Hell on Church Street (11 page)

Maybe taking a shower right then sounds crazy to you. Maybe it was, and maybe I am crazy. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have never been more rational than right after I killed the Cards. It was late and the neighbors were probably asleep. I had no reason to think the cops were on their way, and I calculated that staying and showering was a smarter risk to take than traipsing back through the woods soaked in DNA. Better to wash as much of the evidence down the drain.

Taking that quick shower, I was as objective as I could be. It was like working out an equation. I ran the water hot and scrubbed off good, washing with soap and shampoo. Once the initial shock of killing the Cards had subsided, I was just a man trying to solve a problem. I didn’t have any experience with this sort of thing, of course. I hadn’t planned to kill the Cards, and I had made no preparations for it. I had to improvise, and I needed to do it quickly. By the time I was done with the little shower, I had it all figured out.

I dried off and went into the Cards’ bedroom and put on a pair of Brother Card’s slippers, some khaki shorts and his red
Ask Me About Jesus
t-shirt. Then I dug out his darkest clothes: a pair of black dress shoes, black slacks, dark brown sweater and a black blazer. I lay them on the bed, and I walked back to the kitchen. It was a gruesome sight. The Cards were exactly as I had left them, their eyes open, vacant and rubbery-looking. It was bizarre, really, how they were no longer people. They were objects on the floor. They didn’t have breath or thoughts or a future. They were just objects. Messy objects. The whole place was covered in blood: dried blood and sticky blood and wet blood.

I went out to the garage and rummaged around until I found a plastic container of gasoline three quarters full. I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the table.

Then I dug out Sister Card’s salad tongs, went down the hall to the bathroom and plucked my bloody clothes off the floor like they were a science experiment. As much as possible, I tried to avoid any blood. I took out the envelope crumpled in my jacket. It looked like hell, but it wasn’t bloody. I left it with the clean clothes in the bedroom. Then I went back to the kitchen, threw the bloody clothes on top of the Cards and walked back down the hall to Angela’s room. It was what I’d thought it would be: girly, smelling of her perfume. There was a writing desk with a pile of
school books
.
A big bed with a white comforter and a pink skirt.
The walls were covered in pictures of river otters and dolphins, a map of the world and a poster of a shitty Christian rock band called By His Stripes.

I opened her chest-of-drawers, went through her underwear, looked at her yearbooks (her photo was glum and made me sad, but there was a crown of hearts around Oscar’s photo and I threw the book down) and searched through her closets. I was hoping to find a diary of some kind, but she didn’t seem to have one.

I pulled the comforter off the bed, turned off the light and carried the comforter back down the hall to the chamber of horrors. I doused the Cards in gasoline but made sure I didn’t use too much too quickly and didn’t splash any on myself. I ran a line of gasoline down the hall, splashing some in the bathroom on the dry towels and running a line into both bedrooms. I finally ran out of gas pouring it around the Cards’ bed. I looked under the kitchen sink and found some lighter fluid and went into Brother Card’s office and sprayed his papers and books, anything that would burn well. I did the same thing all over again in the living room, making sure to spray some on the carpet and sofa.

Then I stripped off the t-shirt and shorts and changed into the darker clothes I’d laid out on the bed. I slid the
Dyess
envelope into the pocket of the blazer and walked carefully back down the hall. I stuffed Angela’s comforter in the oven, soaking it with the last of the lighter fluid. The matches were in a drawer under the microwave. After I’d turned on the oven and the range, I struck a match and dropped it on the Cards.
 

Chapter Eleven

I took my time getting home, staying further back in the woods than I had before, and trying to keep cool. The streets were quiet and I was quiet with them. I knew better than to rush home. Keep cool.

Lying on my bed when I got home, I looked over the papers in the manila envelope for a few minutes before I tucked them away. I’m not much of a hand at legal documents to begin with, and my damn hands kept shaking, but the papers were pretty straightforward. It was a copy of a will, and it looked to me as if Mrs.
Dyess
had turned over ownership of the aluminum plant to the church. I couldn’t concentrate very well, but that was what I got from what I read. I also saw the words
in excess of four million dollars
.

It was about what I figured. It looked like Mrs.
Dyess’s
lawyer was a guy named
Vandover
Norris. I assumed he was the “family friend” that Doolittle had mentioned. I tried to reason my way through it, tried to figure out what the
Norrises
were up to, but I couldn’t focus. I put the papers in my trunk in the closet under my pornos and, exhausted, flung myself onto the bed and tried to sleep. I was too nervous, though. My mind raced.

What I’d just done seemed like it had happened in a former life, as if it were some ancient, buried memory instead of something that had happened a few hours before. But it
had
happened. Two people were dead. Two people who were living were now not living because I’d decided—in a very off hand manner I might say—to take their lives.

