Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (82 page)

We kept discussing and refining, until we felt we had a workable procedure. Alcide asked me twice if I was okay, and I reassured him both times; it finally dawned on me that he was thinking I might break into hysterics, or faint.

“I’ve never been able to afford to be too finicky,” I said. “That’s not my nature.” If Alcide expected or wanted me to ask for smelling salts, or to beg him to save little me from the big bad wolf, he had the wrong woman.

I might be determined to keep my head, but that’s not to say I felt exactly calm. I was so jittery when I went to get the shower curtain that I had to restrain myself from ripping it from the clear plastic rings. Slow and steady, I told myself fiercely. Breathe in, breathe out, get the shower curtain, spread it on the hall floor.

It was blue and green with yellow fish swimming serenely in even rows.

Alcide had gone downstairs to the parking garage to move his truck as close to the stair door as possible. He’d thoughtfully brought a pair of work gloves back up with him. While he pulled them on, he took a deep breath—maybe a mistake, considering the body’s proximity. His face a frozen mask of determination, Alcide gripped the corpse’s shoulders and gave a yank.

The results were dramatic beyond our imagining. In one stiff piece, the biker toppled out of the closet. Alcide had to leap to his right to avoid the falling body, which banged against the kitchen counter and then fell sideways onto the shower curtain.

“Wow,” I said in a shaky voice, looking down at the result. “That turned out well.”

The body was lying almost exactly as we wanted it. Alcide and I gave each other a sharp nod and knelt at each end. Acting in concert, we took one side of the plastic curtain and flipped it over the body, then the other. We both relaxed when the man’s face was covered. Alcide had also brought up a roll of duct tape—real men always have duct tape in their trucks—and we used it to seal the wrapped body in the curtain. Then we folded the ends over, and taped them. Luckily, though a hefty guy, the Were hadn’t been very tall.

We stood up and let ourselves have a little moment of recovery. Alcide spoke first. “It looks like a big green burrito,” he observed.

I slapped a hand over my mouth to stifle a fit of the giggles.

Alcide’s eyes were startled as he stared at me over the wrapped corpse. Suddenly, he laughed, too.

After we’d settled down, I asked, “You ready for phase two?”

He nodded, and I pulled on my coat and scooted past the body and Alcide. I went out to the elevator, closing the apartment door behind me very quickly, just in case someone passed by.

The minute I punched the button, a man appeared around the corner and came to stand by the elevator door. Perhaps he was a relative of old Mrs. Osburgh, or maybe one of the senators was making a flying trip back to Jackson. Whoever he was, he was well dressed and in his sixties, and he was polite enough to feel the obligation of making conversation.

“It’s really cold today, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but not as cold as yesterday.” I stared at the closed doors, willing them to open so he would be gone.

“Did you just move in?”

I had never been so irritated with a courteous person before. “I’m visiting,” I said, in the kind of flat voice that should indicate the conversation is closed.

“Oh,” he said cheerfully. “Who?”

Luckily the elevator chose that moment to arrive and its doors snicked open just in time to save this too-genial man from getting his head snapped off. He gestured with a sweep of his hand, wanting me to precede him, but I took a step back, said, “Oh my gosh, I forgot my keys!” and walked briskly off without a backward glance. I went to the door of the apartment next to Alcide’s, the one he’d told me was empty, and I knocked on the door. I heard the elevator doors close behind me, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

When I figured Mr. Chatty had had time to get to his car and drive out of the garage—unless he was talking the ears off the security guard—I recalled the elevator. It was Saturday, and there was no telling what people’s schedules would be like. According to Alcide, many of the condos had been bought as an investment and were subleased to legislators, most of who would be gone for the pre-holidays. The year-round tenants, however, would be moving around in atypical ways, since it was not only the weekend, but also only two weekends before Christmas. When the creaky contraption came back to the fifth floor, it was empty.

I dashed back to 504, knocked twice on the door, and dashed back to the elevator to hold the doors open. Preceded by the legs of the corpse, Alcide emerged from the apartment. He moved as quickly as a man can while he’s carrying a stiff body over his shoulder.

