SUMMER of FEAR (21 page)

I stared at Marty's smug, heavy face while the fury whirled around
inside me. For a second, I was blind.

"Still want the cuffs, Russ?"

Martin Parish knew me well enough to know what I was feeling, and he was
ready. He caught me coming in with a foot to my groin, then a fist to the back
of my lowered neck, and I went down. I felt the cool steel of Keyes's revolver
behind my ear as I gawked at the swirling pattern of the oil stains on the
garage floor. For a long moment, I was lost in that aching, sucking pain that
starts at a man's balls and makes him feel like shitting, pissing, vomiting,
and crying all at once. For whatever reasons, I focused on the laces of Marty's
scuffed brown wing tips.

Finally, Martin dragged me up by my shirt collar. The revolver rode up
with me, adamant against the back of my skull.

"Damn, Russell, I'm offering you the opportunity of a
lifetime."

I stood there, feeling the pain elongate through me. My ears were
screaming from the blow and my neck ached.

"Pick her up and carry her up the hill," he said. "I'll
toss a rock when I want you to turn."

"Why?"

"You don't ask
why,
Monroe. You
do.
You do, or I'll
throw your ass in jail and you can watch the minutes tick by—all day long. You
can think about your defense, and Isabella, and how you're going to make the
payments for your lawyer and this stilt thing. Or, you can pick up Alice and
march up the damned hill."

The revolver left my head. Marty motioned to the freezer. I looked down
through the mist at Alice.

If epiphany is a moment of revelation and insight,
what came to me next was no epiphany at all. It was blinder than any kind of
sight, it revealed nothing, and it came to me not through the brain but from a
deeper, instinctual place inside me—a place of earth and stone, blood and
birth, flesh and bone: It would have taken no dread of our criminal justice
system to eschew the scenario Martin had just sketched for me. In fact, would
have taken a faith akin to religion to offer myself into
it
maw of
society for the purpose of proving my innocence. No, I was a simpler being in
that moment, honed by circumstance to something more essential. What I needed,
what I desire more than anything else at that point in time, was a practice
workable method of saving my own trembling ass.

Judas's heart could not have been more heavy as he placed the final kiss
than mine was at what happened—at what I
did
next!

A patch of Alice Fultz's frozen hair broke off with a click and stuck to
the wall as I wrestled her out. I hefted her over my shoulder and put one foot
in front of the other, heading up the driveway. Her waist rested against my
left shoulder, and I had to spread my arms in order to grasp each of her icy,
stiff ankles. I could see her right arm waving out in the darkness as I
climbed. Her left arm knocked against the back of my head as if in some horrid
reminder, and in the far-right periphery my vision I could see her pale fingers
jiggling tautly with each footstep.

I realized as I climbed, with every step I took, that few things in my
life after this night would ever be the same. The terrible march was a simple,
clear dividing line—a border—that would separate my future from everything that
had gone before. The two might not be able to cohabitate within me; this much,
I knew. New rules would apply; alternate systems would be required;
considerable adjustment would have to be made, bargains struck; concessions
offered; treaties signed. My soul would never again belong only to me, but to
this woman, these men, this night. I had never dreamed that I would be forced
to tender it for so little.

What I prayed for as I struggled up the hillside (if grunting
desperately can be called prayer) was that there be something left of my old
life that I could recognize and remember—and maybe, in a moment of need, cling
to—other than terror, fear, and shame. A rivulet of icy fluid ran from Alice's
waist down my shoulder, the coldest thing this world has ever offered me.

The fog rolled in from the south and we vanished into the darkness of
the canyon. I could hear three sets of footsteps as I labored higher, deeper
into the thick, dry hillside brush. I ached and shivered as Alice's meltings
ran down my body. The video light wobbled out in front of me. A pebble hit my
back and I turned left into a deep ravine, an overgrown clot of oak and
elderberry, sage and prickly pear. My legs burned. I penetrated the cover. I
stumbled and fell. Alice rolled off and righted herself like some kind of
weighted child's toy, faceup in a bed of cactus. The video light went out and I
panted there on my hands and knees.

"Good
enough, Monroe," I heard Martin say. "Now get up and we'll head back
down to your garage. You can't dig a grave without a shovel."

I dug for two
straight hours, and still wasn't deep enough. Marty had recommended a pair of
gloves, which helped. I had to go back for a pick because the bedrock was so
hard, the shovel just bounced. The fog hugged us. The moon disappeared. A dark
circle formed on the earth around Alice. Keyes got most of it on video. I felt
as if I'd been banished to hell, and spent probably twenty minutes trying to
pinpoint—as I bent waist-deep and hurled the pick against the rock—the exact
moment of my death. How could I have missed it? I half-believed, at times, that
this was a severe nightmare from which I would surely soon awake. Fever, I
thought: There must be fever involved.

But the deeper the hole got, the better I began to feel! I felt closer
to being real, and I wondered as the sweat ran down into my gloves if
maybe—-just
maybe
—I would feel truly whole again when the last spadeful
of canyon dirt sealed away Alice and Marty and Keyes and this hellish night
forever. A surge implausible optimism went through me. And it allowed me
concentrate on the particulars of this horror, on the madness that surely drove
Martin Parish to put Alice's body in my freezer on the dire aspects of his
murderous obsession with Amber Mae, on the way—some way,
any
way—that I
could salvage even one handful of redemption from this night. I vowed then and
there that I would never let this touch Isabella, that if I had to I would lay
down my life—and certainly most anyone else's to keep the infection of this
night from ever spreading to her. It seemed clear to me then that Isabella was
the only good thing left in my world and that she must be spared this disease,
this two-decade sickness of Amber and Martin and Grace and, most obviously,
myself. I looked down at my dirt-covered shoes, half expecting to see hooves.
Never, I thought, never will I let you, Izzy, be tainted by this. If I die
having accomplished nothing more than that, it will be a death greeted with a
secret smile. I swear. I promise. I swear.

