Just Between Us

by Rebecca Drake

  “Yes, that’s perfect,” Julie said eagerly, Heather nodding in agreement, but Sarah shook her head.

  “There are cameras everywhere,” she said.

  “Not on the back roads,” I said. “We could leave him on one of those isolated wooded roads. Nobody’s out this late—not on a weeknight.”

  “Including a carjacker,” Sarah said. “Who gets carjacked in the middle of nowhere?”

  “He could have been followed off I-279,” Heather said, her hysteria morphing into an eagerness to make this plan—or any plan—work.

  Sarah stared at the car, considering. “We’d need to leave the gun with the car, too,” she said after a moment. “We could make it look like the carjacker turned Viktor’s own gun on him.” She turned to Heather. “Is the gun registered to you or to Viktor?”

  “Neither of us,” Heather said.

  “Then where did you get it?” I asked.

  She hesitated, gaze skittering away from mine, but before I could ask again Julie gave a short, sharp cough and said, “From me.”

  chapter fourteen

  SARAH

  Alison and I stared at Julie in stunned silence for what must have been only a few seconds but felt much longer. “You gave her a gun?” I demanded. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “She needed to defend herself,” Julie’s voice rose. “You were the ones who said she needed some self-defense.”

  “Yeah, like karate or something, not a gun,” Alison said. “Holy shit!”

  “It’s not her fault,” Heather said. “She was trying to help me.”

  “That doesn’t make it better—she can be charged as an accessory,” I said, and then to Julie, “I didn’t even know you owned a gun.”

  “It’s to keep me safe. For protection when I’m showing houses alone—just in case.”

  Alison gave a bitter laugh. “And you’ve just demonstrated why owning a gun isn’t safe. Now we’ve got to dump the gun, too.”

  “Won’t Brian notice it’s missing?” I said.

  Julie shook her head. “He doesn’t know. Nobody knows I have one.”

  “Well, thank God for small favors,” I said.

  It was just after two A.M. “We don’t have much time,” Alison said. “If we’re really going to do this, then we need to pick a deserted spot, someplace a carjacking could realistically happen.”

  “How about somewhere along Fern Hollow Road?” Julie suggested. “It’s not far off I-279.”

  “Yes, there, that’s a good place,” Heather said, eager to go with any plan that didn’t involve prison. “Viktor drives home that way sometimes.”

  “They could have followed Viktor off the interstate and waited until he was on that stretch,” Alison said.

  “Someone is going to have to drive the car,” I said, “and what do we do with his body in the meantime?”

  We all stared at the car. Viktor was over six feet tall and now he was literally dead weight. “Leave him where he is,” Alison said. “We can’t move the body out of the front seat and then put it back—the police will be able to tell. For this to work we have to leave everything as is as much as possible.”

  “How can we drive the car with him in it?” Julie said, her voice dipping on the personal pronoun as if she were afraid that uttering Viktor’s name would somehow bring him back.

  “What if we covered him with a plastic bag so we didn’t leave any fibers,” Alison said slowly, staring at the car. “And then one of us could perch on the seat in front of him and drive that way.”

  She looked at me, Julie and Heather following her gaze. “No way,” I said. “I don’t want to drive the car.”

  “You’re the shortest.” Alison used her hands to approximate the available space. “It makes the most sense.”

  The thought of having to touch Viktor’s body made me shiver. “Absolutely not.”

  “No one else is small enough,” Alison said.

  “Just shift the seat back and let her drive,” I said, pointing at Heather. “She’s the one who shot him.”

  “She’s not fit to drive and shifting things would be bad,” Alison said. “We don’t want to move anything in the car if at all possible.”

  “C’mon, Sarah,” Julie said. “We need you.”

  She and Heather gave me pleading looks, while Alison pulled out her phone again. “We don’t have time to argue—if we’re going to do this we have to get going.”

  “Fine,” I said, unable to think of another, better way. “But I’m not getting near that car without gloves.”

