I tried quickly to recall the past few moments in my mind, to see if I'd made some sort of sound standing there, a groan, or a gasp, but everything was blank. 'I'm fine,' I said. I cleared my throat, smiled toward the fat man. He gave me a friendly nod, and I returned it.
Then I stepped back into my office and shut the door.
THAT evening I read an article in the paper about a giant confidence game that had been operating lately in the Midwest, bilking millions of dollars from unsuspecting investors.
A fake advertisement would be placed in the local paper, announcing a government sale of goods seized in drug raids. People would bid on this merchandise sight unseen, apparently believing that since the government was running the auction nothing fraudulent could be occurring. The con men would have several confederates mixed in with the crowd, to help artificially raise the bidding. Their victims would make payments by check, assuming that they'd bought things at less than 10 percent of their appraised value, then show up two weeks later to find that their purchases were nonexistent, simply photographs in a catalog.
I took this news with remarkable calm. My check had cleared the day before; I'd gone by the bank to see. My account balance was listed as $1,878.21. I'd given away $31,000, virtually our entire savings, but I couldn't force myself to believe it. It seemed like too horrible a thing to have happened so quietly. A calamity had struck, undoubtedly one of the worst I'd ever encountered, but it had arrived with such little fanfare, a tiny article in the middle of the paper, that I had trouble accepting it. I needed something more, needed to be woken from my sleep late at night by the ringing of the phone, needed the sound of sirens in the distance, needed a sudden flash of pain in the center of my chest.
I surprised myself, in fact, by feeling more reassurance than grief. As long as I maintained the image of the duffel bag in my mind, I could make the $31,000 seem inconsequential, a minor mistake, an unfortunate lapse in judgment. And I found the idea of someone stealing it, rather than my merely losing it, strangely comforting. There were men out there who were just as bad as me, even worse, a whole gang of them traveling the country and robbing innocent people of their savings. It made what I'd done seem a little more explicable, a little more natural. It made it seem easier to understand.
There was a tremor of fear, too, of course -- I can't deny that -- a cold, little kernel of terror mixed in with my reassurance. The safety net that I'd strung up to aid our descent into crime, the idea of burning the packets at the first sign of trouble, had been swept away. We could never relinquish the money now, no matter what might happen in the future, because without it we had nothing. My last illusion of freedom had been stripped from me -- I realized this with perfect lucidity -- and it was this thought that lay at the core of my fear. I was trapped: from here on out, all my decisions about the money would be dictated by its indispensability; they would become choices of necessity rather than desire.
When I'd finished studying the article, I tore it out of the paper and flushed it down the toilet. I didn't want Sarah to know until we were safe and far away.
LATE that night, while I was untying Mary Beth from his tree to take him into the garage, I noticed that the raw spots beneath his collar had grown dramatically worse. They were open sores now, bleeding, oozing runny streams of pus. Mud was plastered into the surrounding fur.
Seeing this, I felt a burst of compassion for him. I knelt beside him on the wet ground and tried to loosen his collar a notch, but as soon as I touched him, he tucked his head, and, very quickly, very neatly, like someone pruning a branch off a bush, bit me on my wrist.
I jumped up, shocked, and he cowered before me in the mud. I'd never been bitten by a dog before, and I wasn't sure how I ought to react. I considered kicking him, stomping into the house and leaving him to spend the night out in the yard but then decided against it. I wasn't really angry, I realized; I merely felt like I ought to be.
I carefully inspected my wrist. The sun was set, and the yard was dark, but just by the way it felt, I could tell that the dog hadn't broken the skin. It was only a nip, a sort of slap rather than a closed-fisted blow.
I watched Mary Beth lie down in the mud and begin to lick at his paws. Something, I knew, had to be done about him. He was sick, unhappy, like an animal in the zoo, tied up all day, imprisoned during the night.
The front light flicked on, and Sarah leaned out the door. 'Hank?' she called.
I turned toward her, still holding my wrist in my hand.
'What're you doing?' she asked.
'The dog bit me.'
'What?' She hadn't heard.
'Nothing,' I said. I bent down and carefully took Mary Beth by his collar. He let me do it. 'I'm putting him in the garage,' I said to Sarah.
THURSDAY night, late, I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, my body literally shaking with an irrational, panic-filled sense of urgency. Deep in the depths of sleep, I'd devised a plan, and now I turned to wake Sarah and tell her.
'Sarah,' I hissed, shaking her shoulder.
She rolled away from my hand. 'Stop it.' She groaned.
I turned on the light and pulled her toward me. 'Sarah,' I whispered, staring down at her, waiting for her eyes to open. When they did, I said, 'I know how to get rid of the plane.'
'What?' She glanced toward Amanda's crib, then blinked up at me, her face still half asleep.
'I'm going to rent a blowtorch. We'll take it out into the woods and cut the plane into little pieces.'
'A blowtorch?'
'We'll bury the pieces in the woods.'
She stared at me, trying to grasp what I was talking about.
'It's the last piece of evidence,' I said. 'Once it's gone, we'll have nothing left to worry about.'
Sarah sat up in bed. She brushed her hair from her face. 'You want to cut up the plane?'
'We have to do it before someone discovers it.' I paused, thinking. 'We can do it tomorrow. I'll take the day off. We'll call around to find a place that rents--'
'Hank,' she said.
There was something about her voice that made me stop and look at her. Her face was frightened. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest.
'What's wrong?' I asked.
'Listen to yourself. Listen to how you sound.'
I stared blankly at her.
'You sound crazy. We can't take a blowtorch out into the woods to cut up the plane. That's insane.'
As soon as I heard her say this, I realized that she was right. It suddenly seemed absurd, as if I'd been talking in my sleep, babbling like a child.
'We've got to calm down,' she said. 'We can't let things get to us.'
'I was only--'
'We've got to stop this. What we've done, we've done. Now we just have to live our lives.'
I tried to touch her hand, to show her that everything was all right, that I was in control, but she pulled away.
'If we keep on like this,' she said, 'we'll end up losing everything.'
Amanda made a short crying sound, then stopped. We both glanced toward the crib.
'We'll end up confessing,' Sarah whispered.
I shook my head. 'I'm not going to confess.'
'We're so close, Hank. Somebody'll find the plane soon, there'll be a big commotion, and then people'll start to forget. As soon as that happens, we'll be able to leave. We'll just take the money and leave.'
She shut her eyes, as if to picture us leaving. Then she opened them again.
'The money's right here.' She patted the bed with her hand. 'Right beneath us. It's ours if we can keep
