by Jake Hinkson
"He give you some money or something?"
"No."
"You sure he didn't give you no money?"
"What put that idea in your head?"
"Cause at least that would make some goddamn sense."
"Not to me it wouldn't."
"You sure you ain't got a pocket full of cash right now?"
"I ain't got a nickel."
"How about I search you and we find out?"
"You ain't putting your hands on me," Three said. She held the shotgun at her side now. "I done told you that a long time ago."
"You threatening me?" her father said.
"I'm telling you the way it is," Three said. "You lay a hand on me, and I'll kill you."
"Your own daddy?" Thickroot asked, almost amused.
"I'll blow your damn head off and throw you in that ditch right there. And you know I'll do it, too."
"Your own daddy," Thickroot said wistfully. "Sad state of affairs."
"Just so we're straight on things."
"Sure," her father said. "We're straight. I just want to know what we're gonna do when Stan comes around."
"We'll deal with it," Three said.
"Yeah. I guess." Thickroot nodded at the truck, "C'mon, let's go up to the house and figure out how the fuck we're gonna deal with this mess."
The girl said okay and whistled at Audrey. They walked toward the truck, but when the girl walked past her father to the passenger side, Thickroot struck her face with the butt of his gun. The girl fell, and the dog yelped.
Thickroot kicked his daughter in the stomach.
"Who the fuck do you think you are?" he yelled.
The dog barked at him, and Thickroot kicked her in the stomach again. Then he spun around and kicked away her shotgun.
He spun back toward her. "You want to threaten me, you little cocksucker?" He kicked the girl in the head. "You want to threaten me!"
He kicked her in the chest, and I ran from behind my hiding place. I knew I had one chance. I was too far away to run at him and hope not to get shot, but I was close enough to make a throw at his head with the bottle. I ran as close to him as I dared and hurled the bottle at his head.
It hit him like a rock. The bottle didn't even break, and Thickroot staggered backward. For an instant, I thought he would regain his footing, but then his right foot stepped on his left foot, and he tumbled to the ground. The girl struggled up and made a wobbly run for her gun. Thickroot, shaking his head and trying to get to his feet, fired at her but had a better chance of hitting the moon. He didn't know what the hell was going on. He fired at Three again, but the girl was in the darkness, and the kick of the shotgun knocked Thickroot back.
Summoning my voice, I yelled, "Hey!"
Thickroot spun around in the mud toward me. As I jumped into the darkness, a shotgun fired.
I crouched in a runner's starting pose behind the remains of a rotted sofa, ready to make a run up the hill, zigzagging in the dark.
Then I noticed silence. I turned back around and ventured a peek around the sofa and saw the girl standing over her father. The dog stood beside her. They were both staring down at the hole in Arnold Thickroot's chest.
"Hey," I yelled.
The dog looked over at me. Then she looked up at the girl. Three kept staring at her father.
"Yeah," Three finally answered.
"I'm coming out," I said. I stood up and walked across the soggy, stinking earth toward her.
When I got to her, she nodded down at her old man. Thickroot clutched his gun, his eyes open wide. Beneath his broken glasses his temple was still bleeding from where I hit him with the bottle, but the red hole smoking in the middle of his chest left no doubt he was dead.
"I come at him from under the truck," the girl said. "When he turned to get you, I shot him in the back."
"Are you okay?" I asked.
The girl shook her head. "He's dead. Died a couple seconds ago, when you was walking over here from your hiding spot."
"I'm sorry."
The girl rubbed the bruise already starting to swell on her cheek, then looked up at me. "You hit him with a rock or something?"
"A coke bottle."
She pointed at her father with the shotgun, its barrel still smoking a little. "You hit him with a Coke bottle."
"Yes."
She stared down at her dead father. She rubbed her cheek and winced as she did it. She seemed to be avoiding looking at me.
"Guess you had to do it," she said finally. "Guess you didn't have much of a choice, him kicking me and all."
I grasped for something to say. "I'm sorry about your father, Three."
She raised her head, her eyes empty and hard. "I told you. His name is Arnold."
"Right. Arnold."
"He never was a father. Old Number One raised me 'cause Arnold was too worthless. When Old Number One died, I was on my own. Arnold was more like a boss. A mean one."
"I see."
We both regarded the dead man at our feet.
"I was trying to help you," I offered. "I came back to help you. I didn't want to leave you here to face him alone. Him and maybe Stan."
The girl wiped sweat from her face with the back of her grimy hand. "Stan," she said. "I forgot about him for a minute."
I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder, but I couldn't, and I knew she wouldn't want me to, anyway.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"You asked me that already," the girl said. "You think I got any better in the last three minutes?"
"No," I said. "You're right. I'm sorry."
The girl stared at Arnold some more. "I should bury him."
I looked down at him.
She asked, "You think that's a good idea?"
"I don't know."
"You want to call the cops?"
I thought of Felicia and Stan. I thought of the dead cop and his brother in the back of the SUV I'd been driving around.
"That's not ... it's not what I would want."
"No, me neither."
I nodded.
"Okay then," she said.
"I'll help you."
"Grab his legs."
