Trinity (5 page)

6

Sleep didn’t come back to Kate. She thought of her brother, her foster mother, this feud between Rich and Val. If she went to him, talked to him, a rational, grown-up conversation, without any macho posturing…then maybe she could get him to leave them alone. Rich wasn’t a morning person, but as she lay in bed, watching the hands on the glowing analog clock face, she thought maybe a crack of dawn visit would breathe some sense into him.

She tried to move without disturbing Val. Gingerly pulling her arm out from under him, she flexed her hand. It tingled, all pins and needles. Short night. After his nocturnal wanderings it had taken him a long time to fall asleep.

In what little gray light snuck around the drawn shade, she pulled on her panties and jeans then searched for her top.

She and Val slept in his old bedroom, and Kate wondered if he would move into the master bedroom. She doubted it. She hoped they wouldn’t be here long enough to need to.

She slipped out into the rosy pre-dawn light, closing the flimsy door behind her. A deer bolted from grazing in the yard as the door slammed, and Kate watched it go as she started her car. As she pulled out of the driveway, she looked over her shoulder at the trailer and the truck before heading toward Lott, towards her brother’s house.

Kate didn’t get far.

A half mile from the trailer she saw a mangled deer in the road.

As her headlights washed over the crumpled mess, it began to dawn on her what she was seeing.

The headlights also shone off something shiny in the ditch on the side of the road. A Suzuki dual-sport bike.

“Fuck,” she whispered. She threw the car into park and opened the door, stepping onto the gravel, looking left and right, even up, to make sure she was alone. Maybe this wasn’t happening. Maybe she’d wake up soon.

She knew from the checkered dirt bike jacket exactly who this was, but she rolled him over to be sure, maybe there was still a pulse, maybe she’d gotten here in time…and half of TJ’s face was missing. Missing to the degree she could see sliced skull edges, and something horrible and gray and soft, already seething with flies that took off at the disruption, buzzing and irritated until they could settle in again. He’d lain on his stomach and the blood had pooled in what was left of his face, the skin looked waxy and purplish. She let go of his shoulder and backed away.

All that blood and sliced-open flesh and the smell and the buzzing of the flies made her head swim and her stomach bucked. She leaned on her open car door and brought up what was left of last night’s dinner. Bile with a slight taste of beer made her heave again. He didn’t lose his face in a bike accident. There were claw marks on him...or sword cuts. Maybe they looked like bear claw marks? She didn’t even know if there were bears in New Mexico. Black bears, but nothing that…large. A mountain lion? Still not big enough. This looked like a grizzly. A big one. Not that she knew anything about what a grizzly bear attack looked like, but she had seen those shows on Fox, where animals attack people and it’s caught on film. Her empty stomach churned again…this wasn’t television though, this was TJ. She breathed through her mouth until the next wave of nausea passed.

Hoping, and starting to cry, she went back and dutifully felt for a pulse.
If there’s no pulse I can do CPR
, she thought, knowing no amount of CPR could fix what had been done.
He doesn’t have a mouth anymore…how could I do CPR like that?
As soon as she touched TJ’s skin, cold and plastic feeling, she gave up. She thought of his clumsy advances, and pushed thoughts of him from her mind.

The hitching wheeze of her engine contrasted with peaceful bird calls. Breathing in through her mouth, she could smell something; sort of half rotten meat, half feces, but with a strange nauseating sweetness to it. She
knew
this guy. This guy who was last seen (to the best of her knowledge) leaving her boyfriend’s home after a violent dispute. The same boyfriend who not only was an ex-con, but had vanished in the middle of the night and come home with blood on his shorts. Had she fucked Val immediately before
and
after he’d hacked TJ to pieces with a machete?

No. She hadn’t. Because Val wasn’t stupid. After high school and before jail he’d started his undergrad on the pre-law track. If he were to kill TJ, he would have showed some degree of cunning or subtlety. Though…he’d kind of had a lot to drink last night. And the business with the hum was troubling. And he didn’t have any kind of alibi. If he hadn’t conspicuously vanished during what seemed to be the precise time TJ was being sliced apart, she would have known he didn’t do it. But…this seemed like a damned big coincidence and Kate didn’t believe in coincidences.

