Mrs. Million (19 page)

André’s argument had been convincing, in part because agreeing with him had gotten Bobby untaped. Now, if he could get the body up those stairs he’d be out of the basement for good.

Bobby was no expert, but if a dead person was anything like a dead deer, this one would start to stiffen up pretty soon, and things would become more difficult. He might be stuck, down there for hours. He took a deep breath, wrapped his arms around the corpse and, with a burst of effort usually reserved for removing undersized cowboy boots from swollen feet, he heaved it up onto his shoulder and carried it up the steps. André scrambled to his feet and got out of the way.

“Where you want him?” Bobby gasped.

André pointed, then ran to open the door leading into the attached garage. Bobby staggered through the doorway and dumped the body into the open trunk of André’s Taurus.

“Okay,” he said, heart pounding, “now what?”

André plucked a shovel from the wall of the garage and laid it in the trunk on top of the body. “Now we go for a drive.” He closed the trunk.

I
N HIS DREAM, HE
was riding a tall horse across the big-sky country of Montana, the horse covering miles with each stride. Bobby looked back and saw Rodney Gent bounding after him. Bobby pressed down on the accelerator, but the horse would go no faster. He clapped a hand to his head, suddenly afraid that his El Presidente would blow off, then realized that the duct tape was holding it firmly in place and something was clutching at his shoulder.

“Wake up.”

Bobby swam for the surface, opened his eyes. His thoughts moved sluggishly, reluctantly embracing consciousness. Headlights illuminated tree trunks and naked branches. He was in a car, in the passenger seat, in the woods. He turned his head, saw André, his beard faintly lit by the dashboard lights. They were not moving. The dashboard clock read 2:12. They’d been in the car for hours, driving, the professor looking for the perfect spot for his friend to spend eternity, talking the whole time. Bobby had finally dozed off.

“Where are we?” Bobby asked.

“A jeep trail, perhaps an old logging road, just off of Miller’s Road.” André reached down and activated the trunk release. He got out of the car, lifted the truck lid. “Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“Start digging.”

Bobby climbed out of the car, moving slowly. André handed him the shovel. The handle felt warm, and he realized that he had no jacket or gloves, and that it was only a few degrees above freezing. Was he really standing in the woods with a shovel and a professor and a corpse? All things considered, this was not that much better than being duct-taped to a chair in a basement. Except for the half-million bucks the professor was promising.

“You just want me to dig a hole?”

“That’s right.”

Bobby looked around. “Where do you want him?”

André pointed to a spot several yards in front of the car. Bobby walked toward the proposed grave site, applied the point of the shovel to the earth, and stomped on it. The shovel blade penetrated three inches into the leaf-covered loam before hitting something hard. A rock? Bobby moved over a few feet and tried again with similar results. He noticed a patch of snow a few feet away. Of course. The earth was still frozen from the long winter.

“This isn’t gonna work,” he said.

André ordered the Trucker’s Triple-X Special: three eggs, three sausage links, three pancakes, coffee, and orange juice. Bobby asked for coffee and pancakes.

“The human animal is not a collection of individuals with free will,” André explained. “We are more akin to an ant colony, each of us performing a specific function, each of us contributing to the betterment of the species. You were a boot salesman, which makes you a part of the class of human elements the function of which is to protect the feet, our predominant means of locomotion. I was a teacher, a processor of information, a disseminator of knowledge.

“But that was then. Do you understand?” André chopped the air for emphasis, then waited for Bobby’s nod. “So you see,” he continued, “humanity can be viewed as a single organism, as the sum of its parts, without regard to individuality. We are all a part of the whole.”

The waitress slid his Triple-X Special onto the Formica table. André lifted his fork and stabbed a pork link and held it up as if displaying a particularly beautiful rose. “Nevertheless, it is still possible and inevitable that certain individuals might exist outside this construct. Certain people through their own abilities or through unavoidable circumstance might break free from the human organism to form micro-humanities of their own. And by stepping outside the organism, they might find themselves answering to different needs, different morals, and different laws.” He bit into the sausage. “We stand outside,” he said.

