I giggled.
Certainly not a college girl.
Wow, I needed to get a grip on things. Even with my perfect memory, it’s hard to navigate anywhere at night and I didn’t want to accidentally miss my exit. I turned right onto Frying Pan Road off Route 28, smiling a little at the tired irony that seemed to pursue me everywhere.
A red light, a right turn, and a long drive through a neighborhood loop brought me to a lit house with a silver Passat parked out front.
I parked behind it and watched the house. For the first time in years I wondered just how smart I really was. Was I like that infamous emperor and his see-through lingerie, about to discover I’d been filling the voids in my logic with the soothing balm of self-infatuation? Did I seriously think I had the right to risk Peter’s life on a gamble?
“I can’t just do nothing,” I said.
Who else might die in the next days, months or years if I simply walked away? Just as I started in on a new batch of rhetorical questions, the front door opened and Erika stormed out, covering the distance in no time at all.
“Why are you following me?” she said into the closed driver’s side window, her face pressed close, causing me to flinch.
“I’m not following you!”
“Bullshit, I saw you before! Driving from…”
She peered closely at me, her face a taut visage of desperation and rage. Then she turned and started back to the house.
I leapt from the car without thinking and said, “The tape’s not there. I already took it.”
That stopped her. She turned around, cocked her head and broke into that smile I remembered from when I first met her. Pretty beyond mere geometry, hair like California sunshine…her hand wrapped in a scarf to stanch the bleeding from her fingers, mangled in a lonely room where she condemned a good man to die.
Erika bopped her head toward the house.
“Why don’t you come in?” she said. “No need to involve the whole neighborhood in our business.”
I stepped around the car, walked up to her and said, “Sure, I’ll come in. But before I do, there’s something you should know.”
She just looked at me, waiting.
“You know all those movies where the guy with all the secrets says if you kill him the evidence gets mailed to the police?”
“No,” she said, lying for no good reason.
“Whatever, just know this: we made another tape. And to answer your next question, no, I don’t have it with me. It’s at my job, in a box where we set out the next day’s packages. I put it there on the way over. If I’m not there in the morning before FedEx arrives, it goes to the police.”
Frowning, Erika said, “You’re a liar.”
I stepped close to her, looked her in the eye and said, “I’m not a liar, Erika. I’m a little bit country and you’re a little bit Norwegian death metal.”
Her eyes grew so wide I thought they’d drop out and roll away.
“Oh, you’ve heard that one?” I said. “It’s from The Matrix. Rob didn’t trust you, so he asked me to bug the house and wire it with hidden cameras. That’s what I was doing during the bachelor party. Sure, I missed seeing the world famous Sweet ’N Low, but it looks like the extra caution was worth it. Rob was right about you.”
“What else did you see?”
“Um, you were on top, then he was on top, then he was behind you, then you tried to get behind him and he started giggling, then—”
“Enough, I get it,” she said. “Anything else? Tapes run out, batteries die. You better have more than homemade porn or you can forget any sort of deal.”
“I still have Rob’s tape,” I said. “And I have footage of him shooting Nate. In the side of his chest, to be precise, while Nate was chained to a bed with the fuzzy cuffs from your pink trunk. After you shot Rob in the face, you gloated for a bit about how you were going to kill Tim, and then ol’ Nate mistook your hand for a turkey pot pie. How’s that?”
Erika nodded slowly.
“You already watched the tape? What’s it been, thirty minutes?”
I hadn’t thought of that.
Recovering, I said, “I saw the live feed while it was taping. And I’ve got the original cassette that Rob made, don’t forget that.”
Erika’s expression went haughty and cold.
“So what do you want, half? I can do half. No negotiating—half is fair, so take it. Same deal as Rob.”
“Except I’m smarter than Rob, and shooting me means you go to jail. We clear?”
She started toward the house.
“Yeah, ok. But you’re bald and ugly, so no sex. Now let’s get inside.”
“Why am I going inside?”
“Oh come on,” Erika said, her tone suddenly playful. “Rob calls all the video he shoots ‘tape.’ It’s just a little memory stick in a camera. I’ll agree you’ve got a real tape of your own, and that’s good enough to keep me honest, but right now I have to find Rob’s camera and get back to the house—and I could use some help.”
I’d hoped to be done by now. Still, if I could keep her here a little longer, so much the better. In about ten minutes, I’d simply leave. Any longer would risk the police showing up.
“You got me,” I said. “You’re a smart cookie. All right, let’s go look for it.”
Together, we walked in, her leading the way. She motioned me past to shut the door and I got my first look at the house of Nate’s would-be killer.
Rob’s tastes hovered somewhere between minimalist neglect and contemporary sleaze, with screens for curtains and beer bottles littering the flat surfaces of the room like cheap pottery. Black leather furniture with built-in cup holders and too much entertainment equipment crowded the small living room, and an enormous weight set occupied the place where normal people usually have dinner. The walls were bare—and by that I mean the only feminine touch was a poster of a topless woman suffering from severe lower back pain.
