by Jeff Strand
She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. When she finally does speak, it’s to offer to take over the digging. I decline.
Now I almost wish she would grate on my nerves, because I’m still planning to murder her.
The digging is going quickly. I’m breathing heavily and working up enough of a sweat that I stop thinking about those wretched bugs attacking me.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take over?” she asks.
The hole is deep enough for a shallow grave, which is where I would stop if I were alone. Should I keep digging, just because I told her we’d make sure the body was never found? That seems kind of silly. Why would I even consider doing that? Why have I not already killed her? Yes, it’s convenient to let her hold the flashlight, but that’s no reason to let somebody live.
“All right,” I tell her. I step out of the grave and hand her the shovel.
She’s a good digger. Not to the point where I think “Uh-oh, she’s done this sort of thing before,” and she’s not digging as efficiently as I did, of course, but I’m impressed.
What would it be like to have a partner?
It’s a ridiculous thing to think about, but, fuck it, she’s busy digging and I might as well think about it.
I could commit the acts of murder. She could help me dispose of the bodies. Then we could make frenzied love in the deadly afterglow.
Probably not going to happen.
What would she do if I tried to hit on her? If I assured her that just because I’d murdered a human being, there was absolutely no obligation on her part, that she should in no way take this as any hint that I was seeking anything nonconsensual, what would she say?
She’d say something like “I just dug half of my boyfriend’s grave. Are you kidding me?”
She’s insane, though. At least a little bit. She might be experiencing some sort of weird sexual thrill from the whole thing, and she might be waiting for me to make a move. We could do nasty things right there in the open grave.
That would be a very appealing concept, if not for the bugs.
I bet she’s into bugs.
“Stop that,” she says.
“What?”
“You’re staring at my ass while I’m digging.”
She doesn’t say this in a playful “Tee-hee, stop staring at my shapely buttocks, you bad, bad boy!” manner. She says it in such a way as to indicate that she would really appreciate it if I would stop staring at her ass.
“I wasn’t,” I say, shocked at how embarrassed I am to have been caught.
“Do you want to take another turn?”
I shake my head. “I think that’s fine. Let’s dump him.”
She tosses the shovel aside and climbs out of the grave. We each take an end of Terrence’s body and drop him right in without ceremony. It sounds like something breaks as he hits.
“Rot in hell,” she tells him.
“Agreed,” I say.
I pick up the shovel and begin to scoop dirt back into the grave. She watches until his body is completely covered, then wanders off. Not out of sight, but far enough that she thinks I can’t tell she’s crying.
It’s okay. I was emotional after my first body disposal, and I didn’t even know the guy.
I’ll kill her after I finish filling in the grave.
That’s almost unspeakably idiotic. I should kill her now and put her in the grave. Did I seriously just consider the idea of filling in this grave, killing Mindy, and then digging a second grave for her body?
If I get caught and spend the rest of my life in prison, I kind of deserve it. God, I’m stupid.
I’ll do it humanely. I’ve never been one to torture somebody to death anyway. That’s just sadistic. I’m all in favor of ghastly violence, but there’s no reason to drag it out, unless you’re some kind of deranged sicko.
Shovel to the head. Give her a dented skull and a broken neck. She won’t even feel it. And if I don’t hit her quite right, if she falls to the ground gurgling blood and still alive, I’ll decapitate her with the shovel blade before she has too much time to suffer.
I should do it now.
Or I could let her live.
Really, truly, when you think about it, what would be the downside to dropping her off at her vehicle, shaking her hand, and wishing her well in her future endeavors?
Aside from the risk of something minor like, say, her blabbing everything to the police and sending them after me with torches, pitchforks, and semiautomatic machine guns?
There’s no decision to be made here. It’s time to stop pretending there is.
“Hey,” I call out to her. “Did you want to say something?”
“What do you mean?”
“Over the grave. Did you want to say something before I finish covering the grave? A few words for the deceased?”
“I already did. ‘Rot in hell.’”
I nod. “All right. I was just making sure.”
I add a couple more shovelfuls of dirt. Mindy curses under her breath, and then wanders back to the hole.
“It’s not like I was married to the son of a bitch. I don’t owe him anything.”
“I know.”
She looks into the grave. “Dear Terrence, if I had total control over your fate, I probably would not have gone so far as to murder you, so accept my apology, for what it’s worth. And I don’t actually hope you burn in hell, but I don’t want you in heaven either, so I hope there’s no afterlife. And I do hope that you get maggots in your eye sockets, and if that makes me a piece-of-crap person, I’m okay with it.”
“Well said,” I tell her.
My plan to smack her in the head with the shovel while she was speaking to Terrence would have been more effective if I had actually smacked her in the head with the shovel while she was speaking to Terrence.
She’s still staring into the grave.
So I offer up a mental apology that I’m not foolish enough to say out loud, even in a whisper, and then I swing the shovel.
