Dirty Money (24 page)

“Shut up. You’re dead. Dead guys don’t talk.” I grabbed handfuls of his shirt and dragged him to the edge of the hole. Then I jumped down into it and started pulling. “Don’t catch yourself when you fall, ’kay?”

He nodded. When I yanked, he fell hard. But he kept his hands out of the mud.

“Ouch.”

“Don’t move.”

“Couldn’t even if I wanted to.” Christopher coughed, which made what were probably very realistic blood spatters.

Breno helped me out of the hole. We looked down at our gruesome handiwork.

“Perfect,” I said. For the first time, I thought this might actually work. “What do you think?”

“Amazing.” And he sounded amazed. “He looks pale from the cold, which is good. Except the blood still looks a little fresh.”

“Shit.” He was right.

“Are you going to take the pictures?” Christopher asked from his grave.

“The blood looks too fresh.”

“Can you wait like five minutes?” I knew it was asking a lot. But hopefully the blood would look a little older and drier by then.

“What the hell? It’s my funeral, right? Who cares if I’m comfortable?”

“I know you’re being sarcastic, but this is for your own good. So stop bitching.” I was so kind.

Breno and I stood over Christopher to wait with him for all of sixty seconds. But then we got cold so we got in the car. We left him out in the cold for more than the promised five minutes. It was a battle between heated leather and frozen mud. Hard decision.

Christopher was doing an awesome impression of dead. The blood had dried, his face and extremities were bluish-white, and his face was slack. His shirt was half open from me dragging him, which worked out well because it exposed the bruises forming on his torso.

“That’s perfect. Don’t move.” I worked my cell phone out of my pocket. “Breno, go like way, way over there. I don’t want any hint of you in these.” He listened. Wisely.

I crouched down and carefully framed each shot. I didn’t want any footprints in the snow to show up. Their feet were definitely bigger than mine. After I had about ten from different angles, I stood.

“Are you finished?” Breno asked from the far side of the SUV.

“Yeah, come look.” I held out my phone. “Hey, Christopher. You’re good. Get your ass up.”

Breno took my phone. “These are great. Yes, very convincing. Christopher, you need to look at these.”

Christopher didn’t move.

“Christopher,” I said. “You can get up now.”

“Yes, stop playing around.”

“Shit.” I jumped into the hole, careful not to land on him. I checked his pulse. He was alive, but his skin was fuckin’ cold. “He’s freezing. Help me get him out of here.” When I lifted Christopher’s shoulders so he was sitting, he opened his eyes and blinked at me.

“Hello, Vivian.” Very formal. “I fell asleep.” He closed his eyes again.

“Hey, you with me?” Nope. He was totally not with me.

Breno jumped down next to me. Between the two of us we were able to lift him until he was on his feet. Sort of.

“I will pull him up. You push from down here. Hold on a minute.” Breno levered himself up and out of the grave while I pinned Christopher against the wall of damp dirt. He cupped under Christopher’s armpits as I grabbed his legs and shoved upward.

“Got him?”

“Yes.”

Breno dragged him onto the snow-covered ground. It took another five minutes to get him into the SUV. We stripped off his wet clothes and covered him with a blanket. The wound on his head had already stopped bleeding. That was probably good.

“Any idea how to deal with hypothermia?” I asked.

“No. Do you think that is why he fell asleep?”

“Probably. He’s cold as fuck.”

“I’ll turn on the heat.” Breno climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine again. “We need to get him somewhere warm.”

“Yep.” That much was obvious. “We’ve done what we can here. Let’s take care of Esau.” We couldn’t do anything else for Christopher until we were out of there.

Esau covered his fear when we opened the back and started hauling him out. But the smirk he was going for didn’t reach his eyes. We dragged him to his grave. He didn’t start screaming until we dropped him in. He caught my eye and started shaking his head when I handed Breno the gun.

“I’m sorry, Esau, really,” I told him. And then Breno shot him. Once. In the head. I jumped into the grave, checked his pulse. There was nothing. Just a rapidly spreading pool of blood. I stripped the tape off his mouth, cut the ties from his wrists and ankles, and reached up to Breno.

