Her eyes asked him to think about when a guy like Dean would confess that he’d abandoned his wife and children.
Marty scratched behind his ear with his pistol. The made-in-Texas noise suppressor added half a pound to the gun’s weight, about five inches to its overall length. He said, “Which is oldest, Jodie or Tiffany?”
Marty had put the question to Melanie, but Dean felt compelled to answer. They were his kids, weren’t they? As he opened his mouth to speak, Melanie willed herself to relax every muscle in her body, went limp as a fresh-killed octopus, slid away and down from Dean, exposing his upper body. Dean could have shot her, but realized instinctively that it would be much wiser to concentrate on Marty. But Marty had already shot him, once, twice, and then a third time, in the area of his collarbone. The groans of anguish Dean made as the bullets bored into him were considerably louder than the noise of the shots, which had been reduced by the suppressor to a soft thump, remarkably similar to the sound of a feather pillow being forcibly punched.
Dean dropped his pistol. He sat down hard, fell against a wall. The three red spots high on his chest merged quickly into one.
Melanie sat down on the bed, on her front-row seat. Dean’s chest turned red. Three streams of blood trickled down his chest and joined at his belt buckle to form a shallow pool of blood in the crotch of his pants. The wounds were bleeding at slightly different rates. Dean’s eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. Or anything at all, really. She said, “Is he already dead?”
Marty shrugged. “Not quite, but he’s getting there. I shot him three times. It’s got to hurt. Want me to call an ambulance?”
“Not just yet. Probably never.” Melanie knelt beside Dean. She looked into his darkening eyes as she searched his pockets, found his cigarettes. She tilted her head towards Marty, brushed back her hair as he sparked his lighter.
He said, “I thought you’d quit for good, this time.”
“Me too.” Melanie exhaled a stream of blue smoke into Dean’s face. He lifted his head an inch or two, and looked her in the eye. There was something about him that reminded her of a dog that hadn’t been fed for a long time. But she was unmoved. She said, “How long is it going to take?”
“Until he dies?” Marty saw that Dean was watching him, listening hard. He said, “I dunno. He’s bleeding to death. Maybe not as slowly as you’d think, because what you’re seeing is only a small part of his problem.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Look how pale he is. He’s bleeding internally. I bet he’s already got a bellyful of blood. But you just can’t tell. He could last a long time, all night long, maybe.”
“Good,” said Melanie.
Marty wondered what Dean had done to her. He didn’t want to know. He wondered if he should ever ask.
He said, “Where’s Harold?”
“At the bottom of a lake.”
“Steve?”
“In a freezer.”
Marty indicated Dean. “He put him there?”
“Him an’ his buddy, Ozzie.”
“And where’s Ozzie now?”
“With Steve.”
Marty said, “I watched the six o’clock news. Joan looked me in the eye and swore up and down that Harold rented fifteen safety-deposit boxes but that they were all empty, except for one that contained fifty thousand dollars.”
“She’s lying.”
“And very rich,” said Marty. “Dean and Ozzie get any of it?”
“Not a penny.”
Dean hadn’t said a word or uttered the smallest sound. His chest and his pants all the way to his knees were soaked in blood. His mouth hung wide open. His eyes were all pupil. His face and hands and throat were ghostly white streaked with smudges of palest blue. He reminded Marty of a picture he’d seen a long time ago, of the aurora borealis.
Melanie said, “What’re you thinking?”
“How deep was the lake?”
“Deep enough.”
Marty said, “How deep?”
Melanie flicked ash at Dean. She nudged him with the toe of her shoe. “He said about twenty feet.”
“Harold had something tied to him to hold him down, did he?”
“He was handcuffed to part of a bed.”
Marty nodded, thinking about it. He said, “Twenty feet, that’s not so bad. I could dive down, slip a rope around him, haul him back up.”
Melanie said, “I don’t mean to sound coarse, but why bother?”
“Maybe we could find a use for him. Revive him, sort of. Where’s the lake, Melanie?”
“Up by Whistler.”
Marty said, “Nice and cold up there. That’s good.” He crouched down and bent Dean’s legs at the knees to keep the blood away from the carpet. He said, “Did Ozzie and Dean get Harold to make the usual pitch on tape, get him to speak into a tape recorder?”
Melanie nodded.
“Good,” said Marty.
He touched Dean’s throat just below the line of his jaw. Dean’s body temperature had plummeted. He felt icy cold. His heart was beating quick as a hummingbird’s — and by now was probably pumping about the same amount of blood. Talk about the living dead ...