She pulled out her cell phone. Held it in her hand until it became warm, staring at the mess before her. Call the police? Call Val?

Calling the police wasn’t an option. She couldn’t lose Val again. But…where had he gone in the night? She looked up at the sky. A few clouds floated there against the blue, pink with the edge of sunlight.

She keyed in 911. Placed her thumb over the green send button, hovered there a moment, and noticed dirt under her fingernail, then scrolled down to Val’s mom’s number. She hoped it hadn’t changed.

The ringing sounded a thousand miles away in her ear. Val answered; his voice thick with sleep.

“I need your help,” she said.

“Where are you?” He paused a moment. “What the fuck time is it?”

“After five. TJ’s dead.”

“What?” He sounded clearer now. “How do you know?”

“I’m standing next to his body. He’s in the road, 719 towards town. Someone killed him.” Val said nothing, so Kate kept going. “You were one of the last people to see him. You just got out of jail. You know how Rich will spin this.”

“What are you saying?”

“Get out here.”

“Truck has a flat tire.”

“You can walk.” God, why was he being difficult?

“Okay.”

He hung up. She put the phone in her pocket, and took a moment to breathe fresh air that didn’t smell like decay before going back to TJ.

Exhaling through her mouth, she looked at the crumpled mess before her. This road didn’t see much traffic, clearly he’d been dead for a few hours, the blood around his throat and face was a tacky dark brown in the building light. The sun peeked over the top of the pines, tossing long striped shadows across his mangled torso. His left arm was gone. Shit. Did the killer take it with him? Maybe a sword could do this kind of damage, wielded in a sequential way to make it look like claws? Did the killer like trophies? Or was it a bear after all?

Kate looked at her watch, 5:40 am.

The mine. The old Olympus Mine. Less than a half-mile from where she stood right this second. No one would ever find the body or the bike. She and Val had explored there some years ago, back when they were kids (everything with Val had happened some years ago, she reflected), and she recalled a fairly wide road in with a drop-off down into an impenetrable blackness. Once Val got here—she hoped he would run, get here fast, every second TJ lay in the road was time a car could come—they could take TJ to the mine. No one would find him there.

She popped the trunk open. Looked at TJ. Looked at the small trunk, with its dirty gray carpeting. If his blood got on the carpet, which it would, and the police linked it back to her, she and Val both would be in a world of hurt. She kept a dirty Indian blanket in her trunk. That should work. Doubled up, the blanket covered the gray carpeting of the car’s trunk. Or should she wrap his body? That seemed more respectful.

This wasn’t the time to cry. She blinked back tears. The pink had almost melted off the clouds overhead, they no longer looked like floating cotton candy. Shouldn’t it be raining for this kind of thing? Thunder and lightning?

Sucking in a wavering breath and stifling a sob, she slid her hands under his armpits and hefted. Fuck. He’d needed to lose weight, and now that it was dead weight—even missing most of his left arm—she began to doubt her ability to do this. She had to wait for Val. She couldn’t get him from the ground to the trunk of the car, he was too heavy. His blood stained her hands, and she wiped them on his jeans, the muscles underneath feeling so…inanimate.

She stepped away from him, to where she could breathe again. She listened to the bugs and the birds, the happy morning choir all around her.

And something heavy moved among the trees.

Her breath, almost a sob, caught in her throat as she whipped her head towards the noise. She wanted to call out Val’s name but she couldn’t make the sound come. What if the killer was back? Did it-he-want to claim TJ’s other arm? Should she hide? She realized she was simply standing still, holding the blanket in her hands. The car wasn’t too far, surely she could make it there before—

Val stepped out of the trees, wearing the same black T-shirt from the night before and his jeans.

“You scared the hell out of me.”

“Who else did you think it would be?”

“Someone killed him. They could still be out here.”

Val walked over to the body and pulled a pair of leather gloves out of his pocket. She saw something flicker in his eyes, the downturned corner of his mouth. She didn’t think about gloves at all, but it made sense. The expression on his face passed, and he stretched like a cat. In the quiet morning she could hear his back crack.