Just like that, it was done. My well-intentioned, but psychotic mentor was gone. It took far less time to fill in the hole than it did to dig it out. The snow picked up again as his face disappeared. It got heavier and heavier as we covered his body. By the time we were done, Breno and I were standing in two inches of snow. Esau wouldn’t be found for a very long time, if ever.

*

Christopher was somewhat coherent by the time we passed Placerville. Or at least he had some color back in his face and extremities. He mumbled in his sleep from time to time.

It wasn’t snowing here, at least not yet. Nothing was open. I directed Breno onto Main Street. The corporate businesses on the eastern end, all newer, were empty. I jumped out and tossed a bag of muddy clothes and various other evidence into the Dumpster.

“Are you sure that will be safe enough?” Breno asked when I climbed back in.

“Yes, it was nearly full. They’ll pick it up in the next few days.”

“No one will go through and notice?”

“No, most of the homeless are in the shelter because of the weather this time of year. And Dumpster diving won’t impress the kids around here.”

He nodded. Good enough. We drove down Main Street to get back on the freeway.

“This is a quaint little town,” Breno said.

“If you’re white and straight.” He seemed confused. “I’ve had a few bottles thrown at my head here. The galleries and restaurants are safe enough, but the bars are hick town to the core.”

“Wonderful.”

“Totally.”

“Where is everyone? Why are the shops closed?”

“Seriously?” He spared me a glance. “It’s Christmas morning.”

Silence. At first. “How did I miss that?”

“You’ve been preoccupied, I guess.”

“I am sorry, Cooper. We will need to spend the day celebrating, I suppose.”

And we did. None of us knew exactly what to celebrate. Maybe warm showers and family we didn’t know we had. Maybe the promise that next year would be better.

When I got back to Chicago, I stayed with Vito. Ostensibly, this was because Vito was concerned about me. He wasn’t. He didn’t trust me worth shit. But that didn’t last long. We got to his house and immediately went to his study. Madge, his wife, who was a total dog, brought us coffee. I figured that meant Vito actually loved her. Not the coffee. The fact that she was a dog. He could have had some mindless trophy wife, but he had this sweet, ugly thing instead. And she really was sweet. After twenty-four hours there, I would have married her.

So we sat in his study staring at each other. I took out my phone and tossed it to him.

“What is this?”

“My cell phone. I don’t want it back. It’s yours.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Look in the pictures.”

It took him a few minutes. The way people over fifty pretend they know how to operate a cell phone, but they can only work their own. I knew the second he found the pictures. For that second, that fraction of a second, he looked happier than I’d ever seen him. Then he schooled that expression into one of stoicism. For my benefit probably.

Just like that, I was golden.

“I need to inform some people about this.”

“I know.”

“May I keep the pictures?”

“They’re all yours.”

“Do you want credit?”

And there it was. The question. He’d protected me from any of Tommy’s friends who might have wanted revenge, though it didn’t seem Tommy had any friends. I knew Christopher didn’t have friends either, but still.

“Don’t take out a billboard or anything.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“You can tell the people who matter.”

And he did.

I spent the next week jumping at every sound, letting Vito hear me scream away the nightmares, getting angry at anything that moved, and sometimes at shit that didn’t move. It was all build up for one conversation. Vito tried a couple times to get me to spill. I ignored him. It was Madge I finally opened up to. It was the best performance of my life.

We were in the dining room. Breakfast was finished. I was staring into my empty coffee mug when she carefully took it from my hands and filled it.

“Thanks.”

“It might help if you talk about it.” She sat across from me. “When you’re ready.”

I smiled at her, but it was an empty sort of smile. “Nothing to talk about.” She just waited. “Really. I killed someone. I’ve done it before.”

“Don’t do that.”

“What? He’s dead. No need to fixate.” I drank some coffee. It burned my mouth. I fucking hated it when coffee burned my mouth. It didn’t make me feel alive or awake or aware. It just hurt.

“You don’t need to trivialize it just to feel better. In fact, you’ll probably feel better if you talk about why it isn’t so trivial.”

