The Spy's Little Zonbi (28 page)

Then she slapped him across the face, hard.

“
I need your help right now!” His face was numb, although it should have been hot and stinging. “We need him on the bed and all the blood wiped off the floor and the wall.”

“
What did you do?” He fingered his cheek.

“
I hit you.” It was her calm voice, and then she smiled and almost giggled. Mitra took his face in her hands. “This isn't what you think. I'll explain it all later, but I didn't have sex with him.”

“
Why …” Chase started to get up, but she pushed him back down next to Bernie.

“
He was crazy.” She pointed down at Bernie with her palm up. Chase watched her slender fingers. “He thought you were some kind of spy and that you were after him. He thought you were going to kill him.”

“
I don't understand? Why are you here? Where's Tylea?”

“
I came because he was going to hurt you, and she's fine, she's at my dad's house.”

“
But …”

“
I know how it looks.” She reached down and grabbed hold of Bernie's ankles, jerking her head in the direction of the skier's head so that Chase would grab him from the other end. They swung his limp body onto the bed.

He knew from his drunken night in the elevator, hanging off Chase like a monkey, that Bernie was light as a feather. Plus, he was now missing a gallon of blood. Mitra began scooping up all that blood with bath towels and draping them across Bernie's body. She had apparently set about to create a wickedly gruesome piece of art. Chase admired the stark contrast of shapes and colors.

“
Did you put your gloves on before you broke in?” she asked, and he looked at his hands and started to pull off the soft gloves. “Don't!”

“
Right.” And he was the spy? “Yes, I put them on outside and didn't touch anything at all.”

Mitra left him with Bernie and padded down the hall. He heard cabinets open and close, then bottles clanking. She returned wearing cartoonish looking yellow dishwashing gloves—which kept hands soft and sexy—and carrying a load of whiskey bottles.

“
Here.” She foisted a half dozen various whiskeys at him. “Just soak the bed and the body. Leave about an inch in each bottle and put the caps back on tight.”

It was no longer Bernie? Just a body? Chase was more than fine with that. He unscrewed caps and did as he was told while Mitra emptied the remaining bottles on the body formerly known as Bernie.

“
Leave all the bottles on the bed. I'll be right back.”

“
You're telling me the truth, aren't you?”

“
I wasn't here to sleep with him.”

She returned with a small brown rectangle he recognized as a fire starting brick, pulling at the plastic wrapper. The funny gloves were making it difficult.

“
Do you have your keys?”

“
In the Jeep,” he said.

“
Okay, you leave through the front door, slow and casual, like you just had a nice little neighborly visit and are heading home. Pull your jacket collar up and if someone's walking their dog, just say something about how cold it is, nothing memorable, no stupid jokes. I'll be at your hotel five minutes after you. Park in the back lot and wait for me in your Jeep. Got it?”

“
I'm not leaving you here,” he said with no authority whatsoever.

“
You're leaving right now if you ever want to see your child again,” she told him in a voice colder than anything outside these walls. “One more thing.”

“
Yes?”

“
Try not to back into anyone's car on the way out.”

He imagined she lit the fire starter when the sound of his Jeep faded into the night. He never asked for details. He assumed she left the lit kerosene-based brick on a paperback book. It would provide a little extra time between her exit and the raging fire, which would engulf Bernie and all the alcohol soaked bedding.

She probably anticipated having some explaining to do. How she knew Bernie was feeling threatened by Chase. But once the truth came out, he was the one who had filled their lives with lies. That Bernie
was
being stalked by Chase. That a pretty good chunk of their life together was grounded in one whopper of a lie, and he was actually serving their country by maintaining surveillance on Bernie. Killing him prematurely was sort of a fuckup on his part, but what assignment ever goes down without a few glitches?

Mitra turned the murder scene into a tragic accident. Depending on the extent of the fire and subsequent damage to the body that had once been Bernie, the sheriff or fire inspector up here in Vermont might request an autopsy. It probably came down to whether they noticed the bullet hole, but the little Austrian ski racer had left a two-thousand mile trail of scorned women and enough pissed-off husbands and boyfriends to keep any investigators occupied right through the summer.

Mitra and Chase made love later that night in his hotel room. They did not talk.

The phone jarred Chase out of a bad dream while the room was still dark. It was a message that the morning's race had been cancelled. There had been a fire and one of the racers had died. They were all encouraged to meet at breakfast and talk about the rest of the weekend; they could help plan services and perhaps hold a race on Sunday in Bernie's honor.

Chase wasn't sure why they made love so often over the next few days. Maybe it was to replace talking. Maybe it was because they sensed some sort of end was near. And a very strange thing happened between them, as each passing moment made it easier for Chase not to tell her everything, especially since she didn't ask. And he never pressed her on how she knew Bernie thought he was a spy out to kill him.

Escaping Vermont, her little red car followed him west through Rutland, across the state line into New York, and then due south. They wound their way down to New Jersey and across the icy Delaware into Pennsylvania, to where their little girl was waiting.

Tylea had a whole new bag full of interesting toys and stories about how each one had died. Chase listened to every word, holding her close, feeling her mom's breath on his neck, wishing it would get warm soon.

T
ylea's bare knees were scabbed from rough soccer practices and games with the bigger girls, some three grades ahead. It was the middle of soccer season and Mitra's father insisted on celebrating his birthday by attending one of her games. Chase argued the risks of her potentially volcanic father, but Mitra had been firm.

“
Grandpa eats people's pets.” Tylea was in the back seat of Mitra's car, Chase at the wheel, as the three made the long round trip journey to pick up Doctor Bam.

“
No, he doesn't,” Mitra said and turned to Chase with a brow-furrowed look that said she wasn't in the mood, that she wanted today to be as normal as possible.

