The Coaster (15 page)

I left him standing there and trotted to catch up with Max. About fifty yards ahead, he had stopped dead in the middle of the driveway. He wasn't growling, he was sniffing around cautiously. I aimed the flashlight where he was looking and there was Corny, lying facedown in the gravel. This time I went up and did the two fingers against the neck thing. Nothing. I nudged him with my foot and said, “Corny, wake up.” Nothing. Time of death: about an hour ago. But it felt like a month.

I left Max to keep an eye on the body and jogged back to the truck. I was fairly certain Corny must have just bounced out of the truck because of the broken tailgate, but I didn't want him out of my sight any longer than necessary. When I drove back to the body, I saw Corny ripping Max's throat out with his bare teeth. Corny stood up, raised Max over his head and threw him through the windshield of the truck. I shook the safety glass and dog hair out of my eyes, and there was Max once again waiting patiently next to Corny's body. The windshield was intact. I was losing my mind.

I got out of the truck and dragged Corny out of the bright lights in front around to the darkness in back. The broken tailgate was still down. You may recall that Sarah and I could barely get Corny in the truck together, and now it was just me and Max. People in books usually carry dead bodies around like they're rag dolls. I'm telling you, Corny was fucking heavy. You know how much harder it is to lift your kid when he lets his body go limp? Dead is nothing but limp. Sure, I don't get to the gym as often as I should, but I'm not a small guy and I could barely get him off the ground.

I got down on my knees, slid both arms under him and lifted him up. I staggered around but managed to toss Corny into the bed of the truck. His head slammed against the metal bed. I winced involuntarily.

I got up in the truck and pushed and dragged Corny's body all the way to the back of the bed. Even that was harder than it sounds. It was a cool night but I was pouring sweat. I wedged him in with bags of grass seed and fertilizer and two-by-fours and all the other crap that had accumulated in the back of the truck. I set the Stallion Spray aside to return to the barn.

I figured all that stuff would hold him, but I still drove cautiously across our property to the east, the opposite direction from where Officer Tate and I found Rex, headed for the one place on the farm where I thought I could safely dispose of the body.

Chapter Nineteen

Once one of Sarah's horses died and she decided to bury the mare on the property. The hole, dug by the Equine Burial Company, and more expensively than you could imagine, was massive. It looked like a swimming pool. When they filled it in, there was a nice little dirt grave mound there. For years. It took me forever to get grass to grow on it, but to this day, it's a hump in the ground.

Obviously, Corny was a lot smaller than a horse, but the principle's the same. You need a much bigger hole than you'd think. Digging by myself, it would take me all night, if I could even do it at all. And when I was finished, you might as well put a sign there that said
Freshly Dug Grave
. It would be that obvious.

So I headed for the pond. If I could get Corny in our little rowboat, I could weigh him down with rocks or chains or something and then dump him in the middle of the pond. It's so murky you can't see your hand if you stick it under the water and it's a good twenty feet deep in the middle. There's no current, so unless the cops decided to dredge the pond, the body should stay there for a long time.

So my plan was to put Corny in the rowboat we use for fishing, row it out to the middle of the pond, and toss him overboard with something heavy to sink him. But as the philosopher/boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

***

I backed the truck up to the little wooden pier we use to dock the boat. I climbed in the back and rolled Corny over and over until he fell off the tailgate. I had ceased worrying about whether I was doing more damage to the body or leaving evidence all over the place. We were outside. I figured the evidence would get erased pretty quickly out in the elements.

I dragged Corny by his feet to the end of the pier. The boat was a twelve-foot fir rowboat that Nick and I put together from a kit one summer. It sounded like a fun father-son project, or in our case it sounded to Sarah like a fun father-son project. This rowboat was supposed to take one decent weekend of work for a reasonably handy adult male and his non-special needs child. It took us a month. At one point when we had about half a boat, Nick said to me, “We can't forget how bad this is or it could happen again.” He was like a holocaust survivor. Eventually the craft was pond-worthy, but it took thirty terrible days of frustrating and difficult work and cost more than a brand new one, already built and delivered right to the water, would have. I guess you could say Nick and I bonded the way a military platoon or a fraternity pledge class bonds—through shared misery—but we didn't need to. We were already close.

We eventually ended up with a boat and Sarah arranged an elaborate ceremony where we lowered it into the water and Nick was supposed to break a bottle of champagne over it. Apparently Sarah believed we had been building a yacht instead of a few pieces of wood indiscriminately hammered together that would be easily demolished by a heavy blow from a champagne bottle.

