I sat back, resting on his knees, and looked at him. His hands dug into the ground. His baseball cap had come off during our struggle, revealing a rapidly receding hairline, dark hair trimmed close to his scalp. He was wiry, his nose thin and creased at the tip, his large black eyes defiant and close set, but he was also scared. I could feel the tremble in his limbs, smell the fear on his breath. Good, I thought, get a little taste of what Jeannette experienced.
When I looked back up, they were all watching me, except Gwen, who was still looking for the gun I was pretty sure she’d never find. “I’m fucked,” she said, her voice terse.
“I believe we all are,” Cathy said.
“Where’s Angie?” Marge said.
“Split,” Cathy replied, and when I curled my lip, she said calmly, “Like we should have done.”
“We are in a world of shit here,” Tracy said, so matter-of-factly that my heart skittered and stopped momentarily. The earlier rush of anger curdled with glee dissolved; I settled back into my body, felt my muscles and bones, breathed deeply, and took it all in: what we’d walked into, what Gwen had done, who we had, and my throat snapped closed.
Gwen muttered, “Fuck all.”
Vince sneered, gave a half-laugh that stopped abruptly when Beth pressed down harder on the pressure points beside his collarbone.
Rage burned out of my pores again, at Vince, at Gwen, at the situation in which we found ourselves. And I knew, I just knew that’s what he’d done—laugh—as he came at Jeannette. I picked up the pliers I’d tossed on the ground, held them up in front of his face. “Is this what you used on her?” My voice sounded coarse and unfamiliar.
It took effort, but he dredged up another sneer. “On who?”
The urge to beat his face into a bloody pulp drummed so hard in my hands I felt light-headed. Beth clamped a hand over his mouth. “Bite me and you’ll regret it.” Then she looked at me. “Well?”
“They’re gonna do to us what they did to Steve Darcy,” Tracy said, her voice thin.
“Ladies, I’m out of here. Sorry,” Cathy said, and she turned, walked back toward the road.
We watched her silently until Beth sneezed, cleared her throat, said, “We need a plan.”
Gwen had stopped looking for the gun and was sitting back on her ankles, staring stone-faced at the ground, one hand rubbing hard against her thigh.
Marge’s wide body moved gracefully toward me; she dropped a bandanna and her cuffs onto the ground beside my feet. “Gag him and cuff him. Then we talk.”
“What, you were expecting this?” I said. Marge hesitated but said nothing, returned to standing by Doris Whitehead, who still had a look of rough amusement to her mouth. A piece of me wanted to stand up and follow Cathy down the driveway.
I stuffed the bandanna in his mouth, tied the ends at the back of his head. I took some small pleasure in making sure the gag was tight. He watched me, his eyes full of imploded fury. Gwen had gone motionless. I said her name.
“What?” Her eyes were blank and heavy. Perspiration had smeared her makeup into a grotesque mask.
“It’s okay,” I said, wanting to mean it.
“The fuck it is,” she spit back, the anger deep in every line of her body.
Beth and I rolled Vince. She stood, keeping a tennis shoe placed firmly on the crack of his butt while I cuffed him hard enough to make him grunt. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. I straightened up, kept one foot on his right ankle, pressing hard on the bone, knowing it had to hurt. I had no idea what to do next. Normally we’d read him his rights, cart him off to a unit, and transport him to downtown booking. I looked at the body again and shuddered slightly. Fact: We had a dead unarmed man. Fact: We had a murder suspect. Fact: We were fucked.
Marge said, “Here,” and she unbuckled her belt, slipped it off, reached down and grabbed Vince by one arm, pulled him up, walked him over to the railing by the kitchen door, threaded her belt several times through the cuffs and the railing, pulled it tight and tied a knot. “Move and we kill you and no one’s the wiser,” she said. I shot her a startled glance. She motioned impatiently for the rest of us to join her over by the tree line. Gwen moved as if her joints weren’t quite in unison.
“We kill you?” Tracy said.
“It’s an option.” Marge rubbed the toe of her tennis shoe against the ground.