Marty wondered if he could find a use for Dean. And what about Steve and the other guy, Dean’s pal, Ozzie? What small or large roles could they play in the drama to come?
Marty’s imagination played across a darkening landscape. He had four character actors to choose from. Three of them were deceased. Pretty soon he’d have a quartet of corpses to strut and bow upon his stage, none of them drawing a penny’s worth of salary.
Plus he had himself, and Melanie.
And Joan, who still believed Harold was alive.
Five million bucks.
Eight, if Jake could be believed.
He’d be risking everything. But that made perfect sense, since he had everything to gain.
Melanie said, “I’m going to take a shower.”
Marty said, “Yeah, okay.”
She hesitated, eyed Marty warily. It struck him that she’d been at least as badly wounded as Dean, and that he’d better keep that thought in mind for a very long time and maybe forever.
She said, “Would you mind washing my back?”
Marty picked up Dean’s pistol. He ejected the magazine and racked the slide, tossed the empty pistol on the bed. He smiled warmly at her and said, “Be there in a minute.”
By now Joan would be under the mistaken impression that her ordeal was over. Her resistance would be worn to a nub. She’d be ripe for the picking.
All he had to do was work out a plot that was feasible and find a way to exploit his pool of talent, write a few lines of convincing dialogue ...
Melanie had shed her clothes on the way to the bathroom. The door was shut. The toilet flushed. Was she singing? Or crying? Water drummed on tile and glass as she turned on the shower. He gave her a minute to get settled, then pushed open the door and eased into the bathroom. Melanie was a dim shape, a pale wraith in the steam.
Marty said, “Honey, have you got a pen I can borrow, and some paper?”
48
Under blue skies and a gentle southerly, the outgoing tide swept the ex-Rottweiler-owner’s body beneath the Lion’s Gate Bridge and into the pleasingly sparkly but hardly pristine waters of English Bay.
The rising tide carried the corpse towards Third Beach. It bumped along the convex granite wall of the swimming pool that, only a few years ago, the Parks Board geniuses had filled with sand and covered with black asphalt, and called a “water park.”
To the north there was a narrow strip of sand and an inhospitable jumble of low rocks that were home to tight-packed crowds of drab grey barnacles that resembled minuscule volcanoes.
At a few minutes past six in the morning, the eldest son of a Japanese family that was collecting seaweed for their city garden discovered a one-armed corpse in a tidal pool nestled between several large boulders, face down in the muck. With the exception of a deaf g
randmother, all members of the family immediately ceased and desisted collecting seaweed.
There was a brief, heated discussion.
The eldest son was delegated to make an anonymous 911 call from the payphone located at the concession stand in front of the asphalted swimming pool.
The 911 call was logged at 6:13.
A unit was dispatched. The body was confirmed at 6:27.
Willows’ phone rang at 6:31. He picked up on the eighth ring. Sheila had arrived unannounced at a little before midnight. She’d harangued him until well past two in the morning. He’d cracked the seal on a bottle of Cutty as she drove away in her rented car. He and Parker had finally gone back to bed at a little past three. By then the level of Scotch in the bottle had sunk below the midpoint of the label.
As Parker padded naked towards the bathroom, she wondered aloud if she was in any condition to go to work.
Willows advised her not to worry about it. From what had been said to him over the phone, he believed her first glimpse of the body was going to turn her absolutely stone-cold sober.
*
It was obvious, even from a considerable distance, that the corpse had been in the water a long, long time.
Willows and Parker approached slowly, from upwind. Willows chewed on a mouthful of breath mints as he wriggled his hands into a pair of latex gloves. A rusty chain led from a black leather belt to a bulge in the back pocket of the man’s ragged jeans. Willows knelt, tugged gingerly and then forcibly at the chain. The body twitched and shuddered as if it were alive. Willows shifted his angle of attack. He yanked on the chain, but the wallet wouldn’t come out of the pocket.
Exasperated, Willows used his penknife to slice through several inches of waterlogged denim, and then the leather belt. He eased the wallet out of the ruined pocket. The chain rattled softly as he took several quick steps backward, away from the stench.
The wallet was made of black leather. Willows pried it open. Inside was a waterlogged half-inch-thick sheaf of thousand-dollar bills, gold and platinum credit cards, a driver’s licence.
He shut the wallet and balanced it on the corpse’s swollen buttock. He stood up. He handed Parker the driver’s licence.
She glanced at it, smiled.
Fatboy.
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