Deceived (24 page)

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go with you. I’ll go anywhere with you.”

“Then listen to me and do what I tell you.”

“Yes.”

“First thing, go in the garage, through the door in the kitchen. In the corner there’s a big blue tarp rolled up with yellow rope. Go get that. We’re going to put the body in it.”

“Right.” Easy, he told himself. Don’t sound like you’re a Cub Scout going off to get marshmallows for the campfire. Just do this thing and help her, and she’ll give herself to you.

He kept telling himself that. He went to the garage and found the tarp. It was the kind somebody would put under a tent. He hauled it back into the living room where Liz was waiting.

“Now untie it and lay it out flat,” she ordered. He didn’t mind that she ordered. Still, he hesitated.

“You can do this for me,” she said. “For us.”

He felt her strength enter him like a river of liquid fire. As he untied the rope from the tarp, he was amazed at how easy it was to cooperate in a crime. This was a bad man she had killed, and she must have had a very good reason. But it was still a crime, and they were going to get away with it. He was going to help her get away with it.

For us.

He laid the tarp on the floor next to the body. Then he helped Liz roll the body onto it. Then they wrapped it up. Like we’re about to take out the trash, Ted thought. Not so far off the mark.

“We’ve got to clean up the blood,” Liz said.

“Yes,” Ted said.

“You holding up?”

“Oh yeah.”

She smiled at him. He drank it in.

“I can do anything,” he said.

Liz nodded, then put her hands behind his neck, pulled, and kissed him full on the mouth.

11:29 a.m.

Don’t get up
, Mac told himself. Stay on the ground.

It had been several minutes since Slezak hit him. In that time he heard Slezak rifling through his things again, throwing drawers on the floor.

Baiting him.

He wants you to get up, Mac thought. That’s just what he wants. For you to get up and take a swing at him. He wants you to take this to the next level.

He wants you back in prison. Or dead. Or anything in between.

The Lord is my shepherd.

The Lord is my shepherd.

Slezak did not say another word. He did not hit Mac again. Instead, he walked out, slamming the door.

Mac waited until he heard the car drive off.

How close he had come to defending himself.
Thank you
,
God
,
that
I didn’t.

He thought of Jesus. Jesus got a whole lot more than a punch in the stomach and didn’t rise up to defend himself.

Yeah, well, that was Jesus. Son of God. Not an ex-con with a head injury.

What did God want of him?

Anything?

Please
,
be something.

11:31 a.m.

“Does anybody know you’re here?” Liz asked.

“Nobody,” Ted said. His body, his nerves, his muscles, everything in him was alive. It amazed him that this was happening all at once — that she had killed a man, that she had kissed him, that she wanted him.

That this was a crime, that he was helping her in a crime, that he was
helping her.

“Are you sure?” Liz said. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“I live alone in an apartment,” he said. “It’s a big complex. Nobody really looks out after anybody else.”

“Good,” she said. “What kind of car do you drive?”

“It’s a Mercury,” he said. “A Mercury Cougar.”

“That’ll do. I want you to look out the window and wait until nobody is around. No cars passing by. My next-door neighbor isn’t here. She’s in Europe or something. Her house is all closed up. The people across the street can’t really see over here unless they’re at the end of their driveway. So wait until you think it’s all clear, then walk calmly to your car and bring it around to the back. We’re up against the hill, there’s nobody back there.”

“Then what?” Ted asked.

“We put the body in, of course.”

“My car?”

“If this ever gets out and the police come calling, they’ll want to search my car. We’ll have enough trouble getting rid of the blood in the house. I don’t want it all over the trunk of my car. You’ll be safe, because nobody is going to suspect you in this.”

“All right,” he said, willing to do anything she asked. She was smart. She was street smart. However she got that way, it was a complete turn-on.

The next ten minutes sped by. He got the car around the house to the back where the big curving driveway led him. Looking around, he could see there was no way for people to observe what was going on unless they were on top of the hill, looking down. No one was there.

They got the tarp-covered body into the trunk, slammed it shut.

