Jim didn't for a second think the man was exaggerating, but he decided to push a little harder. "Well then I guess I'm in a bit of a bind. But you seem like a reasonable man." He spat out the word—not reasonable but man. "Maybe we can come to some kind of understanding?"
The idea seemed to pique the large man's interest. A finger hovered for a moment in the empty air near his lips. "How much of an understanding are we talking about?"
"Ten?"
A thoughtful nibble on his left pinky finger, palm-out "Make it fifteen," the man said.
"Fifteen thousand is a lot of money."
"So is ten. Fifteen grand, Mr. Taymor, and I personally guarantee you, nobody comes to your house in the middle of the night and takes a pair of hedge clippers to you." He tipped his head toward the photograph lying face down on the desk. "Or your pretty wife."
"Hedge clippers!" Jim repeated to us as he later related all of this. It seemed to him much too specific not to be a grim reality. I have to say I agree.
"Fifteen it is," Jim said, and swallowed hard. "Only, that amount of money, I'm going to have to shift a few things around, talk to my accountant..."
"Friday afternoon. Out back of here. Cash."
Jim nodded and stuck out his hand again. This time, the large man took it. A deal was made. His giant fingers, chewed to rat shit, crushed Jim's average-sized hand with only the slightest of pressure. Hands that big could do a man's job with a pair of hedge clippers, Jim thought, and shook away the pain the moment his hand was set free. He opened the door with the other hand. The large man ducked to go.
"We never settled on a time," Jim said.
"Before dark," Richard Holland told him without hesitation, hovering in the doorway.
"How about six?"
The large man nodded. "Six is good."
6
JIM NEVER CAME to me to ask about money. If he had, I would have told him it was readily available, and we didn't need an Acid-test to know it.
The money was a stall. Leanne knew that, too. What Leanne also knew was that if they did pay the man, they'd be paying for the rest of their lives. A few thousand here, a few thousand there, until their entire nest egg vanished into the wind. Every single dime that came out of La Costina not already earmarked for the restaurant itself would go into Richard "Dutch" Holland's double-XL pockets. They wouldn't be giving him any fifteen-thousand on Friday at six P.M. or ever, because they'd never see the end of it.
With that settled, Jim and Leanne put their heads together to figure out what they would do. They knew they could clean out their accounts quite easily between then and Friday (it was late Tuesday they discussed this, after Richard Holland had left, with their customers cleared out and the staff gone away home). They could walk away with all the cash they could liquidate, a tidy sum, and live out the rest of their days in Belize, or somewhere else extradition laws to the United States were lax.
They could do that... but by then their little Italian eatery had become no longer just their retirement fund, but their lifeline. It had occurred to both of them at some point or another that La Costina was the baby they'd never been able to have, and to give it up would be like little Olivia dying all over again. My Virginia had long suspected they'd begun to drift apart after the miscarriage; that restaurant of theirs had breathed fresh life into their marriage, where since the autumn of '98 there'd been only death.
Jim and Leanne stood in the door of the basement walk-in, weighing their options. Cordelia Moone's flesh was gray-blue, with little white snowflakes of frost in her hair and scaled over her eyes, which seemed to have returned to their original brown. Her breasts remained flat, even after they'd stood her up in the corner, though not from gravity; Jim had left her on the floor overnight, and they'd frozen that way. (It was a morbid reminder of the erection he'd gotten the night before, a detail he did spare Leanne, only telling me via the visitor's phone at Nebraska State Pen.)
Earlier, before the staff had arrived, Jim had turned the basement lights off and shined a flashlight in the Moone woman's face for Leanne to see. At first it hadn't worked. There'd been too much frost in her eyes. But when Jim scratched enough of it off—a sickening task if there ever was one (he told me later he tried to think of her like a side of beef, an image that would have just made it harder for me to look at beef)—sure enough, two golden flickers of light appeared.
It wasn't enough to convince Leanne just then, but when the large man had lowered his head to duck under the pot rack, she'd seen it in his eyes too. That animal shine. And the condition of his fingers had sealed the deal. He'd chewed them raw, like Rosco had sometimes chewed obsessively at his own paws.
