dug them up and put them in a bag and carried them out with him fishing, left them in the water out by the dam, each one with a fistful of sinkers tied to them.
But this one, lying on the bed, she wasn’t coming back from nowhere, and she hadn’t scratched anyone. She had gone over. She was dead, dead, dead. ’Cause he knew how to do it now, how to be certain.
“You gonna run the water?” his partner asked.
The big man snapped back to the job at hand.
“Sure. Give me a minute; then bring her.”
His partner, completely dressed now, walked to the curtains and stood in front of them. The bright yellow sign with the red light that blinked MOTEL throbbed through the curtains and made the room pulse like a heat blister.
“I get worried,” his partner said. “I have fun, and I’m okay, but afterward I get worried. Always think there’s DNA all over the goddamn place. Some skin cell off my ass or something.”
The big man paused, put a hand on the bathroom door as he looked at his partner. “See my hand on this door? Think I’m fucking scared? Think I’m worried about prints?”
“You ought to be. You know we ought to be.”
“All right. There’s some fear. Wasn’t any fear, would you do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t think you would either. Thing is, I’m gonna wipe the place clean. I’m gonna run a tub full of water, and we’re gonna clean her, and then we’re gonna let her soak in the water. Where guys who do this fuck up is, they take souvenirs. We aren’t going to take any. I mention that, ’cause I saw you eyeing her ankle bracelet.”
“I thought about it. She’s got a ring through her pussy too. I seen you look at that.”
“It’s there to look at, but I don’t want it. That’s like asking for it. Guys do this, take that stuff, they’re just asking for it. And they kill in the same place, same way, dispose of the body the same way—”
“We’ve done some of that—”
“Yeah. But we change up too. And we don’t do it all the goddamn time. You got to hold back some. Have some self-control. It’s more fun when it’s built up some steam, and then you still got to be careful. That’s the thing matters, self-control.”
“I don’t know. We had self-control, we wouldn’t do it.”
“It doesn’t take any self-control not to do it. It’s the self-control to do it that matters. To know you’re taking a chance, and still keep your head.”
His partner turned back to the curtain and the lights.
“I suppose.”
Sometimes he worried about his partner, thought maybe he was just a little flaky, out there on the rim, wobbling.
“I’m gonna wipe the place down,” he said, “do the cleaning. Then we’re gonna go. Got some DNA here…well, they got to connect it to us. Isn’t any reason to connect it to us, is there?”
“I suppose not.”
“Most little burgs like this, you know they don’t even have fucking DNA tests. Costs to get that done. Costs too much for little towns. You know that. So it ain’t like a fucking television show where they find one nut hair and know some fucker in Cleveland did it. Not if we’re careful. Shit, man. Risk is part of it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Then, we do what we’re supposed to do, any DNA they got, we don’t worry too much about, ’cause they got to match it to us. And why would they? It’s the more practical shit ought to worry you. Like leaving your fucking wallet or some such thing.”
“Yeah. You’re right.”
His partner was back at the bed now, looking down at the nude woman’s body.
“She was sure easy. I didn’t get, you know, what I was looking for. I sort of feel sorry for her. For me, she was kind of a waste. I don’t like to waste. Get what you want, it ain’t a waste, but she died and I didn’t get what I wanted.”
“Sometimes it’s a thrill. Sometimes it ain’t much. It’s like dinner in a strange restaurant. You can’t count on anything. But sometimes it’s pretty special. You got to take a run at it, see how it turns out.”
The big man went into the bathroom to run the tub full of water.
Later they drove away in her green Dodge, leaving her in the motel, at the bottom of the tub, covered in soapy water, this after cleansing and rinsing her a few times. They drove the Dodge to the woods, both of them wearing gloves now.
They got out and paused to light cigarettes and lean against a tree and look up through the branches at the moon, careful not to toss their cigarettes, so as not to leave anything of themselves behind.
Finally they loaded up in their car and drove back to where they lived, some hour or so away. When they got to the big man’s house, first thing they did was remove the shoes they had bought at Goodwill, wiped them down and put them in a bag and took them to the Dumpster.
The big man thought it all over. By the time anyone found the car, maybe found their tracks, even if they came to them, checked out their shoes, looked for them in the dump, if they could find them, those shoes would be plowed way under, could be anyone’s shoes, mixed in with coffee grounds and used Tampax and rotten tomato slices.
Living this kind of life, even taking precautions, keeping the kills down to different towns and wide apart, you still had to be careful. DNA could really be a problem. His partner was right about that. But it could be beaten, this DNA. Wasn’t magic. Was beaten all the time. Otherwise nobody would get away with anything.
Besides, what was the game without the thrill of discovery? Fear of prison and the hot needle full of drop- you-down-dead? Fear of getting caught, that was the hullabaloo that kept it all exciting. Gave life the juice. ’Cause without death, without fear of it, without having it hanging over your head like a slow-tipping bottle full of acid, the whole of existence was merely about floating from one moment to another, like a frog on a lily pad, and he didn’t like to think of himself as a frog.
No. Had to compare himself to some other kind of critter, something that had to do with water…well, he’d go for big water. The ocean. And he would be a great white shark.
Yep. He was a shark. And his partner…well, he was a sucker fish clinging to his belly. No. His balls. Sucked up tight on his balls. That’s how he liked to think of him.
A sucker fish.
And him, the shark, dragging his partner through the water, clinging to the old shark nuts.
12
When he and Joey came into the bar it was cool and dark, and Harry wanted a beer. He wasn’t supposed to drink, remembered the talk with his dad, but lately he had been tying them on. Thing he found out, just by accident on New Year’s, was that when he drank he didn’t hear the sounds and see the images, no flashes of color. The alcohol numbed something inside of him. You could beat on a spot where a sound had leaped at him before, and it would lie dormant.
He knew this for a fact because of Joey’s apartment, and something that had happened there, but he didn’t want to think about that. Not now. Not ever.
He hadn’t told Joey about it. It was the same as how he didn’t like to go over to Joey’s house when he lived at home, didn’t want to go there because of Mr. Barnhouse, who could be all right one moment, then find offense at most anything the next, fly off the handle, go into a cuss-a-thon, snatch Joey up and beat him like a bongo drum. And now that Joey had moved out, he didn’t want to go to Joey’s new place.
Mr. Barnhouse wasn’t there, but…now there were new problems.
He told himself he wouldn’t think about that and now he was. But he wasn’t going to keep it up. He was going to let it go. Now if he went to Joey’s he always went snookered, and it worked, but he had the memories too,
