The Ice Harvest

by Scott Phillips

  “If we get it wrong, some cop might decide to stop us and tell us how to do it right. What do we do when the footlocker starts talking to him?”

  “That won’t happen,” Vic said, but his face was troubled. “I see people do it like that all the time.”

  “Come on, it’s maybe twenty minutes to Lake Bascomb, even with snow. Let’s just put him in the backseat.”

  The voice rose from the locker again. “I’ll make it worth your while, Charlie. I’ll say I couldn’t find you. You can take the money with you. All of it. I’ll bring back Vic’s head in a hatbox and that’ll be enough for Bill.”

  “You feel like listening to that the whole way out there, Charlie?”

  “We’re less likely to get stopped that way. And this way we can fit all the luggage in the trunk and we won’t have to repack it afterward.”

  Vic sighed. “Okay, you win. Whatever Charlie wants. I’m tired. Let’s just get the bastard into the car and get going.”

  They lifted the footlocker by the handles. Roy’s struggling inside caused Charlie’s grip to loosen, and he dropped his end hard onto the cement floor of the garage, prompting a cry of pain and surprise from within. Again he lifted his end and they maneuvered it successfully though with some difficulty onto the backseat. Charlie was again impressed by the car’s deceptively large interior.

  “You know, that’s a hell of a big footlocker. I’m not sure this thing would have fit into the Lincoln’s trunk, either.”

  “Yeah, maybe not,” Vic said. “Let’s get the bags loaded and split.”

  There wasn’t a car in sight as they turned off the old state highway three miles east of town. Roy’s pleadings had ceased and been replaced by low, garbled mumblings. Charlie found that he was almost able to block the noise out of his mind beneath the din of Christmas carols from the easy-listening station, and then Vic reached out and turned the radio off. “Heard enough of that shit to last me a lifetime,” he said, and the incoherent moaning was the only sound to be heard over the engine and the heater.

  Roy probably wasn’t getting much air through those bullet holes, Charlie thought. Without them he most likely would have suffocated already. Vic sat staring straight ahead, his face blank, saying nothing. He looked like he might be headed to cash in some empty pop bottles, or pick up his dry cleaning.

  “I gave the negative to Renata,” Charlie said absently. He still wanted a drink.

  Vic’s brow creased. “What negative?”

  “Cupcake.”

  Vic turned to face him, stunned. “You gave her the negative? What the fuck for?”

  He shrugged. He shouldn’t have mentioned it. “Christmas present.”

  “That’s not funny. You don’t go doing things like that. It upsets the balance of power.”

  “What do we care? We’re gone anyway.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “So it’s okay to fuck Bill Gerard over for three and a half years and then empty his operating accounts, but it’s not okay to give away a lousy photograph?”

  Vic shook his head, disgusted. “Never mind. Just never mind.”

  “She told me Roy was in looking for us both tonight.”

  “Why would she bother to tell you that? Like it’s something sinister? What did you tell her, anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Charlie, why’d she think you were giving her the fucking negative? Of all the dumb bastards I’ve ever met in my whole life you’re the one. You are the one.”

  “Vic, Bill Gerard knows. That’s why we have Roy locked in a box back there.”

  Vic was very quiet. “That’s not the point,” he said softly. They were silent for a few seconds, and Charlie made out a prayer coming from the box, a series of alternating Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

  Vic shook his head. “Listen to him, trying to get in good at the last minute.”

  “It’s funny, I just said a Hail Mary earlier tonight for the first time in I don’t know how many years, and here it is popping up again.”

  “That’s inspirational.”

  “You Catholic, Vic?”

  “Yeah, course I am. So are you, right?”

  “Used to be, anyway.”

  “What do you mean, used to be? Once a mackerel snapper, always a mackerel snapper.”

  “Well, I married a Congregationalist, so my kids are being raised that way.”

  “I’d never let my kids get raised anything but Catholic. Not that Bonnie’d ever try.” Vic turned around and looked back at the footlocker. “Hey, Roy, what’ve you done since your last confession? Nothing too bad, I hope.” He laughed. The raw monotone chant from the footlocker abruptly ceased, and Vic laughed louder. “Sounds to me like Roy’s headed straight for hell.”