This was our most vulnerable moment. Alcide’s bundle looked like nothing on this earth but a corpse wrapped in a shower curtain. The plastic kept the smell down, but it was still noticeable in the small enclosure. We made it down one floor safely, then the next. At the third floor, our nerve ran out. We stopped the elevator, and to our great relief it opened onto an empty corridor. I darted out and over to the stair door, holding it open for Alcide. Then I scampered down the stairs ahead of him, and looked through the pane of glass in the door to the garage.

“Whoa,” I said, holding my hand up. A middle-aged woman and a teenage girl were unloading packages from the trunk of their Toyota, simultaneously having a vigorous disagreement. The girl had been invited to an all-night party. No, her mother said.

She had to go, all her friends would be there. No, her mother said.

But Mom, everyone else’s mom was letting them go. No, her mother said.

“Please don’t decide to take the stairs,” I whispered.

But the argument raged on as they got in the elevator. I clearly heard the girl break her train of complaint long enough to say, “Ew, something smells in here!” before the doors closed.

“What’s happening?” Alcide whispered.

“Nothing. Let’s see if that lasts a minute longer.”

It did, and I stepped out of the door and over to Alcide’s truck, darting glances from side to side to make sure I was really alone. We weren’t quite in sight of the security guard, who was in his little glass hut up the slope of the ramp.

I unlocked the back of Alcide’s pickup; fortunately, his pickup bed had a cover. With one more comprehensive look around the garage, I hurried back to the stair door and rapped on it. After a second, I pulled it open.

Alcide shot out and over to his truck faster than I would have believed he could move, burdened as he was. We pushed as hard as we could, and the body slowly retreated into the truck bed. With tremendous relief, we slammed the tailgate shut and locked it.

“Phase two complete,” Alcide said with an air that I would have called giddy if he hadn’t been such a big man.

Driving through the streets of a city with a body in your vehicle is a terrifying exercise in paranoia.

“Obey every single traffic rule,” I reminded Alcide, unhappy with how tense my voice sounded.

“Okay, okay,” he growled, his voice equally tense.

“Do you think those people in that Jimmy are looking at us?”

“No.”

It would obviously be a good thing for me to keep quiet, so I did. We got back on I-20, the same way we’d entered Jackson, and drove until there was no city, only farmland.

When we got to the Bolton exit, Alcide said, “This looks good.”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t think I could stand driving around with the body any longer. The land between Jackson and Vicksburg is pretty low and flat, mostly open fields broken up by a few bayous, and this area was typical. We exited the interstate and headed north toward the woods. After a few miles Alcide took a right onto a road that had needed repaving for years. The trees grew up on either side of the much-patched strip of gray. The bleak winter sky didn’t stand a chance of giving much light with this kind of competition, and I shivered in the cab of the truck.

“Not too much longer,” Alcide said. I nodded jerkily.

A tiny thread of a road led off to the left, and I pointed. Alcide braked, and we examined the prospect. We gave each other a sharp nod of approval. Alcide backed in, which surprised me; but I decided that it was a good idea. The farther we went into the woods, the more I liked our choice of venue. The road had been graveled not too long ago, so we wouldn’t leave tire tracks, for one thing. And I thought the chances were good that this rudimentary road led to a hunting camp, which wouldn’t be in much use now that deer season was over.

Sure enough, after we’d crunched a few yards down the track, I spotted a sign nailed to a tree. It proclaimed, “Kiley-Odum Hunt Club private property—KEEP OUT.”

We proceeded down the track, Alcide backing slowly and carefully.

“Here,” he said, when we’d gone far enough into the woods that it was almost certain we couldn’t be seen from the road. He put the truck into Park. “Listen, Sookie, you don’t have to get out.”

“It’ll be quicker if we work together.”

He tried to give me a menacing glare, but I gave him a stone face right back, and finally, he sighed. “Okay, let’s get this over with,” he said.

