The hole was big enough. I stood up and breathed once, twice — getting myself ready for my last physical expenditure of the night.
A cloud of seagulls suddenly passed in front of my eyes — a screaming thundercloud of them, swollen with panic. I could see two glowing eyes staring at me from across the dump.
All those clichés of fear — of where real fear first makes itself known to you: in the pit of your stomach . . . up and down your spine. They were all true. And I could feel it in places you might not expect, either. The back of my neck, where it felt as if each little hair were standing on end. The hollow of my chest, which was vibrating like a bass woofer.
The two eyes advanced and with them a sound that grated on what little nerve I had left. Not a bark, no, one low, sustained growl. The kind that said, I am not happy to see you.
I began to back up, slowly, one baby step at a time, even as the dog — I couldn’t make out what breed, exactly; let’s say human retriever — padded closer and closer.
Then I turned — and ran. Maybe I shouldn’t have; maybe it would have been wiser to stare it down. Never show a dog fear — wasn’t that the old wives’ adage you’re taught from youth? It makes them mad, gets their blood up, stirs up their carnivorous impulses.
But something else stirs up their meat-eating instincts even more. Meat. And I had magnanimously left the dog a lot of it. In the person of Winston.
It took several minutes — several minutes I spent scurrying out through the fence hole and into the car — to realize that the dog wasn’t following me.
And then I heard it. A sound of gnashing teeth — of tearing flesh — of lascivious guttural consumption.
The junkyard dog was eating Winston.
TWENTY-FIVE
I had to get rid of the blue Sable.
It had been rented from Dollar Rent A Car by one Jonathan Thomas. One of the four driver’s licenses Winston had stuffed in his otherwise depleted wallet.
The easiest thing to buy—identities, Winston had confided in me. And Winston had four of them. Back when I was young and idealistic, searching for your identity was an expected rite of passage. Winston, on the other hand, simply bought his — or stole it — making sure he had a few extras just in case.
Just in case someone asked him to get rid of someone else.
Now I had to get rid of the car.
That sort of took care of itself. On the way back down Western Avenue, I passed the highway; it was dark, and I was replaying the sounds of canine feeding in my head — hitting the rewind button against my better judgment and listening to it over and over again. When you’re hearing the sounds of someone being eaten, it’s easy to miss things like highway signs. I ended up in a part of Staten Island I hadn’t known existed — farmland, actual rows of fallow field with an honest to God silo sitting in the distance. Two ticks from every sin of urban congestion, and I was suddenly in Kansas.
But not every sin of urban living was missing. I passed a massive car dump. It looked like a watering hole for wrecks, being as they were all grouped around a mud pond, some of them half-submerged in it. One more wreck would hardly be noticed, would it?
I gently swerved off the road and into the bumpy lot, driving the car to the very edge of the water. I took one last look around the car — trying not to touch the pieces of flesh stuck to carpet and leather, opening the glove compartment, and finding a surprise in there. A gun. Winston’s, I remembered, the one that must’ve never made it into his hand because another gun took his head off before it could. I delicately placed it into my pocket. Then I put the car in neutral, stumbled out of the front seat, and with a gentle push forward let the car slip quietly into the pond, where it finally came to rest with just its antenna poking out of the muck.
I wasn’t much for religion — I didn’t know any prayers to really speak of. But I stood there for a minute and whispered something anyway. In his memory.
I turned away and began to walk.
How I was going to get home?
I could have called a car service, I suppose, but I knew they kept records. I needed to find my way back to midtown, where Charles Schine taking a car ride home would be like any other late night at the office.
I passed a gas station. I could see a lone Indian-looking man reading a magazine in a barely lit cubicle. I walked around the side, looking for a bathroom. I found one.
Gas station bathrooms were much like bathrooms in Chinatown, which were much like black holes in Calcutta, or so I now thought. There was no toilet paper. The mirror was cracked, the sink filled with sludge. But I needed to wash up. I would have to find a bus or train that would take me back into the city, and I smelled like garbage.
The sink had running water. Even a little soap left in the holder, a thick scummy yellow. I washed my hands—I threw water on my face—I took my shirt off even though the bathroom was frigid and I was exhaling clouds of vapor every time I breathed. I rubbed my chest and under my arms. A whore’s bath — isn’t that what they called it? And I was a whore in good standing these days. I’d prostituted every single thing I’d believed in.
I put my shirt back on. I zipped up my jacket. I went back outside and began walking.
I just picked a direction. I wasn’t going to ask the gas station manager, who just might remember a shell-shocked-looking white man who’d showed up without his car.
A half hour later I discovered a bus stop. And when an empty bus came to a stop there a half hour after that, I took it. I was lucky. It was headed to Brooklyn, where it eventually let me off by a subway station.
I made it back to Manhattan.
Home.
Something I appreciated after a night of grave digging. Four solid walls of clear yellow shingle and black-pitched roof with one impressive chimney poking through. The real estate agent who’d sold it to us described it as a center hall colonial. A substantive ring to it — nothing much could happen to you in a center hall colonial, now could it? Of course, outside the center hall colonial, all sorts of things.
When the car dropped me off, I walked to the back door and tried to open and close it as silently as I could, but I could hear Deanna stirring from our upstairs bedroom.
I made one more foray to the bathroom — this bathroom a lot cheerier than the previous one. Cleaner, too. Nice fluffy yellow towels hanging from the wall and a Degas print over the toilet — Woman Bathing?
This time I undressed down to my boxers and used a towel generously soaked in soap to rinse myself down. That was more like it — I smelled almost bearable. I took the gun out of my pants and put it into my briefcase.
Then I went upstairs to the bedroom, where I maneuvered my way through the pitch black — one stumble over a high-heeled shoe — and into bed.
Deanna said: “You washed up.” Not as a question, either.
Of course; she smelled the soap, she’d heard the faucet, too. Now, why would a working-late husband wash himself before climbing into bed? That’s what she was asking herself — and I was having trouble coming up with an answer.
Don’t be silly, Deanna, I could say. I haven’t been with another woman. (See: Lucinda.) I've been busy burying a body. This hit man and friend I hired to get rid of someone who was blackmailing me because I was with another woman before. Got it?
“I worked out today,” I said, “and I never took a shower.”
Not a great excuse when you thought about it — not at this hour of the night. I mean, why couldn’t I have just waited till morning? But maybe it would do.