by Preston Lang
It was close to dawn—not enough time to get the job done now. He had to wait a full day before getting rid of the body. Sure, that made him feel like a callus bastard, but what else was he supposed to do right now? It was better to think practically and block out everything—try not to feel.
So the plan was to get rid of body first and then drive somewhere—California maybe—and leave the car there. He had one solid brick of gold, which had to be worth a lot—twenty thousand dollars, maybe? He also had some money put away. He could move to San Francisco and really start to play the guitar. The problem with that was if he had any success, then his face would be out there, and it wasn’t like there was no intersection between musicians and drug dealers.
Focus. First get rid of the body, then become a folk music sensation.
He left the car in a lot, making extra sure he was legal and correctly parked, and then he walked around a mall for a while. There was nothing particularly suspicious about his car—a lot of people had junk in their back seats. He had a full day to kill—wandering around, looking at jackets and belts. A teenaged couple argued about a gift the girl had given the boy.
“I can’t wear it to school; I can’t wear it to church. Where the hell am I even supposed to wear it? I should wear it to sleep? Do you wear a friggin’ hat to bed?”
The girl was near tears. These kids had problems.
A Brazilian guitarist played and sang in the main mezzanine. He’d crossed the equator to sing Fique tranquilo to Nebraskans. It didn’t make Cyril feel any better, so he left the mall and drove around the rest of the day, looking for a good spot of woods to leave the body. He’d felt as if he could smell her from the moment he’d put her in the car, but that was probably just his imagination. As night fell, however, the body had clearly begun to harden. She was really dead.
Cyril was normally a rational man, but while driving in the dark, the idea that she’d rise as a zombie and grab him from behind felt like a real possibility. Every creaking sound and bump from the road seemed to come from her—clearing her voice before speaking.
“I didn’t kill you. I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he said, as if that was a reasonable way to convince a zombie of anything.
In between hallucinations he had some reasonable moments. He wasn’t going to get caught for this. Once he got rid of the body and the car and got himself far away from them, there’d be nothing tying him to her. They’d never find her body. There would be no case. Serial killers usually didn’t get caught until they’d killed lots of people, when they started to get sloppy or fall into patterns. If you just killed one stranger, then left her behind, chances are you’d be fine. Wait, he wasn’t a murderer. Was he losing his mind?
Did the man at the hardware store get a lot of customers like Cyril—dazed, inept, and in need of a shovel—or had he known immediately that Cyril was getting rid of a dead body? Had he called the police as soon as Cyril left the store? What about the guy at the gas station who leered at him, or the early morning farm kids who’d watched him drive by in his New York plates only twenty miles from the scene of the crime? Cyril was unraveling. He needed help, and there was only one person he could think of to call.
CHAPTER 35
Duane drove west. Not all the way to Kansas or Iowa or wherever Cyril might have gone, but he wanted to get a head start in case he had to run from Top. He bought a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of Wonder Bread. He didn’t quite have the stomach for the peanut butter, but he forced himself to eat a slice of bread just to put something in his stomach. You didn’t want to get three days into a situation and realize that you had no fuel. He was driving through Pennsylvania when he got the call from Cyril.
“Where are you?” Duane asked.
“I’m somewhere in the middle of the country.”
“Don’t be cute with me, fuck monkey.”
“I’m sorry, but I—”
“Did you pick up the money?”
“It wasn’t money, exactly.”
“What was it?”
“It was a—metal.”
“Jesus, we don’t have to speak in code—no one is listening. What was it?”
“Gold.”
“Okay, gold—do you have it?”
“Duane, I need help.”
“You have to tell me everything you know. So there’s gold? That’s what you’re saying?”
“You don’t have to believe me, but I—”
“I believe you. Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Can you get it?”
“I really don’t see how I could.”
“You’re a dead man, Cyril.”
“You want me dead?”
“If you were in front of me right now.”
“I shouldn’t have called. I just—”
“First you’re going to tell me everything you know.”
Cyril paused. Duane could hear him breathing—it was infuriating, but Duane knew he was only going to get one chance. If Cyril hung up, he wouldn’t call back. He wasn’t a moron.
“Look,” Duane said, trying to sound less belligerent without letting Cyril off the hook, “I need to know what happened. That’s the only way I can fix this.”
“This Chinese guy and this big white guy stuck us up. The white guy has the gold. I think.”
“What happened to the Chinese guy?”
“I think he got hurt.”
“Who’s us?” Duane asked.
“What?”
“You said those guys stuck us up. Who’s us?”
“Stuck me up.”
“You had someone else along? Who and why?”
“Duane. I need to disappear over this.”
“You can’t disappear. You have to make this right. So a Chinese guy and a big white guy? What else?”
“And Tony Braxton has been talking to people he shouldn’t be talking to.”
