Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (4 page)

“Sounds good,” I said, more than a little distracted. “See you then.”

Before she could answer, I hung up and grabbed my bat. Everything else was ready. As soon as I was done, I was heading to see Karen and Matt, and then I was gone. Where I was going, I wasn’t sure. What I was going to do? Not a clue at all. But I
did
know that I was going to get the hell out of Dodge as fast as I could and go until I couldn’t go anymore.

The feel of warm, smooth-turned wood in my hand reassured me with its heft. Of course, that all depends on this working anyway, which I still hadn’t managed to convince myself it would. Doubt began to flood my brain, but I shook my head. I didn’t have time to worry, didn’t have the luxury of indulging in fear and terror. I knew what I had to do if I was ever going to have a life again. Swallowing back the bile, I checked the clock. It read seven past four.

“An hour, give or take. Are you sure you’re ready for this, Raine?” I asked myself, in the way I always do to check my own nerves.

Heavy tires outside caught my attention.

Oh shit, he’s early. Why is he early? He’s never, ever early
. But there he was, tromping up the front walk that he refused to edge. I heard the dead grass crunch under his boots and squeezed the bat.
Okay, just hold on. Just a few more seconds and it’s all over
.

Improvising has always been one of my strong suits. It’s just something I can always manage to do in even the direst of situations. There was one time, for instance, I filled an entire essay booklet with utter bullshit in a history class I’d almost forgotten I had. It wasn’t anything exciting – just rambling about the injustice of colonialism or something – and I didn’t fool anyone. But the professor was so impressed with my random knowledge that he looked at the essay with just enough of a squint to claim it made sense, and gave me a C+.

That had been the proudest moment of my improvisational life to date. Cold-cocking a brutal husband though, that’s something else entirely. Just like I’d decided, I took my place behind the door, where I knew he wouldn’t see me.

My blood ran cold as I heard him fiddle with the deadbolt, and when it slid back from the doorframe, I listened to the rhythmic thump of my pulse inside my head. Chilly rivulets of sweat ran down either side of my face. I smelled his cologne before he came into view. How he managed to keep smelling like Aramis Classic through a day of manual labor, I’ll never understand, but without exception, he always did. The thought that he’d been cheating on me for half our life together – which was coincidentally when he started smelling like a men’s clothing store – hadn’t occurred to me somehow.

His hand, which was clean of any dirt or grease, was the first bit of him I saw as he passed through the door. Just like I planned, he didn’t bother to look behind him as he walked into the kitchen, but he
was
trying to be stealthy. Instead of his normal pounding, stomping steps, he was being as subtle as someone like Dan knows how to be.

Why would he bother with the stealth? I mean, he didn’t have any clue of what I had planned. He couldn’t – no one did, not even Karen. Curious as I was, it didn’t matter. The more I thought and considered and fiddled around, the more likely I was to drop the bat and give in once more.

Gritting my teeth, I simply refused to let that happen.

I heard the scratch of a chair against the hardwood in the kitchen.
Of course you can’t pick up a chair, just have to scratch up the floor
. Already barefoot, because I’m always barefoot if I have a choice, I crept into the kitchen with complete silence.

He was eating. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. There was a pan of enchiladas in front of him – the ones I’d made the night before and that he refused to eat because he said they were too greasy. There he was, chowing down on the whole pan of cold cheese-filled tortillas.
Too greasy, my ass
, I thought.

Squeezing the handle of my trusty bat, I felt the slightest tug as my skin slid over the wood.
Just a few more seconds, count to three, Raine
.

One.

Two. Dan took another bite, a shovel-held forkful of enchilada went into his mouth. Some of it dribbled down the side of his face.

Three.

I swung as hard as I could, aiming at the ridge on the back of his head.

Thunk
.

It was like the entire world stopped spinning. Dan straightened up in his seat, but didn’t turn around. “Raine?” he asked, his speech slurred a little. “These enchiladas are no... no... no good?”

I fought back against the urge to hit him again. This wasn’t rage, it wasn’t an execution... okay well maybe it was a
little
like an execution, but I really hoped I wouldn’t have to hit him again.

