by Jeremy Bates
He left, humming a song to himself. Katrina hurried to the bathroom door. “Jack?” she said urgently. “Charlie’s truck is still here. Why hasn’t he left? Where is he?” The door opened. Jack was wearing the shirt she’d given him. He’d plugged his nostrils with toilet paper and he really did look like a boxer right then— a boxer who had just gone twelve rounds with the defending champ. “Where did Charlie go?” she pressed. “If he talks to—”
“He’s dead,” Jack said simply.
She blinked. “He’s what?”
“Dead.”
“What are you telling me? You killed him?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, yes.”
“That’s not funny, Jack.”
But he didn’t smile. Didn’t say, “Gotcha!” In fact, he didn’t show any emotion at all. And just like that Katrina knew it was true. She must have gone into shock because when Jack handed her a glass of bourbon, she was no longer by the bathroom but sitting on the sofa.
“Drink it,” he told her.
Katrina looked at him. She felt surreal and hollowed out and utterly confused. She was still waiting for the punch line, still clinging to that gossamer strand of hope this was all one bad joke taken way too far. But it wasn’t and she knew that. She knew that the same way she knew her name was Katrina. Not with thought or effort. She just knew it. Charlie was dead and there was nothing she could do to change that horrible fact. Dead—the word didn’t seem real. It seemed connected to an abstract idea, not a concrete thing. Not a person. Not Charlie.
And Jack had said he’d killed him?
It didn’t make sense. Nothing was making sense.
For a moment she thought she was going to be sick, but the sour sensation passed. A fury of fresh questions wanted to leap out of her mouth. Only one—the most important one—made it. “How?” she mumbled. “How did he die?”
“It was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“Like I said, he bashed me with his cane. I guess he thought I was out for the count. Probably should have been. But I got up. He was heading to the dock. I came up behind him. Last minute he turned around and I punched him. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. But he’d just played baseball with my head, and I wasn’t thinking too straight.”
Katrina dropped her face into her hands, still feeling spacey and unreal. She couldn’t accept they were talking about this. You had conversations about the weather and your job and your friends. You didn’t have a conversation about how you killed someone.
“Where’s his body?” she asked, the last word causing her to swallow hard.
“I moved it to the bushes.”
Finally emotion and gut reaction gave way to reason. She began thinking in terms of cause and effect. “You shouldn’t have moved him.”
“Of course I should have. Someone would have seen him if I hadn’t.”
“But when the police find him, they’re going to be suspicious—”
“Whoa-ho-ho,” Jack said, recoiling from her. “We’re not calling the cops.”
She stared at him as if he’d spoken another language. “What are you talking about, Jack?”
“What do you think I’m talking about,” he snapped. “I just killed a man. They’ll haul me off to jail.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, not wanting to hear what he was saying. “It was an accident. You didn’t know one punch was going to kill him. Besides, all they have to do is look at you, your face. It was obviously self-defense.”
“Right, Katrina. Look at me. I’m six one, two hundred pounds. Charlie was an old man. Must’ve been at least seventy. Throw in my fighting background, how’s that going to look?”
He was right, she knew. But she also knew they had to call the police. It simply wasn’t an option to conceal a murder.
Christ. Was that what it was going to be called?
Murder?
Her initial denial was already becoming acceptance, and with that, horror.
Jack was going to jail. That was the cold reality of it.
“This is all my fault,” she said. “If I hadn’t lied—if I had just told everyone the truth—”
“Stop it,” Jack told her. “What’s done is done. Now we have to focus on the future and decide what we’re going to do.”
“Jack,” she said severely, speaking with quiet conviction, “we have to call the police.”
“Goddammit, Katrina!” He shot to his feet and winced, bringing a hand to the back of his head, as if the sudden movement had jolted his injuries. “We’re not calling the police!”
“We have to,” she insisted. “So maybe we can’t call it self-defense. But it wasn’t premeditated, for God’s sake. We can prove that. Charlie came here. We didn’t know he was going to do that. And what reason would you have to kill him? Right? So we bite the bullet and plead second-degree manslaughter. It happens. Accidents like this. Bars. Sports games. Fistfights break out. People get hurt. Sometimes fatally. What’s that for a first-time offense? Probation? Six months?”
Jack began pacing back and forth in front of her. “Then everyone finds out you lied about this place.”
She made a noise that would have been laughter under more regular circumstances; right then it was just a noise. “I don’t care anymore,” she said.
“You’ll have to leave your job.”
She frowned. “Because I lied?”
“No, because your ‘boyfriend’ killed someone. It won’t matter to anyone you’ve only known me for a couple days. They think we’re together. That’s all that matters. You can’t go on working at some place where they think you’re a liar and your boyfriend is a murderer. Especially not at a school. Think about what the kids will say. It’s the hard truth.”
Katrina felt as though she was watching her life fall apart in slow motion. Jack was going to jail and she was going to lose her job. She was numb with sadness. But if that’s what had to happen, that’s what had to happen. There was simply no way she was covering up a murder. She couldn’t believe Jack was trying to convince her of that route. Just yesterday she’d thought she knew him so well. Now it was as if she hardly knew him at all.
