Callisto (9 page)

“When's Bree coming home?” she asked.

“I don't know, Dean never said.”

“Well, you'll have to be gone by then. She won't want strangers around the place. Bree's a little strange herself and doesn't like it when things get changed around. She likes everything a particular way and that's that. You won't fit in even if you're Dean's friend like you say you are.”

She made it sound like she doesn't believe that part, which is my warning not to let my guard down yet because she's still suspicious. Then she says, “Where in Florida?”

“I don't know. Dean said Miami and Fort Lauderdale, but which one it is he didn't say. He left straight after in a big rush.”

“Bree's got some old high school friend in Fort Lauderdale, and she just loves to visit all the tourist places. I got some postcards from her before, Disney World, Epcot Center, places like that. SeaWorld she likes.”

“Uhuh.”

“So don't get comfortable here.”

“Okay.”

“You're sure he didn't leave a package or a message?”

“Nope.”

“The thing about Dean, he's sometimes reliable and sometimes not. You don't ever know where you stand with him from one week to the next. He has got mood swings. You didn't get into any argument with him?”

“No, we got along just fine.”

“Maybe you're a good influence then. Dean, he's not one for making friends and sticking with them. Whenever he's close to making a friend the mood swings mess it all up. I expect
you'll see all that if you stick around. Not that you'll be doing that with Bree coming home again.” She took another slice of pizza. Lorraine had a real good appetite. “It's a shame,” she says. “Dean needs a friend. So far I'm the only one he's got, and we don't see things the same way every day of the week. I don't know why I'm telling you this seeing as you won't be staying here long. It's family. You've got obligations to family that you wouldn't spend five minutes doing with someone else. But with family you're obligated. How many in your family?”

“Just me and my dad. We don't get along.”

“That's a shame,” she says, but not really meaning it, just being polite. “How tall are you, Odell?”

“Six-three.”

“How much do you weigh?”

“I don't know, two hundred something.”

“I'd say two-ten, two-fifteen. I'm good at guessing weight.”

“I'm good at guessing how many marbles is in a jar. One time they had this contest to guess how many marbles in this jar, and mine was the closest one. I won a prize for that.”

“What kind of a prize?”

“Oh, just a basket of stuff from the store. It was for the New Orleans cleanup fund after the hurricane. You had to pay ten cents to enter, so I did.”

“Had much education?”

“I didn't graduate, I said that.”

“Well, it's just ridiculous you going off to join the Army. There's other work you can get without a graduation certificate if you know where to look.”

“I'm not picking no crops,” I told her, “that's for Mexicans and they don't even want you to try, I found that out. They
like to keep all that kind of work theirself, which you can't blame them. And the farmers too, because they can pay them less, so they like it that way. There's no point even asking, I found out.”

“So you looked in the wrong place. I'm saying there's other kinds of jobs.”

“Like what, pumping gas?”

“Prison guard. We've got this big prison now out the other side of town, Callisto State Penitentiary. Only opened for business eighteen months ago, brand-new facility, state-of-the-art lockdown, closed-circuit TV spycams, you name it. How does that sound?”

“I never thought about something like that,” I said, which is true.

“They like big guys for the job. They look the part. Those are tough cookies, those inmates. They'll stare you down and give no respect unless you earn it. You have to be a hardass like them, it's the only way. Small guys, they just can't carry it off. Now, you, they'd look at you coming along the corridor and think Whoa, that is one big guy I don't feel like messing with. It's a built-in advantage for the position. I could talk to my supervisor. You can read and write okay?”

“I like to read,” I said.

“Okay then, you want me to put in a word for you? You don't have any kind of a criminal record, do you?”

“No, I'm law-abiding.”

“Good. Now it's not top wages to begin with, but if you prove yourself the pay goes up. I already moved up a level myself since I got started there. Before that I was at the Safeway. You can stick that job where the sun don't shine.” She
laughed when she said that, so now I'm thinking she likes me, you don't try and get someone a job just like that if you don't like them.

“Thank you.”

“Don't thank me yet, you haven't got the job. You want the job?”

“Sure,” I said, which I would if I could stay around Callisto, which obviously I can't with two dead bodies in the house and I killed one of them. But it was real nice of her to do that for me, and we only just now met, so I'm making the right impression as they say. I was proud of myself for not giving off a nervous sweat like you might expect me to with the situation the way it is, bodies etcetera, but no, I'm winging it good and surprising myself with how cool I am. And another thing I noticed – Lorraine, she likes me, I can tell, and here's the reason. Mostly when I talk to a girl I don't have a damn thing to say for myself and they get impatient waiting for the conversation to flow, which with me it never does. But with Lorraine she's a talker herself, kind of leading the conversation this way and that, so all I have to do is listen polite and answer the questions she puts to me direct, policewoman style, which I have got the answers ready because I'm just saying the truth most of the time, and even the lies have been coming out quick and clean, very impressing if you weren't that way before. So you could say I was feeling confident about things, which should have been another warning sign when that happens, only my mouth is full of pizza and my eyes are full of Lorraine, if you know what I mean.

She stood up and I got the full effect of that tight uniform again, and she says, “I'll just go upstairs and see if Dean left
anything for me. He was supposed to, but with him you can't depend on it. You finish up that pizza, Odell.”

And away she went up the stairs and I could hear her moving around in Dean's room, opening drawers and shutting them, then the big old-fashioned wardrobe he's got in there, so it's a good thing that's not where I stashed him, I'm thinking, but I've quit chewing I'm so wound up about her stomping around up there with her brother right under the bed, which is a place you sometimes look if you're looking for something hid away like an Easter egg hunt or something, so I can't swallow my pizza until she's all done and coming down the stairs again. She's a big woman like I said, and you can hear where she is and when she's coming, especially in a house so old it's got creaking floorboards and so forth. Then she's back in the kitchen and she doesn't look real pleased over what she didn't find.

