Dark Duet

by Eric Beetner

  “We can’t leave him there,” Garret said.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s still one more out there. The other brother, Rafael. We can’t leave anything that would tip him off that we’re coming for him.”

  “Who the fuck is gonna tell him?”

  “I don’t know.” Garret stood and threw down the bloody towels. “What if the police come by here and find this mess? They’d call his own brother to tell him he was dead, right?”

  Kyle shrugged, his crying over for now.

  “And what about the people they deal with?” Garret asked. “If they killed a guy, they’re probably into some shit we don’t know about. What if someone comes by looking for him?”

  “Fine,” Kyle said. “So what do we do with him?”

  Garret looked around the store. The broken glass on the front door was a sign of trouble. Someone would see it. He had no idea how long it would take to find Rafael and he really didn’t want a killer with experience after the two novices. But my God, he wasn’t a virgin anymore.

  Garret’s eyes went out of focus. He’d killed a man. In self-defense, sure, but he’d pulled the trigger on another human and ended him. And he planned on doing it again.

  He thought back to the night when Trip suggested breaking into the Smart Mart. If he’d stood his ground, said no. Been a man. Now he’d bypassed man and went straight to killer. But time only runs in one direction. If they hadn’t come here that night, this wouldn’t have happened. But if the two brothers hadn’t killed that guy or killed Trip. Or tried to kill him. Garret’s eyes came back in focus as his justification became clear to him again. Time to hide a body.

  “What if we make it seem like he died in a car accident?” Kyle said. “We could put him behind the wheel of his car and put a brick on the pedal or something.”

  “He’s got a bullet in him.” Garret said. He gave Kyle a look that implied how stupid he thought the idea was. “For Christ sake, he’s got three.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m just thinking.”

  It was thinking about the other night that gave Garret the idea. “Let’s put him on the roof.”

  “The roof?”

  “Yeah,” Garret said, moving under the ceiling panel where they’d dropped down from the rooftop with Trip. “No one will see him up there, and why would anyone look up there? By the time anyone does, we’ll be done and it doesn’t matter if they find him.”

  “How do we get him up there?” Kyle said, staring at the ceiling as well.

  Garret did some quick planning—moving shelves, if one of them went up first and the other one handed off the body. It all seemed too difficult. The deadweight, the clean up afterward.

  “We should do it from outside.”

  Kyle looked out the broken door. “How?”

  “It doesn’t have to be pretty. We just get him up high enough to toss him over the edge so he lays up there out of sight.” Garret moved to the doorway to survey his options. “We can stand on the hood of my car. I’ll climb on the roof and then you hoist him up and I’ll grab him and pull him up.”

  “It’s way too far.”

  “Fine.” Garret searched aisle three, then moved to aisle four. He found the automotive section. Not much there, but enough. Next to the motor oil and the air fresheners were jumper cables, three sets. Garret lifted them. Sturdy, long. “We’ll make a harness out of these. I’ll climb up and you loop these under his shoulders, and I can lift him.”

  Kyle’s shoulders slumped like he just wanted it to be over. Giving in, he said, “Fine. Pull the car around.”

  CHAPTER 13

  He couldn’t remember the man’s name. Sutherland had memorized the address and his license plates, but he’d made a point of not learning the man’s name so he wouldn’t be so real. The idea of Tracy screwing another man—a nameless, harmless man—didn’t hurt as much as knowing who the guy was.

  Now the man whose name he didn’t know lay still on the brick patio next to a stereo speaker hidden inside a fake plastic rock. A snail crawled a few inches left of his arm. Sutherland could see blood in the unreal light coming off the energy efficient bulb in the back patio light fixtures.

  The gun was still in Sutherland’s hand. The guy down there, he dropped his. When he died, Sutherland guessed. Most guys would.

  He listened to a dog barking a block away, otherwise the neighborhood remained quiet. Most people think every little sound in the night could be a gunshot, until they hear the real thing and then it becomes a car backfire—which cars don’t even do anymore—a fallen branch, a loud TV.