“No way,” I said quickly. Marge glanced up briefly without moving her head, her toe still moving across the ground. Doris Whitehead smiled, her lips tight against her teeth. “Then what?” Marge said, one thick hand cutting through the air to the dead man’s body before returning to rest on her thigh.
“Do we even know for sure this guy did it?” Beth said softly.
“He did it,” Doris Whitehead said.
“Cowan and Barker are getting a warrant,” I said, quickly outlining my conversation with Kirk earlier in the day outside Headquarters. The bloody fingerprints at Jeannette’s house had come back a match to Vince Durham. He had a long record that included aggravated battery. An old girlfriend had filed a restraining order against him, and he’d spent three months in jail for beating the hell out of her with a hot iron. The trucking company said they hadn’t heard from him in four days, that his rig was parked on the company lot. Barker and Cowan were getting a search warrant for it—and Vince—in the morning.
“But there’s no warrant yet?” Beth asked.
I shook my head. “Not that I know.”
“What about this other guy?” Tracy said.
“He had a gun,” Gwen said again, but listlessly this time.
“A friend, Roger somebody,” I said. “Only prints inside were Vince’s and Jeannette’s.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t help him,” Gwen said.
“Reality check, Gwen,” Marge said. “There was no weapon in his hand.”
Gwen’s face shifted into ugliness, and she stepped up to Marge. “I saw a gun, goddamnit.” Then she whirled, lunging toward me. “This is your goddamn fault with all your goddamn motherfuckin’ weepies over some woman stupid enough to stay with a motherfucker like him.”
I looked at her, stunned, protest caught in my throat. Then I hauled off and slapped her, hard.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Tracy reached out and gripped Gwen’s arm, pulled her back several steps.
For less than a second Gwen looked like a four-year-old. “Damn,” she whispered. When her face smoothed back into a hard mask, I turned away. My hand tingled and throbbed.
Beth put a hand on my shoulder, said, “It’s not Sarah’s fault. We didn’t have to come. Anyone of us could have shot him. It was dark, hard to see.” Beth’s forehead crimped into deep lines beaded with perspiration.
“Yeah, try telling that to IA,” Marge said.
“We need to make some decisions and make them quick.” We followed Tracy’s gaze toward Vince, who was struggling against the belt, his body twisting one way then the other, his feet trying to find leverage.
“We can’t hang around here,” Beth said.
“What do we do with the body?” Marge said. “And him?” She tilted her head back toward Vince.
“I thought he had a gun.” Gwen spoke to the ground, her fingers pinching the seam along her jeans. Her cheek was mottled where I’d hit her.
I looked at Doris Whitehead, who stared back with a preternatural calm, then at Vince, then down at the body, and finally at Gwen. I imagined our positions reversed. My stomach flipped once, then curled up in a fist.
“Okay,” I said, and they all looked at me. “The three of you take Gwen back to the cars. Leave. Ms. Whitehead here will call the police, tell them an off-duty police officer needs help, she’s got a murder suspect.”
Gwen was shaking her head even before I finished. “Uh-uh. Don’t be a fuckin’ martyr. You aren’t taking the fall for me.”
“Won’t work,” Marge said. “He’ll tell them there were others. How do we explain there’s no gun?”
“Anybody got a throw down?” I a
sked.
They all shook their heads.
“We could get one,” I said.
“Where?” Beth rubbed her nose with a finger.
“There’s no time,” Tracy said.
“No.” Gwen’s hands were jammed deep in her back pockets. “My fuckup, my call. I’ll stay.”
“They’ll tag you,” Tracy said softly. “There’s no way you can cover this. You’ll go down. We’ll all go down for this.”
Gwen turned away, slammed her hand against a sapling hard enough to snap it forward.
I stood with my hands on my hips, looking at Vince, looking at the body. Work the facts, I kept thinking, just work the facts and weigh your options. But all I came up with was a big fat zero and the fervent desire to be somewhere else.
“Can I make a suggestion?” Doris Whitehead spoke slowly, calmly. She stared at some spot beyond our heads, and for a second, I saw the schoolteacher in her. “It’d been simpler if you girls hadn’t showed up—”
“Talk about begging the fuckin’ obvious,” Gwen said.