  “I want to talk to a priest,” Roy said. He sounded drunk.

  “That’s right, isn’t it, Charlie? You die with anything worse than a venial on you without confessing you go directly to the hot place.”

  “That’s what I seem to remember, but I’d really have to ask a priest or a canon lawyer. There might be some sort of exemption if you’re genuinely unable to get to a priest and you genuinely want to confess. Maybe some extra time in purgatory.”

  “Fucking lawyers, always looking for a loophole. I say Roy’s going right from Lake Bascomb into the lake of fire.”

  At that Roy began kicking fiercely at the top of the box, and Charlie began to imagine dropping the trunk into the frigid black lake water. He wasn’t sure he could make himself do it, wasn’t even sure he could stand by and let Vic do it. Why couldn’t Vic have just shot the poor bastard? This was a long way out of their way and a lot of time out of the schedule just to satisfy Vic’s Grand Guignol sense of revenge. Maybe Roy was right, and once they were out at the lake Charlie would be joining him under it. Maybe he should consider accepting Roy’s offer. He knew the part about letting him get away with the money was a bluff, but it seemed to him there was a good chance Roy would let him live. Not a bad quid pro quo, it seemed to Charlie. Roy bellowed incoherently inside the footlocker, probably delirious from the lack of oxygen, or maybe from the blow to the head.

  “You ever killed anybody before, Charlie?” Vic looked at him sideways.

  “No.”

  “Thought you were in the army. Weren’t you in Vietnam?”

  “I was stationed in Germany. I was out before they started the big buildup over there, anyway.”

  “I could’ve gone to Korea, if I hadn’ta been in jail. I even volunteered to go if they’d let me out, but they didn’t bite. I would’ve gone, too. I wanted to.”

  Charlie cleared his throat. “So how come you went all the way out to the Midas Touch to bury Deacon?”

  Vic shrugged as if it were obvious. “If I left him in the house or buried him in the yard someone might’ve seen me, and if I ever got picked up it’d be that much easier to pin it on me. And I figured if you and me are missing, and Roy’s missing, and they find Deacon’s body, who’re they gonna blame for all of it?”

  “Bill Gerard?”

  “Exactly.”

  Roy’s breathing was ragged now, loud, heaving wheezes.

  “Maybe we should let him have a little air in there, Vic.”

  “Are you nuts? He’ll be dead in ten minutes.”

  Charlie pondered the idea of Bill Gerard going down for the whole mess. That he and Vic might be considered possible victims instead of perpetrators hadn’t occurred to him before this. They would be counted as missing and presumed dead. A sudden, intrusive thought brought with it a momentary wave of panic.

  “Hey, Vic?” He felt his voice rise half an octave on the second syllable.

  “Yeah?” Vic was looking away from him, out the passenger side at the passing snowscape of low fences and telephone poles.

  “What do you think really happened to Desiray?”

  Vic said something under his voice without turning.

  “What? I didn’t hear what you said.”

 
His voice rose as he repeated himself, still facing out the window. “I said don’t worry about Desiray.”

  “I’m not worried. I just, you know, I wonder sometimes.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  They drove on, accompanied by the loud, wet gasps from inside the footlocker. Finally Vic faced forward.

  “Look, Charlie, she knew what we were up to.”

  “How’d she figure it out? Nobody else did.”

  “I was screwing her at the time. She was around a lot; she started putting things together. One day she just asked me, Are you ripping off Bill Gerard? She caught me off guard. I told her.”

  “You told her?”

  “What was the point of denying it at that stage? Jesus, she’d already figured it out. She wanted to cut in, come along with us. She wanted to come with me, specifically.”

  “So you killed her?”

  “What would you have done? She wanted a third of it. That’s one-third of my half and one-third of yours.”

  “Jesus, Vic, she had two kids.”

  “Hey, those kids are with her sister and brother-in-law. The sister’s a nice churchgoing gal, nothing at all like Desiray. She’s a much better influence on those kids than that greedy whore was. And don’t forget, you’re part of it. I was defending your interests just as much as my own.”

