The eyeball backed away from the window and the blinds snapped shut. Trembling hands opened a childproof bottle for another tranquilizer. A cameraman balled himself up in the corner and wept.
“What are we going to do?” asked Günter. “There’s video of us burying the body!”
“I don’t know.” Nigel popped the pill. “But I can’t take this anymore. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I haven’t shaved. We haven’t set foot outside this room.”
“They’ll think we murdered him!” said Günter. “They have the death penalty in this country!”
“You don’t need to remind me. It’s all I can think about.” The eye went to the window again. “My chest won’t stop pounding, like the cops are going to break in any minute.”
“We have to get that video back!” said Günter. “As long as it’s out there, we’ll be looking over our shoulders the rest of our lives!”
“I know, I know, but how?” Nigel rubbed his wino whiskers. “It’s impossible to track that Serge guy down, plus he may have already made copies of the tape. I don’t want to leave this room.”
Günter began crying again, then Nigel.
The tears trickled off. “Okay, we have to get ourselves together,” said the producer. “We’re big deals, after all. We don’t need to be cowering . . .” Sniffle. “. . . We need a plan. We need to take action!” He plugged his cell phone into the charger.
“That’s taking action?”
“It’s a start.” Sniffle. “The main thing is getting organized. When was the last time we bathed? . . .”
They took turns in the shower.
Nigel toweled off his hair. “That’s better. We’re taking control now. We’re thinking straight.”
“So what’s the plan to get the tape back?” asked Günter.
Nigel stood in thought, his brain flipping through mental note cards. He finally shook his head. “I can’t come up with anything that will work. What about you?”
“Maybe if we— . . . or we could— . . .” Eyes began welling again. “It’s impossible. Unless we . . .”
“Unless we what?”
“The hillbillies. They’ll know where he is.”
“Except we don’t know where they are,” said Nigel. “We’ll never find that cabin, and even if we do, I want to go back there even less than I want to leave this room.”
Günter collapsed on the bed. “We’re doomed!”
“Hold everything,” said Nigel. “I think I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“The whole time we’ve been approaching this from the wrong angle.” He picked up an electric razor. “We’ll never get the tape back. So what?”
“So we go to death row.”
“Don’t you see? It’s exquisitely simple,” said Nigel. “What does the tape show?”
“Us burying a body.”
“No, it shows us burying something. Who’s to say it’s even human?”
“The police will discover that when they dig him up.”
“Exactly. So we have to make the tape irrelevant,” said Nigel.
“What does that mean?”
“We need to fix it so that when the authorities follow that video into the woods and start digging, they don’t find anything,” said Nigel. “All we need to do is go back and move the body. It solves everything.”
Günter’s eyes bulged. “No way! I’m not going anywhere near that forest!”
Another peek out the window. “It’ll be dark enough soon.”
“Especially at night!”
“It’s our only hope,” said Nigel. “I can’t do this alone.”
“Even if I agree to come, I don’t think I can function,” said Günter. “I’ll freeze up with nerves. It’s hard enough just getting my legs to cooperate in this room.”
“We’re going to have to stop for shovels anyway, so we’ll pick up some beer.”
“Might work,” said Günter. “It’s a long enough drive.”
The Groves
Afternoon sunlight streamed through a kitchen window. Butterflies circled outside. Squirrels dug for nuts. A hummingbird hovered with unseen wings at a decorative feeder.
Trish smiled at the view. Serge had been right. A good nap and now all the weight pressing down on her was evaporating.
The kitchen began to fill with the smell and sound of frying butter. A mixing bowl poured batter in the skillet. Trish began whistling a merry tune as she sliced Valencia oranges in half and twisted them on a hand-operated juicer.
Coleman plopped down in a seat at the table, his hair in anarchy.
“I’m making pancakes.” Trish flipped with a spatula. “Nothing like breakfast when it’s not breakfast time. Want any?”
Coleman had a distant stare like he was recovering from a stun gun. “I’m not quite here yet.” He began his own breakfast with Schlitz.
“By the way, have you seen Serge since I went to sleep?”
“Ask me again in a few minutes?”
“I wonder where he could be? . . .”
. . . Ten miles east, sunlight sparkled off bright green leaves. A hand snatched a Valencia orange off a tree.
Serge jammed a ninety-nine-cent plastic citrus sipper in the side of the fruit and began sucking as he squeezed. The deflated orange was cast aside and the sipper lovingly stowed in a Velcro pocket of his cargo shorts. “I never get tired of that.”
Then he picked up his shopping bags and ventured deeper into the isolated rows of orange trees until arriving at a preordained spot.
He stood alone and pinched his lower lip. “Did I get my coordinates wrong?” He looked down at the ground where there had been some kind of commotion in the dirt. “No, this is definitely where I left him.”
There were two irregular grooves in the soil. Serge followed them, pushing branches aside as he climbed into the next row, then the next. “There you are!”
On the ground, a man was tied to a tipped-over chair, frantically digging heels into the earth to push himself along. “Mmmmm! Mmmmm! . . .”
“Let me give you a hand.” Serge uprighted the chair. “Didn’t mean to be gone so long, but it was nuts rounding up all the supplies for my new Route 66 job.” He dropped the bags and sat on the ground in front of the chair. A large pictorial book opened in his lap. “This stuff is absolutely fascinating! And I thought I knew everything about crystals, even polycrystals like ice cubes, where individual components of the geometric structure don’t carry over to the next cell. Aren’t ice cubes insane? That crystal formation is why water expands when it freezes—the lifelong enigma is finally solved!”
“Mmmmm! Mmmmm! . . .”
“You’re right, I’m getting off track.” He flipped pages. “The hard-core crystal community believes their rocks vibrate at different energy levels to impart the virtues of joy, energy, creativity, wisdom, protection, sexual prowess . . . Nudge, nudge, wink, wink . . .”
Serge reached into the first shopping bag, removing various clear packets of stones that he arranged chromatically on the ground. “I’ve totally rededicated my life to the world of crystals. When I was in school, they told us neutrons and protons and electrons were as small as it gets. But now there are quarks, bosons, hadrons, gluons, which means I was seriously gypped!” He rummaged in the other bag, producing a pair of drinking glasses and bottles of spring water. “But here’s where all that science brings us to crystals. Most people think that only plants and animals are alive, and everything else isn’t. I mean, look at my car keys. Like crystals, they appear completely solid, but inside, all these subatomic particles are racing around like they’re late for something. So my keys are actually alive . . . Note to self: Don’t just throw them on the dresser anymore . . .”