When I turned to look at Erika…well yeah, she was pointing another damn gun at me. Just once, couldn’t it be nunchucks or brass knuckles?
“Where’s the tape, Mr.—I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”
Chapter 34
“Call me Dan,” I said. “Hey, is that a Kimber 1911? That’s a crazy gun.”
“Great, another gun nut. It’s from Rob’s collection. Move over there.”
She motioned me deeper into the room.
I started to sit down on the couch, but stopped when she told me not to. I lifted my hands, palms up.
“My tape’s in the bin at my job, just like I said.”
“So where’s your job? If you tell me I’ll let you go. No reason to kill you if you don’t give me a reason.”
I said, “Also, if I die in Rob’s house then it complicates things. And with you being the last person alive—”
“—I become a suspect, sure,” she said. “But there’s something you don’t know.”
“You’re not left-handed?”
She ignored that.
“This is Rob’s gun, in his house. It’s not like he’ll be giving any interviews, will he? I’ll be a ‘person of interest,’ but not a serious one. So where do you work?”
“Hey, look,” I said. “You’re right. The tape’s not at my job. Making these kinds of videos—that’s my real job. Not exactly a nine-to-five thing. If you shoot me, they’ll search my house, find the video equipment and then start snooping—you know they will, that’s what they do. And I took a lot of video, not just from tonight.”
“Uh huh,” Erika said. “So let’s go to your house. I still have some time.”
“Actually,” I said, trying on Peter’s favorite opening, “that’s where you’re wrong. Those bodies will start to get stiff soon. Some detective’s going to use that to figure out the time of the murder.”
“It wasn’t murder,” she said. “It was self-defense.”
“Excellent, great, that’s the spirit—not too shabby, maybe add a few tears. But what do
you think the cops will say when a double killing takes place and you’re off driving around running errands?”
“How will they know I was driving around?”
“Well, your car will still be hot, right? Probably the first thing they do when they show up is feel the hood—that’s standard police procedure. So that’s another half hour you don’t have, waiting for it to cool off.”
I had no idea if that was true, but that was a really big gun she was pointing at me.
Erika stood looking at me, appearing to think about it. I stood quiet and hoped she’d talk herself out of shooting me.
“Ten million,” she said.
“Come again?”
Oh, the money.
“I’m not giving you half,” Erika said. “What would you do with it, anyway?”
“I’d think of something.”
“It’s my money and I’m not giving half of it away. Take the ten million, it’s more than fair. You’ll never have to work again. You could move to an island and lay on the beach all day.”
“I’m afraid of skin cancer,” I said.
“Then fishing,” she said.
“And all that mercury? No thanks.”
Angry now, Erika pointed the gun even more at me, if that were possible.
“I earned that money, not you!” she said. “You didn’t have to sleep with anyone. I didn’t mind Nate, but Rob’s a sweaty pig.”
“Come on, I did stuff too,” I said.
Erika snorted.
“Yeah, like what?”
“I had to watch that tape with you and Nate—total gross-out theater.”
A moment passed where I was sure I almost got shot. I wondered why I said stuff like that when people were pointing guns at me.
I raised my hands and said, “Ok, fine, ten million. You’re right, it’s more than enough. We’ll meet at the mall or something. When the heat’s off.”
Calmly, Erika slipped the pistol into her purse and zipped it closed. Just like that, we were friends again.
I couldn’t help wondering how long the police would take to identify the corpse in Nate’s bedroom. I definitely didn’t want to be here after that.
Erika said, “I wasn’t lying when I said I needed help finding that camera. This place is so messy it could be anywhere. It’s little, about as big as your fist.”
I needed to get out of there, but that camera was the only solid evidence of her crimes. Looking at her—still pretty if you ignored the reptile staring out from behind her ice-blue eyes—I could tell she’d be hard to convict. I could imagine the story she’d weave. How Rob forced her to do what she did. Rob, with his strip club. Juvenile criminal turned exploiter of women. Erika’s lawyer would make her the victim in all this. And Nate, if he lived, wouldn’t remember any of it.
“Well, get to it,” Erika said. “It’s in here somewhere. I have to leave but I’ll be back, so stay put.”
I felt suddenly cold.
“What do you mean? Where are you going?”
“You know about Tim, right?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. The other brother—the good one.”
“Little queer, you mean,” Erika said, snorting like a piggy. “That lump of a dead husband told me brother Timmy’s in the will. He’s supposed to get half—can you believe it?”
I just looked at her, hating her for the wrecking ball she was in these people’s lives. At first, I thought Rob had manipulated her into all this. But the more I thought about it the more it seemed the other way around. Erika was a piece of work, and Rob would have been easy prey for someone with her looks and intelligence.
“Half, huh?”
“Yeah, what a retard. And you know where the rest is going?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.”
Snorting like it was the funniest thing, Erika said, “Some kids’ hospital. I about died when he told me. He said he’d change the will after the wedding, give him a smaller piece, but I don’t do promises. I’d be counting the days until he remembered, trying to think of new ways to remind him. No thanks.”
