and therefore would not instigate an immediate and intense homicide investigation, Billy hoped to keep everything clean.
From the linen closet, he fetched an armload of fluffy towels. Lanny still used the same detergent and fabric softener that Pearl had used. Billy recognized the distinctive, clean fragrance.
He draped the towels over the arms and the back of the chair in which the cadaver sat. If anything remained to be spilled from the exit wound in the back of the skull, the carefully layered towels would catch it. He had brought from home a plastic bag used as a liner for small bathroom waste cans. Avoiding the filmy protuberant eyes, he pulled the bag over the dead man’s head and with adhesive tape sealed it as best he could around the neck—further insurance against a spill.
Although he knew that no one could be driven mad by grisly work, knew that the horror came after the madness, not before, he wondered how much more he could traffic with the dead before his every dream, if not his waking hours, would be a howling bedlam.
Lanny came out of the chair onto the tarp readily enough, but then he became uncooperative. He lay on the floor in the position of a man sitting in a chair; and his legs couldn’t be pulled straight.
Rigor mortis. The corpse was stiff and would largely remain so until decomposition advanced far enough to soften the tissues that rigor mortis made rigid.
Billy had no idea how long that would be. Six hours, twelve? He couldn’t wait around to see.
He struggled to wrap Lanny in the tarp. At times the dead man’s resistance seemed conscious and stubborn.
The final package was awkward but adequately sealed. He hoped the rope handle would hold.
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The towels were spotless. He folded them and returned them to the linen closet.
They didn’t seem to smell as good as they had earlier.
Lanny to the head of the stairs proved easy, but Lanny down the first flight was a hard thing to hear. In its half-fetal position, the body rapped and knocked step by step, managing to sound bony and gelatinous at the same time. At the landing, Billy reminded himself that Lanny had betrayed him in an attempt to save a job and pension, and that they were both here because of that. This truth, while inescapable, didn’t make the descent of the final flight of steps any less disturbing.
Getting the body along the lower hall, through the kitchen, and across the back porch was easy enough. Then more steps, just a short flight, and they were in the yard.
He considered loading the body in the Explorer and driving it as close to the ancient vent as possible. The distance was not great, however, and dragging Lanny all the way to his final resting place seemed to require no more exertion than to heave him into the SUV and wrestle him out again.
Like a banked furnace, the land now returned the stored heat of the day, but at last a faint breeze came down out of the stars.
En route, the sloping yard and the swath of tall grass and knee-high brush beyond proved longer than he had imagined it would be from the foot of the porch steps. His arms began to ache, his shoulders, his neck. The hook wounds, which had not recently bothered him, began to throb with new heat.
Somewhere along the way, he realized that he was crying. This scared him. He needed to remain tough.
He understood the source of the tears. The nearer that he drew to the lava pipe, the less Billy was able to regard his burden as an incriminating cadaver. Neither anointed nor eulogized, this was Lanny Olsen, the son of the good woman who had opened her heart and her home to an emotionally devastated fourteen-year-old boy.
Now in the starlight, to Billy’s dark-adapted eyes, the knob of rock embracing the lava pipe looked increasingly like a skull.
No matter what lay ahead, whether a mountain of skulls or a vast plain of them, he could not go back, and he certainly could not bring Lanny to life again, for he was only Billy Wiles, a good bartender and a failed writer. There
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were no miracles in him, only a stubborn hope, and a capacity for blind perseverance.
So in the starlight and the hot breeze, he came to the place of the skull. There, he didn’t delay, not even to catch his breath, but pushed the wrapped cadaver into the hole.
He lay against the redwood frame, peering into the bottomless blackness, listening to the long descent of the body, the only way he could bear witness. When silence came, he closed his eyes against the dark below and said, “It is finished.”
Of course only this task was finished, and others lay ahead of him, perhaps some as bad, though surely none worse.
He had left the flashlight and the power screwdriver on the ground beside the lava pipe. He slid the redwood lid into place, fished the steel screws out of his pockets, and secured the cover.
Sweat had washed the last tears from his face by the time that he returned to the house.
Behind the garage, he left the screwdriver and the flashlight in the Explorer. The latex gloves were torn. He stripped them off, stuffed them into the SUV’s litter bag, and drew on a fresh pair.
He returned to the house to inspect it from top to bottom. He dared leave nothing behind to indicate that either he or a dead body had been there. In the kitchen, he could not decide what to do about the rum, cola, sliced lime, and other items on the table. He gave himself time to think about them. Intending to start upstairs, in the master bedroom, he followed the roseflowered runner along the hallway to the front of the house. As he approached the foyer, he grew aware of an unexpected brightness to his right, beyond the living-room archway.