Bobby Quinn’s head made a nodding motion, but André did not believe that to be a true sign of comprehension. The poor man was no mental giant.

André, by contrast, was feeling particularly brilliant. He had not felt this alive in years. Things had never been so clear to him. He had a dead body in his trunk and a million dollars sitting across the booth and he was in a truck stop twenty miles outside of Cold Rock eating pork sausage at 3:30 in the morning. It was as if he had become a different person, as if the events of the past twenty-four hours had stripped away a disguise and revealed a new André, the true André.

“You see, the moment your wife won the lottery, she triggered a series of interconnected events which led you into my cellar and led poor Jayjay to his tragic end and ultimately resulted in my being freed from my position within the organism and placed into a situation where I had to create my own laws. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Barbaraannette won the lottery and your weird little friend hit me over the head with a wrench and now he’s dead and we’re eating pancakes.”

“That is another way to look at it. I, however, am eating sausages.”

Bobby said, “Are we going to get some sleep pretty soon?”

“Of course we are. But first we have to dispose of our friend.”

“We can’t bury him.”

“I realize that. The earth is frozen. The river, however, is not.”

Shortly after 3:00
A.M.
Jon Glaus looked at the last invoice, an Escort, white. He dropped it back into the file and rolled the drawer shut. It had taken him nearly four hours to go through all the files, one invoice at a time, checking first for model, then for color, then pulling all the invoices for green Ford Tauruses. They’d sold a total of forty-six in the past five years. He hoped that Hugh—and he wouldn’t forget the guy’s name anytime soon—would be happy with that. He’d damn well better be.

Hugh was asleep in the back of a new Expedition in the showroom; his girlfriend had sacked out in a Crown Vic. The other guy, Rodney, was in the customer lounge reading
Motor Trend.
Jon poured himself another cup of coffee. He would take a few minutes to collect himself. The offices of Fetler Ford were cold and quiet and smelled like stale popcorn, and Jon had a pounding headache. Maybe it was the coffee, four cups in the middle of the night. He flipped through the invoices, wondering what made this pile of paper worth five hundred bucks. Green Tauruses. Why would anybody be interested in anybody who drove a green Taurus?

Two miles north of the Cold Rock city limits, County Road 12 crossed the North Rock River. The river there ran fast and deep but was no more than thirty yards wide. The banks were heavily wooded. André pulled to the side of the road just short of the bridge and popped the trunk. Four o’clock in the morning. The only conscious human they had seen since leaving the truck stop was the attendant at the Kum & Go just outside of town where they had purchased two forty-pound bags of cat litter, a box of plastic garbage bags, and a roll of duct tape.

Bobby helped André seal the bags of cat litter into the plastic garbage bags, then helped him drag the now stiffened, plastic-wrapped body out of the trunk. Bobby found that it helped him to think of the body as a dead buck. He had handled dead deer before, and it was dark enough out that the shape didn’t look all that human. Bobby held up one end as André attached a bag of cat litter, wrapping several loops of duct tape around the body. The longer Bobby watched André work on the package, the more difficult it became for him to think of it in terms of deer hunting. For one thing, he would never have picked a guy like André to go hunting with. He set aside the deer imagery and tried to get interested in the half million dollars. All he had to do was get through the next few hours and he’d be rich.
He
hadn’t killed the kid.
He
hadn’t done anything wrong. This whole situation was, as André had said, a series of interconnected events.

He lifted the leg end of the body as André attached the second bag. As long as he couldn’t see the body it wasn’t so bad, but he wished he couldn’t feel the shape of the boy’s boots through the plastic.

André finished taping, stood up, clapped his hands together cheerfully and said, “Excellent.”

Bobby lowered the weighted legs to the ground. “Now what?”

André said, “Now you carry him onto the bridge and send him on his way.”

Bobby looked doubtfully at the duct-taped mass of flesh and clay. “I don’t think I can. He’s got kind of heavy.”

André produced an exasperated sputter. “I will assist you, then.”

They each grabbed opposite ends of the body and tried to lift and carry it, but the combination of the added weight, the slippery plastic, and the awkward shape of the stiffened corpse proved too much for them. After a few false starts, they found that it was easiest to drag it. Five minutes of effort brought them to the center of the bridge.

