“Mornin’, Birdie.” Jerry smiled. “Thanks for helping us out.”
“You have my money?” she asked in a deep voice, blinking at him from behind those thick lenses.
“Got your money right here,” Jerry answered, reaching into his bloated pocket for a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills. He turned back to Cole. “I’m in the cash money business, son. See? Never have to wait for a bank to open. I am the bank.”
Birdie took her time counting the money and then scanned the parking lot and glanced up and down the street.
“All right,” she said, “there’s a loading dock in the back. Pull around. Quick. I’ve got an eight o’clock with a patient who had a pretty major disagreement with a porcupine.”
They did as they were told, Cole standing in the bed of the truck and passing the heavy plastic bags out to Jerry. There was a tense moment when a corner of one bag caught on a doorknob, ripping open to reveal a stiff, pale hand, but Birdie was there to calmly stop Jerry and free the bag. In a few minutes the truck bed was empty and they stood in the back of the veterinary’s building.
“Now what?” Cole asked.
Birdie pointed to a large contraption that looked like a steam engine.
“I’ll cremate them,” she explained. “And poof—they’ll disappear.” She blew at her fingers, as if to make a wish on a dandelion’s fluff.
“Come on, Cole,” Jerry said. “Time to go visit your banker.”
“No,” Cole said firmly. “I want to see it done. This is my money.”
Birdie glanced at Jerry, who shrugged and yawned.
“Take a seat, then,” Birdie advised. “It’ll be a bit. We’re not nearly up to the proper temperature yet.”
* * *
—
Not long after nine o’clock that morning, Cole left the bank with a ten-thousand-dollar cashier’s check. He slung wearily into Bill’s truck and passed the check to Jerry, who quickly examined it. He pointed at the memo line.
“Nice. I like that touch. ‘Consulting.’ ”
At the Rose, Jerry climbed out of the truck and back into his car. They drove far out of town to the southeast, where the landscape was slightly less rugged, more rolling foothills and arroyos than mountains. Off a gravel road and past a cattle-guard and -gate that Jerry unlocked, they drove toward what was obviously an abandoned ranch: a barn, a metal toolshed, and a clapboard two-story house whose windows were mostly broken, the front door hanging on by a single hinge.
They parked the truck in the barn, removed the license plates and VIN number, and then padlocked the old weathered building.
“Throw those plates in the garbage,” Jerry advised, dusting off his hands. “At a gas station or something. And make sure your prints aren’t on ’em either. I scrubbed that truck as best I could. You get real twitchy, we can always come out here at some point and torch the vehicle, but . . . I suspect you’re in the clear. And don’t forget, I want another check in a week, and that final payment’s due the first of the year. If you don’t—I’ll be leaving an anonymous tip for the local policía. Capiche?”
Jerry drove them back toward Gretchen’s house, leaving Cole just off the highway.
“You can’t take me up to the house?” Cole snapped.
“And get a flat tire on that shitty road? Go to hell, Cole. Have yourself a nice walk back, and hey, try not to kill anybody else for a little while, huh?”
Then Jerry drove off into the steadily brightening morning, and Cole was left in the cold, his hands trembling, a sickly-smelling sweat trickling down his forehead and back. There was something like seven miles ahead of him, all of it uphill.
27
A doctor roused Teddy from where he slept in a waiting room, just outside the Intensive Care Unit. The Wasatch mountains outside the hospital’s smoky black windows were smaller and farther away than what he was used to back home, the landscape somewhat drier and flatter. The doctor was an older woman, heavyset, with a broad, sun-tanned face; her hand on Teddy’s shoulder felt uncommonly kind, and he almost leaned his cheek into that touch.
“Your friend is very, very lucky to be alive,” she said.
Teddy exhaled a deep sigh of relief.
“But Mr. Christianson’s far from being in the clear,” she continued, sitting down beside Teddy. She studied his face for a moment. “Were you aware of the fact that your friend is a heavy crystal meth user?”
At first, Teddy shook his head. No, that wasn’t quite true, he thought. I mean, yeah, he might use it a little, but he’s not a “user.” Not Bart.
“Well,” Teddy began, “he was under a lot of stress. We’re building a house, and I think he was sort of using—sort of—you know, smoking a little meth to stay awake, to keep going. . . .” Even Teddy didn’t believe what he was saying.
“What is your name, sir?”
“Teddy Smythe, ma’am. Bart and I are business partners.” He swallowed, bit his lip. “And we’re buddies, ma’am. Known him all my life. There’s nothin’ he wouldn’t do for me. Or my family. He’s a good man.”
She nodded. “Mr. Smythe,” she began.
“Teddy,” he put in.
“Teddy,” she said, smiling gravely, “your friend has a serious septic infection stemming from sores all over his body. His immune system is . . . frankly, Teddy, it’s wasted. Right now, I am extremely concerned that he’s susceptible to further infections. He’s also going through withdrawals, and to be honest, the poor man looks not only malnourished but physically exhausted. This is to say nothing of his severed fingers, of course.”
She placed a hand on Teddy’s back.
