Never Saw It Coming

by Linwood Barclay

  “I dropped my keys by the door. You’re going to have to rinse those off.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes held hers. “So, just what kind of shit you getting me into here, babe? Am I, like, covering up a murder?”

  “He was going to kill me if I didn’t kill him.”

  “Well, I guess then, it’s cool.” He certainly wasn’t inclined to call the police. If they came and arrested Keisha, what would happen to him? Would he have to look after her kid? Would he have to go live someplace if she lost her house? If she got taken away and wasn’t making any money, how was he going to live? How would he pay for improvements to his truck?

  No, turning her in was not an option.

  “Kirk, you can do this, right?” she asked. “You can get rid of that bag?”

  He gave her a smile, but his eyes looked dull. “Hey, I scratch your back, you scratch mine, right?”

  Keisha didn’t like the sound of that, but right now, Kirk was all she had. She needed him to do these things for her, and she needed him to do them right now.

  He left the bathroom. She listened until she heard him pull the front door closed. As she was about to step under the spray, it hit her, everything that had happened in the last hour, and she took two hurried steps to the toilet, lifted the lid frantically, dropped to her knees and threw up. Three good heaves.

  She unrolled a couple of feet of toilet paper, dabbed her face, flushed the toilet, and allowed her body to collapse against the cold tiled wall.

  I nearly died.

  I killed a man.

  Her breathing was quick and shallow, and she wondered whether she might pass out. Hold it together, she thought. Suck it up. Kirk would get rid of the evidence, clean the car.

  She hoped to God he didn’t fuck it up. It wasn’t like she’d sent him to the store with a list of ingredients to make rocket fuel. He ought to be able to wash a car and get rid of a bag.

  Slowly she pulled herself to her feet and got into the shower. The hot water felt good hitting her skin. She poured some shampoo into her hand, washed her hair, rinsed, shampooed it again. Then a third time. By the time she picked up the soap to start on her body, the blood was washed away, but that didn’t stop her from nearly scrubbing herself raw.

  She stood under the water until it started to go cold. When there was no hot left, she turned off the taps, reached beyond the curtain for the towel, and dried herself off.

  Out of the shower, she studied her naked body in the mirror. She thought there was a tiny spot of blood on her right shoulder, rubbed it with the towel, realized it was a mole.

  She was confident she’d gotten every trace of Wendell Garfield off her.

  Still naked, she gathered up the towel and bathmat and walked it down to the basement, shoved everything into the washing machine, poured in some soap, and hit the start button.

  Back upstairs, she went into her room and dressed herself in fresh clothes. She found a blouse with a high collar, which she buttoned to the top to hide the bruises on her neck. Then she slowly walked the route between the front door and the bathroom, looking for any traces of blood. The newspaper seemed to have done the trick. She got some paper towel and Windex from underneath the kitchen sink and squirted the tiles inside the front door. She cleaned them three times, just to be sure, then flushed the paper towels, one at a time so as not to cause a clog, down the toilet.

  Then she thought, what about when she ran from the car to the house? It was such a short distance, she was confident no one had seen her. If anyone had, they’d surely have called the police. But there might be blood out there.

  She opened the door. The light snow that had fallen overnight had melted on the driveway and the path from it to the house, but everything was so wet, she didn’t think, even if some blood had somehow dripped from her clothes, that anyone would be able to find a trace of it out here.

  She went back inside, picked up her wallet by the sink, and rubbed it all over with several dampened tissues. Took out her driver’s license, Social Security card. Made sure everything was clean.

  Then she leaned against the bathroom counter, put her face in her hands, felt some relief slowly washing over her. She was done. So long as Kirk did as he was told, she was good.

  Time for a drink.

  As she entered the kitchen, the phone rang. It wasn’t a sound that normally made Keisha jump, but she nearly hit the ceiling on that first ring. She looked at the caller ID, but it came up as unknown.

  No one knows. No one knows anything about what happened. Certainly not yet.

