It was a man’s voice. “Is Mae there?”
“Yeah, but she can’t come to the phone now. Can I say who’s calling?”
“It’s Duane.” Varney knew who that was. He was one of the messengers that went around distributing stolen stuff all over the Midwest. About a month ago, when Varney had gotten into an argument with Tracy over her wanting Mae to work a party, Duane had been one of the ones the party was for. Varney glanced at the calendar. It was not about a month. It was exactly a month.
Varney said, “Wait a minute. I’ll tell her.”
He went toward the bathroom, his mind gnawing at him. Something was going on. He stopped before he got there, and returned to the phone. “Duane?”
“Yeah?”
“She says to come pick her up at eleven.”
“Really?” Duane sounded pleased. “Eleven? Where?”
“Here,” said Varney. “You know the address?”
“Yeah, I been there,” he said. “Thanks.”
Varney hung up the telephone and went back to stretching. When Mae came out of the bathroom, he had begun lifting weights. Her head gave a little jerk, as though she were surprised and a little frightened to see him there. She said, “I thought you were going out for your run.”
“I am,” said Varney coldly. “You lift, then you run.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said softly.
“Can you do me a favor this morning?”
“I guess,” she said. “What is it?”
“Go out to the Sportmart on the mall. I need a new pair of shorts like these—any color as long as it’s dark—and another twenty pounds of weight for this bar. See? Two ten-pound disks like this? They’re all standard, so you can’t screw it up.”
“Okay . . .” she said doubtfully. “They don’t have shopping carts at the mall. Will I be able to carry them?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. “You can carry twenty pounds. If you can’t, get the clerk to do it. The mall opens at ten, and I’d like you back by one.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll go as soon as I’m dressed. I’ll be there when they open.”
He went into his sit-ups. When she left, she said, “See you later.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. He heard her steps on the stairway, then stood beside the window to watch. She went outside, got into the car, and drove off. He closed the window and lowered the shade. He changed his clothes, went to the closet, and took out the two bags he had bought a week ago from the hardware store. Mae had been begging him to brighten the place up a little, so he had bought what he needed to paint the kitchen.
He laid the plastic tarp on the floor, moved the furniture out of the way, set the two gallon cans on two opposite corners and the roller and pan on another, then sat down on the bed and waited patiently.
At exactly eleven he heard the car. He moved to the kitchen and listened carefully to the sound of the footsteps. They were quick and heavy, but there was only one set. He looked outside and saw the car, and verified that there was nobody waiting in it. He heard the knock and opened the door.
Duane was big, with a puffy pink face and a shock of blond hair that seemed to be duplicated on his thick forearms. He was wearing blue jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses that were too small for his face, so they looked like the useless little masks across the eyes in drawings of comic-book superheroes. Duane stepped back and stood uncomfortably outside the doorway. “Hi, I’m Duane. Is Mae ready?”
“Just about,” Varney said. “Come in and sit down.” He set a chair in the center of the tarp.
“I’ll wait out here,” Duane said.
“Come in,” Varney repeated, his dark expression telling Duane he meant it. Duane looked at the tarp, pan, and roller. Varney said, “I don’t want people hanging around the hallway, spooking the neighbors.” Duane stepped in.
“I see you’re doing some painting,” said Duane, as he obediently sat in the kitchen chair.
Varney said, “Yeah,” as he went to the refrigerator and reached into the freezer. He could see that the sound of the freezer made Duane feel less awkward and worried. His shoulder muscles relaxed, and he reached up to take off his sunglasses. Before Duane’s hand could touch the frame of the glasses, Varney pulled the knife out of the freezer, turned, and shoved it up into the space below Duane’s ribs into the vicinity of his heart. Duane looked down, as though to see what the source of his sudden discomfort might be. He saw the darkening spot at the top of his paunch, gripped it with both hands, and lunged forward, his mouth open in a silent circle.
Varney’s knee came up quickly and snapped the sunglasses neatly at the bridge of Duane’s nose, so that the glasses came apart, dangling from Duane’s ears. Varney gripped Duane’s hair with his left hand, brought the knife across Duane’s throat, and shoved him down so that his face hit the pan on the tarp.
Duane’s heart was still pumping, but only half the blood seemed to be spurting into the pan. Varney judged that the rest of it was leaking into Duane’s chest cavity or out onto his shirt. Varney raised his knife to the side, spun it in his fist, and exerted his right arm muscles hard to drive the blade through the thin wall of bone into Duane’s temple. Duane’s body jerked once more and went limp.
Varney stood and looked around him. There were no blood spatters on the floor or walls. He heard no sound of footsteps. It had been unusually quiet. Varney moved the kitchen chair off the tarp, waited a few minutes, then checked Duane’s carotid artery. He had no pulse, and his skin was already beginning to feel cooler to Varney than it had at first. He dragged the head back, and saw that the blood that was dripping now was just running down from Duane’s chin. The roller pan held only about two quarts, and the overflow had pooled under and around Duane, soaking his clothes.
It took Varney a few minutes to clean the knife, return the paint cans and roller to the closet, pour the pan out into the sink drain without getting much on the porcelain, and wash it too. He used a few week-old newspapers to soak up the pools of blood on the tarp.
He took Duane’s wallet, removed $620 from it, and then found his car keys in his pocket. Varney went downstairs, moved Duane’s car to the back of the building beside the door, and lined its trunk with plastic trash bags.
When Varney returned, he was pleased to see that most of the blood had soaked into the clothes or the old newspapers or thickened and begun to dry a bit. He rolled Duane up in the tarp, tied it securely with twine, and then ran duct tape around the ends to hold it. It occurred to him that Duane looked like a big blue sausage, and he laughed. He put a trash bag over Duane’s top, and another over the bottom, tugged them until they met, and secured them with more duct tape.
Varney moved all of the furniture back into the kitchen, took a last look around to be sure there was nothing he had forgotten to clean, then knelt and used his legs to raise Duane to his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
He staggered getting Duane up, then steadied himself and stepped out the door. He could feel the strain of the extra weight on his back and knees as he went down the stairs, but he breathed deeply, kept his shoulders flexed and his back straight. When he bent his knees to shift Duane into the trunk of the car, then straightened, he felt as though he were rising into the air. He was proud of himself: there weren’t many men his size who were strong enough or in good enough shape to do that. He was sweating a bit, but he wasn’t strained or winded.
Varney drove to the south for an hour before he saw the right kind of wooded area. He used the knife to loosen the top layer of leaves and dirt, then dug a bit more with a spare hubcap he found in the trunk. He worked hard, dug two feet down before he went back to get Duane. He unrolled the tarp so that only Duane and his glasses went in, then gathered the tarp, knife, and newspapers into one of the trash bags and tied it shut. He filled in the hole, covered it with leaves again, and took the trash bag with him to the car.