“I have to pick up the kids at my sister’s house,” I said, afraid to check the time on my phone.
Vero gestured to Harris. “What do we do with him?”
I couldn’t put him back in the van with my kids. But I couldn’t leave him lying in the middle of the garage where they might see him when they got home.
“We’ll put him in your car.”
“My car?” Vero’s eyes flew open wide, her ponytail swinging with her recoil. “Why my car?”
“Because you have a trunk. Everyone knows dead bodies go in the trunk. Don’t look at me like that. What do you want me to do? Strap him in Delia’s booster seat? His shoes are sticking out!”
Vero muttered a string of expletives in Spanish as she pulled her keys from her pocket. We snuck out the side door, where I waited in the rhododendron bushes, watching for faces in the neighbors’ windows as Vero crept to the street and backed her Honda tightly to the door of the garage. We turned off the porch lights and the lights inside the garage, and by the dim glow of the streetlamp at the foot of my driveway, together we heaved open the broken garage door and attempted to hoist Harris Mickler into her trunk.
“I think he’s gotten heavier,” Vero said after our third breathless try. My hands were raw and red with the effort. Damp flyaways had come loose from my mom-bun and were plastered by sweat to the side of my head. “How did you get him in the van by yourself?” she asked.
“I lured him with promises of sex,” I panted. Vero quirked an eyebrow, unconvinced. Clearly, amateur-killer-in-sweaty-yoga-pants was not my best look. I rolled my eyes and said through a huff, “He was under the influence of drugs, okay?”
Vero snorted.
She was right though. There had to be an easier way to do this.
“Grab Delia’s skateboard,” I said. More likely, it was the bourbon talking when I pointed to the hot pink plastic deck propped against the far wall.
Vero wheeled it alongside Harris. “Did you get this idea from one of your books?”
“Not exactly.” I was pretty sure it came from an episode of Sid the Science Kid. At this point, I didn’t care as long as it worked.
On the count of three, we hefted Harris onto the board and rolled him to the open trunk of Vero’s car. Using the bumper for leverage and Harris’s head as a counterweight, inch by inch, with a lot of cursing and grunting, we managed to stuff him inside. When it was done, I leaned against the rear quarter panel of the Honda, dripping sweat and feeling a strange sense of accomplishment.
Vero grabbed the small pink trowel from the workbench and tossed it on top of him.
“What’s that for?” I asked as she slammed the trunk closed.
“What else do we have to bury him with?” She shrugged and got in the car.
CHAPTER 11
According to our parents, the first question out of Georgia’s mouth the day I was born was, “When can we send her back?” Georgia had never asked for a baby sister, and in her defense, she’d only been four years old at the time. But this remained the defining question of our relationship until the day Georgia left home for the police academy. As kids, I had always been the bad guy—the one person in the house Georgia could point a finger at whenever anything went wrong. But once Georgia became a cop, it was as if she’d suddenly run out of fingers to point at me. The bad guys were everywhere else, and by comparison, I guess I wasn’t so bad.
Only it didn’t feel that way as I stood in the doorway of my big sister’s apartment, smelling like vodka and sweat and Harris Mickler’s saliva, fully aware that his body was probably slowly decomposing in the trunk of Vero’s car. Hopefully, Georgia would be so relieved to see me, she wouldn’t notice anything odd.
Zach was splayed on her shoulder when she answered the door. She wrangled my limp toddler into her arms, pausing as I leaned in to take him from her. She wrinkled her nose. “I thought you said you were working.”
Damn cop senses. Georgia’s nose might as well be a Breathalyzer. “I was.”
I reached for Zach. She held him just out of reach. “Why do you smell like booze?”
Because bourbon might be the only thing holding me together right now. “Writer’s block. I needed something to loosen up my brain.”
“Are you okay to drive?”
“I didn’t.” I hitched a thumb over my shoulder at my partner in crime.
Georgia rose up on her toes, glancing over the balcony. Below it, Vero’s butt stuck out the back of her Accord as she wrestled the kids’ car seats into place. “I thought you said Steven let her go.”
“He did.” I scratched my still-sweaty neck, finding it hard to look her in the eyes. “She came over to the house to pick up her things, and we ended up…” Destroying my table linens, dividing what’s left of my assets, and stuffing a dead guy in her trunk. “… working something out.”
As if summoned, Vero appeared behind me. “I’m going to move in and watch the kids in exchange for room and board,” she said, reaching for Zach.
And forty percent of my soul.
Georgia sagged as if a huge weight had been lifted off of her as she hefted Zach into Vero’s arms and she whisked him off to the car. Georgia rubbed her shoulder, inclining her head toward the sofa behind her. Delia lay curled under a blanket, her fine blond hair rising in a staticky halo around a silver crown of duct tape, her brow furrowed in her sleep. The TV was on low, its pale glow flickering over Delia’s soft cheeks. I was glad she wasn’t awake to hear it as the anchorman recounted the details of three grisly homicides only a few miles away. I glanced up at the headline: Man suspected of ties to mafia acquitted of all charges.
I gestured to the TV. “I’m sorry you missed your night out with the boys from OCN.”
Georgia loosed an exhausted sigh as she watched two men descend the courthouse steps and disappear into a sleek black limo on the screen. “There’ll be plenty more nights like it,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing sticks to these guys. The Russian mafia could murder half the city and still find someone to bribe. That asshole will never spend a day behind bars as long as Zhirov’s around to bail him out.”
I hadn’t watched the news in as many weeks as I could remember, and I had no idea what Georgia was talking about, but I nodded sympathetically as I slid the diaper bag over one shoulder and scooped Delia onto the other.
“Thanks for watching them for me,” I whispered, feeling the weight of Georgia’s eyes on me all the way to the door. The day, the adrenaline, and the hangover were all catching up to me, dragging at my heels.
“Finn.” My name was a quiet command. Slowly, I turned around, terrified I’d given something away. “I’ve been worried about you,” Georgia said. She handed me Delia’s cap and scratched her chest, grimacing as if something inside it made her uncomfortable. She stared at her feet, at the diaper bag, everywhere but right at me when she said, “I’m glad you’re not alone.”
I swallowed the painful lump in my throat, suddenly unsure which was worse: the secrets I was hiding from my sister, or the body I was hiding in Vero’s trunk. Georgia was always alone here. And as much as she’d insisted that was exactly how she wanted it, sometimes—times like this—I wondered how she could stand it.