“Now what?” he said.
Now what?
He knew what he wanted. He wanted to melt and stay with her always. He didn’t care what that meant, he didn’t even care if that meant his soul was damned forever.

“Inside,” she said.

He followed her into the house. He would have followed her into the flames if she wanted him to.

“We have to wait,” she said. “Until tonight.”

Wait? With her? All day? Yes, yes, yes.

“I need a drink,” she said.

“I’ll get you some ginger ale,” Ted said, starting for the kitchen.

“No,” she said. “I want a real drink.”

“Do you have something?”

“I do. You like bourbon?”

He smiled. “I’m more of a vodka guy.”

“If I said bourbon is all I have and that I want you to have a drink with me, what would you say?”

His heart was running a one-hundred-yard dash. “I’d say that I was a bourbon guy.”

“All right, then we’ve got some work to do. There’s a bucket and bleach by the washing machine. And some rags. Bring them.”

1:23 p.m.

Mac knew he could kill Slezak. His head wanted him to. The hate was building up inside like water against a dam. It was going to burst, just like it always had since he was a kid. Since his father died, in fact. He could trace it back that far.

He could barely remember his father’s face. The man had brown hair, Mac remembered that much. And his voice. He thought, at odd times during the night, he could hear his father’s voice, telling him what it was like to work maintenance on the MTA.

“You have to feel the vibration of the tracks. You have to listen to the rumble to know what direction that big old train is coming. You know what it’s like? It’s like walking around here at night.”

“Around here” was a two-room apartment about ten minutes from downtown Newark. You just didn’t go out at night, that’s all there was to it.

Mac did remember his father had a laugh that seemed forced. It was like he knew life had delivered a bag of day-old bread to him, and that was going to be it. That’s what he’d have to go on, but he didn’t want his son or wife to know about it.

He died when Mac was eight. His dad was working repairs in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. He and another guy were carrying a dolly across the G track toward the A and C. How they misjudged the G train no one ever knew, because both of them were killed instantly.

Mac remembered the funeral. A lot of people turned out. A lot of hands touched Mac’s head and told him what a great guy his father was. He didn’t know when it happened, but somewhere in there, sometime at the funeral, he started hating everybody. It came on him like a black fog. He didn’t have a father, and all those people were all part of a world that took fathers away. No explanation, it just happened.

He lived in that fog until he was eighteen years old. He busted a lot of heads, bloodied a lot of faces. Once, when he was sixteen, he almost killed a kid from Great Neck who was visiting his grandmother. He just looked like a Great Neck kid, and that was all. That little episode got him busted into medium-security juvie at Burlington.

And that’s where he might have graduated into the hard stuff if it weren’t for the judge who told him he could choose between the Marines and more time.

Mac chose the Marines.

It did the trick for a while. All the hate got channeled into the places the corps wanted it to go. And after the Gulf, he thought he had it turned around.

But the headaches kept coming, and the VA kept jerking him around. He learned to hate again, this time the bureaucrats. He did manage to work in a couple of garages, got fired both times. Most of the nineties were lost to him.

Then he met a beautiful woman named Athena in Oceanside and that very night conceived a child. Three months later they got married. The child came. A daughter, Aurora.

Mac felt the promise of new life. It lasted about a month, which was when the money started running out. When fights with Athena started to get louder and made the baby cry.

One night he pushed Athena to the floor and ran out, got five bottles of tequila, and holed up in the Aku Aku Motor Inn for two days.

When he sobered up, he used a gun to hold up a liquor store.

2:05 p.m.

Geena was chattering away while Rocky tapped on her laptop. Trying to search and gather when Geena was around was like trying to do a crossword at a rave. A little distracting.

“ — of the four harmonies,” she was saying, just as Rocky was accessing the archives of the
Pack Canyon Herald
, such as they were. “They are actually the four humors the ancient Greeks found, only now we know what to do with them.”

I’ll tell you what you can do with them, Rocky thought.

“I can’t remember what the guy’s name was — ”

“Hippocrates,” Rocky said.

“What he said was, all of us have humor. There are four kinds of humor.”