It’s a good swing. I don’t botch the swing at all. There’s plenty of power behind it, and the aim is perfect. But she was expecting it, and she moves out of the way.
I swing again. This time I hit her. It’s not a solid hit, and it gets her in the side instead of the skull. The blow is nowhere close to fatal, not even incapacitating, though she loses her balance and tumbles into the grave.
I jump in after her. There’s probably nobody around for miles, but it’s best to kill her before she starts screaming.
She kicks me in the shin, so hard that I yelp. It feels like she cracked the fucking bone in two.
She screams.
I lift the shovel high over my head.
She kicks again, this time connecting dead center with my groin. The world goes blurry and I drop to my knees.
I let go of the shovel. I am vaguely aware of how close I come to a wacky slapstick moment where the shovel I’ve dropped bashes me on the head; however, the shovel misses me by an unknown distance and falls onto the dirt.
Mindy attacks.
We struggle. She has the advantage of my pain and disorientation, and also her vicious fingernails. But I’m stronger and have murdered people.
She’s winning.
I’m no sexist, but how the hell is she winning?
“What’s the matter with you?” she screams. “Why would you do that?”
I have no good answer at the moment.
She’s clawing at my eyes, but I have thus far avoided having them punctured.
I throw a punch at her neck that hits her shoulder. It’s a weak hit. Doesn’t slow her down at all.
I’m pulling my punches. Even down here in this grave, with the very real possibility that she might beat me in a physical fight, I’m pulling my punches. This is insane.
The punch she aims at my neck does not hit my shoulder, nor is it a weak punch. I clutch at my throat, gasping for breath.
She grabs a handful of my hair, and the next thing I know my
face is deep in the soft dirt.
“Why did you betray me?” she asks, sobbing. Cognitively, I know her words are laughably corny, but they sure don’t sound corny with my face in the grave dirt.
I’m so discombobulated that I attempt to answer, which just gets me a mouthful of dirt. I try to pull my head free, and can’t believe I’m unable to do so.
“You didn’t need to do that,” she says. “This didn’t have to happen. Everything was fine.”
I discover that spitting out dirt while one’s face is being pushed into dirt is ineffective.
I can’t breathe. I’m going to suffocate here in this grave unless I summon some more strength, but now she’s on my back, pushing my head down with both hands, and I may be screwed.
My face presses into something. It could be Terrence’s dead face. The drop cloth separates us, but it’s still eerie. Is he smiling?
Would he feel avenged by the knowledge that I’m going to die facedown on top of him, or would that be a further insult to his death?
I think: insult.
I desperately need to breathe.
What an awful way to die.
I’m trying as hard as I can to escape. I may have been pulling my punches out of some deranged feelings I still can’t understand, but I am most definitely trying to get her off me now, and I can’t do it.
I need her to show mercy.
I’m fading.
I’m gone.
* * *
I haven’t left the grave.
I’m sitting up now, leaning against the dirt wall. My face is still covered with dirt, and I try to blink it out of my eyes. They burn.
My mouth tastes like mud. I push air through my nose, trying to get dirt out of my nostrils.
My hands are bound together with duct tape.
Mindy is sitting in the grave with me.
“I found your backpack in the car,” she says. “At least I assume it was yours, unless Terrence carried around a kill kit I didn’t know about. You were pretty well-prepared.” She holds up a hunting knife. “Was this in case you needed to do detail work on him?”
It’s not damning evidence. I’ve never used it on anybody. But I still don’t like her touching my things.
“It was a gift.”
“Don’t lie to me. I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m stupid. I want you to tell me who you are.”
My feet are bound together with duct tape, too, wrapped at the ankles with what seems like half a roll of the stuff. Since I couldn’t beat her when I was trying to catch her off-guard with a shovel, it seems unlikely that I’m going to turn this situation to my advantage when I’m helpless and she’s got a knife.
“I’m nobody.”
“You’re not nobody.” She wipes her eyes, which are red and swollen. “I’m not good at torture. I’ve never done it. I have no idea how to get maximum pain out of somebody, but I can cut things and break things until you talk. Please don’t make me do that.”
“I’m nobody,” I insist. “Your boyfriend was banging my girlfriend and I killed him. That’s all there is to it.” She hasn’t found anything that contradicts my story. She’s being completely irrational.
“All there was to it, except for you trying to kill me, too.”
“I needed to clean up the loose ends. Nothing personal.”
“Sure. Why would killing somebody ever have to be personal, right?” She’s fidgeting with the knife, switching from one hand to the other. “I’m not saying we had anything. No spark. Nothing to keep us together after we finished burying Terrence. But…you didn’t have to try to hurt me. You really didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not sorry.”
“No, I really, truly am.”
I wish she’d bound my hands behind my back, so I could subtly try to free myself and take her by surprise. But my hands are in my lap. If I can get my arms around her neck, I might be okay, but that seems unlikely.