"Jim... what are they?"
"Pandas are carnivores," Jim said. "Did you know that?"
"No." She wasn't sure where this was going, but she was willing to follow along. For now, she told herself. She'd come this far without turning him in. Already she'd be considered an accomplice, so she might as well hear what he had to say and hope it didn't sound as crazy as she feared he'd become.
"Well, they are. They have all the characteristics of a carnivore. Carnivore genes, carnivorous digestive tract, ursine teeth. That's bear."
"I know what ursine means," Leanne said, annoyed by his unintentional patronization.
"Right. They even belong to the order Carnivora. But for some reason, they only eat bamboo. Maybe twenty percent of the 30 to 40 pounds they eat gives them nutrition. Carnivorous animals get sixty percent or more. The rest of that bamboo is waste."
"So why do they eat it?"
"They eat it by choice, not necessity. They're the vegans of the animal kingdom." Leanne let the obvious mistake slide, because it seemed he was on a tear. It was easy enough to forget humans were part of the animal kingdom, despite our higher level of consciousness. We put a robot on Mars, for Pete's sake—when was the last time you saw a chimp do that? "Whether that's because they've evolved to be too, let's say hefty, to hunt," Jim went on, "or they're conscientious objectors, nobody knows. All we know for sure is that they were hunters, once."
"You mean these, these things," she said, nodding toward Cordelia's frozen corpse, uncertain just what to call it, "they eat our leftovers so they don't have to hunt?"
Jim shrugged. "I'm not sure why they do it. But I know these—people? Whatever the heck they are—I know they have the teeth and the strength to eat us, if they wanted."
Leanne took a step toward Cordelia Moone's stiffened corpse. The freezer was empty, aside from the few boxes on some of the shelves, freezer-burnt breadsticks and various foodstuffs whose Best Befores were long behind them, things they'd meant to get rid of so they could shut off the freezer for good. She was glad they hadn't now. What would they have done with Cordelia, otherwise?
Leanne reached out, meaning to touch her.
"What are you doing?"
Jim's voice startled her. She'd forgotten he was there. Without answering, she peeled back Cordelia's upper lip. When she let it go, it relaxed slowly, then stiffened in an Elvis-like sneer.
She stepped back in absolute terror, her breath expelled in a frosty cloud. The front teeth—the glamor teeth, her dentist called them—were perfectly normal.
But Cordelia's molars were as sharp as razors.
7
IT WAS LEANNE who suggested their next move. In the two-and-a-half days between late Tuesday night and their Friday evening deadline, the Taymors gave as much time as they could spare to finding out who the large man was, where he lived, how he spent his days, and with whom, if anyone, he had relationships.
As it happened, Richard Holland ran a carpentry shop on the south end of town. Leanne had almost contracted him to do work on La Costina's interior, back when it was still a dream on the horizon, but Dutch's company had rescinded their bid at the last minute without explanation. She had only spoken to him over the phone, or she surely would have recognized him. Though her recall of faces wasn't quite as finely tuned as her husband's, there was no mista
king a man of his size and stature.
So while Jim took care of business at the restaurant, Leanne followed Richard Holland from the carpentry shop to his home, a smart little split-level on the east side, close to the old mill. She drove the sedan, so as not to arouse suspicion. If he'd looked out his window and seen the Suburban, he would have gone out to investigate. She couldn't chance that.
As the sun sank in the west, Dutch's home darkened along with the sky. He didn't turn on any inside lights, even after the streetlamps came on overhead, and Leanne began to think he'd slipped out unnoticed through the backdoor, or worse, that he'd seen her parked out front, recognized her from the restaurant, and was presently slinking around back to pounce on her, to use those unusually sharp molars to strip the flesh and gristle right off her shivering bones.