Three leaned her gun against the truck. Then she pried her father's gun out of his hand and leaned it against the truck, too. I picked up the man's feet, clutching his thick ankles through dirty socks. Three grabbed his arms. We took a few steps when the arms began to slide, and Three dropped her father, lurched away a few steps, and fell to her knees.
I watched her for a moment, then I dragged Arnold Thickroot to his grave and shoved him in. He slid down, pushing a wave of mud in front of him. When he stopped, he lay hunched over, a muddy, bloody black hole between his shoulder blades.
I walked over to the girl. "I'm going to bring down the car and throw the other two in here with ..."
Three nodded.
I walked, then ran, to the SUV. When I drove back to the grave, the girl was standing at the truck, staring at her father. I backed up to the pit and got out. Without saying anything to her, I opened the back and hauled out the first twin. The body hit the damp ground, but the kid didn't move. I dragged the body to the pit and pushed it in. It slid down, half lying on Thickroot.
The girl took a deep breath, walked to the SUV, pulled down the other body and pushed it in the grave. She did it all with a minimum of movement, with no look on her face except a concentration of effort to get the job done.
"Need to quicklime them," she said walking toward her father's truck. When she came back, she carried a white plastic bucket. She pried the lid off, pulled out a decapitated milk jug full of white powder and shook it over the bodies. Then she scooped out a few more jugfulls and powdered the bodies until they were completely covered.
She took the bucket back to the truck while I stared down at the three dusty bone-white corpses in the pit below me.
A moment later, she walked up beside me.
"What are you thinking?" she asked, looking down at her father and other tw
o dead men.
I didn't say anything, but I gestured at the bodies.
The girl nodded. "I'm pretty sure a jury would say we both killed Arnold. Especially once we bury him and these other two."
"I suspect that's true."
She watched me for a minute, then she asked, "What are you gonna do now?"
I rubbed my face. "I'm not sure. Everything has happened so fast."
"You gonna go up against Stan the Man?"
I looked at the dead men in the hole. "I think I have to."
"He's a pretty bad dude."
"Yeah. I know."
"You ever shot a gun?"
"No."
"Ever been in a fight?"
I shrugged. "Not really."
Three put her hands on her hips and crooked her head. "So why are you gonna take on Stan? That don't make a lot of sense."
"There's a woman."
"A woman."
"Yeah."
The girl pulled out her cigarettes and lit one. She blew out some smoke and said, "You love her?"
I shook my head. "Not exactly," I said.
"Then why do it?"
"I feel like I need to protect her."
"How come?"
"How come you didn't let Arnold kill me?" I asked.
She took a drag off her cigarette, peered at me as she blew out the smoke and said, "Okay. But is it gonna do her any good for you to get your head blowed off?"
"That's not the point."
"What's the point?"
I wiped some mud from my hands. "I killed myself yesterday. I killed myself, and they brought me back in the ER."
The girl stared at me for a while thinking about that. Then she took another pull off of her cigarette and said, "So, what, this is like a second chance or something?"
"No," I said. "But this is a decision to make. And for a long time, I thought I was out of decisions."
"So this is your decision, then, to go up against Stan and try to protect this woman?"
"Yes."
Smoking her cigarette and squinting against the smoke, the girl looked at me long and hard for a while.
"Well, I could sit here at the dump and wait to see what will happen to me or I could go with you."
"No one's asking you to help me."
"I know, but if you run off and get killed I ain't got no reason to think Stan won't come in here and knock me off."
I didn't know how to respond to that. From what I knew of Stan, it was probably true.
Finally, the girl dropped her butt, stubbed it out in the stinking mud and asked, "So do you want some help or not?"
"I wouldn't feel right about it."
She said, "You'd feel alright leaving me here alone? I thought you offered to help me before."
"How would taking you to face Stan be a way of helping you?" I said, but I caught myself. Maybe there was a way to help her.
The money. All that goddamn money.
"For what I've done for Stan," I said, "and for what he's tried to do to me, he owes me."
The girl didn't know what I meant, but she waited on me.
I said, "What would you do with a million dollars?"
-CHAPTER SIXTEEN-
Cleaning
The girl and I buried her father and the twins under a few tons of trash. Working the bulldozer in a cloud of exhaust fumes, she pushed sludge and filth over her father's grave. The bulldozer roared and spat mud and smoke into the air, but I was acutely aware of the silence beyond our darkened hollow. We sat at the raging center of nothing.
When the girl finished, she drove the bulldozer up the hill. Then she walked back down and drove her father's truck to the house. I followed her in the Armada, watching her thick white arm hang out the driver's side window and Audrey's head hang out the passenger side.
When we got back to the house, she jumped out of the truck and walked over to me. She held up Arnold's cellphone.
"Good," I said. I gestured at our sweaty, muddy clothes and hair. "We should clean up, quickly. We smell like a couple of sewer rats, and we don't want to call anymore attention to ourselves than we have to."
The girl nodded but didn't move.
"It's all right if you're having second thoughts," I said. "I understand."
"It ain't that," she said. "I want to go with you."
"Then what?"