  “I have some.” Heather hurried to the back of the garage and fetched a box of disposable latex gloves from a cabinet above the workbench. “Here, we can all wear these.” She put on a pair and passed the box around.

  I pulled on a pair and felt strangely guilty, as if I’d fired the gun myself. And what about that gun? “What are we going to do with it?” I asked, pointing.

  Alison slipped on some gloves before squatting down to carefully pick it up, quickly and expertly emptying the chamber.

  “Wow, you know how to handle guns?” I was surprised.

  “The things we learn about each other,” she said sardonically.

  I tentatively pressed a gloved hand against Viktor’s leg. It moved slightly and I reared back, crying out. Heather shrieked and Julie and Alison turned to look.

  “Sorry, it’s okay, he isn’t alive,” I said. “I’m just checking to make sure we can still bend his leg to get it in the car.”

  “Do you have any large plastic garbage bags?” Alison asked Heather.

  “They’re in the house, under the kitchen sink.”

  “I’ll get them,” Julie said to Heather. “You should go shower.” She headed inside, but Alison stopped Heather from following her.

  “Take off your clothes here so you don’t get any blood inside,” she said. “And after you shower you’ve got to pour bleach down the drain.”

  Heather stripped and collected her clothes. “I’ll throw these in the wash.”

  I shook my head. “It’s too risky—the police might be able to tell that you ran the machine. You have to get rid of them.”

  “What a waste—I liked these jeans,” Heather said, letting the clothes drop. It was jarring to hear her say that with her dead husband just a few feet away. But she was in shock—I think we all were.

  As she hurried inside, I found a large pair of scissors and a roll of duct tape on the workbench. Alison peered inside the car, bending down to look at the driver’s-side floor.

  “Good, I don’t see any blood here, so we don’t have to worry about tracking it.” She stood up just as Julie returned with a box of black trash bags and a handful of small blue plastic grocery bags. “We’ll cover both of you,” Alison said to me, plucking a black bag from the box and cutting a scoop out of the bottom and on either side. “Here.” She tossed me the altered bag. “Pull this on over your head.”

  We worked at a frantic pace, barely speaking, a tense silence punctuated by sounds of ripping plastic and duct tape. Julie helped me pull the bag on over my clothes while Alison made plastic sleeves that they then duct-taped to the shoulders of the bag and then around the wrists of my latex gloves. Plastic pants followed and then they taped smaller blue plastic grocery bags to my feet. Alison cut another large plastic bag and draped it over Viktor’s body.

  “I feel like the Michelin man,” I said, crinkling as I moved. “How am I supposed to drive like this?”

  “We don’t have an option,” Alison said, “so you just have to make it work.”

  Heather returned in new jeans and a shirt, damp hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she’d put on shoes. “You need to cover your hair,” she said as I moved closer to the car. “I’ll get you one of Viktor’s hats.” She came back with a knit cap, which they pulled on my head because I couldn’t raise my arms high enough to do so without tearing the plastic suit.

  “We’ll lead the way in my car,” Julie said. “That way, if we see
any traffic or a police car—God forbid—we can distract them so you won’t get stopped.”

  I felt squeamish as I stepped over Viktor’s extended leg and sat gingerly on the slim bit of driver’s seat not occupied by his body. I slid against the plastic covering it and grabbed the steering wheel to try to keep my balance, pushing back to maintain a grip on the seat and coming up hard against his body. I cried out involuntarily as Alison carefully bent Viktor’s leg, folding it up into the car, where it rested uncomfortably against mine. She closed the door and I struggled not to panic, breathing shallowly, trying to avoid sucking in the overpowering scent of blood. It was like a butcher shop. I hated the smell of raw meat, and this was meat that was starting to rot. Was this how an operating room smelled? Had Viktor been surrounded by this odor every day?

  The keys were in the ignition. Blood had hit the embossed leather fob and it smeared against my glove as I turned the key and switched on the lights. The sound of the engine seemed too loud as I backed slowly out of the garage. Alison, Julie, and Heather followed me out and closed the garage door before getting into Julie’s car, and I let them lead the way slowly down the drive.