Leanne thought of those pandas, who had the equipment and refused to use it. Though Dutch had told Jim they were against the consumption of what he'd called "living meat," did she believe they would not they lash out, if cornered? There was no doubt in her mind. Even a rat is smart enough to attack when afforded no other option.
Still she waited, as Jim had waited, in a different car in a different part of town, both of them choked by the very same fear.
It was perhaps an hour later—the same radio voices droning on and on about President Obama's military might—when the front door opened and a great shadow emerged. He didn't need to duck; he'd retrofitted the otherwise small house to be giant-proof.
Instead of heading for his car as she'd hoped he would, Dutch turned and crossed the street, taking up on the sidewalk and lumbering like an ogre right past her car. She ducked, cold terror flooding her insides, turning them to acid, certain he had seen her, would see her. She waited for the knock of his meaty fist on the window.
Or the shattering of glass.
But the monster that was Richard Holland passed by without incident, leaving Leanne, when she'd finally caught her breath, with three options as she saw it. Following by car would attract too much attention, not to mention the trouble she might run into if Dutch slipped down an alley or into a back lot, as seemed to be his custom. She'd be less likely to be spotted if she followed by foot, but she'd worn heels (Stupid girl! she cursed herself), so she'd have to do it barefoot.
The third option, which she gave short shrift, was to give up: to head back to the restaurant and tell Jim she was through; to gather up the money and await their back alley meeting with bated breath (though not baited, as Cordelia's had been), hoping that first $15,000 would also be the last.
The thought of those glimmering eyes, those pointed teeth... all the better to eat you with, my dear... These images arose in her mind, as clear as the dried-out strawberry air freshener swaying from the rearview, as her own harrowed reflection staring back at her from the mirror, as the dulled gold wedding band and the permanent indent it had made on her finger.
Lying awake the night of the murder (Leanne began thinking of it more as an extermination; it gave the death a more humane slant in her mind, much like using the warfarin had for Jim), the idea of turning her husband in had grown awfully tempting. With the key to the old basement walk-in on the bedside table, within her view, and Jim snoring contentedly beside her, the thought of him locked away safely behind bars—this man she'd lain beside for 26 good years, who had turned out to be a cold-blooded killer, or so she'd considered it at the time—began to feel like the only sane decision, the right decision.
The moment she realized this, she'd gotten up, made her side of the bed, and started cleaning. It wouldn't do to have a filthy house when the police showed up, let alone those newspeople with their immaculate hairdos, and their hot lights and cameras that could pick out every spot of grime and dust-bunny in brilliant high-definition.
(These were thoughts a wife should spare her husband, yet later on, Leanne Taymor spoke them. In front of me, and in front of Gin. In front of God too, I suppose.)
She hadn't made up her mind entirely about sparing Jim until she was sitting outside the Holland Woodwork & Joinery. She'd been watching the large man through the big front windows as he glad-handed clients and pored over blueprints with employees, all the while smiling that toothy, hooded-eye smile. At just past noon, she tucked into the Hammental sandwich she'd made that morning, consisting of maple-glazed ham, Emmental cheese, lettuce, tomato, Dijon mustard and a few sprigs of dill. Over time, it had become a favorite, but now it occurred to her she hadn't made one in quite some time. Not until that morning.
She remembered the first time she'd made this sandwich—two of them, actually: one for herself, and one for Jim. Back then she had been Leanne Wexler, and Jim had been a boy she'd seen around campus every so often, with his few friends or by himself on his way to class. She'd smiled at him in the hall once, and he'd turned away shyly, blood rising in his neck all the way to his fluffy, tawny sideburns. After that day she'd decided the next time she saw him, she would strike up a conversation herself.
She couldn't remember exactly what they'd talked about. Their talk had been brief, she remembered that much. He'd been sitting on one of the stone benches in The Quad, in front of Jesse Hall and the four columns left over from the old Academic Hall that had burned to the ground in the early '80s. He was eating a Big Mac and flipping through a thick geology text, something with the incomprehensible name Quantitative Seismology: Theory and Methods Volume II.