André, gasping for air, said, “Now you simply lift him up and over the railing.”

Bobby, wanting nothing more than to be done with this whole business, squatted over the body and worked his hands beneath it, trying to get a good grip. As he began to lift, one of his hands slipped into a rent in the plastic and hit cold, moist flesh. A tremor went up his arm; he leapt up and away from the body, wiping his hand furiously on his jeans.

“What happened?” André asked. “Are you all right?”

Bobby shook his head, backing away, still wiping his hand. The thought of a half million dollars came and went, obliterated by the horror of the moment. He turned and ran for the car, jumped into the driver’s seat, and groped for the keys.

No keys.

He jumped out, ready to head straight into the woods, but André was coming around from the back of the car with his arms high above his head. He had the shovel. Bobby raised his own arms but not in time, the flat of the shovel hit the top of his head and boomed down his spine, buckling his knees. Bobby caught himself, his hands hitting cold gravel, and lay there face down, still conscious but without the will to move. He heard a grunt of effort, but he did not feel the second blow.

R
OLLING OVER BACK
to side, side to stomach, spinning like a chicken on a spit, images of Bobby, Hilde, Art, and money strobing in her head. If she’d slept a wink, Barbaraannette couldn’t remember it. She got up five or six times to check on Hilde, who snored peacefully through the night.

At one point, sometime around 4:00, Barbaraannette got out of bed and took a shower. It didn’t help. She gave up at 5:30, threw on her robe, and made cornbread muffins.

At 6:45 she called Toagie.

“You up?”

“Not by much,” Toagie said, her voice more ragged than usual. “I’m somewheres between peeing and making coffee.”

“I’m getting Bobby back this morning,” Barbaraannette said. “I’m meeting him at the bank.”

“You’re actually gonna do it? Who’s getting the money? Not Hugh Hulke, I hope. I couldn’t hardly stand it, he was a millionaire.”

“Somebody else.”

“Jeez. A million bucks.”

“Listen, Toag, about your mortgage. I want to help you with that.”

Barbaraannette heard the click of a lighter, the sound of her sister drawing on her first morning cigarette.

“Yeah,” Toagie said wearily. “Bill said you probably would. He quit his job yesterday.”

“I didn’t know he was working.”

“He had a gig working maintenance at the college, going on three weeks. It wasn’t much money but at least he was working and not sitting around here watching TV and sucking down brewskis.”

“Art said they’re about to foreclose on you.”

“He told you that ’cause he wants some of your money.”

“I think he just doesn’t want to put you out of your home.”

“We might’ve worked it out if Bill hadn’t quit. We were gonna make a payment Friday.”

“Like I said, I’ll help.”

“You know why he quit? He quit because he figured that you’d help us out. He actually said to me—I coulda killed him—he says ‘My sister-in-law’s a millionaire. Why should I be emptying garbage cans?’ That’s what he said.”

“It’s my fault he quit his job?”

“I’m not saying that. You’re just his excuse this time. What time are you going to the bank? You want company?”

“I think I’ve got to do this one on my own, Toag. But I do need a favor. I’ve got Hilde here.”

“Oh. You talk to the people at Crestview yet?”

“I’m leaving that to Mary Beth.”

“Good idea. You want to drop Hilde by here, that’s fine with me. Only let me know how it goes at the bank so I don’t go nuts wondering, okay?”

Barbaraannette went to her bedroom and began to work on her outfit. She started out with a black ensemble-mid-calf skirt, silk blouse, wool jacket—but decided that would be too dragon-lady. She replaced the blouse with a camel sweater, then went to gray wool slacks. Yuk. Several permutations later, she arrived at jeans, a V-neck cashmere sweater that matched her blue eyes, and a taupe blazer. Odd, but not bad. She put on a pair of dangling red coral earrings, added a few quick strokes of lipstick and eyeliner, and stepped into a pair of oxblood moccasins. Not bad at all, she decided, striking a pose before the mirror. She heard a giggle, turned to find Hilde standing in the doorway.

“You lose those earrings, Babba, and I think you’ve got it.”