“What do you propose?” he asked. His tone, his face…both were so cold.

“What?”

“You called me out here to do something, presumably with this body, what do you propose?”

“The mine.”

His silence goaded at her. It made her angry to watch him contemplate the body. “They’ll think you did it! Where did you get the blood on you last night? Where were you?”

“Back your car around so we don’t have to lift him so far. He wasn’t a little guy.”

Walking to the driver’s side door she found herself mad at Val. Hadn’t she called him because she knew he would get shit done? He was getting shit done, but she also wanted kind words. A hug. Something.
Poor Kate
,
you must be so scared
. That kind of attitude wouldn’t come from Val, and she knew it.

Val directed her back and told her when to stop.

“Should we wrap him in the blanket?”

“If we wrap him in the blanket I can’t get a grip on him. Line the trunk with it, I’ll get him in.”

She did as she was told while Val got his hands under TJ’s armpits. She thought dead bodies were supposed to be stiff, but TJ’s stump waggled pathetically, and he bent obligingly at the waist.

“Get his feet, please,” Val said.

“Sorry,” she said, stepping in and reaching for his boots. The leather didn’t have blood on it, and she reached for it.

“Wait,” Val said. “Don’t touch him with your bare hands. They can pull prints off anything. Do you have gloves in the car?”

“No.”

He threw a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves at her. “Enjoy.”

She pulled them on, not enjoying the plastic feel up her arms, but she supposed this was smart. Too much to think about.

At some point, poor TJ had shit himself. She hoped, as she sort of hooked his ankles over the lip of the trunk and paused to pant in the building heat of the morning, it had been a post-mortem shitting. Though she would not deeply mourn his death, she didn’t want to think of him being so afraid of something that he couldn’t control his bowels.

She kicked dirt over the bloody spots in the gravel of the road. A look at the sky suggested it wouldn’t be raining any time soon. She kicked harder, trying to spread it as much as possible, looked at the heap that was TJ in the trunk, reached out and folded a corner of the blanket over his ruined face, then slammed the hatch shut.

“It looks like he was riding to your place,” she said, looking at the bike.

“Mmmhmm,” Val said. “Your knight in shining armor.”

Or so it seemed. What did she know? “Goddamn it, TJ,” she muttered under her breath, still somewhere between crying and not.

“I’ll follow you on the bike,” Val said.

Swallowing tears, she asked if he needed help picking it up.

“I think I got it.” She waited to see if he did, and he used his knees to do it, turning his back to the bike and getting it up on its wheels easily. She started the car, and Val followed her. The car bounced down the rutted road, long unused, grown over in places with scrub brush, past a large
no trespassing
sign as per the orders of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, wishing she had Val’s pickup instead of her own little car.

She skidded to a stop in front of an old metal gate which reiterated this was private property, a few pieces of steel across the road on a locked hinge. Val braked hard behind her, the dirt bike wobbling. They could walk around it, of course, the bike could get around, no problem, but carrying TJ’s body? She got out and studied the lock. It was a simple padlock, looking quite rusted. She debated slamming through with the car, but the car was very yellow, and the gate was gray, and it seemed like that paint swap would make everything easier for the Otero County Sheriff’s Department. If they got this far, she didn’t want to give them any help.

Val came up behind her, off the bike now, with a rock in both gloved hands. She could see the muscles standing out in his arms from carrying it, and it only took him two hits to break off the lock. He tossed the rock off to the side.

Already in the heat, she was slick with sweat. Val walked the gate open, and she went back to the car. He followed on the bike. The opening to the mine faced west and in the morning light it looked like a gaping black mouth in the side of a hill. For at least a few hundred yards the road was wide enough to get a dump truck in. She anticipated no problem turning the car around and getting out. She took a moment to ponder the possibilities if she were to get it stuck. It was easier not to think about it until it became an actual problem. Her headlights illuminated the cavernous room. She stopped the car near the edge of a drop off. Pulling a large flashlight from the backseat, she shone the light down. Val turned the bike off, the only sound was the idling car. Bats fluttered near the roof, irritated by their interruption.