  It was 2:30 A.M., the time of night when it’s utterly and completely dark, the heavy blackness penetrated only by the occasional security light on the houses we passed. In Sewickley Heights these were spaced few and far apart and well off the road. There weren’t streetlights out here like there were in the village, no sidewalks for late-night dog walkers. It was too early for the crazy runners who risked life and limb to run along these narrow, winding, hilly roads, and too late for the drinkers who’d already closed down the bars in town. The empty roads made it safer for us and yet I was terrified of the dark and the body pressing against me, only the lights from Julie’s car to let me know I wasn’t utterly alone.

  I kept a few car lengths behind, careful not to let her car disappear over a hill and out of sight, but equally careful not to get too close. Julie was staying at the speed limit and I knew it was wise, but I still wished that she would just floor it and we’d get to where we were going as fast as possible. The knit hat was itchy and I felt claustrophobic, fighting a desperate need to get out of the car, away from that horrible stench of blood and decay, and tear all of the plastic off my body.

  The brake lights suddenly went on ahead of me and I slammed on my brakes, too. I immediately reversed, jerking the car onto the side of the road and switching off the lights, straining to see what had stopped them. They didn’t move for a minute. If it were a cop, wouldn’t they have been pulled off to the side?

  My palms were sweating and I instinctively rubbed them against my thighs, forgetting how I was dressed until I felt that awful sticky rub of plastic against plastic.

  Some movement caught my eye, and then a raccoon scuttled into the glow of Julie’s headlights. “Everything’s A-okay, Viktor,” I said with a nervous laugh that fell flat in the deafening silence of the car. I swallowed down a wave of nausea, switched my lights back on, and cautiously resumed following Julie.

  Several minutes later Julie braked abruptly again, before jerking her car to the side of the road. I was quick to follow suit, dousing the lights and the motor, and in the silence was suddenly aware of the loud hum of another engine before I saw the distant headlight glow and then a darker shadow as another vehicle passed by on the cross road about a hundred feet ahead. This time Julie waited longer to start driving again, clearly wanting to put distance between us and that other driver.

  We followed a circuitous route for several more minutes, a blur of winding streets, before finally turning on to Fern Hollow. Tree-covered hills rose on either side of us, and we drove for only a few minutes more on the deserted two-lane road before Julie slowed and put on her turn signal to indicate that I should stop. I pulled Viktor’s car over to the side of the road, tires crunching against the pebbles and dirt. It sounded so loud—had anyone heard it? I peered out the windows and checked the rearview mirror as Julie pulled her own car over about twenty feet ahead. When I switched off the car, the headlights stayed on. As Alison and Julie hurried toward me, racing on tiptoe, I tried to carefully open the driver’s door without disrupting the body.

  At that moment, we all heard the low rumble of an approaching engine. Julie stopped short, looking wildly around, while Heather headed back toward her car and Alison ran off the road and into the woods. I closed the car door quietly, fumbling for the light switch. The noise seemed to get louder for a moment and then it just stopped. No one moved for a long minute, all of us listening.

  “Where is it?” I hissed as I quietly cracked open the door again, looking around for the source of the noise. “I don’t see anyone.”

  “It must have turned up one of the other roads,” Julie said, opening the door the rest of the way, while I switched back on the lights and Alison stepped forward to catch Viktor’s foot, angling it so it hung out the door just as it had before. She then reached out a hand to help me out of the car, the sickening peel of the plastic too loud in the stillness.

  I gulped the clean, fresh night air like a swimmer coming up from some deep, dank pond. Julie and Alison were lifting the plastic bags off Viktor’s body and folding them hastily into a trash bag they’d brought with them. I moved away from the car and began stripping off my plastic suit. “Be careful,” Alison hissed. “Don’t leave anything behind.”

  “Should we leave the headlights on?” Julie whispered.

