maybe. Whatever meal it was, it consisted of a bottle of Budweiser and a cream-filled Twinkie sponge cake. He had the TV tuned in to Family Feud, where a family of fucking inbreds, in Kirk’s estimation, was trying to guess how one hundred people had responded to the question: “What part of your body do you sometimes forget to wash when you have a bath?”
Kirk shouted: “Behind the ears!”
He was pretty good at Family Feud. It was his favorite game show because, unlike, say, Jeopardy! or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? you didn’t actually have to know anything, you just had to be able to guess what people thought the answer was. That meant Kirk often shouted out the correct response, which made him feel very good about himself.
He needed to feel better about himself these days.
Often, his gaze would move from the television to the shelf he’d set up on the adjoining wall to display the mag wheels he was going to put on his truck when the snow melted. These were 20-inch Mamba wheels, the M3 model, with eight spokes, finished in machine black. Normally, a set of four cost as much as two grand, but he’d managed to get these for three hundred off.
As much as these wheels were a sight to behold now, they were going to look awesome once they were installed. It turned out to be a blessing Keisha didn’t have a garage with this pipsqueak little house of hers. If she had, he wouldn’t be able to admire them every single day, and he didn’t have to worry about someone breaking into a garage and stealing them. What he did have to worry about was that li’l fucker, as he now thought of Matthew, going over and touching them, getting his greasy little fingerprints on them, maybe even knocking them off the shelf and breaking the little bastard’s foot.
That made him think of his own foot, which was feeling much better, thank you very much. Not that he wasn’t still limping around Keisha. He wanted to keep the sympathy going for as long as possible.
Anyway, back to that little bastard. That was the operative word. Keisha hadn’t been married when she’d had the boy, and the dad was long gone, so he felt well within his rights to call the kid a bastard, but the fact was, he liked li’l fucker better. Kirk expected the kid was going to be better behaved in the future, not touching the wheels or anything else of his, after the recent talk he’d had with him. No ten-year-old kid wanted to get sent to a military academy for pre-teens, and that was what Kirk had told the kid his mother was considering if he didn’t keep his nose clean and stay out of Kirk’s way.
But it was their little secret, Kirk told him. Your ma doesn’t know I’ve told you what she’s thinking. Stay out of trouble, keep the noise down, stay out of the grownups’ way, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll forget the whole thing.
It was working, too. The kid had been on his best behavior lately.
“Between the toes!” he shouted at the set, coming up with another answer.
He took a swig from the beer bottle and another bite of the Twinkie. Turned out he could have stayed in bed. Never got the “Nina” call from Keisha, which he guessed meant her latest target had bought her story hook, line and sinker. He wondered how much money she’d come home with today. They needed more food in the house. He’d looked all through the fridge and hadn’t found a single thing he wanted to eat. He was definitely going to have to have a talk with her.
He yawned, stared at the set like a lumbering bear. The Feud wasn’t holding his interest. Sometimes he found it a bit hard to follow.
He was reaching for the remote when Keisha burst through the front door.
Covered in blood.
He tossed the remote onto the coffee table and swung his feet down to the floor. “What the hell?”
There was blood on her face, on her throat, all over her blouse. There was blood on her hands and arms and some on her pants, as well.
“Help me!” she screamed at him, dropping her purse to the floor, standing there like someone who’d been thrown into a pool with all their clothes on, arms sticking out to the sides, away from her body, car keys dangling from the fingers of her right hand.
He ran over, but held up when he was about a foot away, afraid to touch her, she was such a fright. Kirk hated getting his clothes all messed up. “What happened? Were you in an accident? Where you bleeding from?”
“I’m not hurt-well, I am, but the blood, the blood’s not mine.”
“Jesus, woman, who the hell’s blood-”
“Shut up! Shut up and listen to me!”
“I’m just asking, what the fuck-”
“Shut up!” she screamed, much louder this time.
He wasn’t used to letting her talk to him this way, but the circumstances seemed to dictate that he do what she said, at least for now. So he shut up.
“Get a garbage bag,” she told him. “I’m takin’ my clothes off right here and bagging them. Then get some newspapers and put them on the floor so I can get to the bathroom without leaving any blood anywhere.”
He stood there, stunned, not moving.
“A bag!” she said. “Get a goddamn bag!”
Kirk ran into the kitchen and returned with a green garbage bag with a red plastic tie threaded into the top. Keisha dropped her keys to the floor and started to unbutton her blouse. She opened it up, slid the blood-soaked sleeves down her arms and dropped the top into the bag as Kirk held it open. Blood had soaked through her blouse and stained her white bra. She reached around her back, unsnapped it, slipped the straps off her shoulders and dropped the undergarment into the bag, noticing that even now, in the midst of something horrible Kirk still had no understanding of, he still took a second to look at her tits.
She slipped off her shoes, unzipped her pants, stepped out of them, panties too. Dropped everything into the bag.
She stood there, stark naked, and said, “Hand me the bag. Get the newspaper.”
Kirk wasn’t a newspaper reader, but Keisha always maintained a subscription to the Register for leads on possible clients. There was a stack of them under the coffee table and Kirk used half a dozen to make a path over the carpeting to the bathroom.
“Baby, you gotta tell me what happened,” he said as she walked tentatively down the hall.
“I went to see that guy, whose wife disappeared last week,” she said. “The one I had you on standby for?”
Kirk nodded. “Yeah. The one on the TV with his daughter.”
“That’s right. The son of a bitch did it. He killed his wife. He thought I’d figured it out and he tried to kill me.” She was in the bathroom now, looking at herself in the mirror. “You see the marks on my neck here?” She ran her hands under the tap, tried to wipe away the blood on her throat.
“Holy shit. He tried to strangle you?”
“Yeah. He’d just about finished me off when I got hold of this knitting needle and swung it back and got him in the eye.”
Kirk winced. “In the fucking eye?”
“That made him let go of me,” Keisha said, reaching into the shower to turn on the hot and cold taps.
“Wait, what are you saying?” Kirk asked. “You left the guy with this needle sticking out of his head? Did he go to the hospital?”
“He’s dead, Kirk.”
His head snapped back. “What?”
“He’s dead. This is what you have to do. You have to get rid of my clothes. At first I was thinking, burn them out back, but the cops, I’ve seen those shows, they can find blood on burned-up clothes, I’m sure of it. So you got to take that bag and drive somewhere far away, like go to Darien or Stamford or somewhere and throw that bag into a Dumpster with a thousand other bags, just someplace where no one is ever going to find it, you got that?”
“You killed this guy?”
“Are you listening?”
She stuck her hand in the water to test the temperature. She turned up the hot tap. She was going to burn this blood off her.
