all fucked up. The socket was caved in around one of her eyes, where he guessed the gun had connected. It was a mess, but through the blood and bone he could see that the eye had popped out some and was layin’ down low. It seemed the way the eye was pointed that she was lookin’ off to the side. The eye was an inch or so lower than where it should have been, and it was exposed nearly all the way around. Nerves and muscles and shit was the only thing still holdin’ it on her face. Her jaw had turned color and was set off to the side kinda funny, and it had already swelled up, too. Her hands were bent at the wrists in the center of her chest, like she had arthritis or sumshit like that. If she was breathing, he couldn’t tell.
I guess I killed her, thought Durham. I just murdered the fuck out of that bitch.
He dropped the gun back in his pocket.
He walked around the apartment for a little while. How long, he didn’t know. He searched her room and took her keys off her nightstand. He searched the room where her son slept. He looked under the boy’s bed and through his drawers. The usual kid shit was thrown around the room: CD cases and game cases and wires and controllers coming from the PlayStation he had hooked up to a small TV. Ticket stubs from a Wizards game. He had a Rock poster and a magazine picture of Iverson taped up on his wall, too. But no chronic and no money. He went to the kitchen and then the bathroom and searched through the cabinets and all but found not one thing. In the bathroom mirror he saw his face and noticed the dirt tracks on it. His forehead had sweat bullets across it and his eyes were bright.
He sat down on the toilet seat and wrung his hands.
He couldn’t just leave her here, that much he knew. Take her somewhere else, dump her body, let her go missing for a while until he figured out what to do. When they did find her it would look like she got herself killed at random. She’d said her boy would be with his uncle for a couple days, and that would give him some time.
He took the shower curtain down off its rings. Out in the living room he spread the curtain on the floor and picked Olivia up off the couch. She hadn’t gone cold yet and she wasn’t stiff like he’d thought she’d be. Blood trailed on the wood floor as he carried her and dropped her roughly on the curtain’s edge. He rolled her up in it and looked at the mess she had left behind.
He couldn’t take her down the front stairs. He went to the back door that led to a rickety old porch overlooking the alley. It was quiet back there, except for the dogs. A light from down the way showed that below the porch was a narrow yard of dirt. He knew what he’d do, but he wasn’t ready yet.
He found some Comet or something like it in the kitchen, wet some paper towels, and shook some of the cleanser on the couch where most of the blood was. He rubbed at it and it got soapy and also turned the brown couch to beige. Must’ve had some bleach in it or somethin’, and anyway, didn’t look like the blood was coming out. He got up what she’d spit out and all and used more cleanser on the floor, and that came out all right. But the couch was going to be a problem. He couldn’t bring the color back to it, that was a fact. He had fucked that up good. But he rubbed at it some more as if he could. Then he flushed all the paper towels down the toilet, one by one so they wouldn’t clog it, and waited to make sure they had disappeared.
He started to talk to himself as he worked. “You all right, Mario,” and “You okay, boss,” like that. He noticed he was sweating right through his jersey. His hands were slick with sweat.
Durham found a rag under the sink and went around the apartment wiping off his fingerprints at the places he could remember he’d touched. He must have touched damn near everywhere, he knew. Still, he did the best he could. He put the rag in his pocket, then went back out to the living room. The shower curtain was red where Olivia had bled out. He bent down over what had been Olivia and picked her up, lifting mostly with his legs. He had no bulk on him and little muscle, so it was hard. He felt his back strain as he carried her out to the porch. He looked around but not too carefully, as he knew now that the rest of it would run on luck.
He dropped Olivia off the back porch. She came out of the curtain halfway down. When she hit, the sound was dull, like she wasn’t nothin’ but a bag of trash. He thought he heard her moan for a second, but he knew that it had to be in his mind. There wasn’t no sounds out there, not really. The dogs that had been barking all night were still barking, and that was all.
AFTER turning off the television and stereo, and the lights, Mario Durham got Olivia’s Tercel and drove it back into the alley with its lights off. He rolled her back up in the curtain, noticing that one of her arms was bent funny and most likely had got broke from the fall. He had to fold her some to get her body in the trunk of the car. She still hadn’t gone stiff.
Durham drove into Southeast. He knew a place he could dump her there.
It surprised him, how calm he was. He was sorry he had killed Olivia and all, but he couldn’t take it back now, and anyway, he had done this thing for Dewayne. What else was he gonna do, go back to his brother with empty hands, tell him that Olivia had given his chronic to someone else and it was just gone? Dewayne had always taught him that when someone stepped to you, you had to step back. And when Mario had promised to square it, Dewayne had said, “Don’t tell me,
He turned the radio on and kept the volume soft.
The thing he had to look out for now was the police. He didn’t want to go to no prison for this. That was the only thing that scared him right there. Fuck all that rite-of-passage bullshit he heard the young ones talkin’ about. He knew he wouldn’t last in no kind of lockup.
He’d get rid of Olivia and lay up with his best boy Donut for a while. Let his mother and Dewayne know where he’d be at, but only them. Dewayne would front him cash, he needed it. The underground time, it wouldn’t be all that long. The police didn’t waste too much clock on murder cases down here. And once those cases got cold, they stayed cold; this much he knew.
He stopped the car on Valley Avenue, near 13th Street in Valley Green, along the Oxon Run park. Donut lived only a few blocks away; Durham could walk to his place from here.
Oxon Run was a long, deep stretch of woods controlled by the Park Service, cut by one of those concrete drainage channels down the middle. The Park Service had signs posted warning trespassers to stay out, trying to discourage the dealers and their runners from using the woods as an avenue of escape. Kids weren’t even supposed to play back in there. Durham knew they did, he saw kids back up in there all the time, but he hoped those signs would work to keep some of them out.
It was late and the street was quiet. Durham waited a few minutes to get his nerve. Then he got out of the car and opened up the trunk. He had parked close to the woods. It wouldn’t be easy to carry her, but it wasn’t all that far.
It was tricky getting her out, trickier still to close the trunk lid with her in his arms. But he did it, and he walked like a man cradling a bundle of wood across the unmowed field and into the woods. He could smell his own sweat by the time he hit the trees.
He went deep in. He was talking to himself again, saying that everything was all right, because he was afraid of animals and especially snakes. Was a moon out, and he managed to make a kind of path by that light and ignore the thin branches that were swiping at his face, and he went on. He dropped Olivia on the ground when he couldn’t walk no more.
Durham had hoped to dig a shallow grave with his hands, but he broke a fingernail on the hard earth as soon as he tried. He decided to cover her up with leaves and stuff instead. That would work just as good.
He unrolled her from the shower curtain, ’cause the curtain was light in color and in daylight maybe it could be seen by some kid just walking by. He did this, and she tumbled out. He heard more air come out her and figured that was natural, like how they said people still breathed sometimes in those funeral homes and shit, even though they was dead. And then he heard her moan some and knew that she had not died after all.
He stood over her and tried to make her out in the little light that came down through the trees. She wasn’t moving. But her good eye was open, and it was fixed straight up on him.
He couldn’t stand to hit her again with a rock or nothin’ like that, so he brought out the pistol and shot her three times in her chest. It was louder than a motherfucker, and the bullets made her body jump some from where it lay. Smoke kind of moved slow through the moonlight and its smell was strong. Well, he