“I need to prepare you for the fact that your friend is in an incredibly delicate, even dangerous position. There is a not-insignificant chance that we may still lose him. He lost almost a half-gallon of blood, Teddy. Most people with his injuries . . . They’d be dead.”
Teddy worried his hands, rubbed his shaved head, and tried with great difficulty not to cry.
“Does he have a partner, or family?” the doctor asked.
Teddy shook his head.
“Well, we’re going to have to keep him here for quite some time,” she said softly. “He could be in Intensive Care for weeks before we can release him to another room, and even then,” she continued, “he’s going to need to find a treatment center and also look into physical therapy for his arm and hand. For one thing, he’s going to need to think about whether or not he wants a prosthetic.”
Teddy was overwhelmed with the scope of his friend’s needs; his future; their future.
“You said you and your friend were working on a house? I take it you work for a construction business together.”
“We own our company,” Teddy explained. “We’re partners.”
After listening to Teddy, the doctor breathed a forlorn sigh of sadness before clasping her hands together. She hardly even needed to say it, that Bart’s construction days were likely over. He knew.
“How long can you stay with him?” the doctor asked.
Teddy shook his head. “I have to get back, I think,” he said. “We’ve got to finish this house. Thanksgiving is . . .”
“Today, as a matter of fact.”
“Shit,” he said. “I need to call my wife.”
The doctor smiled. “The good news is that your friend is alive, and we’re going to do our level best to get him healed and strong again. And you know what?”
Teddy glanced up at her.
“He owes his life to you. Most of the time, we don’t advise tourniquets. But in this case, you saved his life. Just so you know, you did everything right.”
She stood up.
“Now go call your wife,” she said. “And please, do get some sleep. I don’t care what you say, that house can wait.”
28
Cole picked up Teddy from the Jackson airport. It
was midafternoon when Teddy finally walked out of the terminal and he looked like a much older man. Bags of exhaustion sagged below his eyes, and his clothes hung off his body, wrinkled, dirty, and spotted in places with blood. Cole gave his friend a long bear hug.
“How’s Bart?” he asked.
Teddy shook his head and blew out a sigh of sadness. “He’s back there all alone,” Teddy said. “I just— Poor guy.”
“Yeah, well, let’s get you back to your family,” Cole said. “Britney’ll be worried sick.”
“She’s super-pissed is what she is,” Teddy replied. “And can’t say I blame her. Didn’t know where my phone was. I guess I left it in the house. She couldn’t get a hold of me. And man, I didn’t even know what day it was. That’s how much I’ve lost track of things.”
They drove in thick silence, neither of the men ready to speak of the horror they had participated in.
* * *
—
If Britney was angry, she put on a good face. The Smythe family condo smelled of Thanksgiving, and the girls seemed unaware of their father’s emergency trip to Salt Lake City. Soon, Cole and Teddy were slumped into chairs in the family’s living room, sipping boxed wine in front of a football game they could barely care about. Two of the older girls were in the kitchen with their mother, making final preparations, while the younger two seemed to orbit around Teddy, taking turns climbing into his lap for a short cuddle or telling him about the previous day’s doings. He listened intently, or at least made a sincere production of pretending to.
“You mind if we step outside for a minute?” Cole asked after a while. “There’s something I want to show you in my truck.”
Teddy eyed him suspiciously.
“Britney!” he called out. “Me and Cole are gonna go look at something outside. Back in five minutes.”
“Okay, well, dinner’s almost ready,” she replied. “So . . . hurry up, all right?”
The two men hustled out to the truck and stood around the bed, as if looking for some tool. Cole glanced back over his shoulder to find one of the girls staring out at them through parted drapes.
“Makes me want to throw up,” Teddy began, “just thinking about it. I mean, dear god, what happened, Cole?”
Cole recounted the night in the vaguest of details, and he did so to protect his friend, to keep from further incriminating him. For if there was one bona fide blessing to emerge from that gruesome night, it was this: Teddy had done nothing wrong. Teddy had harmed no one and seen no violence directly. So when Cole laid out their shared narrative, he did his level best to paint only the most general picture, figuring that Teddy could wade through his omissions and half-truths in the way a bloodhound captures a scent: not out of any great intellect, just intuition.
“And José?”
Cole shook his head.
“My lord,” Teddy murmured.
“Yeah.”
“Huh,” said Teddy when Cole was all through. “The only loose end, then, is Jerry, I guess. And the vet, maybe—and the truck.”
“Yeah, that’s how it looks to me. But the way I see it, we each got dirt on the other, and at this point, hell, Jerry’s already hidden the truck and helped with the bodies. And the vet, too. Ain’t like anyone’s hands are clean. The fact of the matter, Teddy, is that it was all a horrible accident . . . and there’s no sense in getting taken down for it.”
“But we sure do owe Jerry a shitload of money.”
“I couldn’t think of another way out, Teddy. You were gone, Bart was gone, and I had two bodies on my hands. Blood everywhere.”