  We debated it for a precious minute, trying to decide which way would make it look more like a carjacking. As we were arguing in whispers, the car suddenly answered the question itself, the lights switching off automatically.

  A last-minute check of everything. Alison ran a cloth over the door handles and the steering wheel, because she assumed a carjacker would remember to do that even in a botched attempt. I bundled the pieces of my plastic suit into the trash bag and then we ran back to Julie’s car. I climbed in the back after Heather, who was nervously tugging at her hands. We had just pulled onto the road when Alison said, “Our tire tracks!”

  Julie put the car in park in the middle of the road and fetched an ice scraper from the trunk. She used the brush to swipe the side of the road ahead of Viktor’s car, trying to erase any evidence of her car and our footprints.

  When she came back to the car, she added the scraper to the trash bag. “We need to find an isolated garbage dump or Dumpsters somewhere,” she said.

  As we pulled away the second time, I turned to look out the rear window, capturing forever the scene that I would I visit over and over again in my dreams. The isolated stretch of road on that murky night, the black spires of trees looming above it, and that bottle-green Mercedes. Its jewel color glinted in the taillights, and I could see the driver’s door ajar and picture Viktor’s foot dangling over the side, its dead weight brushing the ground. I watched the car shrink as we sped away, until it disappeared from view, swallowed up by the darkness.

  We took different roads back to Heather’s house, Julie purposely changing the route. Along the way we passed an old industrial park, and when we couldn’t spot any cameras, she pulled into the back and Alison threw the bag into a huge metal Dumpster.

  “We still have to get rid of the gun,” Alison said. “You’re sure Brian doesn’t know you have one?”

  Julie shook her head. “No. He’s anti-gun.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Alison said in a dark voice.

  It was almost three. What if Olivia woke up, or Eric, and found me gone? When I’d left home, my daughter had been asleep in our bed after crawling in with us sometime around midnight. Soon after, her father had given up trying to sleep with three of us crowding the queen-size bed and had decamped to her room. Both of them had been sound asleep when I tiptoed out of the house, but what about now? Would Eric call 911 if he woke and found me gone and couldn’t reach me on my cell phone? In my haste to help Heather, I’d left it in my car. I pictured the police swarming over my house, Sam greeting them at t
he door in pajamas, Olivia and Josh wailing. My throat constricted.

  “We can ditch the gun in the river,” I suggested.

  “I’m afraid of being spotted on a security camera,” Alison said. “We can’t risk being seen throwing something off the Sewickley Bridge.”

  “Well, we can’t hold on to it—we’ve got to get rid of it,” Julie said, as if she weren’t the one responsible for the gun.

  “Maybe we could bury it?” I said, but where would we do that without being spotted? I pictured us trying to hide it at the park and some enterprising dog digging it up.

  “Let’s find another Dumpster,” Alison said, but we’d moved away from the river and were driving along one of the winding back roads between Sewickley and Edgeworth, and there weren’t any businesses with Dumpsters in sight.

  Feeling queasy from all the twists and turns, I didn’t realize we were crossing over a creek until Julie stopped the car. “What about here?”

  We were on an old stone bridge that covered a steep embankment with a creek running through the middle. We got out of the car and looked down at the water below. It looked like an oil slick in the moonlight, a fast-running greasy stream. Someone had thrown a bag over the side, spilling pop and beer cans. Brush and silt had accumulated like mortar up and around them, creating a dam. “Someone will come by to pick up this trash and they’ll spot the gun,” Alison said. “The water’s not deep enough to hide it.”

  “The water’s moving further out,” I said, pointing at a spot through brush and scraggly trees where I could make out a thin line of dark water. “No one will look there,” I said to Julie. “Just be careful on the hill.”

  “I don’t want to climb down there through that muck,” Julie said.

  “It’s the best place we’ve found.”

  “Then you do it.”

  “It’s your gun,” I snapped. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t given it to Heather in the first place.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Alison growled, moving toward the edge of the bridge. “I’ll climb down and one of you can pass me the gun.”