The air was cold and wet, and if you stood still for a moment the chilling damp would creep into your bones. I could tell the temperature was taking a dive, and the bright sky of the morning was a fond memory. It was an appropriate day to dump a body. Alcide opened the back of the truck, we both pulled on gloves, and we grasped the bright blue-and-green bundle. The cheerful yellow fish looked almost obscene out here in the freezing woods.

“Give it everything you got,” Alcide advised me, and on a count of three, we yanked with all our might. That got the bundle half out, and the end of it protruded over the tailgate in a nasty way. “Ready? Let’s go again. One, two, three!” Again I yanked, and the body’s own gravity shot it out of the truck and onto the road.

If we could have driven off then and there, I would have been much happier; but we had decided we had to take the shower curtain with us. Who was to say what fingerprints might be found somewhere on the duct tape or the curtain itself? There was sure to be other, microscopic evidence that I couldn’t even imagine.

I don’t watch the Discovery Channel for nothing.

Alcide had a utility knife, and I did let him have the honor of this particular task. I held open a garbage bag while he cut the plastic away and stuffed it into the opening. I tried not to look, but of course I did.

The body’s appearance had not improved.

That job, too, was finished sooner than I expected. I half turned to get back in the truck, but Alcide stood, his face raised to the sky. He looked as if he was smelling the forest.

“Tonight’s the full moon,” he said. His whole body seemed to quiver. When he looked at me, his eyes looked alien. I couldn’t say that they had changed in color or contour, but it was as if a different person was looking out of them.

I was very alone in the woods with a comrade who had suddenly taken on a whole new dimension. I fought conflicting impulses to scream, burst into tears, or run. I smiled brightly at him and waited. After a long, fraught pause, Alcide said, “Let’s get back in the truck.”

I was only too glad to scramble up into the seat.

“What do you think killed him?” I asked, when it seemed to me Alcide had had time to return to normal.

“I think someone gave his neck a big twist,” Alcide said. “I can’t figure out how he got into the apartment. I know I locked the door last night. I’m sure of it. And this morning it was locked again.”

I tried to figure that out for a while, but I couldn’t. Then I wondered what actually killed you if your neck was broken. But I decided that wasn’t really a great thing to think about.

En route to the apartment, we made a stop at Wal-Mart. On a weekend this close to Christmas, it was swarming with shoppers. Once again, I thought,
I haven’t gotten anything for Bill
.

And I felt a sharp pain in my heart as I realized that I might never buy Bill a Christmas present, not now, not ever.

We needed air fresheners, Resolve (to clean the carpet), and a new shower curtain. I packed my misery away and walked a little more briskly. Alcide let me pick out the shower curtain, which I actually enjoyed. He paid cash, so there wouldn’t be any record of our visit.

I checked out my nails after we had climbed back in the truck. They were fine. Then I thought of how callous I must be, worrying about my fingernails. I’d just finished disposing of a dead man. For several minutes, I sat there feeling mighty unhappy about myself.

I relayed this to Alcide, who seemed more approachable now that we were back in civilization minus our silent passenger.

“Well, you didn’t kill him,” he pointed out. “Ah—did you?”

I met his green eyes, feeling only a little surprise. “No, I certainly did not. Did you?”

“No,” he said, and from his expression I could tell he’d been waiting for me to ask him. It had never occurred to me to do so.

While I’d never suspected Alcide, of course someone had made the Were into a body. For the first time I tried to figure who could have stuffed the body in the closet. Up until this point, I’d just been busy trying to make the body go away.

“Who has keys?” I asked.

“Just Dad and me, and the cleaning woman who does most of the apartments in the building. She doesn’t keep a key of her own. The building manager gives her one.” We pulled around behind the row of stores, and Alcide tossed in the garbage bag containing the old shower curtain.

“That’s a pretty short list.”

“Yes,” Alcide said slowly. “Yes, it is. But I know my dad’s in Jackson. I talked to him on the phone this morning, right after I got up. The cleaning woman only comes in when we leave a message with the building manager. He keeps a copy of our key, hands it to her when she needs it, and she returns it to him.”