A hundred percent right, of course, but how did Cyril know about these things? Duane had balled a slice of white bread into a tiny sphere. He kept squeezing it. Who could the Chinese guy be? He couldn’t think of any Chinese men they dealt with regularly.
“How do you know the guy was Chinese?” Duane asked.
“He was Asian. I think his name was Danny,” Cyril said.
“Danny? Why do you think that?”
“That’s what the other guy called him.”
“Danny. Danny Chin?”
Okay, maybe they were getting somewhere.
“I don’t know. He didn’t say a last name.”
“How tall was Danny?”
“I don’t know—it was dark.”
“You knew he was Asian. You knew the other guy was big.”
“Danny wasn’t big.”
Yeah, it had to be Danny Chin. Duane wanted points for this. They’d gotten one message from Luis about a Danny Chin getting out of prison—was there anything they could do for this Danny Chin? That was a year ago and Duane remembered the name. Duane deserved a medal for this one.
“What was the big white guy’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anything else you can tell me about him?”
“No, I don’t—I don’t remember.”
“This is really important. Really, really important.”
“I don’t know. I think they were close. You know, when Danny got hurt, the other one seemed pretty upset. Then again, he took off alone with all the gold. He left Danny lying there.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I just don’t know.”
“You didn’t follow?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m really sorry if—”
“Cyril, you don’t have to disappear. You just have to help me get this back.”
“I’ll tell you anything else you think would be useful right now. But that’s all I can do. I’m not going back home.”
Duane was ready to punch a hole through his own windshield, but he had to keep on pushing.
“Who was in the car with you?”
“I told you—”
“Cyril, you said us. There was someone else in the car with you?”
“Just a girl. She had a great voice. She lied to me about a lot of things.”
“Who was she?”
“Don’t worry about her.”
Let’s say Duane could bring in Cyril’s head—here, Top, I’ve got him for you. No money, just his brother. Would that save Duane? Probably not. Cyril was right to disappear.
“The money is with the big white guy,” Cyril said. “Last I saw, anyway. I don’t know where he went, but I think Danny Chin is—gone.”
“You killed Danny Chin?”
“I didn’t kill anyone, but the girl is gone too. I mean—she went down.”
“Okay. Okay. Thank you. Now go back home and wait for me.”
“Duane, I think this is it.”
“If I see you I’m going to kill you. You understand?”
“Then I really shouldn’t go home and wait for you, should I?”
Yeah, that threat hadn’t made a ton of sense. Cyril always had a good ear for illogical statements.
“You’ve fucked me over, C. You even think of that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“After everything I did for you.”
“Maybe you should take off, also.”
They were at the end of the conversation, but neither wanted to hang up.
“Can I ask you a question?” Cyril asked.
“Go ahead.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve ever had to get rid of something. Like a . . .”
Duane put the phone down and laughed—two quick, hacking bursts.
“You’re riding around with a dead body in your trunk? If you didn’t kill it, why not leave it where it was?”
“I had good reasons.”
“So while I have you on the phone—How do I get rid of the corpse? That’s what this just turned into?”
“Please.”
Now that Duane was on solid ground, he felt a little better. It wouldn’t help him any, but it was something to work on, to feed his mind. Some people dealt with stress by doing Sudoku.
“You got a shovel?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Well that’s really most of it. That was going to be my big piece of advice.”
“Where do—”
“This is the girl? The girl you killed?”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“If you knew what you were doing, I’d suggest finding a cattle farm out there. They’ve got these decomp pits for their dead cows. If you could manage to drop her in and cover it up like nothing happened, that would be the way to go. But my guess is you’d either get caught trying to dump her, or the farmer would notice something wasn’t right with his pit. Next morning—Gruesome Discovery by Local Cowman. I’d just bury her out in the woods.”
“Have you done this?”
“You want to drive some distance away from where it happened and then see if you can bury her fairly deep. Rain can come in and wash surface dirt around. Animals can smell something unless it’s a few feet down there. You’re a strong kid—put some back into it. And try not to leave anything behind. That’s mostly about being careful beforehand rather than after.”
It was good advice, simple and clear. Duane was starting to regret that he hadn’t spent more time with his brother.
“Thank you,” Cyril said. “How should I get rid of the car?”
“How about I come out there and do it for you? Then we’ll stop at Dairy Queen and I’ll buy you a training bra? I’m done helping you.”
“I appreciate all of—”
“Just never get comfortable, okay,” Duane continued, “because there’s lots of ways people can find you. If you’ve got an account somewhere, take all your money out immediately, and then get out of that town. Get rid of your phone. I mean like right after you hang up here. And if you start to think you’re somehow invisible, like people have just let go of . . . Hello?”