“So, I move then,” she said.
Jack was shaking his head. “You just got here. You told me you liked it. You’re not packing up and moving because of something stupid I did.”
“That’s my decision to make.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I said no cops,” he said firmly.
“There’s a dead man in the bushes!”
Jack stopped pacing. He spent a long moment looking at her, appraising her. His face was lined in thought. He said, “Listen, it’s not so simple.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s something I haven’t told you.” He poured himself another drink from the bottle on the buffet table. “It’s about my past. When I told you about my fighting, I didn’t tell you everything. I mentioned I competed in tournaments. Some legal, some not. What I didn’t tell you was that the illegal ones were really illegal. Pit fighting stuff. I became involved with a bad crew down in California. Links to mobsters, corrupt businessmen. They set up the fights and I fought them. Always won. I became a black-market celebrity of sorts. Then there was this one fight, my last one. Some muay-style fighter fresh off the boat from Thailand. He was a prizefighter of a wealthy nightclub owner who had ties with the Russian Mafia over on the East Coast. I knocked the guy out in the first round. The thing is, he never got up.”
Katrina hadn’t thought this could possibly get any worse, but it just had.
“You killed him,” she stated in a flat voice.
“I elbowed him in the face. Only my elbow hit him in the eye. There was this sound—Anyway, his eye socket shattered, sending shards of bone into his brain. He dropped to the ground. Was pronounced dead at the scene.”
Katrina opened her mouth and closed i
t. She didn’t know what to say.
“The next week the police busted up the fighting ring,” Jack went on. “My promoter, one of the first people arrested, ratted me out. But I’d already packed up and quit fighting. In fact, I’d just come up the coast to Washington when I heard what happened. It was all over the news. I stuck around Seattle for a few weeks, then started east, for Michigan or maybe Massachusetts. While passing through Leavenworth I liked the vibe and decided to stick around for a couple days. And then, well, and then I met you.”
Katrina was shaking her head, feeling sickened and staggered all over again, like she was on a nightmare rollercoaster that wouldn’t stop to let her off. Jack had killed two people in his life. She should have known he was too good, too perfect, to be true.
“So you’re on the run?” She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry.
Jack shrugged, finished his drink. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
“The police know you killed that fighter?”
“My promoter sung like a canary. They know everything. You see the problem I’m in here? I tell them what happened with Charlie, my name goes in the system. Bulletins pop up.”
Katrina stared at Jack for a long moment, then looked away. She wasn’t mad at the deception, she realized. All she felt was drained. “I’m having a hard time accepting all of this, Jack.”
“We call the cops, Katrina, and I’m going to jail for a long, long time.”
“But they were both accidents,” she said stubbornly, angrily.
“A judge or jury isn’t going to have much sympathy for someone who’s killed two men with his bare hands, accident or not.”
“So what do you propose we do?” she said in challenge, knowing by asking this question she was getting pulled over the line to his side in this marathon tug-of-war. “We can’t just leave him in the bushes. The neighbors know he came here. His wife probably knows as well. When he doesn’t return home, she’ll call the cops. We’ll be the prime suspects. Last people to have seen him alive.”
“We make it look like an accident.”
“But it was an accident.”
“No, I mean a real accident. A car accident.”
Katrina looked at him skeptically.
“We put his body in the pickup,” Jack explained, his eyes alight, as if he was reinvigorated by her partial acquiescence. “I’ll drive. You follow in the Porsche. Charlie said he lived in Skykomish. That’s just west of here. When we get near the town, we make it look like he ran off the road.”
“He just drives off?”
“Maybe he falls asleep? Maybe a deer runs in front of him? It doesn’t matter. The cops have no reason to be suspicious. They won’t think of asking us. It’ll be over.”
Katrina was silent. Was she buying into this mad scheme? If she did, she would be an accomplice to murder. If she didn’t, Jack would go to jail. For an accident. Something that was already done and couldn’t be undone. Dammit! she thought. There were so many gray areas. She needed more time to think things through. But she didn’t have the luxury of that option. There was a dead man in the bushes and a couple dozen teachers down at the dock.
“Katrina,” Jack said calmly but resolutely. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “Charlie’s dead. There’s nothing we can do to change that. But we can change the future. Either we report the death and your life here gets ruined—not to mention I go to prison—or we do what I’m suggesting. No one will be any the wiser, and that will be that.”
“We’ll get caught,” she protested. “Something will go wrong.”
“Nothing will go wrong.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You just have to trust me.”
“Dammit, Jack.”
“Trust me.”
She went silent, frantically searching for a last-minute exit but finding none. Suddenly she was consumed by a deterministic feeling she was being swept up in something larger than herself, something she could do nothing to prevent, and that terrified her more than she could have imagined.
Jack tilted her head so they were looking into each other’s eyes. “Will you do this for me?” he asked.
No! Tell him he’s on his own.
Abruptly Katrina thought of Shawn, gaunt and weak, a skeleton on his deathbed. She recalled the helplessness she’d felt, the frustration at her utter powerlessness. The vow she’d made to herself to never let someone in need down again. Then she flashed back to last night, lying in bed beside Jack, the bond she’d felt between them. He’d been a rock for her so far. He’d listened to all her crap. He’d pursued what he’d thought was the best course of action to get her out of her sticky lie. And he’d asked for nothing in return. Not a thing. What was it he’d said? I’m here for you.