He stood, pushing back from the table and knocking the old Amish chair backwards. One of his legs faltered, but he managed to catch himself on the end of the table. Turning around, I saw that one of his eyes had gone googly in his skull and the other was staring off at nothing.

“You’re done with me,” I snarled, my body trembling. “I’m done being kept under your thumb.”

Dan started laughing. A rattling, taunting sound with a certain frailty to it. I pulled back to hit him again, aiming right at his left temple. But before I swung, he started to jibber. The laugh turned to gasped breaths, and then he went to one trembling knee. Reaching out for me, Dan grabbed ahold of the waist of my jeans. His weight tugged at them so heavily that I had to back up and push him off to keep him from pulling me to the floor.

Shaking my head unconsciously, I started to myself tremble.

“I did it,” I said as he fell into a formless heap, like a spineless jellyfish, at my feet. “I killed you, you son of a bitch. You can’t ever hurt me again.”

I circled him, watching for any sign of movement, any sign of life. He had none. Dan just lay there, motionless and helpless and, I thought, dead as a damn doornail.

Poking him with my toe, I lifted his shoulder and then dropped him back to the ground with a thud. It occurred to me that I should probably check for a pulse, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Somehow, I managed to distance myself from what I’d done. I managed to convince myself that he wasn’t actually
dead
, dead, he was just really unconscious.

I was going to take him somewhere, leave him there, and by the time he came to and got back to the house, I’d be long gone. I never wanted to kill him, not really I don’t think, but he’d pushed me to the brink of my coping ability and far beyond. I thought I saw a twitch of life leaving his body, but wasn’t sure.

Either way, I just couldn’t check for a pulse.

All of a sudden, my thoughts began to rush a million miles an hour. Should I call the police and say he’d come after me and I clocked him good in self-defense? It was plausible enough – I mean there was only the one time I called the cops on him, but hey, that’s enough, right?

But no, if I called them, they’d put one and one together. I know that they always investigate spouses in cases like this, and I’m sure they wouldn’t be fooled by a dumb story about Dan coming after me. I couldn’t exactly figure out why, but I knew they wouldn’t.

“No,” I told myself, talking just to have sounds in the air besides my own breaths and the pounding in my chest. “No, keep to the plan, keep to it. I made a plan, and it’ll work,” I told myself. “It’ll work... because it
has
to work.”

I poked him again with my toe. “It
has
to work.”

It was easier to get Dan’s limp form into the wheelbarrow I’d stashed in the pantry than I thought it’d be. Getting him into the back of his pickup? Not so much, but I managed.

Sitting in the front of his rusted, ancient Ram, I laughed for a moment. I stared into the rearview and watched myself.

My face twisted, my lips curled, and the bitter laughs turned to desperate sobs.

––––––––

D
on’t get me wrong, I’m no stranger to police procedurals. Hell, once upon a time, I even tried out for the Boston PD, but fell about two minutes short of making the mile-long run in time. I’ve stared at hours of
Dragnet
, I’ve shaken my head at
CSI
and told unfortunate co-viewers about the inaccuracies.

But when you’re driving down a road with someone in the back of a truck? Shit gets real, and quick.

The emotions running through me made a lot more sense in retrospect than they did at the time. I wasn’t panicked – wasn’t even scared, really. I didn’t have any regret, or feel bad for what I’d done. The only thing on my mind was that I needed to do
something
with all of this before I ended up on the news headed to the slammer.

Funny thing about all that.

I hadn’t ever considered jail until just then. Didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been so fixated on getting free from Dan’s increasingly paranoid, desperate clutches that reality hardly seeped in. As I hit a bump, and he kind of flopped around in the bed, thudding against the side that aforementioned reality started sinking in. Big time.

The thing is, I’m not entirely sure
why
. After all, Dan didn’t have any family, didn’t have anyone he particularly cared for... or who cared about him. And him just up and vanishing wouldn’t have been the strangest thing in the world. Hell, he did it all the time, only to show up a few days later with a hangover and a sour attitude.