“You tell him to call me the minute he gets back, okay? This is important and he hasn't followed through – again. You tell him I said if he doesn't fix this he's out of the loop, he'll know what that means. You can't do business with someone like that even if he's my own brother, you tell him I said so.”

“Okay.”

She looked me directly in the eye. “Have you told me everything, Odell? Because it's a little weird to find someone you never met before in your aunt's house when she's away. Are you being straight with me?”

“Sure.”

“People that are straight with me, they don't regret it, but people that mess me around, I make sure they don't do it again, hear what I'm saying, Odell?”

“I sure do, and thank you about the job, Lorraine.”

She lost a little of the hard look she's giving me and hitches at her belt to settle things, which I noticed she sees that I'm watching her waist, probably with a look on my face that says I like what I see. There is no hiding that stuff. I was thinking to myself how it'd be if she's wearing a gunbelt, and then before you know it I'm thinking about her wearing nothing
but
a gunbelt, which got me hard in about three seconds.

“Okay then, you going to be a gentleman and see me to the door?”

I didn't want to stand up with my dick like a police baton in my pants that way, but it would've been not polite to stay sat at the table like I am, so I got up kind of hunched over a little bit with my hands on the table to shield things from view, but then I had to step away from the table to get started towards the hall, and I could see right off she noticed what happened to me. She says, “Those are cute shorts.”

“I got them special for the lawnmowing,” I said, feeling the blush shoot up my neck like a flame.

“Well, they suit you. They don't suit every guy.”

“Uhuh.”

She had this tiny smirk on her face which got me blushing even more, then she says, “Think you can walk me as far as the door without tripping over?” That was a joke, I think.

“Sure.”

We went to the door and she turned to me and says, “Nice to meet you, Odell.”

“Nice to meet you too, Lorraine.”

“So I guess I'll see you around. You get Dean to call me pronto.”

“I will.”

She opened the screen door and I got set to follow her out, then she stops all of a sudden to say something else, and I kind of banged into her by accident, which because she's turning to speak, I banged into her front, which was like getting an electric shock right through me from those breasts she has got, and she knew it too. “It's a big old house, Odell, no need to stand so close.”

“I didn't mean to.”

“I was going to say, my number's on the wall next to the phone if you need to reach me.”

“Okay.”

“No need to walk me to the car, you might break something.”

“Okay.”

“You're a man of few words, Odell.”

“Yeah.”

She made this noise in her throat like she's choking off a laugh, which made me feel like a fool about what happened. If only she hadn't hitched at her belt and got me thinking about other things I would not have suffered this embarrassment that I did, but I can't do a thing about it now.

Lorraine got moving across the porch and down the steps to her car. She gave a look back at me before she got in but didn't wave, so I didn't either. Then she started it up and drove on out of there and I went back in the kitchen. With Lorraine gone it's like I can think clear again, and the situation has gotten even worse than before, because here's this woman that I wasn't expecting to show up but she did, and now what am I going to do?

Then I got this idea, which is to get Bree and Dean and take them somewhere and hide them both away so nobody can find them and start accusing me of something, and that way I'll have some breathing room to figure things out, it's just too nervewracking with corpses around the place. Only where to put them? Well, the obvious place is in the hole that Dean already dug convenient for the job, only there'll be a heap of dirt left over but that's okay, I can put it here and there around the place, distributing the dirt so there's nothing left and then put the chicken coop over the mound like Dean planned. If I had've been more familiar with the Callisto area, maybe I could think of a better place, but I wasn't from around here so the first plan was the best.

I went upstairs to fetch Dean down for taking out to the hole in the yard. I could just as easy have brung Bree up from the basement but I wanted to get Dean first, working my way from the top down, I guess, or maybe I wanted him buried first on account of the guilty feelings I have got concerning the baseball bat and what happened there, I don't know. Anyway, I went upstairs to his room, which has definitely aired out pretty good so Lorraine never did mention a bad smell, thank goodness, and I got down next to the bed to drag him out.

Now here's where things took a whole different turn in the road, because when I lifted up the bed drapes to grab ahold of him I see this envelope sticking out of a cowboy boot right next to his head which I didn't see when I put him there I'm in such a godawful rush to get him hid when Lorraine drove up. I looked at the envelope, thinking why would that be there, then I did what anyone would and took it out and
opened her up, and guess what – there's money inside, a lot of cash money, the folding kind. I counted it and there's exactly two thousand dollars legal tender in that envelope. Okay, straight off it struck me this is what Lorraine was looking to find, but what's the money for?

I'm sitting there next to the bed wondering about this and forgetting entirely about redisposing Dean elsewhere and then, like dayjar-voo on rewind, I hear this car coming up the drive and figure it's Lorraine come back because of something she forgot maybe, so I shoved the money back in the boot and the bed drapes got dropped into place like before. Then downstairs I went again, rearranging my face to be peaceful and calm which I was not feeling inside, no way.

I went to the front door and already knew it isn't Lorraine because the engine sounds different, a big American engine. I turned on the porch light right about the time the car stops in the yard, and my heart give a tiny kick when I saw it's a green Pontiac like Lorraine asked if that's the kind Dean went away in, and here it is. The driver got out and come on over, only he stops at the bottom of the steps when he saw me waiting in the doorway, someone he wasn't expecting, someone not Dean. Then he kept on coming and he's at the door, a skinny guy maybe thirty-five with his hair short all over except at the back where it hangs over his collar. He looked at me suspicious for a couple heartbeats then says, like Lorraine did, exactly the same, “Who're you?”