When I shoved Corny off the pier into the boat, his head smacked hard against wooden planks that had been haphazardly secured by a man and his boy just trying to finish the job. The planks gave way just enough for water to begin seeping into the boat. The fucker was going to sink right here, two feet from shore. I could stand here saluting as the ship went down, or I could try to get the son of a bitch out to the middle of the pond. I jumped in with Corny and started to row. The water was up to my ankles, but we were moving. It's not a big pond, maybe fifty yards to the middle. I was freezing from the icy water but sweating with the exertion and the fear. If the boat went under in shallow water, I was screwed. Hell, I was probably screwed anyway, but when Nick inevitably asked me where the boat was, it would be a hell of a lot easier to say “I don't know” if you couldn't see the damn thing from shore.

As the boat filled with water, the going got slower and slower but eventually I got to what I estimated was roughly the center of the pond. I crammed Corny's body underneath the middle seat until it was wedged tight. I tugged on him from each direction and couldn't budge him. He wasn't going anywhere unless his body was eaten away by something. And I knew the fish don't bite since I fished here all the time.

I waited for the boat to fill and start to settle toward the bottom. I stood on it as it went down to keep it from drifting closer to shore, but it wasn't really necessary. It went straight down. Treading water right above it, I couldn't see a thing. Of course, it was pitch black and the middle of the night, but I thought it would be invisible in daylight too. I'd have to wait and see.

I swam the fifty yards to shore, expecting something to grab my leg at any moment like in a bad horror movie. I dragged myself out of the water, thanked Max for all of his generous help, got in the truck and drove back to the house. The truck was covered in mud and who knows what else, so I washed it down with the garden hose. I figured the weather would take care of anything I missed. I cleaned myself the best I could with the hose and then stripped naked. I carried my wet clothes inside, tossed them in the washer, poured in detergent and about half a bottle of Clorox, and started it up. No problem, thanks to my recent practice with the sheets.

When I got upstairs, I took the hottest shower I could stand. I was so cold the water felt like needles against my skin, but my body temperature eventually got back to normal. As I dried off, I stared at myself in the mirror and thought:
You have no idea what you're capable of. You thought you did, but you don't. You better be ready for anything. The next few days may make tonight look like a walk in the park.
In the bedroom, Sarah was snoring gently. I crawled under the covers and went to sleep, imagining Corny's dead eyes staring up at me out of the water.

***

There's an old episode of
The Simpsons
where Homer takes a second job at the Kwik-E-Mart. The instant he gets home from his grueling night shift and lays his head down on the pillow, the alarm goes off and he gets right back out of bed to go to his day job. That's what I felt like when my alarm went off the morning after Corny's death. Eyes closed, just starting to drift off, followed immediately by
beep beep beep beep beep beep
. I hate that sound even after a full night's sleep and that morning I wanted to throw the clock through the window.

But I also knew it was important to act natural. The last thing we wanted was to let the kids think there was anything wrong. I reached over and touched Sarah on the shoulder. She mumbled “Not today” and turned her back to me.

“Not that,” I whispered. “We need to talk.”

She rolled back over and opened her eyes. I could see her recollections of last night gradually come into focus. “Did you—?”

“Yes. Everything's taken care of.”

“What did you do?” We were both whispering. I don't know why, the kids couldn't hear us in the bedroom. At least that's the operating principle that allows us to have sex while they're awake, although it's not exactly a Roman orgy in here. Even Christian missionaries would have suggested we try a different position once in a while. We kept whispering nonetheless, like the conspirators we were.

“I took care of it. That's all you need to know. And I found Rex. He's fine. You'll need to get some of your guys to fix the stall and go round him up, but otherwise we need to treat this like any other morning.”

Sarah pulled me close to her in a ferocious embrace. We're not big huggers around our house. I still hug Emily sometimes, but Nick's made it clear he wants no part of it. I hugged her back just as hard. “Everything's going to be okay. In a few days, we'll be back to our old boring lives.”

“I hope you're right. I act all tough and I can handle myself in a boardroom fight, but I am not equipped to deal with real-life violence. And, no offense, but you're not exactly Chuck Norris yourself.”

I nodded. “We are definitely fucked if I have to play hero.”

“
Guitar Hero
, maybe.” She kissed me and got out of the bed. “No, actually, you suck at that too.”

“These kids today and their rock music. Give me an old acoustic camp song and I'll ‘Kumbaya' the crap out of that game.”

***

I went downstairs and started the coffee. I usually fill the coffeemaker the night before and program it to start brewing in the morning, but I'd been a little distracted.