***
Cyril had hung up the phone. In fact he’d hung it up and thrown it off a bridge into the middle of a dark river named for a betrayed Lakota warrior. He’d hung up on his brother because he’d started crying, slowly at first, then uncontrollably, but he didn’t stop driving. A crying man on the side of the road would attract attention. He cried for about five minutes, steering through sparsely populated stretches of land. Finally he pulled it together. He had to do this, and then he had to get himself lost.
CHAPTER 36
Marcus drove and drove, pursued by ghosts, but he genuinely felt like he could outrun them. He stopped only to get gas and buy Mountain Dew and chocolate covered peanuts, cranking back east through steady rain with more than nine hundred thousand dollars in gold. Somewhere in Indiana an unfamiliar ring came from Marcus’s pocket. His first thought was—Danny. Maybe he was okay. Marcus had no idea where the sleek, new phone had come from. He looked at it like it was an alien artifact, but he accepted the call.
“This is campus police at Graham College. Who am I speaking to?”
“What?”
“Campus police. Give me your name and location, and do not make this difficult.”
Marcus never figured out what Graham College was. Ghost police? Demon avengers? He flung the phone out the window, into the grass, and kept driving.
If he’d been stopped, the gold would have been seized, added to the treasury of one lucky county, and Marcus would probably have been locked up. He easily could have crashed, hit another car, or flipped off a railing at ninety miles an hour, driving hypnotized, chanting the names of the towns he passed over and over in his mind—Vickory, Vickory, Shinrock, Shinrock. Instead he made it back to Massachusetts in the early morning hours. Just like he’d left it: in the cold dark before any sensible person is out of bed. How long ago had that been? A month, a year?
It didn’t seem possible or real, but he was home.
CHAPTER 37
Cyril was able to pull off the road and ease behind some brush. Cops driving past wouldn’t notice the car unless they’d been tipped off for some reason. He carried a shovel and a 130- pound woman for about ten minutes, then laid the body down and started digging. The earth was cold and heavy, but Cyril didn’t mind the hard repetitive work. He dug until he had a giant hole, deep enough to fit this woman who’d been so full of ideas and motion just twenty-four hours earlier. Finally he was exhausted and heartbroken and nauseated, but the light of self-preservation was still on. He desperately hoped he wouldn’t return to see state police rummaging through the mess of Willow’s car.
When he got back, he found dark empty road and the car sitting there behind light cover, looking like your average Toyota. He took out her driver’s license—her birthday was next week. Her eye color was listed as hazel, but he would have said brown. Her name was Annette. He took the money out of her wallet, fifty-five dollars, and put the license back in. Then he drove until he was nearly asleep. He made it all the way to Denver this way, still smelling a dead woman. When he got to the city he parked near the train station, with the keys still in the ignition. He left the shovel and pick ax leaning against a building and threw the tarp in a nearby trashcan. He carefully cleaned out the wallet and put the ID, the other cards, and the pills deep in the bottom of a different trashcan. Good idea, bad idea? Was he being careless? Was there something obvious he was leaving for the police to find? Too tired to really think about it, Cyril bought a one way ticket to Sacramento. He hadn’t slept since—when?—not last night or the night before. He’d never had much luck sleeping on trains, and he felt cut up and haunted, so he doubted he’d get any rest on the way.
The next thing he knew he felt stiff and disoriented, slumped against a window somewhere in Nevada. If he’d had any dreams, he couldn’t remember them now.
CHAPTER 38
Saida didn’t drink very much during the school year, but on Tuesday night, she blew off studying
and drank a bottle of cheap white wine and watched a TV show about millionaires who pretended to be homeless to gauge the reactions of average people. She was pretty sure a lot of it was fake, but she still found herself sobbing when an old woman bought the unwashed tycoon a new blanket.
In the very small hours of Wednesday morning, she heard a jingling in her dreams. A large animal was dropping pennies onto a patio. It wasn’t until she heard a loud crash of metal that she bolted awake. Someone was in the living room.
This wasn’t the most dangerous neighborhood she’d ever lived in, but they had their share of troublemakers; and she knew their locks weren’t the best. She quietly unplugged the lamp, held it above her head, and crept out into the living room to see, in the near dark, a giant man. Was it Marcus? The big man didn’t move like Marcus—he was shaky, not at home—but he was the right size and shape. She was ready to scream and attack if needed, but she wanted something better to hit him with than this lamp.
The figure entered the bathroom. When he turned on the light, she saw for sure: her boyfriend had returned. He must have peed for five minutes straight. When he came out into the living room she had all the lights on, and he caught her staring at the bulging duffel bag that lay on the couch. Marcus wasn’t drunk but he wasn’t walking steadily.
“Baby?”
“Here I am. Here I am,” he said.
It felt like something obvious was off about him, like he was missing an arm or leg. He opened the bag for her.