And with that silent vow, a clarity came to me, and I knew that there
were questions I needed to answer. I was four feet down into the earth by then.
I wiped the sweat from my face on the sleeve of my stinking shirt. Keyes was
sitting on a rock, camcorder across his lap. I looked up at Martin.

"So," I asked, "how much money did I murder the wrong
woman for?"

Marty's face, fog-brushed, regarded me from on high. "Well, as you
know, she's worth about six million. I did some prying when I thought she was
dead."

"Did you."

"You
sure as hell
didn't—you knew it all ahead of time. Grace came into the beginnings of her
share when she turned eighteen. That's why you waited."

"What is Grace's share?"

"Five million," said Marty. "Come on, you know all this.
I'm written in for half a million, and so is ex-flame, lover, friend, worshiper
Russell Monroe. If you or I die before Grace does, or end up in prison, for
instance, the winner gets a full million. If Grace goes first, the United Way
ends up with the five. A little more prying finds you owe some pretty big bucks
to the hospital. Tina Sharp, quite helpful when she thinks she's talking to an
administrator. Motive, Russell. Lots of motive in the air around here."

I could hardly believe that Amber would include me in the dispensation
of her fortune. But my belief was not important.

"Then there's the life-insurance policy she took out ten years ago,
for Grace. Death benefit of another two million— payable over ten years. Were
you and Grace going to split that?"

"I don't know," I mumbled.

"When did you figure out that you'd slaughtered the wrong
beauty?"

I couldn't answer truthfully without admitting to Martin that Amber had
defected into my camp. The fact that I knew where she was and had in my
possession a boxful of evidence collected by Martin Parish—to save his own ass
from the gas chamber, I could now assume—were my only two remaining hole cards.
Why hadn't Martin figured she would come to me?

I thought long and hard about how best to play this. None of the obvious
options seemed strong enough to bet on. I concluded that the best I could do
while digging Alice's grave was to encourage Marty to dig one for himself.

"When I saw her," I said. "The
body."

"I have to know, Russ, were you going to stick Amber
my
freezer when you framed me, or somewhere else?"

I smiled up at him. My own boldness—or was it pure
desperation?—frightened me, not only because it felt dangerous but because it
felt good. "In your freezer, Marty,
naturally."

Martin clapped his hands together, tilted his head back and yipped into
the darkness like a huge coyote. "I knew it! This first place I looked
when I came up to your place two night ago? The freezer! The freezer I gave
you! Damn, I just feel so good about myself!"

He howled and yipped again, and I taxed my mind for way—a plan—by which
I could take my shovel to this lunatic homicide cop and bury him, too. Keyes
was the problem though, as Marty had foreseen. I wondered whether I could
fatally spear Keyes by throwing the pick, but it was a faulty ides because it
was a stupid one. His eyes gleamed at me in the darkness.

"Why don't you say something, shithead?" I
asked him.

He aimed an index finger at my face and released the thumb hammer.

"I can see a lot of brains in this one," I said to Marty.
"Where do you get these guys?"

"Wald sends us his cream."

Keyes looked at me steadily.

"Keep digging," said Martin. "You're
almost there."

A wisp of fog blew past him; I turned back to my hole and dug.

"Russell, it was a good idea to make it look like the Midnight Eye,
but why go to all that trouble if you were going move the body?"

"You figure it," I said. "Earn your
keep."

"Well, I've been trying to. What I figured was, you doctored up
Amber's room to look like the Eye—
Grace
doctored it— before I got there
on the third. Grace had bashed her earlier. It was easy enough to tell Alice
was fresh. You had come back that night, when you saw me leaving, to check the
work and realized it wasn't Amber at all—I suspect her message on the answering
machine was one obvious indicator. So you figured, why leave the wrong woman
there, done in by the Midnight Eye? It's too sloppy, too risky, and besides,
you might have wanted to use the same trick on the right woman sometime. The
best you could come up with was just to clean up the whole mess, which you did
on the afternoon of the Fourth. You thought that I'd sit on the whole thing,
especially with no body left. Another few days, you'd have buried Alice up here
just like you're doing now, or dumped her in a trash can, or spilled her off a
pier."

"What about that night—when I found you in Amber's bedroom with
nothing on but your shorts?"

"You were making one last pass before Amber got home. Maybe
figuring how to put on another coat of paint before she saw your Eye
decor."

"You're good, Martin."

"You're damn right I'm good. Okay, friend—you're deep enough. Trade
places with Alice and fill it back up. Double time, soldier."

I stood there, chest heaving, then climbed out. Both men were waiting for
me when I righted myself on the lip of the grave. The sudden notion hit me that
Keyes was going to shoot me through the heart and leave me with Alice, but it
went away as quickly as it had come—nobody films a murder they're committing,
do they?

Martin smiled and told me to put out both hands,
palms up. My gloves were still on. Keyes moved to my side and his revolver
barrel pressed again into my neck.

"Just a little sting, Monroe, as the doctors like to say.
Here—"

And with that, Marty's fist raked across my right palm, his knife
leaving the glove leather split and a wash of blood oozing from the gash.

I yanked back my hand as the pain shot through it, but Keyes pulled hard
on my shirt, my feet slipped, and I landed on my butt. Keyes, still behind me,
took out a handful of my hair and sprinkled it into the open grave. I
understood.

"For Dina," I said.

"For Dina," said Marty, folding up his pocketknife. "Give
her something to remember you by."

I pulled off the cut right glove—the slice in my palm
was
long but not deep—and tossed it
down to Alice. Plenty of blood for Dina to work with, if it ever came to that.