“Who would you have gotten rid of?” I asked between scoops.
Vero only shrugged. “I’m just saying, there’s no shortage of assholes out there. And in this town, there’s no shortage of money either. I say we corner the market while it’s hot.”
I dumped a pile of dirt beside the hole, the edge already level with my knees. “Easy for you to say,” I said between labored breaths. “You have the small shovel.”
“Exactly why we need one of those.” She pointed her tiny pink trowel at the hulking outline of the front-end loader Zach had been so eager to climb only hours ago.
I held out the big shovel, swapping it for the pink trowel, hoping after fifteen minutes of heaving dirt she might feel differently about the likelihood of a “next time.” Or maybe because I was worried I might start feeling differently about that front-end loader if I had to shovel any more. I checked the time on my phone. An hour had already passed. At this rate, we wouldn’t be home until dawn.
“We don’t even know how to drive one,” I reasoned.
She jammed the shovel into the ground, her sneaker braced against the blade, grunting as she heaved out a scoop. “There’s nothing you can’t learn on YouTube,” she said between ragged breaths. “My cousin Ramón learned how to hot-wire a car. How hard could it be?”
Her cousin sounded like he should be the one out here digging the hole. “We are not adding grand larceny of farming equipment to our growing list of felonies.”
“Think about it.” She leaned against her shovel, her face coated in grime. “We could have had this entire hole dug in five minutes with one of those things. I learned about this in economics class. It’s the time value of money. If we’re going to be professionals, we need to start acting like professionals.”
“And professional contract killers bury bodies with front-end loaders?”
“I’m just saying, we should be working smart. Not hard.”
“Killing people for money is not smart!”
Vero clapped the dirt from her gloves and hauled herself out of the waist-deep hole. She traded me the shovel for the little pink trowel and pointed it at me. “We’ll see how you feel when you’ve got your fifty thousand dollars.”
She popped the trunk of her car. I climbed out of the hole and peered over her shoulder, sighing at the human-shaped lump wearing my table linens.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing the bungee cord around his ankles. “Let’s bury this pervert and get out of here.”
Together, we heaved Harris Mickler out of the trunk, balancing his weight against the lip before dumping him to the ground and unrolling him. Vero bundled the linens and stuffed them back in the trunk. I took Harris’s phone, car keys, and wallet from his pockets and passed them into her waiting hands.
“Shouldn’t we burn off his fingerprints and yank out his teeth or something?” she asked.
I threw her a sharp look, even though she was probably right. If anyone did find Harris Mickler’s remains, even without his wallet and phone, it wouldn’t be hard to identify him.
I grimaced as I took Harris under the arms. His hands were already cold, his fingers and neck slightly rigid, his arms and legs grossly limp. “Digit removal and dentistry are where I draw the line,” I said through a grunt as we dragged him to the edge of the hole.
“I wonder if we could charge extra for that.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
Vero and I gave Harris Mickler one last look.
“Are we doing the right thing?” I asked.
In answer, she reached in her pocket and offered me Harris’s phone. I didn’t take it, unable to stomach the thought of opening those photos again. Vero slipped the phone back in her pocket. Then we rolled Harris Mickler onto his side beside the grave we’d dug, and on the count of three, we dumped him in.
CHAPTER 13
I’d first met Veronica Ruiz eight months ago, while the kids and I were in line at the bank. It had been a busy Friday afternoon, payday for people with regular jobs, and while getting a regular check made most people happy, apparently the man in line behind me was an exception to that rule. He’d grumbled to himself about the noise. Zach had been teething, his raw, chapped face distorted with angry tears because I wouldn’t let him down to run wild through the lobby. He’d thrashed in my arms, refusing to quiet. We’d made it almost all the way to the front of the line when Delia decided she had to pee and couldn’t hold it any longer. Left with no other options, I’d abandoned my place in line and ushered my children to the restroom. By the time we came out, the line had grown a cramped and winding tail, extending all the way to the vestibule.
I’d been ready to give up and walk out when a teller waved me to the front of the line from behind her Plexiglas divider. She’d gestured at the cranky man who’d been standing behind me, signaling him to wait as I approached the counter. Zach stopped crying, flashing Vero a shy smile from under my neck. Meanwhile, the cranky man had started a ruckus, spewing insults at Vero as she slid a red lollipop through the slot in the glass for Delia. Vero cashed the check Steven had written me, her sharp dark eyes trailing the man as he’d stormed from the line in search of a manager. She’d counted out my crisp bills with a snap of each one and waved good-bye to Delia and Zach. As I’d turned to hold open the vestibule door for Delia, I saw the manager approach Vero’s register. His harsh admonishments had filtered through the garbled speakers in the glass, and I’d hovered in the open door, listening, riddled with guilt as Vero put up her CLOSED sign, gathered her things, and left through an exit around back.
Taking Delia’s hand and hoisting Zach higher on my hip, I’d rounded the building and found Vero kneeling in her high heels, slashing a small hole in her boss’s tire.
“You seem to like kids,” I’d said as she stood and wiped the grime from her hands. “I could really use a sitter.” I’d held out a wad of cash, nearly half of the check I’d just cashed, partly out of guilt and partly desperation. Vero had raised an eyebrow as she considered the money, then my children, and that had been that.
* * *
Vero and I sagged in our seats, the closed garage door looming in front of us, both of us too exhausted to muster the effort it would take to open it. Vero’s hands were raw and red, stiff around the steering wheel. My own were coated in a layer of filth, my cuticles ringed in dark crescents of soil. I extricated myself painfully from Vero’s car and hobbled to the keypad beside the door. Fighting to uncurl the fingers of my right hand from the ghost of the handle of the shovel, I punched in the four-digit code before remembering the opener was broken. I rested my forehead against the keypad as the motor whirred on the other side of the motionless door.
Then, my back groaning and the blisters on my palms screaming in protest, I heaved the garage door up its track so Vero could pull her car into the empty space beside my van. Mrs. Haggerty’s kitchen windows were dark across the street, but I knew better than to assume the old woman wasn’t watching. My arms shook as I held the door above my head. Still, I was tempted to flip her off with one hand, just to see if anything moved behind her curtains.