I switched my wet laundry to the dryer and went upstairs to wake the kids while Sarah was in the shower. I kept things as normal as possible on the way to school. The kids both had iPods or iTouches or iPortabletelevisions with earbuds, so no one said a word. A typical morning. They didn't even notice that after all I went through last night, I must have looked like I was in the middle of a week-long bender. I stopped the car and the helpful volunteer students opened the car door and let the kids out. Our kids don't volunteer for that duty because it would require their father to “volunteer” to get them to school a half-hour early. Do these other parents get up every morning at five?

“I'll pick you up right here at three-thirty!” I yelled. They didn't hear me (earbuds), but something sort of tugged at my brain when I said it. I stopped and thought for a second but was angrily waved forward by the eleven-year-old early-morning drill sergeant who was directing traffic. I almost had it but the fear of being yelled at by a little girl knocked all cognitive ability from my brain.

***

I decided to go to the office. I was off trustee-duty for the week so I really didn't have much to do, but I didn't want there to be any visible interruption of my routine, anything that could lead someone to think anything was amiss.
Bob never has a second cup of coffee at work. I'll bet he killed a guy and dumped him in the pond.

My routine when I'm in my office is to make a few phone calls and surf the Internet, and I thought I could probably pull that off. For the second time in a row, an evening with Corny had left me dead tired the next day. I really couldn't complain this time because it left him just plain dead, but I didn't want to give anyone in the office the impression that I was less than a hundred percent. An obviously sleep-deprived Bob could elicit embarrassing questions, as well as general mockery, so I fueled up on coffee and tried to look alive.

I spent an hour catching up on my e-mails, which in my case meant sifting through 789 offers to increase the size of my penis or refinance my home, just to find the three non-spam e-mails I got all weekend. My assistant, Pauline, appeared at my door, which is unusual. Normally I can't find her unless I've just farted in my office. Then she's certain to walk in.

Pauline was a pretty brunette about forty years old. She was the kind of woman who…hell, I don't know what kind of woman she was. She was the kind of woman who was frequently late and often had to miss work because one of her kids was sick. Fortunately, I had virtually no secretarial work that needed doing.

“Can you give me a ride to pick up my car over lunch?” Pauline asked.

“Sure. Eleven-thirty?”

“Great.” She shut the door and left. The niggling thought was back in my brain. Whatever it was, I just couldn't reach it. It felt like the name of a song that's on the tip of your tongue but you can't think of it.

Although it clearly violated my “try to act normal” policy, I decided to use my time productively, so I made a few business calls I'd been putting off. On the last one, before I set the receiver down, I thought I heard another click. Was it possible these phones were tapped?

There was a good chance I was being paranoid. I've seen a few too many fictional scenarios where the bad guys know every move you make. In real life, why would they even bother? They're not worried about what I'm doing. Plus, it's risky. Even with all the other illegal activity Nixon was up to, it was the decision to wiretap the Democratic National Committee's offices that brought him down.

At eleven-thirty on the dot, Pauline knocked on my door. She is extremely prompt when it concerns lunch. We went down to the garage and got in my car. “Where to?” I asked.

“Lube shop on Tenth. I'm just getting my oil changed.”

When I pulled in, I said, “Do you want to get your car and then go to lunch or something?”

She opened the car door and stepped out. “No, I'm not even sure it's done. I don't want you to have to wait around for me.” That's the good thing about Pauline. She doesn't want to go to lunch with me any more than I want to go to lunch with her. Like me, she wants to get away from the people she works with…Then it hit me.
I don't want you to have to wait around for me
.

Now I knew what I was trying to remember. Corny had to get to my place somehow last night. It's a farm out in the middle of nowhere. He couldn't have been dropped off because he wouldn't want someone waiting around for him. He couldn't have known in advance how long it would take—he seemed to be prepared to work on me all night—so there couldn't have been a prearranged pickup time. Surely somebody would have come looking for him when he didn't show up. So he must have had his own vehicle. But where was it?

***

I was tempted to rush home and search our entire property, but I reminded myself of my own advice to treat this as a normal day. I take plenty of afternoons off, but I don't just disappear. I tell somebody where I'm going to be. So I'd have to make up a lie and then there might be follow-up questions.

I grabbed a quick bite and then went back to the office. I didn't have any trouble keeping busy until it was time to pick up the kids. My trustee work had kept me from keeping up on the celebrity gossip, so I didn't know whether Charlie Sheen was currently in rehab (no) or whether Lindsay Lohan was currently in jail (yes). I skimmed through the political sites I frequent and learned that a congressman sent dick pics to his mistress, and Donald Trump was considering a run for President (he's kidding, right?). I perused some angry sports columns and found out local sports team A's quarterback sucks and local sports team B's coach is an idiot. Good to know nothing changed during the weeks I had spent actually working during the day.