“Guess they’re not concerned about people stealing bodies,” Tessa comments.
“Guess not.”
“So now we wait?” she asks.
“Now we wait,” I agree as I look over my shoulder toward the back of the funeral home. The parking lot is in front of us, but the entrance is a street over, so I doubt anyone will see us back here before they go inside. And even if they do, we’re just hanging out as far as any random person passing by is concerned. It would probably be prudent to remove my license plate just in case. Once that’s done, I slip it into the saddlebag and then take a seat on the curb behind the back wheel.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry. We’ll need to grab a bite to eat when we finish up here…” I say before it hits me that neither of us may be in the mood for food after we kill one, possibly two men. “Sorry. We can wait.”
“No, I’m getting hungry too,” Tessa says when she climbs off the bike and comes to sit next to me.
“You think you’ll be able to eat after?” I ask.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Guess we’ll find out.”
“Guess we will,” I agree.
“Have you, um, ever done anything like this before?” she asks as she fidgets with her hands in her lap.
“No, I haven’t,” I admit.
“Oh,” she mutters, sounding surprised.
What kind of person does she think I am?
“Do you think it will be hard for you?” Tessa asks. “For me, it’s personal, you know? Vengeance and all that.”
“Sweetheart, it’s personal for me too,” I assure her. “They may not have laid a hand on me, but what they did…I don’t have any doubts about going through with this.”
“Me either,” she says. “Even if that makes me a bad person. They’re worse.”
“True,” I agree. “And you could never be a bad person, not even after this. Do you hear me? You can’t think that way afterward, all right?”
“Yeah,” Tessa says with a sigh that I don’t entirely buy.
“So…how are things going with your parents?” I ask, since she hasn’t mentioned anything about them recently.
“Same old,” she replies. “They call every day, just like Paul. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don’t. They’re worried and want me to come home, but I can’t.”
Fuck. Paul is still calling her? She still talks to him? When will that poor son of a bitch give up?
“Your folks probably just want to figure out what they can do to help. They care about you,” I tell her, avoiding the Paul topic altogether. “You’re lucky to have them.”
“I know,” she agrees sadly. “What about you? You never talk about your parents.”
“Not much to say about them,” I admit. “Never knew my mother. She left as soon as I was born. Dad has a picture of her, but that’s it. He may have raised me, but not in the conventional sense. Nowadays, well, he still only cares about himself.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Tessa says.
“It is what it is. He hasn’t ever called me first I don’t think. I send him a text every few months just to see if he’s still alive. As long as I get some sort of inappropriate emoji back, I know he’s good. So, give your parents a break. You don’t have to go live with them. Just talk to them when they call. At least they care enough to check in to see how you’re doing.”
“I just wish we could talk about something other than me, like before everything happened,” she says. “But for the past year, everything was about wedding planning, so now I don’t know what to say.”
“It’ll get easier,” I tell her. “Just ask them about what they’ve been doing. Steer the conversation back their way.”
“I try. When it works, those are the best conversations, making me feel like everything is normal again,” she replies with a smile.
Tessa and I chitchat for three or so more hours until around 9:00 a.m. when an older-model blue truck finally pulls in to the lot and parks.
“Shit,” I whisper as I crawl over to the saddlebag and pull out the pair of binoculars. “Here, come look,” I tell Tessa, who crouches down behind the bike to take them. Then we both kneel by the front tire to get a look as the man slips lazily out of the driver seat that is fortunately facing us.
As soon as I hear Tessa’s gasp, I know he’s our man.
“It’s him,” she says, lowering the binoculars and handing them to me. “He’s one of them. I’m sure of it. He has sandy-blond hair that’s thin and wispy in the front and a big nose. It was dark, but I did see that much.”
“I trust you,” I tell her, because I do. Tessa knows how serious what we’re planning is, and I know she wouldn’t go through with it unless she was certain. I watch the emotion on her face as she watches him – the anger, the sadness, the fear. That last one is the reason he has to die.
“He’s going in,” she says when her hand flies out and grabs on to my arm instinctively and holds it tight. “How long should we wait?”
“I say we give him ten minutes to make sure there are no other employees coming in running late, then we move, get this over with.”
“That makes sense,” Tessa agrees, still not letting me go. “But I doubt a town this small would need to use the funeral home more than once or twice a week. If there are any other workers, they would probably only be part-time and work at night, you know, for viewings or later in the day for funerals.”
“I hope you’re right about that. I don’t want to involve any innocents in this shit,” I say. And because I know she’s panicking at the thought of seeing him again, I tell her, “When we get inside, I want you to wait at the door until I call out when I find him. Then, you’ll need to check for security cameras. If anything goes wrong, you run out of there, you hear me?”
“Yes,” she agrees with a jerky nod.
While I do want her to check for cameras, mostly, I don’t want her to see me kill him. She can see his body once he’s no longer breathing, unable to hurt her again, but it’s too dangerous until then. He doesn’t look like a big guy or one in great shape, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be paranoid and armed after all the heinous things he’s done.
The whole ten minutes we’re waiting, I keep looking at my watch and going through all the shit that could go wrong. The worst is, what if I fail and he gets to Tessa? Unable to deal with that possibility, I reach into my bag and pull out the smallest gun I have – a snub-nosed .38 revolver.
“Do you know how to use a handgun?” I ask when I hold the handle out for Tessa to take it.
“Yes,” she answers when she takes it gingerly from me. “A little.”
“It’s loaded, and this one doesn’t have a safety. All you have to do is pull the trigger,” I explain. “Just don’t put your finger on the trigger unless you’re planning to pull it.”
“Okay,” she agrees, laying it on the cement beside her. “Are you planning…is that how you’re going to kill him?”