“—I’d have taken care of it, killed him, and that’d been it.”
“And you’d have gone to jail,” I said.
She put her hands out, palms up. “I’m an old woman, he scared me, I knew he’d killed Jeannette. Who’s gonna convict me?” Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a half-smile. “Maybe he even had a gun. We can all tell a few little lies.” She finally looked at me, her eyes dark, probing. “I still could.”
“Good God,” I said.
“Maybe—”
“No,” I said, speaking as clearly and carefully as I could. “No more killing out here tonight. Not an option, understand?” Marge busied herself brushing invisible dirt off her pants, but said “Okay” without meeting my gaze. I looked at Beth who quickly said, “Agreed.” Tracy nodded slowly. Gwen avoided my eyes.
“Gwen?”
“Y’all just leave, and I’ll handle it,” she said.
I looked at her profile, her shoulders hunched slightly forward, and I knew exactly what she’d do. The realization made me woozy. “No,” I said, my voice soft.
“We all stay or none of us stays,” Beth said firmly, and Marge and Tracy nodded.
Gwen made a funny noise, but sob or cough, I couldn’t tell.
Doris Whitehead drew in a breath, pulled her shoulders back, and spoke briskly. “All right then. Here’s what I’m proposin’. You need time to think, and I’ve got a place to do the thinkin’. We take him out to my fishing camp off the Pearl River. ’Bout eighty miles from here. Used to be my husband’s, but he’s gone, and it’s mine now. No one passin’ by regular like to hear us, or him. Need a boat to get out there. Give you girls the time you need.” Before I could open my mouth she’d anticipated me. “Coupla you come with me, to make sure, you know,” she hesitated, her smile almost coy, “it’s all on the up and up.”
I squinted, befuddled by her logic. “We can’t transport him someplace else. That’s kidnapping. It’s illegal.”
Marge’s chuckle was short and not humorous. “What do you call this?”
Gwen gave a funny strangled laugh. “Fucked?”
“And how is this going to help us?” I said, still trying to get my mind around the concept of taking Vince somewhere else.
“Give us time to think when we aren’t panicked.” Marge looked at Vince as she spoke.
They had a point. We couldn’t stay here, and I wasn’t letting Vince go.
Tracy cleared her throat. “It might work. Temporarily.”
“Buy us some time,” Beth said.
“What about the body?” Marge said.
“Take it with us?” Beth said.
My mind had latched on to the “temporarily” and was churning as fast as my stomach now. “We leave it here. Gwen, that your issued gun or a personal one?”
“Personal,” she said.
“Good. Registered?”
“No.”
“Even better.” I held out my hand. “Give it here. We’ll dump it in the river.”
“I’m not giving you my gun.”
Beth wiped the back of her hand against her nose. “Pretty isolated up there in places, swampy and all. We could dump the body there too.”
“No,” Tracy said. “Sarah’s right. We don’t need to transport a body and a murder suspect. Leave him here, take the gun.”
She and Marge exchanged glances, and Marge said, “Okay, then.”
“Are y’all out of your fuckin’ minds?” Gwen said. “Shoot him, here, now, if you’re going to do that.”
“No,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Well,” Doris Whitehead said, “lemme go get my car ready.” She sounded as if we were off on a field trip.
I stared dully at her figure as she disappeared down the driveway, blinked, then tried to gather myself up to do what needed to be done. I would have given anything at that moment to turn back time. Way back, beyond police work and college and high school. Back to the womb, I thought, or dancing across the kitchen floor to the crooning of Marty Robbins, my feet on top of Daddy’s shoes, or up in his arms, waltzing through air thick with the possibility that my life could always be like this—safe, loved, beautiful, simple—back when consequences was a foreign concept, a word I couldn’t even pronounce much less need to understand.
I drove with the window down, letting the wind tear at my face and whip my hair into a tangle, as we headed east down Interstate 12, hovering just below the speed limit, toward the I-59 cutoff north that would take us to Pearl River. The taillights of Doris Whitehead’s old Buick in front of us flickered, and I worried about some overly zealous state trooper stopping her. Or us. Gwen sat silently in the passenger seat beside me. Vince was in the trunk, cuffed, gagged, his legs tied tight with rope Marge had retrieved from her car along with an extra set of handcuffs. We’d all shook our heads, amazed, as she hauled the stuff from her car. “You must’ve been a hell of a Girl Scout,” Tracy said, and briefly, for the first time that night, we laughed. Even Gwen’s burro hiccup laugh surfaced momentarily.