  Keisha picked up. “Hello?”

  “Oh, hey, Keisha? It’s Chad and—”

  The health store owner in Bridgeport who needed her advice every time he met a new man. “Chad, I don’t have time today.”

  “But I met this guy, he came into the store, and I think we kind of clicked, and I found out his birth date and I’m not sure we’re compatible because I’m a Virgo and—”

  “Not today,” Keisha said and hung up.

  She opened the fridge. She needed something strong to drink but there was nothing in there but Kirk’s bottles of Bud. That would have to do. She plunked herself down in a chair, cracked open a bottle, and took a long swig.

  Never again, she told herself. Never again.

  The thing was, Keisha didn’t know what other line of work she was suited for. Sales? Working in a department store? Greeting people as they came into Walmart? Didn’t you have to be a hundred to do that? Yeah, she’d cleaned houses once in a while, but even that was never entirely honest work for Keisha Ceylon. She found it hard not to take a peek into the backs of dresser drawers, in case there was something valuable stashed there, something she could help herself to that when the owner finally went to look for it, they’d have no idea when it actually went missing.

  She wanted to blame her dead mother at times like this, but Keisha knew, in her heart, that she was an adult now and responsible for her choices. The good ones, like keeping Matthew and doing her best by him even when his father didn’t give a damn. And the bad ones, like getting taken in by Kirk’s charm, and now having to live with the consequences. But Jesus, her mother really was a piece of work, and Keisha felt entitled to lay at least some of the blame at her door.

  The way they lived. Always moving from town to town, Marjorie surveying the local papers for obituaries to find men who’d recently lost their wives and just happening to show up on their doorstep, offering her services as a housekeeper, but not before putting on her lipstick, letting her hair fall down around her shoulders, and unbuttoning that top button on her blouse. “Your wife just died?” she’d say, with a hint of Alabama in her voice. “I had no idea I was troubling you at such a time. I’m just looking for some work to support myself and my daughter here, but I won’t trouble you a moment longer . . . What’s that? Why, I must confess, I wouldn’t mind a glass of lemonade.”

  Marjorie’d worm her way into some lonely man’s heart just long enough to gain his trust, and access to his bank account.

  And then they were off to the next town.

  “Can’t we live in one place for a while?” Keisha’d ask her mom. “So I could go to school and make friends?”

  The longest they stayed anywhere was when Marjorie got a job managing a rooming house in Middlebury where almost all the residents were elderly, living alone, and scraping by on their Social Security checks, out of which they paid the rent. Marjorie had been thinking of quitting—the owner, who lived down in Florida, didn’t pay her much to run the joint—but then one of the residents died in his sleep one night, and Marjorie had an epiphany. If she didn’t report poor old Garnett’s death, and got rid of his body, she could cash, and keep, his Social Security checks when they arrived each month. If she rented out the room to someone else, she could pocket the entire amount.

  With Keisha’s help—the girl was now in her teens—Marjorie removed the body from the house late one night and buried it in the woods outside Middlebury. It was Keish
a’s job to endorse the checks when they came—her mother, who had a very shaky hand, was very particular that the signature look just like Garnett’s, and made Keisha practice over and over again before actually signing the check.

  Over the next six months, two more residents died. The scam expanded. Marjorie now had three Social Security checks coming in, plus her wage for managing the rooming house.

  A pretty good living, until one day a woman dropped by, looking to reconnect with her long-lost uncle Garnett, and when she couldn’t find him, said she was heading to the police station to file a missing person report.

  “Pack your bags,” Marjorie had whispered to her daughter the moment the woman left. “We’re leaving town in five minutes.”

  The police never did catch up with her. When Marjorie died, of liver cancer, she’d never spent a single day in jail.

  Keisha’d known it was wrong, but what was she supposed to do? Turn her mother in? Then what?

  So maybe the cards were stacked against her when it came to making an honest buck, but today, well, today was one hell of a wakeup call. Surely there had to be something she could do—something legitimate—that employed her skills.