  “So where’s the—” He stopped himself and rephrased it. “Where’d you put her?”

  “Same place as Roy’s going. In another footlocker.”

  “Jesus. You didn’t put her in there alive, did you?”

  “Would you feel better if I said no?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I would.”

  “Okay, then. She was dead before the box hit the water.”

  Neither of them spoke again until they got to the lake.

  There were no tracks in the snow leading to the short wooden dock. Charlie brought the car to a stop about ten feet away from it, then got out and opened the rear driver’s-side door. Vic opened the other door and pushed as Charlie pulled. Charlie’s hip was throbbing again, and he slipped, pulling the footlocker down with him and out of the backseat. When it hit the ground a sound came from inside it like a basketball deflating. Another inch forward and its corner would have hit him right in the balls.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, certain that Vic intended to kill him right there, the second he was no longer needed to help push Roy under the waves.

  He stood up and brushed himself off, the pain in his hip worse. They carried the footlocker toward the dock, with Vic taking the front end and walking backward. Vic stepped carefully onto the snow-covered dock, and before he’d taken two more steps his foot slid out from under him. The locker hit the planks hard on Vic’s end, the gasp from within barely noticeable this time.

  “Shit. Come on, let’s get this cocksucker in the water and hit the road. Set it down and push.” Vic stood again and began dragging the locker to the end of the dock. Charlie pushed, sliding the locker over the bumpy planks.

  “Okay, stop.” Vic stood at the very edge of the dock. He turned to look out at the lake, frozen over and covered with a thick layer of luminous snow. He let out a satisfied sigh. “It sure is pretty, Charlie.”

  “Yeah.” He watched Vic admiring the view, the footlocker heavy behind his knees, the dock slick with snow, and as he reached his decision he was already bending over to shove the footlocker, putting his shoulder into it. It slammed into the back of Vic’s knees, and his feet flew out from under him. He managed to keep himself vertical, his feet dropping toward the ice, and his arms flew out behind him and he barely clung with one, struggling, to the end of the dock for a moment. Then he lost his hold and, after a brief, silent fall, hit the ice with a thud and a crack, but no splash.

  “You dumb son of a bitch! Help me up!”

  Charlie leaned over the footlocker and looked down at Vic’s dark silhouette, spread-eagled on the ice to distribute his weight evenly. The drop had been a good eight feet; the lake was low this year.

  “Hold on, I’ll go get something for you to grab onto.”

  “Hurry the fuck up.”

  Charlie walked slowly back to the car and opened the trunk. He reached behind the bags and pulled out a tire iron and a two-piece jack of a type he’d never seen before, then returned to the dock.

  “Hurry up; this ice ain’t gonna hold forever.”

  Charlie winced as he dropped the first part of the jack a few inches from Vic’s face. It smashed straight down through the snow, through the ice, and into the water. There was a creaking sound like an old house settling.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Charlie?” Vic very carefully raised his head above the ice, inching himself away from the jack’s hole and its spreading cracks, moving away from the shore in the process.

  “Sorry, Vic.”

  “You piece of shit.”

  “You were going to kill me.”

  “You don’t know where the money is, Charlie. You’re screwed without me.”

  “It’s in one of your suitcases.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The creaking came again, louder and a little higher in pitch, and Vic moved very gingerly, looking toward the shore and reaching into his coat pocket for something. Charlie dropped the other part of the jack. It, too, went straight down, hitting less than a foot from Vic’s chest, and the ice opened up under him. He disappeared for a second, and then he reappeared, sputtering. Only his head and the shoulders of his down jacket were visible above the surface as he began treading water.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s cold. . . .” His voice broke with his shivering. “Charlie, help me. I wasn’t gonna kill you. I swear.”