“Totally weird,” I said.
“Don’t forget the basement,” she said, then turned to leave.
“Erika, wait.”
“Christ, what is it now?”
“Are you sure you have time for this? Ticktock, remember?”
Erika looked at me and shook her head.
“I read this article,” she said, “about this man who woke up and found his wife dead in the kitchen. Aneurism or something, doesn’t matter. You know what he did?”
“Killed her gay brother?”
Erika rolled her eyes.
“No, dick. He took the body, put it in bed like she was sick and spent the next couple months making it breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like she was still alive—washing its hair, changing its clothes. Eventually, someone complained about the stink.”
I laughed.
“Seems like a lot of work,” I said, “but if that’s what you want—”
“—Would you shut up for a minute? The point is, when something like that happens people go into shock. Everyone knows that. Tomorrow morning, I go walking down the road, naked, covered in blood with, like, no expression on my face, acting all out of it just like that man in the story. Someone calls the cops and they treat me like a victim.” She flourished her hands like a magician’s reveal. “Then I’ll be rich.”
Desperately, I tried to think of something wrong with her plan, anything to get her to change her mind. But it was a good plan, dammit. Why couldn’t she just be crazy? Why did she have to be crazy and smart, too?
Giving it one last try, I said, “You’re going to be a widow—I’m sure the state will give you something. Heck, Tim’s decent enough—he’d give you a few million, at least.”
Erika grimaced, shaking her head.
“The state won’t give me shit if it isn’t in the will. And Tim hates me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dodging private detectives.”
I didn’t know Tim that well, but I had to agree with her—he didn’t like her at all. I couldn’t believe it: she was going to kill Tim.
I felt sick.
My pulse quickened and my hands grew clammy as I forced myself to breathe, in and out. Deeply, calmly.
“Give me about an hour to finish this,” Erika said. “You find that camera and we’ll both be rich.” Then she flashed me that stellar smile of hers.
Before she reached the door, I said, “Why couldn’t you just stay married to the guy? Would it have been so bad?”
Erika stopped, turning around to look at me.
“Do I seem like the marrying type?” she said, warily eying the silenced 9mm in my hand, the one Rob had shot Nate with. The one I picked up before leaving and hoped I’d never have to use. I’d planned to ditch it with the handcuffs, throwing even more guilt on Erika when it became clear a gun was missing.
I shook my head, saddened.
“No, not really. But you could have been. Have a seat.”
I motioned to the couch and stepped back as she moved to sit down. I let her keep her zipped purse with the gun in it, watching in case she moved to open it.
Erika shrugged.
“So what, you want half now? That could work. I mean, come on—it’s not like I can argue if you’ve got that other tape. We can change the deal—you don’t need that.” This last with a significant look at the Browning.
She went on about the deal we could make, how it would work, and would I please put the gun down? A little bit into it she looked afraid, sensing something impossible to her worldview and trying to deny it.
“I have things to tell you,” I said, when she started repeating herself.
“Things?” Erika said. “What things?”
“There is no other tape.”
“What?”
“I didn’t make a tape.”
Erika smiled, politely, like I made a dumb joke
and she was covering for me. Good friends.
“Come on, this is silly. We don’t have time for this.”
“I was in the room with you,” I said. “That’s how I knew what happened, what you did. All of it.”
“You were in the closet? Was Nate into that?”
Exasperated, I said, “No, he wasn’t into that. And I wasn’t in the closet, I was in the bed. I was Nate.”
“You’re crazy, get out of my way,” Erika said, standing up.
I fired a round into the couch, sending her arms flailing about. The gun’s suppressed report still sounded loud in the quiet room.
“Ok! I’m not moving, see? What the fuck!”
“Do you know what happens when you die?” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you know where you go? What do you believe in?”
“You don’t go anywhere,” Erika said, voice rising. “Maybe if you’re rich you get a nice coffin. Ok? We done? Is this about Nate? Look, I’m sorry. You were friends or something?”
“Give me a second,” I said, collecting my thoughts. “Here’s the story. When I died, the stuff I did when I was alive…it ended up mattering a whole lot more than I ever thought it would. After I died, I could somehow remember things. Important stuff I wish I thought about before I did what I did. But that wasn’t all that happened. I was sent back—I assume to make up for my mistakes. At least, I hope so. And now you’re part of it. Only, you’re such an amazingly awful person it’s hard to see how.”
Erika’s eyes had grown very large. She shook her head, treating me like she would any psycho with a gun.
“Do you even like children?” I said.
“Sure,” she said, nodding. “I love children. My sister has kids, they’re great.”
“Ever volunteer, growing up? Help out old people? Anything like that?”
Erika nodded again.
“Yeah, volunteering. Old people.”
“Anyway,” I said. “Wherever you end up, whatever happens, you’d be smart to think about those answers you just gave me, see if there’s even a tiny bit of truth in them. Because lady, you need to grow your conscience back. You need to stop being selfish and actually give a damn about people or it’s going to go real, real bad for you. I can’t prove it or anything, it’s just a feeling I have.”