“Funny and unfunny,” Rock said, reading the screen.

“Hmm?”

“Clean and dirty.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The four humors.”

“Really? No! They’re liquid. Something like that. In the body. And Swami says if you have them in balance, you become like a liquid battery. Like car batteries with liquid gel or something like that.”

“I don’t find that humorous.” Rocky was trying to read the story on Arty’s death.

“So tell me more about this guy you met.”

“Geena, do you mind?”

“I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours.”

Rocky stopped reading. “What do you mean, yours?”

“No fair. I said you first.”

“Geena, my humorous friend, I have
not
met a guy
,
okay? Mac’s Arty’s friend, that’s all.”

“Do tell.”

“There’s nothing to tell. Will you knock it — ”

“You have no idea” — Geena did a spin move — “what is in store for you.”

“Not romance, if that’s what you’re thinking. That ship has sailed. Crashed, burned, and sunk. Now can I get back — ”

“His name is Leonard.”

“Whose name is Leonard?”

“Leonard.”

“I got that. Is this your guy?”

Geena did a spin move the other way. “Might be.”

“Is he humorous?”

“He’s smart, is what he is. Anything computer. Anything digi. Anything, anything.”

“Anything?”

“Yeah. How ’bout that?”

“I’d like to meet this Leonard.”

“You would?”

Rocky closed her laptop. “Like, now.”

2:22 p.m.

“Lord,” Mac said, on his knees, at his bed, Bible open, “please don’t let me do anything stupid. Please keep me from doing something wrong. Please keep me from breaking the law. Please keep my head from hurting.”

For the moment, while he was praying, while he looked at the Bible, his head was all right.

Maybe, he thought, if I walked around with an open Bible all the time, that would keep me out of trouble. Keep it tied to my face like a horse’s oat bag.

Slezak. Slezak. You can kill him and get away with it.

Not God’s voice. The con voice. He closed his eyes and put his head on the Bible pages.

“Make it take,” he said aloud. “Make it take . . .”

2:36 p.m.

“Ted?”

“Hmm?”

“How you doing?”

“Warm.”

“Relaxed?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Nerves steady?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You’re not going to bail on me, are you?”

“No way.”

“I can count on you, can’t I?”

“All the way.”

The drinks had warmed him up. He never knew bourbon could make him feel so good. It was a nice, wood-fire kind of thing, right in the middle of his chest. And his head was happy. It all just made him feel so good.

That book is great, he thought. Mom said if I read it, it would make a difference. Boy, oh boy, was she right. Sorry, Mom.

“What did you say?” Liz was looking at him.

“Hmm?”

“It sounded like you said
Sorry
,
Mom.”

“No,” he said. “No way.”

“I’ll put on some music,” Liz said.

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”

“Who do you like?”

“Hendrix,” he said. “Do you have any Hendrix?”

3:21 p.m.

When they got to the apartment on La Brea, Rocky almost had to hold Geena down, she was so hyper. Being stuck for a long time in LA traffic hadn’t helped things. All the bubbling, vibrating, universe-vectoring energy that was Geena Melinda Carter was ready to burst forth like an electric storm.

It happened when the door opened, and Geena jumped the guy. He stumbled backward into his apartment.

So this was Leonard. A fuzzy-headed, sloe-eyed, lumbering sort with black glasses. He had a slight lisp as he said, “You must be Geena’s friend.”

Genius. Pure genius. Rocky grunted as she entered the apartment, which smelled of sandalwood incense.

“We met at the ashram,” Geena said.

“Ah,” Rocky said. “Another of Swami G’s acolytes?”

“T,” Geena said. “Swami T.”

“If Swami T married Kenny G, what would they name their kids?” Rocky said.

Geena and Leonard just looked at her.

“You ever been ’shramed?” Leonard said.

Geena giggled and squeezed his arm. “He means
ashramed
. Doesn’t he have a way with words?”

“He’s a regular Hemingway. Now, can you help me with this?” Rocky pulled out the half cell phone she’d found in Pack Canyon.