropped, freezing her to the spot. No, it was OK, he was just shifting his position, placing his arm around her mom’s shoulders.

  Up the stairs, quiet, quieter. The third stair creaked under her weight.

  “Pip?! Is that you?” her mom called, shuffling on the sofa to turn around.

  “Yeah!” Pip called back, bounding up the stairs quickly before her mom got a good look. “It’s me! Sorry, I’m just desperate to pee.”

  “We have a bathroom downstairs, you know,” her dad shouted as she rounded the top of the stairs into the hallway. “Unless by pee, you really mean a p—”

  “Thought you were staying at Ravi’s?” Her mom now.

  “Two minutes!” Pip shouted in response, running straight for the bathroom, closing the door behind her, locking it. She’d have to clean that door handle too.

  That was close. But they were acting normally; they hadn’t seen anything, not the flecks of blood, or her ripped-up hair, or the raw skin on her face. And those were Pip’s first tasks.

  She pulled her hoodie off over her head, shutting her mouth and shutting her eyes, so none of the drying blood would stray inside. She dropped it carefully, inside out on the tiles. She kicked off her sneakers, and her socks, then peeled off her dark leggings. She couldn’t see any blood against the material, but she knew it was there, hiding somewhere in the fibers. And then her sports bra, a small, rusted stain near the middle where some of the blood had transferred through her hoodie. She left the clothes in a pile and turned on the shower.

  Warm. Hot. Hotter. So hot that it hurt to step inside under the stream. But it needed to be hot, to feel like it was scouring away the top layer of her skin. How else would she ever feel clean of DT? She scrubbed at herself with shower gel, watching as the pinkish blood-dyed water ran off her legs, between her toes and down the drain. She scrubbed and scrubbed again, finishing off the half-full shower gel, cleaning under her fingernails too. She washed her hair, three separate times, the strands feeling thinner, more brittle now. Shampoo stinging the graze on her cheekbone.

  When she finally felt clean enough, Pip stepped out into a towel, leaving the water running for a while longer, to wash away any residue of blood on the shower floor. She’d clean that later too.

  With the towel tucked under her armpits, she grabbed the flip-lid trash can nestled beside the toilet and pulled out the plastic bucket liner from inside. There were just two empty toilet paper rolls in it, and Pip removed these, stacking them on the windowsill instead. In the cabinet under the sink she found the toilet bleach, unscrewed the lid, and poured some into the plastic bucket. More. All of it. She straightened up and filled the bucket halfway with warm water from the faucet, diluting the bleach, the smell strong and noxious.

  She’d have to make two journeys to her bedroom, but her family were all downstairs, it should be clear. Pip hoisted the bucket, heavy now, holding it with one arm against her chest as she unlocked the bathroom door. She staggered out, across the landing, and into her bedroom, placing the bucket down in the middle, water sloshing dangerously close to the rim.

  More eerie sounds of a TV audience applauding her as Pip returned to the bathroom, grabbing the pile of bloodied clothes and her backpack.

  “Pip?” came her mom’s voice from the stairs.

  Fuck.

  “Just showered! I’ll be down in a minute!” Pip called back, hurrying into her room and closing the door behind her.

  She dropped the clothes beside the bucket, and then, on her knees, she turned to the discarded pile, and gently, one by one, lowered them into the bleach mixture, stuffing them down. Her sneakers too, bobbing half-in at the top.

  From her backpack, she added the lengths of duct tape that had bound her face and her hands and her ankles, pushing them down into the diluted bleach. She pulled out Jason’s burner phone, sliding the back off to remove the SIM card. She snapped the little card in half and dropped the disassembled phone into the water. Then the underwear she’d used to wipe the blood from her face, and the spare T-shirt she’d sat on. Finally, the branded Green Scene gloves she and Ravi had used—perhaps most incriminating—she pushed them right to the bottom. The bleach would deal with the visible bloodstains and probably the dye of the fabrics too, but it was just a precaution: everything in here would be gone forever by this time tomorrow. Another job for later.

  For now, Pip dragged the bucket across the carpet and hid it inside her closet, poking her sneakers back in. The smell of bleach was strong, but no one would be coming into her bedroom.

  Pip dried herself and dressed, in a black hoodie and black leggings, and then turned to the mirror to deal with her face. Her hair hung down in feeble, wet strands, her scalp too sore to run a brush through. She could see a small bald patch on the crown of her head, where she’d ripped out her hair with the tape. She’d have to cover it. Pip dragged her fingers through and secured her hair into a high ponytail, tight and uncomfortable. She layered two more hair ties on her wrist for later, when she and Ravi returned to Green Scene. Her face still looked raw and blotchy, and then slightly sickly as she piled foundation on to cover it. Concealer on the worst parts. She looked pale and the texture of her skin looked rough, peeling in places, but it would do.

  She emptied her backpack to repack it, checking off items from the mental list she and Ravi had assembled, seared into her brain like a mantra. Two beanies, five pairs of socks. Three of the burner phones from her desk drawer, all powered on. The small pile of cash she kept in that secret compartment too, taking it all just in case. In the pocket of her smartest jacket, hanging in her closet over the bucket of bleach, she found the embossed card she hadn’t touched since that mediation meeting, and placed it carefully in the front pocket of her bag. Darting quietly into her mom and dad’s bathroom, she grabbed a handful of the latex gloves her mom used to dye her hair, at least three pairs each. She repacked her wallet on top of everything, checking her debit card was inside; she would need it for her alibi. And her car keys.

  That was it, everything from upstairs. She ran through it again, double-checking she had everything needed for the plan. There were a few more items to get
from downstairs, somehow avoiding the watchful gaze of her family, and a younger brother who made everyone’s business his own.

  “Hey,” she said breathlessly, skipping down the stairs. “Just had to shower because I’m heading out and went on a run earlier.” The lie came out too fast, she needed to slow it down, remember to breathe.

  Her mom turned her head against the backrest of the sofa, looking at her. “I thought you were going to Ravi’s for dinner and staying over.”

  “A sleepover,” Joshua’s voice added, though Pip couldn’t see him through the couch.

  “Change of plans,” she said, with a shrug. “Ravi had to go see his cousin, so I’m hanging out with Cara instead.”

  “No one asked me about any sleepover,” added her dad.

  Pip’s mom narrowed her eyes, studying her face. Could she see, could she tell what was hiding just beneath the makeup? Or was there something different in Pip’s eyes, that haunted faraway look? She’d left the house still her mom’s little girl, and she’d returned as someone who knew what it was to die violently, to cross over that line and somehow come back from it. And not only that: she was a killer now. Had that changed her, in her mother’s eyes? In her own? Reshaped her?

  “You haven’t had an argument, have you?” she asked.

  “What?” Pip said, confused. “Me and Ravi? No, we’re fine.” She attempted a lighthearted sniff, dismissing the idea. How she wished for anything as normal, as quiet, as an argument with her boyfriend. “I’m just grabbing a snack from the kitchen, then heading out.”

  “OK, sweetie,” her mom said, like she didn’t believe her. But that was fine; if her mom wanted to believe she and Ravi had had an argument, that was fine. Good, even. Far better than anything near the truth: that Pip had murdered a serial killer and was now, at this very moment, heading out to frame a rapist for the crime she’d committed.

  In the kitchen, Pip opened the wide drawer at the top of the island, the drawer where her mom kept the foil and baking paper, and the plastic sandwich bags. Pip grabbed four of the resealable sandwich bags, and two of the larger plastic freezer bags, stuffing them on top of her backpack. From the bits-and-pieces drawer on the other side of the kitchen, Pip retrieved the candlelighter and packed it too.