  Charlie stepped off the dock and rummaged around in the snow for a rock. He returned to the dock’s edge with a couple of big ones, the larger a good ten pounds, and he dropped the smaller one. He missed Vic’s head, and the rock made a loud, plosive sound as it hit the water. Charlie dropped the second rock, and Vic yelled in pain and surprise as it hit the top of his head with a surprisingly wooden sound. Vic stared up at Charlie, dazed, and then he went under with an audible intake of lake water. Charlie watched the jagged black hole for a minute and a half, timing it with his watch, then turned to open the footlocker. He worried briefly about Vic’s coming up through the hole in the ice once he began to bloat, but he decided that the ice would probably re-form over the hole by then. In any case it was a big lake, and he was unlikely to come up right where he went down.

  “I’ll have you out of there in a second, Roy, and we’ll talk about a deal.” His great, life-changing plan was over now, years of careful planning and deception over and done with, and poor Desiray lay dead in a trunk just like this one in the icy water beneath him for nothing. He felt curiously relieved, prying at the cheap combination padlock with the tire iron until its hasp twisted and snapped open.

  “Roy?” He reached inside and gave him a shake. Roy’s eyelids half-covered his motionless eyes and his jaw hung loose, his tongue visible between his teeth. Charlie checked his neck for a pulse and found none, but he didn’t really know exactly where to press. He shook Roy harder. “Come on.” Roy didn’t move. He remembered an old story his great-grandfather Arlen used to tell about a country doctor who’d revived a supposedly dead tenant farmer by breaking his big toe. The farmer had shrieked in pain and surprise and sat up, alive and apparently healthy, prompting talk locally of resurrection and miracles, but the toe turned black with gangrene and killed him a week later. The tale was always accompanied with gleeful laughter on the part of the storyteller.

  He didn’t want to take off Roy’s shoe, so he grabbed the clammy left hand and snapped its little finger. The expression on Roy’s face didn’t change. He reached down into the footlocker and came up with Roy’s empty pistol, a tiny nickel-plated thing he must have kept hidden in his sock. He didn’t feel right stealing from a dead man, and in any case he didn’t know where to get ammunition for it or eve
n what kind of ammunition it took, but he thought it might be good to have. He dropped it into his inside overcoat pocket. “Sorry, Roy.”

  He closed the footlocker and shoved it off the end of the dock. It instantly tore a long rectangular hole in the ice just to the left of the first. It floated for a moment, foundered, and sank.

  14

  Vic’s suitcases contained eight or ten changes of warm-weather clothes, three pairs of alligator shoes, a shaving kit, and a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks. There was no other money. Charlie hauled both suitcases to the dock and dropped them into the larger hole, got back into the Mercedes, turned the radio back on, and started the drive back to Vic’s house.

  An all-string orchestra made its way through a tepid arrangement of “White Christmas” as he drove along the blank drifts and poorly kept fences on either side of the road. The ragged-voiced disc jockey murmured in a slurred, hushed tone of awe over the end of the song about the deeper meaning of this particular snow, suggesting that it might be a Christmas miracle. Charlie thought for the first time in years of his eighth Christmas, when it had snowed three days straight, the year he got the Labrador puppy on Christmas morning. Even though it was intended as a pet for all six kids, the pup had attached itself to Charlie immediately. He named him Duke, and Duke was always primarily Charlie’s dog, at least until he went away to college. Whenever he came home on a break Duke was hysterical with joy, whining and barking and licking, and his eyes took on an almost comical sorrow when Charlie inevitably packed back up and headed off again. The dog had died when Charlie was in the army, and he felt himself getting teary-eyed at the thought of the old dog dying without him. He realized he didn’t even know where his parents had buried Duke. Now that he thought about it, his great-grandfather had also died while he was in Germany, and he wasn’t sure where he was buried, either.

  He wondered if Great-grandfather Arlen’s story about the tenant farmer had been true, or if he’d just made it up to scare Charlie and his brothers and sisters. Most of his anecdotes about his frontier youth were similarly sensational, filled with gory, petty violence, drunken cowboys, ubiquitous, terrible sickness, vengeful Indians, and wandering ghosts. The old man would have been tickled at the idea of the three cadavers spending the winter together under the ice in Lake Bascomb, a murderer and his two victims waiting for the spring thaw.