“
Why do you think so?” Chase asked and shrugged his shoulders at his wife.

Tylea folded shut the book she'd been reading, something about vampires and good looking teenagers. “The packages in his freezer all have names written on them. Names of pets, like Princess and Buster.”

“
That's just Grandpa's sense of humor, honey,” her mother said.

“
Grandpa said that we could solve a lot of the world's problems if we considered cats and dogs edible. Like the neighbor's dog who goes to the bathroom in his flower garden. And know what else?”

“
Grandpa doesn't really think that,” Mitra interrupted, but Chase knew it was true. The man loved animals, wouldn't hurt a fly until it dug up his prized marigolds. That's when the gloves came off.

“
He says that people should be made into food after we die. He says that dead people don't need to take up so much room and that the planet only has so much space.”

Chase stifled a laugh, but Mitra was obviously upset. Chase knew it must bring back troubling memories, ones she'd rather their daughter not have to deal with.

“
My teacher says we go to heaven when we die, but Grandpa says … well, he called it a bad word having to do with cow poop. He said if it were true, heaven would be just about the scariest place ever, a bunch of dead people walking around. I sure don't wanna go to heaven.”

“
Your teacher meant to say that she believes a person's
soul
goes to heaven,” Mitra explained. “Not their whole body.”

“
I wouldn't want to eat dead people, anyway. What if you found out it was your uncle? How come you don't have brothers and sisters, Mom?”

“
Because your grandfather only wanted one little girl,” Mitra told her. “I was his one and only sugar plum.”

“
He says he made you in an experiment.” Tylea opened her hardcover book and hunted for her place. She scooted down to put her knees against the back of her mother's seat. “But I saw pictures of your mom before she died. Grandpa keeps them in a drawer next to where I sleep at his house. She looks just like you.”

Chase took his eyes from the narrow country road that had cost the lives of so many wandering pets. Mitra's head was turned away from him, her hands clenched into fists in her lap. Her mother had been the original taboo subject of their marriage. If her knuckles hadn't been so white he might have dared ask again what she really knew of her mother's fate.

As soon as they pulled into the shaded driveway, Doctor Bam's front door burst open. They were greeted by loud rock music and a short, stocky man hoisting a lumpy sack with a dark stain at the bottom.

“
I'll ride in back with the star footballer!” Doctor Bam squeezed past Mitra. He wore a new lab coat, was recently shaved, and looked to have attempted maneuvering a comb through his wiry hair.

“
We call it
soccer
, Grandpa. Football is a different sport.”

“
Do you know, young lady, what my country does to its soccer players who do not win?”

“
Dad, please.”

Chase had backed out of the driveway, taking extra care over the speed bumps installed in front of Doctor Bam's house. He suspected the township had targeted this stretch in particular because of the doctor's notoriously erratic driving habits.

“
I'll tell you what they cut off when your mother is not listening. Here, have a cookie.”

“
She can't have sweets before a game.” Mitra's tone was stern and supposedly meant for her daughter, but Chase knew it was more to protect Tylea from having to reject the offer. Tylea was aware of the risk of taking food from her grandfather.

“
Then turn on the radio,” Doctor Bam ordered, and Chase heard the sound of the cookie being shoved back into the dirty plastic sack. “What are athletics without music? What is life without music?”

Chase rubbed his left temple with his thumb, relieved to have Mitra's father singing along behind him instead of talking. “It's just one game,” Mitra had promised. And so much better than an afternoon spent inside his house, surrounded by peculiar smells and the same scratchy records played too loud while brown things were served in deep bowls.

Chase began to relax as he settled in for the drive. The spring and summer had flown by, his secure email account remaining empty. Not a peep from DB6 or anyone at the CIA, which was fine with him. He welcomed their silence, as he welcomed it from Mitra when it came to Bernie. Even as a newlywed, he'd been anxious between assignments, worried that the jobs would dry up, each passing day more certain he'd been replaced. But now he dreaded that an assignment would take him away from what he needed most in his life—an uninterrupted season on the soccer field with fourteen girls in crisp new uniforms, a season with his Tylea.

As moms and dads pulled into the community park fifteen minutes before practice, Coach Chase was already placing corner flags and laying out obstacle courses of orange and yellow cones.

“
Devon's here,” Tylea would say, as she helped arrange the small cones in an arc around the goal mouth for a new drill he had planned.

“
Claudia's here.” She announced each arrival of her friends, her teammates.

During her first three seasons, Tylea had been happy picking clover and testing buttercups rather than running after the ball. She'd been one of the kids who Chase was just happy to see leave the sidelines and her mom's lap, tears barely held back. Players started in the Under 6 division, four and five-year-olds herded up and down miniature fields by coaches in what looked like a rugby scrum, the black and white ball somewhere in the middle.

As seasons passed, the players would learn about making and using space; then the games took the shape of real soccer. Chase kept the set of cones in his Jeep to mark off fields at the empty school playground down the road from the library. They could practice there, even if it was just for a half-hour between errands. When the other kids were playing t-ball and little league, Tylea was juggling and dribbling, building her skills.

As soon as the snow disappeared in April, a few of her friends would take the after-school bus to her mother's library, change into shorts and old t-shirts in the bathroom, then cleat up, grab their water bottles and balls and hike to the field. They'd cross the busy county road, then cut through the town's water company with its snarling guard dog. They continued on through backyards and out into the park where Chase would set up a short field and scrimmage for two hours before it was time for dinner and homework. Every week a few more girls joined. Soccer was co-ed in their part of the state until the kids turned ten—much too old in his opinion—so they made their own niche for the girls to play among themselves. They started with eight girls and ended with more than twenty.