“Stop fucking around,” Jack says, and drags me back to my feet, the cuffs digging painfully into my wrists.
A warm glow is starting to burn deep in the side of my stomach. We keep walking. A hundred yards. Two hundred. I can remember clearly driving out here last year. The weather was similar, though we’d just come off the back of a very long summer. The glow in my stomach is making its way into a sharp pain, an appendix-bursting pain if you had two appendixes. I bury my thumb into the area and it helps a little.
Another hundred yards.
Then I slow down. I start studying the trees. The open clearing ahead is full of dirt that a year ago was also full of dirt. It’s all coming back, sure, but it’s also all looking a little different. The leaves have fallen from the trees and formed a brown paste with the earth. There is moss on the stones and rocks. Last year the same trees were hanging onto life a little better.
“He’s here,” I say to nobody in particular. I point at one patch of dirt that looks like any other while keeping my other thumb buried into my side. “I think,” I add. “If not here, then close to here.”
“That’s not too specific,” Kent says.
“A lot better than what you had before, don’t you think?”
The body is going to be a mess. These people hate me now, and what I did to Calhoun isn’t going to win me any admirers. Unless people admire those who cut off fingertips and pull teeth. Maybe it’s possible. If people can admire midget porn, they can admire anything. I dumped Calhoun’s parts into a plastic bag along with his identification to dispose of later. As hard as I try, I can’t remember what I did with that bag. It wasn’t found on me when I was arrested. I must have dumped it somewhere. If I told that to Ali, she wouldn’t believe me. But I was distracted that night. With blackmail and violence and love. Under the circumstances anybody could be forgiven for misplacing a bag of fingertips.
Jack begins to dig. Calhoun isn’t deep, maybe only a few feet. It doesn’t take Jack long to find evidence of it. The shovel hits a bone and Jack stops digging.
“We’ve got something,” he says, then uses the tip of the shovel to carefully scoop away the dirt covering Calhoun, creating a funnel into which dirt starts to sprinkle back inside. “Remains,” he says.
“Okay,” Kent says. “Cover him back up. We’re done here.”
“You’re kidding,” Jack says.
“You knew the deal coming into this,” Kent says. “You know we’re leaving him here.” Then she looks at all of them. “You all know the deal here. You’re not expected to like it, but it’s your job to shut up about it.”
“This is fucked-up,” Officer Dick says.
“No, this is the job,” Kent says. “And it is what it is. Put the dirt into place and pat it down,” she says, and she gets her cell phone out and starts playing with a GPS feature, marking the location of the grave.
Jack doesn’t start covering the grave. He’s leaning on the handle with both hands and he’s deep in thought. Then that thought makes its way out into the open. “There’s nothing to stop us from shooting him,” he says, and if I remember rightly he brought that subject up during the drive from my apartment to the hospital on the day I was arrested. It’s time to move on. “We shoot him and say he made a break for it. Then there’s no deal left to be made, right? We shoot him and we bring Calhoun back home.”
Kent lowers her phone. I start to raise my arms, but they don’t get far because the chain makes a clanking sound and brings any movement to a halt. “That’s not the deal,” I say.
“But it’s a good deal,” Jack says. “I say we vote on it.”
Nobody else says anything. They all look like they’re thinking about it. Really, really thinking about it. The air is so still that any sound could travel a mile, but right now nobody within a mile is making any kind of noise. I look from one face to the next, there are some poker faces in there and some faces with thoughts written all over them.
“Can’t we all just get along?” I ask.
Nobody answers. In fact only Jack is looking at me. The others are looking past me or through me. They’re still playing various scenarios in their heads. They’re playing out all the possibilities. Except Jack, who has played them out already. This is one of those moments that comes along in life that can change the direction of a man. A turning point. It’s a Big Bang moment all over again.
“Everybody needs to take a deep breath,” I say.
“The same kind of deep breath women would take when they found you in their homes?” Officer Nose asks.
Exactly! But I don’t say it. I look at Kent. I get the sense if she agrees with the idea then in the next few seconds I’ll be one part human and twelve parts bullet. Melissa is taking her sweet time about opening fire.
“I deserve a trial,” I tell them, but I don’t finish it up by saying I’m innocent. I think that would put them over the edge.
“We should take a vote,” Jack says again.
“It needs to be unanimous,” Officer Dick says.
“I agree,” Officer Nose says.
Suddenly we’re all looking at Kent. She is now the center of attention the way I was earlier. My life is in her hands. My heart is racing and my legs feel a little weak and I’m actually close to throwing up. A year ago I tried to shoot myself when the police found me, but that was impulsive and stupid. I don’t want to die. Not here, not now. Not ever. Not at the hands of these assholes.
At least it would stop the stomach pains.
Then, slowly, Kent shakes her head. “This is ridiculous,” she says, without any emotion, as if she’s reading The cow goes moo off a cue card. Then she injects a little more conviction into it. But only a little. “I’m not going to risk my career for him,” she adds.
“There’s no risk,” Jack says.
“Of course there is,” she says. “You think we can say Joe ran so we had to shoot him? That we couldn’t catch him?”
“Why not? You think people will care?” Jack asks, and suddenly it’s looking like if Kent doesn’t agree, I’m not going to be the only one having new holes made inside them. They can say I got hold of a gun and shot her before they shot me. Then they’ll have an excuse for putting so many holes into me. Kent doesn’t see it. If she did, she’d stop arguing.
“People will care,” she says.
“Who?” Jack asks. “Come on, Rebecca, this is a freebie. This is why we became cops, right? To right some wrongs. To give justice. If we do this, then we can be honest about why we were out here. We don’t have to fuck around with this psychic shit.”
She doesn’t answer right away. There’s a pendulum swinging—or a wrecking ball—and she still hasn’t decided to go with it or against it. “Family members of victims will care,” she says.
“No they won’t. They’ll be thrilled,” Officer Dick says.
“They deserve to face him in court,” she says. “They deserve the right to confront him.”
Everybody goes quiet. More thoughts and no Melissa, just tension mounting upon more tension, and more tension rising in my stomach. I push my thumb a little deeper. Something in there swirls around. Something in there doesn’t want to be in there anymore.
“We can do this, Rebecca,” Jack says. “We can do it and say whatever we want. You know that, right?”
She nods. A slow, purposeful nod. “I . . . I don’t know,” she says. “But . . .”
“You can’t do this,” I say.
“Shut up,” Jack says. “Rebecca . . .”
“Can we live with it?” she asks.
“Don’t—” I say.
“Shut the fuck up,” Jack says.
“I can live with it,” Officer Dick says.
My stomach does one final turn, then my legs turn to jelly and my ass muscles just can’t hold on, and before anybody can add anything else a sound like a thunderclap tears itself free from my ass. It echoes through the trees and across the fields. The mess that follows is like a mudslide.