  Coverup plans swirled in Sutherland’s mind. There had to be a huge advantage to being sheriff. He could write his own report, his own version of the truth, if only he could decide what that was.

  The back door opened again. Tracy stepped out tentatively, a thin robe wrapped around her body. A robe Sutherland had never seen before. One she bought and kept here, at his house.

  “Mike?”

  Shit. That was his name. Mike.

  She set her bare feet on the bricks and turned. She saw her husband first—standing with a gun in his hand outside her boyfriend’s bedroom window. Then she saw Mike. Tracy gasped. The tiny hairs on her bare legs stood up and caught the light.

  “Hank, what have you…?”

  Sutherland stood still. He had no answer. What he’d done was lying between them. He could have asked her the same. He’d been planning on it. He, on his high horse, questioning her from the moral high ground. How could she? What was she thinking? Didn’t she know how hurtful this was?

  Tracy stood shivering in the night air thinking all of his questions back at him.

  “Oh my God. My God. Is he…is he dead?”

  She knew he was. She had to. Otherwise she would have bent down and tried to rouse him or checked for a pulse. Sutherland could tell she knew right away. He thought it must have been the way he was staying so still. Or maybe death settles over everything like a chill in the air. You feel it even when you can’t see it.

  “Tracy, I—”

  “What the fuck are you even doing here?” She didn’t bother to keep her voice low. If the gunshot hadn’t brought anyone out of their homes, her shouting would. “Did you follow me?”

  “Me? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Obviously you know the answer to that.” Tracy looked away from Hank and caught sight of Mike again. “Oh, God. You fucking killed him.” She broke into tears. Tracy clutched the robe tighter to her, but it was too thin to ward off the cold.

  Sutherland moved for the first time since he shot. “Tracy…” He put a hand out to her. She jerked away.

  “Don’t.”

  She crouched down and held a hand out over Mike’s face, too afraid to touch his already cooling flesh. Her crying went quiet now, an open-mouthed, silent sob.

  “Tracy, he had a gun. He drew on me. I was justified to shoot back.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Hank.” Her eyes ran over Mike’s shirtless body, the two bullet holes placed by an obvious marksman. “What am I gonna do? I can’t really call the police, can I?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Sutherland said. “He drew on me, Tracy. He must have thought I was an intruder.”

  “Aren’t you? That’s exactly what you are. You don’t belong here. This is mine. This made me happy, being here. With him. But you can’t stand to see me happy, can you?”

  “Tracy, calm down.”

  “You don’t belong here,” she repeated in a shrill screech sure to wake the neighbors.

  He took another step toward her. “Come on, now.”

  Tracy leaned back, away from him. She put a hand down on the bricks to steady herself and pushed up to standing again. When she stood, she had Mike’s gun in her hand. She raised it to her husband.

  “Tracy, don’t—”

  His words were cut off by her shot. A spark of fire lit up in Sutherland’s thigh. At such close ra
nge, she couldn’t have missed. His muscles reacted before his brain. His right arm went up, the gun already there. No draw required, and less time to rethink things. Two more quick rounds. Six more in the clip.

  Tracy’s robe flapped open as she fell. Streaks of blood ran across her bare breasts. She landed on her back, her skull cracking the bricks with a frightening sound. It would have meant a concussion, or worse, if she hadn’t already been dead by the time she hit the ground.

  CHAPTER 14

  Finding Rafael’s address was easy. Getting Troy onto the roof was hard.

  They’d tripped over the address when Garret went behind the counter. Procrastinating on the task of hauling a dead body to the front door, he got distracted by a small strongbox with the lid open, Troy’s job of finalizing the night’s numbers not quite finished. Inside were papers pertaining to the Smart Mart. Liquor license, property tax statement, more official business papers that listed Rafael as the primary owner in the business, with Troy as secondary. Some listed the Smart Mart as the address while others listed an address in Pine Hills, a development for the smart set of Bishop. Garret pocketed a slip of paper before turning back to Troy’s bleeding body.