Katrina understood that what Jack was proposing wasn’t the right thing to do, and that he wasn’t the perfect man she’d thought him to be. But sometimes the right decision wasn’t always the best decision, and perfect or not, she still did have strong feelings for him. And she knew with a growing certainty she wasn’t going to be able to sit idly by while another man’s life slipped through her fingers. Not when she could do something about it.
Her choice, it seemed then, was inevitable.
“Yes,” she said softly, almost to herself. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 17
Zach was pressed against the trunk of a tree, still as a tombstone. Blood was thumping in his ears and his legs felt rubbery, like they might give at any moment. Jack had already returned inside the cabin, but Zach was too terrified to move. When he’d shifted his weight earlier, making noise, he’d been convinced Jack was going to come over to investigate. If that had happened, he’d been ready to run and just keep running. Because Jack had not just killed that old man, he’d demolished him—and he would demolish Zach as well if he knew he’d witnessed the entire murder from start to finish. Nevertheless, he could no longer remain where he was. He had to check on the poor sucker. There was no way he could be alive, no way, not after all those bone-breaking kicks that soon became wet, fleshy kicks. But he had to check, just the same.
He looked around the tree trunk. All clear. He crept over to the bushes where Jack had dragged the body. He took a few steps into the thicket, pushed aside some shrubs, and flinched, even though he had known what to expect. The old man’s face was a scarf of blood. His nose was crushed. It almost looked out of place, as if it had moved a few inches to the left. His mouth was open, revealing a black, toothless hole. Maybe he didn’t put in his dentures today, but more than likely his teeth were lying in the dirt over where he’d been beaten silly. Cold moonlight reflected in his upward-gazing eyes, which shone like two silver coins—the ferryman’s fare for the trip across the river. As horrible as his face was, it was his body that caused true horror in Zach, because it wasn’t natural. It looked like a doll’s body—something stuffed with beans and as supple as a noodle. It was in the shape of a badly drawn S, scrawny arms at its side, knees together. And the chest—that was the worst part. It looked deflated, empty, like an alien in a horror movie had just burst free from it, leaving a womblike cavity behind.
He was dead. No question. Demolished was the word Zach had thought before and the word that came to his mind again. He stumbled away, feeling the first squirming of self-loathing. He’d stood by and watched Jack murder a defenseless old man. He’d remained hiding behind a tree when he could have done something. But what could he have done? It had all happened so fast and unexpectedly. He couldn’t have anticipated that first palm strike or whatever the hell it was. Then Jack was kicking the old man as soon as he’d landed on his back. By the time Zach had gotten his wits about him, it was over. Five, maybe six seconds. That’s all it took.
Zach’s first impulse now was to whip out his cell phone and call the police, or even run down to the dock and tell everyone what Jack had done. But he hesitated. He didn’t know all the facts yet. Didn’t know why the old man had attacked Jack, or what was going to
happen next. Because maybe Jack was going to turn himself in, and Zach wouldn’t have to get involved at all. Or, better yet, maybe Katrina would turn Jack in. How sweet that would be. Talk about poetic justice. So, yeah, maybe he would just wait and see how things played out, say in the next ten minutes or so—
The cabin door opened and Jack and Katrina appeared. Zach stiffened, as if he was going to bolt. But he didn’t move. They would see him. He might be thirty yards away, but any movement would draw their eyes. They’d know he had seen the body. Jack would come after him and catch him before he could call the police or reach the others. So very slowly and quietly he lowered himself to his chest and crawled deeper into the tangle of bushes, moving away from the old man’s body. Then he stopped and remained perfectly still. The rich, earthy smell of the soil filled his nose. He scarcely allowed himself to breathe.
“Where?” he heard Katrina say. She sounded shaky.
“Right there.” Jack. He didn’t sound shaky at all.
They pushed into the patch of bush where Zach was hiding. Shrubs snapped and rustled. They couldn’t have been more than ten feet away.
“Oh, Jesus,” Katrina said, barely a whisper.
“Try not to look at it,” Jack said. Not him anymore. Just an it — a clump of meat and bones that if skinned and hacked to pieces wouldn’t look out of place in a butcher’s window.
“There’s so much blood. Why’s there so much blood? You said you only hit him once.”
“I did. Right in the nose. All the blood’s from his nose.”
“What’s wrong with his body? It looks—floppy.”
“That’s because he’s dead. Muscles loosen.”
Loosen my ass, Zach was thinking. It’s because you broke every rib in his chest and probably every bone in his arms as he tried to defend himself.
“I thought they stiffen,” Katrina said.
“Not for a few hours. Now stand back. I don’t want you to get any blood on you.”
There was a much louder crackling of vegetation: Jack dragging the body free, all the way to the pickup truck, which was twenty feet away. Zach pushed himself to his knees so he could see what was happening. Jack lifted the old man effortlessly into the bed of the pickup. He took something from Katrina—a sheet, Zach realized—and flung it over the corpse.