Cole had left out the gory details of dispatching José but could easily recall with haunting clarity their struggle: the freezing water, the younger man’s wet black hair, and then, not long after, tying those knots around the already stiffening corpse. In a way, that was another accident. Cole hadn’t meant to kill him. And in the end, hadn’t he just defended himself?
Just then the front door opened and one of Teddy’s girls called out, “Dinner’s ready!”
* * *
—
They held hands and said a prayer before the meal: turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, a green-bean casserole, rolls, and both pecan and pumpkin pie. Cole hadn’t eaten in about two, almost three days, and he began loading his plate with a ludicrous amount of food. Teddy’s girls laughed at these two men, who you would have thought were starving, shoveling all that food into their mouths with a strange sort of sadness in their eyes, as if they weren’t actually sitting down for a holiday meal—with all the time in the world before them—but just rushing this food down their gullets before running off into the night.
Cole was aware of it, aware of how he couldn’t quite stop himself; this food was the best thing he’d ever tasted, and he could feel tears in the corners of his eyes at the thought of what they’d done, at the thought of Bart, and the reminder of all that was yet undone. If he could have, he might have thrown that November feast right into a dozen Tupperware containers and lit out for the jobsite, worked through the night, until the thing was done.
But he forced himself to relax, if only a bit, engaging the girls in conversation and making harmless jokes at Teddy’s expense, jokes designed to ensnare the whole table in the kind of laughter you’d expect on a holiday. Jokes designed to detour his mind away from the light smoke he’d seen rising out of that veterinary office’s smokestack that morning. Or the bats swooping around Bill’s truck in that darkened barn. Or Gretchen’s house and the bloody mess he’d still have to clean up the next morning.
Cole slept on Teddy’s couch that night after several slices of pie and a cup of decaf coffee. It was the kind of sleep so dense and deep that his mind went blank a second after his head touched the pillow. And morning itself came all too soon. Even though it wasn’t a school day, he heard the tumble of dry cereal landing in ceramic bowls and hairdryers blowing upstairs and the soft sounds of television talking heads chattering away. He lay on the couch, and the first thought that took shape in his mind was that there were now fewer than thirty days before Christmas. A stab of anxiety and fear caused him instantly to sit up and rub his eyes. He had to get dressed and make for the building site.
In the kitchen, Britney poured him a glass of orange juice and then went back to wiping down the counter with a dish towel. “Too bad Bart couldn’t join us last night,” she said, looking at Cole curiously.
“Yeah,” he responded, “too bad.”
He knew then that Teddy must not have told her everything, though he had to have told her about Bart and why it was he had disappeared for a day. She clearly had no idea about Bill or José; but, then, there was no reason for Teddy to tell her. And she would only have blamed Cole for everything, because she saw him as their leader, even if he wasn’t that, exactly, even if they were technically equal partners. Britney, Cole understood, was the kind of wife who, clear-eyed about her husband’s weaknesses and limitations, looked at everyone in his life as someone who would either help or hinder him.
Just out of town Cole stopped at a Walmart and bought a six-pack of Mason jars and a gallon-size plastic jug of vinegar.
Back at Gretchen’s house he scoured the garage floor for Bart’s fingers, which he found, half-buried in a drift of sawdust, and deposited them in the vinegar-filled jar. He was not sure what else to do with the digits and could not see throwing them in the garbage or out into the forest for the ravens and crows. . . . He walked the jar to their trailer and placed it into their dorm-size refrigerator.
29
The day after Thanksgiving was the best day of her life. She could not remember another day in recent memory and maybe not since her childhood when she’d felt so free, even as her body felt ever more fragile, even as the pain intensified, localized. Somehow, she felt incredibly light. After calling for a meeting with those senior partners of her firm, who, like her
, would actually bill for at least a few hours, even on a holiday Friday, she submitted a no-nonsense, one-paragraph-long letter of resignation, effective two weeks from that day. The partners present roundly thanked her for her enduring service to the firm and even offered up a standing ovation, something no one could remember ever having happened before. A firm-wide email was immediately circulated promoting a retirement cocktail party at a trendy subterranean speakeasy a block away, where she was sure to be given a ridiculously expensive token of their corporate affection and no doubt some sort of plaque or piece of engraved glass.
Back at Gretchen’s Pacific Heights penthouse, Abby was handling various facets of the move out to Wyoming: the purchase and delivery of furniture Gretchen had already picked out for the new house, a moving truck to pack and relocate certain effects inside the penthouse, and more practical details as well: a new pharmacy and oncologist, the transferring of bills, and the collecting of updates from Gretchen’s various real estate brokers, scattered, it seemed, all across the western hemisphere.
When Gretchen came home that evening, it was as if they were longtime roommates. Gretchen felt so relieved to have crossed all these obligations off her list, she actually flung her heels in the air, startling Abby’s raptor in its cage. She reached into the refrigerator for a bottle of Dom Pérignon, quickly poured two flutes of champagne, and, passing one to Abby, cried, “I’m done! I can’t believe it! I’m actually done!” And then, after two glasses each, Abby ordered a Lyft and they rode to the downtown steakhouse, where they sat at the bar, looking at men and laughing.
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