“What if it is trivial? The guy was an asshole. The last guy I killed was an asshole. Didn’t Vito tell you? Or are you the type of wife who doesn’t want to know?”

“I don’t feign ignorance. It would be a lie.”

“How very honorable of you.”

“All right.” Madge stood. “You’re not ready. I see that. But when you are I’ll be here.”

She was already out the door when I spoke.

“He taught me multiplication.” Her footsteps stopped. “When I was a kid, this boy in my class told me girls couldn’t do math. So Christopher taught me multiplication. He quizzed me on it for a whole weekend.” Madge came back into the room. “The next week, I got all gold stars on the stupid math chart thing our teacher had on the wall. The other kid couldn’t even get past his subtraction tables. It sounds dumb. I know.”

“It doesn’t sound dumb.”

“He was cool when we were kids.”

“Just when you were kids?”

“Yeah, just then. When Carissa died…I dunno. He died or something. Earlier this year, he hit Reese. Do you know Reese?”

“Yes.”

“She has a scar now. Here.” I pointed below my eye. “Such a fucking asshole.”

Madge sat next to me. And waited. And waited some more.

“I knew we were going there to kill him. That’s what Esau does. Did. Whatever.”

“It’s what Esau did.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

“But it’s not what you do,” she said.

“No. I guess not.”

“It sounds like you and Christopher were close once.”

“Shit happens.”

“What kind of shit happens?” She mimicked my phrasing. It sounded weird. Like having your grandma cuss at you.

“I just got so fucking mad at him. He shot Esau.” I started shouting. “Just shot him. With his own gun. He shouldn’t have shot him.”

“It made you mad?”

“It was my damn fault. I tied him up. Esau always says—he always said to tie them up tight. But I didn’t. The squirrelly bastard got his hands free. And then—Esau never carries his gun. He always leaves it sitting there like a fucking idiot. So Christopher grabbed it and he shot him.”

“Did he try to shoot you?”

“No. He set the gun down. He said he wanted to talk to me. So I hit him. And then I hit him again. And again. At first, he tried to stop me. He didn’t hit me back. He just tried to stop me. And then he just took it. Like a little bitch. And that made me even madder. So I grabbed his head and I slammed it into the desk. And. And―” And then I was crying. The kind of crying where your whole body feels like it’s shaking and you can’t breathe and your nose is running. And I remember thinking what a badass I was for committing to my story like this. I didn’t think about why the hell I was actually crying.

Madge didn’t try to hold me or comfort me. She just let me cry it out. Which was probably for the best. Otherwise, I might never have stopped. She cradled one of my hands between hers. I used the other to wipe my face as I sniffled and sobbed. Somehow, she produced tissues when I was able to breathe again. Big gulps of air became only minor gulps, and then my chest was slowly rising and falling.

“Thank you for telling me.”

I looked at her. Didn’t say anything. Looked away and back again. “He didn’t die.”

“He didn’t?” Now she was worried.

“No. Not right away. It took him forever. I knew I couldn’t save him. I didn’t want to. But I couldn’t just end it either.”

“What did you do?”

“Called Vito. Loaded the…the bodies into the car. When I was driving, I could hear him in the back. Moaning and coughing. Then he’d fall asleep or pass out and I’d think he was dead and then he’d cough again.” I shuddered. “It took so long to dig their graves. It was past dawn when I finished Christopher’s. I did his first. And I thought if he wasn’t dead, that I was going to have to shoot him because I couldn’t bury him alive. But when I opened the back, he was dead. Just like that. And then I was thinking about how he taught me multiplication and how I don’t know if I thanked him. And even if he was an asshole I should have done something.”

“What would you have done?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Held his hand. Told him I was sorry.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because I was so damn mad at him.”

“But why were you so mad?”

“For everything, I think.”

“What do you mean, everything?”

“Like, before I was mad ’cause he was a jerk to the twins. And then I was mad that he stole all that money. And then I was mad ’cause he was screwing Vito over. And he kept trying to get out of it. As if it wasn’t his fault he was such a douche bag. He was saying the most insane shit. Like, he made me look in his desk and there was this photo of the twins’ dad. And he said he killed him so he could marry Carissa.”

It was the little details that made a lie.