  Politics, maybe.

  She almost laughed. The thing was, what she’d been doing with all her variations on a theme was selling people outrageous notions. That she could help them talk to deceased relatives. That she could give them a glimpse of their future by reading the stars. That she could use her psychic gifts to help track down missing loved ones.

  If she could sell people that kind of malarkey, how hard could cars be? Or insurance? Or carpeting?

  Keisha told herself she could do it. She had to do it. Not for herself, but for Matthew.

  She couldn’t be much of a mother from behind bars.

  She had to turn over that proverbial new leaf. She had to rid herself of Kirk. But first, she had to get out of this current mess she’d gotten herself into. Then, she could start thinking about a new career. Get herself some new clothes. Less funky, more conservative. No parrot earrings. Maybe a different hairdo. A more professional look. And of course, she’d have to get some new business—

  No. No no no no no.

  She’d given him her business card. Wendell Garfield had tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  Twenty

  Kirk opened the passenger door of Keisha’s fifteen-year-old Korean shitbox and set the trash bag on the floor ahead of the seat. The vinyl upholstery was tan, so there was no trick to spotting the blood smears on the driver’s seat. He fetched a container of already dampened cloths in his truck—he had a full supply of automotive cleaning supplies tucked behind the seats—and used the first one to wipe down the handle on the driver’s door of Keisha’s car. Once he’d cleaned the grab handle on the inside of the door, he turned his attention to the seat. He went through a couple of dozen cloths, jamming them into the cracks and crevices of the cushioning. There wasn’t all that much blood, but he knew there wouldn’t have to be for the cops to nail Keisha. He didn’t just watch Family Feud. He knew stuff.

  He found heavier concentrations of blood when he wiped down the steering wheel. Keisha’d had it all over her hands, of course. He took all the bloodied cloths and stuffed them into the bag, which had not yet been tied off. Once he was confident the car’s interior was not only wiped clean of blood, but cleaner than it had been since it left the showroom, he knotted the top of the bag with the built-in red ties and settled into the driver’s seat, still glistening from the wipes.

  It struck him it might be a good idea to get the entire car washed while he was at it. There was one of those do-it-yourself places up on Route 1. He searched his pockets to confirm that he had enough coins. He’d get Keisha to pay him back later.

  He drove the car into a wash bay. He had his choice of all of them. Hardly anyone was washing their cars when there’d been snow overnight and the streets were wet and slushy. He plunked in some quarters and trained the high-pressure hose on the driver’s side of the car. Back and forth along the door, just to be sure.

  When he was finished, he got on the turnpike and headed west. At first, he was thinking he’d go as far as Westport, or maybe even Norwalk, but he hadn’t even gotten to Bridgeport when he started thinking this was a really dumb idea of Keisha’s. A bag of garbage was a bag of garbage, even when it was stuffed with a lot of bloody clothes. As long as he dumped it in with plenty of other bags, he didn’t see the sense in driving it halfway across the goddamn state. Any Dumpster ought to do.

  So he got off at Seaview and went north, keeping his eye out for a strip mall that would have a garbage bin out back. He’d be able to ditch the trash, get back to Keisha’s house within the hour, and find out a little more about this mess she’d gotten herself into. God, she could be dumb sometimes.

  Living with her, you just never knew what was going to happen. All sorts of weird folks dropping by, wanting Keisha to tell them whether to quit their jobs or get married or try to reach their dead cats so they could say hello, taking as gospel some mumbo-jumbo bullshit that Keisha just came up with out of her head. And, once in a while, when some kid got abducted or an Alzheimer’s patient wandered out of the nursing home, anxious relatives—at least those who believed in any of that other aforementioned nonsense—would ask for Keisha’s guidance.

  People sure believed some strange shit.