  He wasn’t that heavy, but the left turn out from behind the counter to the shop floor was tricky while pulling a man by his legs. Kyle was outside positioning the car as close to the wall as he could get it. Garret had wanted to shoot rock, paper, scissors to see who got to move Troy’s body, but one look at the stricken expression on Kyle’s face and he knew he should suck it up and do it. The night was not over and he needed Kyle still.

  Garret’s feet crunched glass under his sneakers as he finally got Troy turned and slid onto the linoleum flooring. Marking the path they’d traveled was a dark smear of blood. Garret started to taste it in the back of his throat. He hadn’t been sure what it was at first, but some primal part of his brain saw the blood and connected the smell to the sight. He nearly gagged. He had to remind himself—Fuck this guy. He killed Trip. He tried to have me killed. Who knows what other evil shit he and his brother have done?

  Keeping up the momentum of hate toward the brothers was tough, but now he had the added incentive of Rafael’s wrath. If Troy’s older brother discovered what went on here, he would show no mercy. They killed before. How many times, Garret wasn’t sure, but they were bad men.

  Garret felt like a paper target at a firing range. One who finally got a gun himself and decided to fight back.

  Kyle appeared at the door. He stopped when he saw Troy’s body. “You ready?”

  Garret was able to get from the hood of his car to the top of a dumpster and then jump up to grab the lip of the roof, just like Trip showed them two nights before. He leaned over the edge to where Kyle had Troy splayed out on the hood.

  “Toss me the cables,” Garret said. Kyle flung one end of their makeshift rope of jumper cables and Garret caught it. He brought the other end up to him and then dropped the loop down to Kyle who fed it under Troy’s armpits.

  “Okay,” Kyle said, backing away.

  “Get him up to the dumpster. I got no slack here.”

  Kyle sighed and muscled Troy’s body onto the closed lid of the dumpster. To Garret he looked like the night when Zach Geisz passed out after too much domestic vodka and they pushed him over the wall into his own front yard before honking the horn on the way down the street to wake his parents.

  With Troy up a few feet higher, Garret could get a better grip on the harness and he started pulling. As soon as Troy was swinging free Garret knew he couldn’t hold him. The cables were scraping against the side of the building making it hard to pull them up. He had no leverage since Troy’s body weight was trying to pull him forward over the edge. And with each tug upward, Troy’s arms lifted a little bit higher. The under-the-pits strategy wasn’t going to last long.

  Garret was sweating. Kyle couldn’t look. He turned his back on the whole scene under the guise of watching for cars.

  Garret pulled again and the cable slipped. Troy’s body fell, sliding for a moment down the brick side of the squat building before his dangling legs caught on something and pushed his body out. He came crashing down on top of Garret’s hood. Kyle leaped into the air at the sound.

  “Fuck,” Garret said.

  “Holy shit, man,” Kyle said.

  In the distance, a long way away but coming closer, they heard sirens.

  Garret was on the move. He jumped to the dumpster, anticipating a solid landing, but the lid was plastic and the force bent the cover and he went crashing into the trash pile. The bags of garbage broke his fall but covered him in a smell worse than the tang of blood he’d only just gotten out of his nose.

  Kyle ran to the edge of the dumpster. “Shit. You okay?”

  “Help me out of here.”

  Kyle pulled Garret out and they both stood shaking and brushing off the trash and the night in general.

  “Let’s just get the fuck out of here,” Garret said. He got no argument from Kyle.

  He started the car, adrenalin coursing through him. He let the anger take him. He put it in reverse and backed away at full throttle. Troy’s body spun off the hood and landed in the short weeds next to the dumpster, out of view from the parking lot until sunrise at least.

  Garret threw the paper with Rafael’s address on it to Kyle in the navigator seat. “Get us here.”