“I’m not going to get all girly with emotion on you,” she says. “I just want you to know that you didn’t have to do that.”
“I know. It was a mistake.”
“Tell me the truth about why you killed Terrence.”
“I already have.”
“You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you? Instead of giving me a straightforward answer, you’re going to make me torture it out of you.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. If that’s what you feel you need to do, if you’ve crossed some sort of line to where you want to force me to give you information I don’t have, then there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”
She wipes her eyes again. A tear runs down her cheek, leaving a narrow streak in the dirt on her face. “So let me make sure I’m one hundred percent clear on this,” she says, voice cracking a bit. “You are making the choice, on purpose, not to answer my question, so that I’m forced to try to make you talk. Is that what’s happening?”
“Don’t put this on me,” I tell her. “If you want to cut me, that’s all on you. That’s your choice. If you think you’re going to have problems with it afterward, if you think it’s going to haunt you, then maybe you shouldn’t do it.”
Can she tell I’m sweating?
Does it matter? An innocent man would sweat under these circumstances.
Mindy looks sad. Not simply resigned to what she’s going to have to do, but genuinely sad.
She holds the knife blade up to my left eye.
“I’m the Flatside Killer,” I say.
I’m not good with pain when I’m the recipient.
She lets out an incredulous laugh. “That’s who you are? How the hell did I not figure this out earlier?”
“You know me?”
“Of course I know you. Do you really think I lived with Terrence without knowing about the Flatside Killer? He used that story to hit on me at a bar.”
“I told you who I am. Please put the knife away.”
She lowers the knife away from my eyeball but keeps it out. “So, what, was he secretly trying to track you down, so you had to kill him before he discovered your true identity?”
“Nothing that elaborate.”
“Revenge?”
“Yes.”
“Revenge for telling the police after he accidentally found the bodies of people you killed?”
“Yes.”
“You think he shouldn’t have said anything? He should have just gone on with his evening as if nothing had happened?”
“What I did has nothing to do with the morality of what he did. He ruined my life. That’s all there is to it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“I prefer things that do.” She starts fidgeting with the knife again. I really wish she’d get rid of it.
“Are you going to let me go?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want a death on your conscience. Not even somebody like me.”
She holds the knife up to my eye again. “Don’t rush me into a decision. If you rush me, I’m going with my impulse, which is to kill you. So don’t fucking rush me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What you’ve basically told me,” she says, moving the knife even closer to my eye, “is that you killed the man I love, the father of my baby, and he was never cheating on me.”
I’m feeling a bit of panic now. “You knew he was.”
“No, I suspected he was. I thought that’s what he was doing tonight. But he wasn’t.”
“He was. I promise you.”
“With who?”
“I don’t know that. But I know—”
“You don’t know anything. He might have been completely innocent.”
“He hit you.”
“He didn’t deserve to die for that.”
“I disagree.”
“You killed him because you’re a psycho serial killer. You weren’t making up for any injustice. You’re just a
sadistic monster.”
I have an eye thing. I wouldn’t even be able to stick a knife in somebody else’s eye. I need her to move this knife someplace else or I’m going to lose it.
“I love you,” I tell her.
“What?”
“I could have killed you as soon as you got in my car…hell, I could have done it as soon as you walked into the storage unit. But I didn’t. I don’t understand my feelings most of the time, but I do understand this one, and I love you.”
It’s not true. Before she shoved my face in the dirt, I might have felt a mild affection toward her, but not anymore.
She’s not moving the knife.
“Fuck you,” she says. I have to admit that it’s probably the answer I deserve.
Mindy finally lowers the knife.
“Where do we go from here?” I ask.
“I’m delivering you, in a nice gift-wrapped package, to the police.”
“Really? You assisted me in the murder of your baby’s daddy and now you’re going to involve the cops?”
“I did not assist you in the murder. Your sociopath ass did that all by yourself. Helping you dispose of the body? Well, gee, that all makes sense if I tell them I knew who you were and was afraid for my life, right? I was distraught. I went along with you because I didn’t want to be in a grave, too.”
“You’d have no way of knowing who I was.”
“Is that so? My boyfriend and I meet when he tells me he was the one who found the victims of the Flatside Killer. When my boyfriend is brutally murdered, my first thought is, hey, maybe it’s the Flatside Killer. That’s so little of a stretch that I’m disgusted with myself for not thinking of it on my own.”
“It won’t work. They won’t believe you.”
“Of course they will. Even if there was a camera on me this whole time, I’d be okay. In fact, from now on, I did know you were the Flatside Killer, and you fell right into my trap. We’ll even play the heroic angle: I wouldn’t let you leave me at the storage unit because I was worried you might go after somebody else, and I wanted to keep you in my sight.”
“Again, it won’t work.”
“We’ll see. Do you know what’s worth the risk? The fame and glory associated with bringing a serial killer to justice. That’ll take care of my baby just fine, so I thank you.”