Tracy, Beth, and Marge had stayed behind at Jeannette’s to clean up the scene, removing all traces of our presence the best they could, including Gwen’s bullet cartridges. They’d promised me repeatedly they’d leave Roger’s body exactly where he’d fallen. I imagined Cowan and Barker working that scene, Kirk and Watson collecting evidence and taking pictures, Ricky there as well. My stomach twisted another notch.
I glanced at the dash clock: 12:05. Just over thirty minutes since we’d parked on the levee. I wondered whether Doris Whitehead’s camp was on the Louisiana or Mississippi side of Pearl River. Kidnappers transporting across state lines.
I chain-smoked cigarettes and watched the thick line of trees whiz by—dark, jagged blurs against the midnight blue of the sky—the tires humming and thump-clicking over patches in the highway. I watched the green and white signs approach and disappear: Denham Springs, Satsuma, Hammond, Covington, Abita Springs. I barely registered my favorite sign: Baptist Pumpkin Center.
We’d just pulled onto I-59 when Gwen cleared her throat. “I fucked up.” The dashboard lights partly illuminated her face.
“Yeah. Well.”
We were quiet for a minute, then I said, “I shouldn’t have hit you.”
“I would’ve.” She snorted, her “fuckin’ mama” snort. “Sarah Jeffries losing control. Really a fuckin’ watershed moment, huh?”
Doris Whitehead pulled out into the left lane, and I followed her, passing a slow-moving Datsun with a missing license plate.
“I could’ve sworn he had a gun,” she said.
“I know.”
“Did you see it?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Shit.”
A car passed us. Then another. “I’m sorry you have to pull this alone,” she said.
I shrugged.
We’d decided I’d pull the first watch with Doris and Vince. Tracy, Marge, and Beth
had day shift; they’d head up to the camp as soon as they got off shift. Gwen and I were off Wednesdays and Thursdays, but Gwen had her husband, Joe, to deal with.
“Joe going to think it’s weird you driving my car home?” I asked.
“Probably won’t even notice.”
“Tell him I had too much to drink, that you dropped me off at my apartment.”
“It’s my fuckup; I should be doing this.”
I tried to imagine her and Doris Whitehead baby-sitting Vince. And then we’d have two dead bodies to worry about. “It’s okay.”
Gwen thumped her head against the windowpane. “You’re the only one without complications.”
She was right. That was my life in a nutshell. Not complicated. I went to work, I came home. But there was Ricky. I tried to remember. We’d had dinner together, was it only six hours ago? He’d fixed pasta with oysters and andouille sausage while I put together a salad, cutting avocados in long strips. We’d walked Peacock over to Baton Rouge High and let her chase squirrels, came back holding hands, watching the clouds blend into dusk, put Peacock on the back porch and made love, long and unhurried, on the living room floor. He’d left at 10:30, kissed me on the nose, said, “Have fun, cher. Talk with you tomorrow.”
“Ricky’s not at the apartment,” I said.
Gwen sighed. “I’ll tell Joe I’m going to see my sister in Metairie and get back up here in the morning as soon as I can.”
“Okay,” I said.
She shifted in her seat. “Don’t decide anything until I get there.”
Irritation pushed up vicious and alive, hard under my skin. Decide? Decide what? I wanted to yell. But I didn’t say anything except, “Okay.”
We pulled into a tiny, dark marina way off the main road just after 1:30. On the Louisiana side, I noted with grim relief. It wasn’t really a marina, more like a dock with some boats tied up and a broken-down shack near the water’s edge. The mosquitoes were thick and hungry. Gwen helped us load Vince, a shotgun, and two sacks of groceries and clothes into a small boat. He struggled only a little bit until Doris Whitehead slapped him hard across the face and Gwen muttered something into his ear. I looked away.
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 20