  Kirk did his part, playing the father whose missing daughter Keisha’d found based on a vision. He thought he did a good job at it, so long as the people didn’t ask too many questions. Once he started lying, he found it hard to remember everything he’d already said, laying traps for himself. So he’d keep it short, pretend to get all choked up and say, “That woman, Keisha, she’s the reason our little angel was brought home to us. I can’t even think what might have happened if she hadn’t been there for us.”

  Oscar-worthy.

  Life was never boring with Keisha, but son of a bitch, she’d really raised the bar this time. From what she’d had time to tell him as she did her striptease, she’d killed this guy in self-defense with a knitting needle in the eye.

  Fucking eye, man. He could not get over that.

  He couldn’t have predicted, when he’d moved in with Keisha, anything like this. He could see that it wasn’t going to be perfect, what with her having the kid and all, but he didn’t seem all that annoying at first, and Keisha was pretty awesome in the sack. She said she was taking precautions so he wouldn’t knock her up, not like when she’d had that thing eleven years ago with a soldier home on leave from Afghanistan who hung around Milford long enough to spread his seed. Then he was back on the plane to blow up some more Taliban. Keisha didn’t know whether he kept signing up for more tours because he really liked riding around in a tank in a hundred and twenty degrees, or because he didn’t want to face the fact that back home he was a father.

  Matthew’d only met the man twice in nine years. Which was one more time than he’d sent home money. That one time, it had been for $123.43.

  Keisha, however, was doubly devoted to the li’l fucker. Okay, maybe he wasn’t that bad a kid really, but the fact was, he was there. Kind of hard to have one’s needs met when there’s some twerp hanging around, playing Wii, asking to be taken to the mall, coming down with colds and expecting his mother to look after him. And lots of time she’d make his breakfast or a sandwich or take him a snack at bedtime, and she wouldn’t even think to ask Kirk if he’d like something too.

  Still, it had been a good plan, moving in with Keisha. He’d been as nice as he could be when he met her, helping her with that flat tire. And it was no act, his treating her with respect. She had it going on. Nice bod, pretty face. That first night at her place, he found out she could cook a half-decent meal, too. He went slow, not wanting her to think the only thing he cared about was getting into her pants, but once she told him the kid was asleep, he knew she wanted it, and he was happy to oblige. The thing Kirk never got around to mentioning was, he didn’t
actually have a place of his own. He’d gotten the boot from his ex-girlfriend, and had taken to sleeping on the couches of various guys who worked for Garber Contracting, except for Glen himself, who wasn’t taking in boarders when he had a young girl in the house, no offense intended. He couldn’t keep doing that forever, so when Keisha started hinting that since he was staying over most nights anyway, maybe he should just . . .

  “Yeah, okay,” he’d said.

  Things were okay those first few weeks, before Glen cut back his hours. Then he hurt his foot, and in some ways that came at a good time, because he could tell Keisha had been starting to reassess, to wonder if maybe inviting him into her home had been such a great idea after all. She wasn’t going to kick him out while he was recovering. She was too nice to do that.

  And now, his foot pretty much healed, he was sensing she might be thinking, once again, about dissolving this relationship. But now, well, she needed him now. Big time. What woman is going to throw out onto the street the man who’s helping her cover up a murder?

  Oh yeah, he was in for the long haul. No doubt about that.

  Hey, that looked like a good spot.

  A short plaza on the right with a nail salon, a takeout-only pizza place, a T-shirt operation, and a shop that sold radio-controlled cars.

  Always wanted to get one of those, Kirk thought. Now that I’ve got my wheels for the truck, time to treat myself to something else.

  A row of shops like this had to have some kind of Dumpster out back, especially with the pizza joint. They’d have a lot of trash, right? Leftover food at the end of the day, cardboard, cheese that had gone moldy?

  He hit the blinker, turned into the lot, drove down the side of the building and around back, coming to a stop by a battered metal refuse container the size of this shitbox car he was driving. It sat about thirty feet out from the building, and was surrounded by other trash. Abandoned pallets, scraps of rusted pipe, an old oven, half a dozen tires.