  He drove away telling himself—They deserve it. They deserve it.

  CHAPTER 15

  “It’s been a hell of a week so you’ll forgive me if you think I’m overreacting.”

  Rafael examined his nails, checking for chips or breaks. The man in the chair probably would think he was overreacting, but his lips were too swollen to speak. Repeated punches to the mouth with a dictionary will do that.

  “You see,” Rafael continued. “We’ve had a bad run. A sudden uptick in late payments, partial payments.” He squared off with the bloody man in the chair. “Nonpayments.”

  He didn’t like to do business at home, but this one had been tough to find. And really, Rafael didn’t think they should have to go out looking for these jerks anyway. They should hire someone for that. But, times being what they were, and with all their business being split two ways, payroll didn’t have room for a hired hand.

  So here he was, in his own home office, extracting the interest on a defaulted loan.

  The loan business had been great for a while there. An economic collapse, coupled with a tightening of bank lending put a whole lot of people off the approved list for a traditional loan. But Rafael and his brother didn’t offer traditional loans.

  “I’m a business owner,” Rafael said as he went to a small cabinet in the corner of the room. “I own five Smart Marts. You knew that, right? Five of them across the county. That’s what we call collateral. If I were to take out a loan and not pay it back—” he unlocked the cabinet, “ —the bank would take my stores.” Rafael turned, a dull piece of metal in his hand. “But we’re not a bank and you, sir, have fuck all for collateral.”

  He let the steel pipe slide through his hands until the grip rested in his fist. This was Rafael’s own invention. An eighteen-inch-length of pipe, threads on both ends which he capped after filling the inside with birdshot. Once it was sealed up nice and tight, a weighty and brutal tool, he took a grip he found in a bike shop and fit it onto the end to make a firm grip for him when he swung the pipe. A dictionary is good for a lot of things, but it won’t break a knee without some real effort. With Rafael’s pipe thingamajig, knees cracked like potato chips at the bottom of the bag.

  “Please,” the man slurred.

  “Hey,” Rafael said. “I don’t like it any more than you do.”

  While not entirely true, Rafael did wish his brother was there to help out. But then the role of enforcer and business manager and numbers guy and…it all came down to Rafael. His baby brother sometimes wasn’t worth the sperm it took to make him.

  He
took a small comfort in the amount of calls and early payments he’d gotten in the past day or two. When word got out about Willy, and word always gets out, the brothers’ stock went up. Guys who owed them and thought maybe they could squeeze a few more days or weeks out of the loan suddenly found hidden cash they’d forgotten about. A few great aunts died unexpectedly and Rafael got inheritance money as payoffs.

  The new reputation only encouraged him to act the part, which is how a man ended up in his living room with a bloody face and soon-to-be-broken kneecaps.

  Rafael called, reminded him of the payment, reminded him it had been a while since they heard from him, and added a final reminder about Willy and what a shame it was. Too, too bad. Then what do you know? A knock at the door. A partial payment that wouldn’t even cover interest but was offered as a “good faith” down payment.

  The only thing Rafael had faith in was the pipe in his hand. He squeezed the grip. Fit his hand like it had been made in a mold.

  “Maybe it’s our fault,” he said. “Next time, we’ll check to see if you have the proper collateral. It’d probably be much easier for both of us if I was doing this to your car right now.”

  He smiled and brought the pipe high over his head.

  CHAPTER 16

  Well, this is what you came here to see, Sutherland thought. Not exactly. He stood staring at his wife and another man flat on their backs half naked together. But dead, each with a pair of bullets he had put there himself.

  When Tracy first fell back to the brick patio, she exhaled a few times, a simple muscle contraction after death. The last few bursts of electricity leaving the brain. Tiny puffs of condensation left her mouth. The wounds in her chest gave off steam as the hot blood hit the cool night air. Both bodies were perfectly still now, chilled as the bricks below them. Another obstacle for the garden snails to navigate.