Leanne had sat down beside him. He'd pretended not to notice her until she'd leaned in between his eyes and the dense text and said, "As an English major, I have to say, I find your taste in literature deplorable." He grinned, still not daring to meet her eyes. "Although any guy interested in making the earth move is okay by me."
His cheeks had flushed with color at this. The rest of the conversation had been rushed, following the nervous pace of a young man who hadn't spoken to many girls. He asked her out, more as a reflex than at his own behest. The details were nailed down, a few delicate innuendos made, and Jim was up on his feet with his giant book and ugly yellow Styrofoam sandwich package, ostensibly heading off toward his next class.
They picnicked at Stevens Lake on Saturday, walking the trails and feeding the ducks. She'd filled a thermos with sparkling wine and they'd drunk it out of paper Dixie cups: Jim sipping, Leanne taking healthy gulps, enjoying the feel of the bubbles filling her mouth and prickling down to her belly. Despite the blanket Leanne had brought to sit on, Jim held a napkin under his sandwich—which he'd named "Hammental"—while he ate. At the time, she thought it was just about the most absurdly adorable thing she'd ever seen. He complimented her sandwich-making skills, and when she joked "All that's missing is the special sauce and a sesame seed bun," he'd laughed so hard champagne spurted from his nose.
After lunch, heading back to Jim's car (he drove a Plymouth Acclaim back then, its wheel wells growing so much rust the once-white rocker panels had turned a deep brown), he had stepped back suddenly, startled. At his feet, a baby bird lay shivering and wet in the grass. From the branches of a redbud, its sweet, wild-smelling purple canopy shading them from the sun, came the frantic squawks and chirps of its family.
"Poor little guy," Leanne said, and continued on, certain the mother would fly down to pluck it from the ground to deposit it safely back in the nest.
"We can't just leave it."
Leanne turned back, saw Jim looking down at the poor thing, and felt her heart swell with affection. Before she could say anything—about fleas, about the Avian flu she'd heard them describe on the news just lately, about the poor thing's mother—Jim scooped it up from the grass and tucked it into the pocket of his surfer hoodie.
Mama Bird immediately went wild, swooping down from her high branch with a violent chirrup and dive-bombing Jim's head like a kamikaze pilot. Jim paid it no mind except to duck out of its way as he pulled himself up into the low branches of the redbud tree. Petals fell around Leanne in a violet snowstorm. She stood below him, laughing fretfully, praying for his safet
y. With perfect mental clarity, she saw the image of Jim laid out on a hospital gurney, the baby bird a squashed mess of blood and tiny broken bones in his pocket.
Over the edge of the nest, the hatchlings stretched their little orange beaks to Jim, as if he were their mother returning with a worm. He placed their sister back among them, and beamed a big pleased smile down at Leanne, a job well done.
"Now get your butt down here," she said. She'd been about to call him "hero" when Mama Bird swooped in and struck the base of his skull with her beak. The sound was like a baseball dinged into the crowd. He fell.
A moment later, Jim was lying on his back at the base of the tree, legs in the air, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
Get a good look, Leanne, she'd told herself, before rushing over to help him to his feet. That's the man you're going to marry.
She laughed now, remembering it. She must have had the memory at the back of her mind while making her lunch that morning. And since she'd been thinking only of what Jim had done the night before, and the key he'd given her, putting his life in her hands, she thought she must have made her decision without even being consciously aware of it. The sandwich was her answer. Jim's Hammental.
And speaking of food, not once did she see big Dutch Holland eat something, not even sitting alone in his office. She supposed he could have been on a diet, considering his size. But as the afternoon went on, and Leanne grew hungry yet again, she was seized by the certainty Dutch was saving his appetite for the delicacies of the evening. The moment this idea occurred to her, she knew she could no longer share the world with things like Richard Holland, inhuman creatures wearing human skin like children wore costumes on Hallowe'en. She understood then that Jim had done right by poisoning Cordelia Moone.
By exterminating her.
Knowing what they knew, there could be no turning back. Not for Leanne, and not for Jim.
Not ever.
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