'Ain't got time for this.' Charlie's hangover pulsed through his sore thumb like a truck barreling through a garden hose. 'We got to get it taped and sanded. Painters will be in by Friday, and nobody can fuck up a subcontract like a painter. I want to get my check and be gone, else it'll be 'Fix this' and 'Patch that' till hell freezes over.'
Jack continued staring at the floor. 'You can cover it up, but it'll still be there.'
Charlie shivered, even though sweat trickled down his back, the dust making a paste on his skin. He and Jack had hung a bedroom once for the widow of an ex-cop. The cop had blown his head off with a twelve-gauge, got brains and slime and blood all over the wall. All in the wall, because the studs, insulation, and siding had been pocked with dried meat. They'd slapped three-quarter-inch sheet rock over it, taped and troweled the cracks, but that smell of death had been just as strong as before.
You can cover it up, but it'll still be there. That's what the cop's widow had said.
'What the hell, Jack, it's coffee break.' Charlie's throat was dry from the dust. He had a couple of fingers of Jim Beam resting in the bottom of his thermos, just waiting for ten-thirty.
'Nobody's been in here, have they?' Jack said.
'Nobody but us chickens.' A crew was hanging some windows upstairs in the building's west wing, but they were so far away that Charlie only heard an occasional shouted cussword or dropped tool.
'Then how did that get there?' Jack pointed to the floor.
Charlie's tape measure slid into its box, rattling like a metallic snake.
Don't look, Charlie ordered himself. Damn you, don't look.
He'd seen plenty enough funny stuff in the two days they'd been hanging this section of the basement. Little movements out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he'd turn to catch them, but there'd be nothing but the softly spinning dust. That wasn't so bad, he could chalk that up to the swimming eyes that came from hoisting a few too many.
Except he'd heard those rumors about the kids. What had happened here, and why the building's new owners were so desperate to give it a facelift and move it on me market. To make it go away.
Charlie swallowed, the dust like gravel going down.
Jack said, 'You're in such a pissy mood today I didn't figure you for jokes.'
'I ain't joking today, I'm working. You ought to be, too.'
Jack looked up at Charlie. Jack's tongue was set between his teem as if he were thinking hard. Usually, Jack couldn't get lost in thought if you gave him a Chinese map with nothing but left turns.
'You didn't do it, did you?' Jack asked, then turned and stared at the floor again.
'All right, goddamn it.' Charlie's voice bounced off the flat, empty walls and the echo slapped his eardrums. He set down the sheet rock and stomped over to Jack. 'Now what me hell is it I didn't do?'
Jack pointed.
Charlie looked at the floor. His balls shrank and his heart took an accounting of a lifetime of cigarette smoking.
You can cover it up, but it'11 still be there.
Whatever happened here still lived in the walls, just like at that suicide cop's house. Charlie's hands shook, and he knew the two fingers in the thermos wouldn't be nearly enough. He'd be knocking off early today, calling the contractor and playing sick from the safety of his apartment couch. Maybe if he drank enough, he wouldn't be sick anymore. Maybe he'd drink himself sane.
The floor was covered in a fine silt of dust, marked by their footprints.
Among them, scrawled so that the concrete floor showed cleanly, was a single word:
Free.