She put her hands on her hips and jerked her head toward the house. "Fact is, I been wondering how to keep everyone from finding out. People knowed me and Arnold fought like a couple of roosters. They're gonna think I killed him just to be done with him." She thought about that for a second. "And the fact is, I can't say it wouldn't a-happened that way eventually."
"How long will it take people to miss him?"
The girl shrugged. "Arnold didn't have no friends to speak of, but we got people in here all the time dropping off garbage. I reckon I could tell them he run off, but where would Arnold have run off to? That's the question. Folks might get suspicious."
"Are you thinking we shouldn't have buried him?"
"No," the girl said firmly. "I shot him in the back. If we woulda called the police, they woulda tossed us both in jail. Then the police woulda found them other two." She stared at my face a moment. "What?"
"What?" I said back.
"You got a funny look on your face. Who was them other two we buried out there?"
I rubbed my face, but my hand was greasy. My arms felt heavy. "Couple of Stan's guys. One of them was a cop."
That news would have jarred most people, even ones who spent all their time among killers and thieves. Finding out you just buried a police officer in a trash pile is hard to hear.
But the girl simply looked away from me, spit into the dark and said, "Well shit." Audrey stared up at her worriedly. Finally she said, "Let me turn that over in my head. We'll get cleaned up and get on the road."
* * *
I showered in a large and clean upstairs bathroom. Like the rest of the house, it stood in stark contrast to the man who'd owned it. Thickroot might have been a son of a bitch who lived at the top of a trash pile, but he liked his comforts. White tiles covered the wall and floors. I scrubbed my body with a yellow exfoliating brush and scented soap. The filth of the garbage dump graveyard spun down the drain between my feet.
As I hurriedly washed the grime out of my hair, I tried to piece together what had happened. Stan had called Thickroot and told him to kill me. Either before we left the twins' house—maybe when Felicia and I were getting dressed—or after I'd left the gas station.
What did Felicia know? Where was she in all of this? It seemed to me that there were three possibilities.
One, she'd been working with Stan from the beginning. My whole involvement was a setup from the start. Maybe they'd always planned to kill the twins. Looking back on the day's events, it seemed like they'd always been on one side and the twins had been on the other.
Two, she was going along with Stan now that he'd decided to get rid of me. After I rode off to deliver the twins to Thickroot, Stan had told her that I was out of the picture. Maybe she felt bad about that. Maybe not. But she and Stan would have five million dollars to split. That kind of money eases a lot of pain.
Three, she was being held hostage without knowing it. Stan would use her to negotiate the new deal with Fuller and then he'd kill her.
I shut off the water, but the sight of a bruise on the back of my right hand jarred me. Brown and yellow, from where the IV had gone in at the hospital, the bruise covered most of the back of my hand but didn't really hurt. I turned my hands over. My palms were pink, wet and clean. Beneath the creased skin, faint green veins. I closed my hands into tight fists, watched my knuckles bulge and whiten. They were good hands, though I'd never put them to much use. I'd turned pages in books, caressed Carrie, caressed myself, lifted bottles to my lips. I'd killed myself with these hands. I'd sinned with these hands, but maybe now I could do something good with them, something discernibly, unequivocally good with them.
Then I thought, In this shithole world is there such a thing as unequivocal good?
I laughed and pulled the curtain back and grabbed a towel and hurriedly dried off.
That was the kind question you used to ask. In your first life. No time now for theology or philosophy. Now is a time for doing.
When I stepped out of the shower, I found some blue jeans and a black T-shirt with a breast pocket Three had left folded by the door. I put them on and stared at myself in the mirror.
I'd never been a man of action. For most of my life, I'd contented myself with studying: studying in school, studying in seminary, and once I'd become a full-time pastor, studying for my weekly sermon. But for the past year, I'd drifted: alcohol and oblivion and a series of part-time jobs.
But in this new life, I had no notion that I was going to live forever—neither in this life nor in some eternal realm with Christ. There was nothing left to study except the machinations of Stan's mind.
If Felicia was alive, I would find her. If she was going to betray me, then I would be betrayed. If Stan was going to kill me, then I would die. But I was going to force them both to reckon with me.
-CHAPTER SEVENTEEN-
Lucky
Three had left me white socks and a pair of heavy work boots. I pulled them on and walked down the hall. The upstairs, like the rest of the house, was bright and clean. One hallway ran the length of the upstairs, with the bathroom on one end and the stairs on the other.
The girl came up the steps. Her short hair was still dripping, and she wore the same outfit I did: blue jeans, work boots and a black T-shirt.
"We look like roadies for Johnny Cash," I told her.
"I reckon."
"These your clothes I'm wearing?"
"Yeah. 'Cept the shoes. Those were Arnold's."
"Good fit. Thanks."
"Sure."
She was developing a black eye where her father had hit her.
"You should put ice on that," I said.
"I did," she said. "You ready to go?"
As we walked downstairs she said, "It seems creepy here, now. I want to get out of here."
I followed her out to her truck and we climbed inside. She stashed the shotguns behind the bench seat, fired up the truck and backed down the path. We were almost to the service road before I thought to ask, "Where's the dog?"