Just as I was starting to sink into that particular rabbit hole, my phone buzzed and I grabbed it, answering to have something to distract myself from my own feedback loop.

“Raine?”

It was Karen. Thank God it was Karen.

“Hey what’s shakin’?” I asked, as casually as a person possibly can with a limp body in the back of a pickup.

“Not much,” her voice was a little taut, a bit strained. It took a second to pick up on, but when I did, I couldn’t forget it. “Just seeing if you were still coming out tonight.”

I checked my watch. “Oh shit!” I yelped. “Sorry, I totally lost track of time. I had no idea it was so late.”

“No worries,” she laughed. “It’s just karaoke night, don’t get upset about it.”

Something about the way she said that clicked in my brain. “Oh,” I said, “I’m not upset, I just didn’t mean to stand you guys up.”

“Don’t even give it a thought. We’ll be at the bar whenever you can swing by. I take it Dan’s not coming?”

I snorted, on accident. “Uh, no,” I said. “He kinda took off earlier. I don’t really know where he went, but... well yeah, he does this sometimes. Goes camping or something.”

That sounded like just about the lamest line of bullshit I’ve ever dropped
. Still though, no matter how much, how badly, I wanted to tell the truth that just wasn’t in the cards. Not yet anyway. And after all – it
was
something that happened plenty of times.

“Right on,” she said. “Well hey, see you when you get here?”

I gulped, hard enough that it was probably audible. “Yeah,” I managed. “Won’t be long, probably a half hour or so.”

The line went dead, and just as it did, I realized what I’d just said. I had a half hour to dump a body.

Holy
shit
that’s a thing to come to terms with.

I had a body in the back of my husband’s truck. My husband’s body.

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely keep a grip on the slick, old wheel. The rubber was all gone where he gripped it, and the metal underneath was rusted and patchy with hand oil. I squeezed harder, peering into the darkness to try and decide just what the hell I was going to do.

That’s when it hit me.

Camping
.

It was like a rush of fresh air after being under water for a few seconds too long. He
did
go camping a lot, and almost always did it without taking me along. He needed the time to himself, you know, because his life was so damn bad.

Just thinking about that got my blood roiling again, and buried my fear.

Dan also nearly always went to the same place. A little inlet in the woods not too far from our little suburban town, with lots of drops and lots of fairly deep rivers. A guy, out in the woods by himself, drinking a little too much and falling in?
Much
stranger things happen every single day.

With my mind set in stone, I pulled over to the shoulder of the highway and turned the aging truck around with a significant amount of creaking and groaning. Assuming everything went right, I
would
be at the bar in a little under a half hour.

And I mean, there I was, brain completely isolated from the very real danger I was in, making intricate plans about the
removal of a goddamn body
.

The road was only sparsely populated with traffic, and what little there was, happened to be on the side heading into town rather than going out into the woods. Good thing, too. In a haze, I took the exit to Dan’s favorite little alone-time spot, and wound along the narrow, unpaved, pothole-ridden road until Crane Landing spread out in front of me.

That’s a very grandiose name for what it actually is. Really, Crane Landing is little more than an earthen peninsula jutting out over a river. The only settlement for ten miles in any direction were a series of rental cabins to the east, and a trailer park to the west.

With the sour taste of bile building up in the back of my throat, I took a deep breath and climbed out of the truck.

I couldn’t just dump him and take the truck back. Assuming anyone believed me that my husband just went off one weekend and never returned, I think having his truck sitting in the driveway would make that story seem slightly implausible.

At the same time, I couldn’t take it to a chop shop or a junkyard or something because... well, paper trail.

“Here I am,” I announced to the empty woods. “I am going to leave a truck in the forest and walk ten miles back to town because... I don’t have any choice.”

The next several minutes of my life seemed like distant memories even as I was living them. Dan’s weight, the sound of him falling into the water, the groan of his ancient truck as I nudged it close enough to the drop off to be convincing, but not to have it fall off on him – I think in the back of my mind I sorta hoped he’d come-to when he hit the water – felt distant.