The full importance of this didn’t really occur to me until later on, but as I lay there in the small, quiet hours of the morning—knowing that not all that far away the Cards’ house was a burning hell—I couldn’t get it off my mind.
I wasn’t racked with guilt
,
understand
. I wish I could say I was, but I wasn’t. The Cards hadn’t deserved to die any more than most people do, but I hadn’t killed them because they deserved it. It was simply what had happened. And I thought about it on that level. I just couldn’t quite believe it had actually happened. Maybe it had been easy because I’d never liked Sister Card and she’d never liked me. Maybe I was just scared. Why do these things happen, anyway? I don’t know. They just do. If there is a god, I suppose these kinds of things must be part of him and his big master plan. Maybe they’re his idea of a joke, the overlapping ironies of his inexhaustibly complex nature. If there’s not a god, then this kind of wickedness is simply a facet of the human psyche, some glitch we haven’t worked out yet and probably never will.

I tried to think about Angela, but she started to seem small compared to what I’d done for her. That made me angry for a moment, but I let it pass. No use getting mad at her. She hadn’t done anything. Just then she was at a friend’s house, sleeping soundly probably, with no idea her parents were dead.
Silly of me to get mad at her.

In a way—and I’m fully aware that you may have trouble making this leap, but do me and favor and try—it seemed like some real good might come from what I’d done. I mean, in a sense, things for me had just improved. The Cards had always been the only real obstacle between
me and Angela
. Except maybe Oscar, but he was just some pathetic little basketball player. Had she ever even loved him? I doubt it. Love at that age, what is it really?
Nothing but hormones colliding with insecurity in a limited pool of options.

I actually loved her.

Or I thought I did. Many people would say I didn’t. But let’s put it this way: I killed for her. I didn’t plan on it, but when the challenge came, I took it. I actually murdered people for her, like Abraham ready to sacrifice Isaac to prove he loved god. God himself demanded that kind of love. How demented could it be? I wasn’t desperate after I killed the Cards, I was glad. I was locking it in. No matter what, I would be joined with Angela forever. She would need me now more than ever.

The more I thought about her, though, the more that something tugged at me.
The last obstacle.

Doolittle Norris. I didn’t want to think too much about him or about our inevitable confrontation. Thinking too much will always mangle your mind. I needed to be clear when I saw him. I decided not to think about him.

Which left me with nothing but the really
Big
Questions, the moral implications of what I’d done. Well, who wants to think about that shit? I watched a porno instead and finally fell to sleep.

The doorbell rang about three hours later. It was early, and sunlight was just beginning to splinter the night sky. When I opened the door Doolittle Norris shoved his way in, threw me to the floor, and slammed the door shut behind him. He stalked over to the curtains and peered outside.

Then he spun around.

“What the fuck happened?”
 

I motioned at the door. “Did anyone see you come in?”

He glared at me like I was a fool. “No. Do you think I want people seeing me come in here right, now?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you do.” I couldn’t help but smile when I said it.

He stared at me for a long moment and took a step back and leaned against the wall. He crossed his arms. “Well,” he said, “you little motherfucker. You little piece of shit.”

I shrugged and pushed myself off the floor.

“Care to sit down?” I said.

“No.”

“Then let’s get down to it,” I said. “I have what you want. I’ve done something for you, now you can do something for me.”

“Killing the preacher and his wife and burning their fucking house to the ground wasn’t my idea. That was yours.”

“True. That’s why you’re called an
accomplice
,” I said. “I bet when they give me the lethal injection, you don’t do more than ten or fifteen years. But I doubt you want that. I doubt you want to go to jail at all.”

Violence simmered in his eyes and his ruddy cheeks were hot with blood, but Norris hadn’t become the criminal he was by beating the shit out of people when it didn’t benefit him. He stared at me and said, “Be careful with what you say.”

“I will,” I said. “But you can see I’m right. I’m sitting on a few million dollars for you. However you plan to get it, I’m the key. I have the will. You need it, and I have it.”

“What makes you think I need it now? I could just say it burned up in the fire.”

I shook my head. “C’mon, don’t treat me like that. We both know why you’re here. If you didn’t need me, I’d be in jail or dead already. You can’t throw me in jail because you know I’ll name you as an accomplice, and you don’t want to kill me because I have the key to old lady
Dyess’s
money.”

He did. He stared at
me and thought,
and I could tell he knew I was right. “Where’s the envelope?” he asked.

I grinned at him disappointedly. He shrugged.

“So,” he said, “you’ve got it stashed away somewhere. Now what do you want?”

“Two things. Not big things either. First, I want you to take care of this little mess we have.”

He ran his hand through his hair and rubbed his eyes. “It’s a hellish nightmare over there.”

“Can you pass it off as an accident?”

“Christ, no. It looks like a murder scene. I’m not the only one there, you know. Anyone who sees it can tell it’s a murder scene.” His face screwed up in revulsion the more he thought about it. “Accident! Are you out of your mind, you sick bastard? There’s a guy with a fucking knife in his skull.” He shook his head. “I can’t pass that off as an accident.”

I shrugged. “So it’s a murder. Investigate it like a murder then. But you know where it can’t lead.”

He pursed his lips and weighed the chances of success. “It’s not going to be as easy as you think.”

“That’s your problem now,” I said.

I don’t know why I was needling him, but he didn’t respond to it at all. He only scratched his chin and asked, “What’s your second condition?”