“What took you?”
“Finishing my shave.”
Bill squinted. “You don’t look shaved.”
“My razor’s old. Need a new one, if people really can’t tell the difference.”
I wondered how Lia doing. How was she holding up, locked in that room with only a dead man for company? How long could she hold onto her wits… I felt like I was losing my mind, just standing outside and trying to have a normal conversation with someone.
“You know, I remember renting the room to two women.”
“Yeah, and?”
“It’s two occupants to a room. No sleeping on the floor… not if you’re a third person.”
“I slept in the car,” I told Bill. “They let me into the room for a shower and a shave before they checked out. Is that allowed?”
“I suppose. But it wasn’t much of a shave.” He gave a hiccup of a laugh. “You’ve got an early five o’clock shadow.”
I could’ve punched him in the face. I could’ve wrung his neck. I could’ve shot him dead… I’d done it before.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll start shopping around for a new razor.”
I started to close the door. He stopped me and, madly, I thought of Columbo. ‘One more thing’ and then he showed you that he knew you were the murderer all along.
“There’s a third car in the lot.”
Against my every instinct, I stopped trying to squeeze the door shut. “What?”
“Well, there’s my car, then there’s the car you came in, and now there’s a third car. So you three, you and the women, are the only ones here, but now there’s someone else and they haven’t registered. Are they here to meet up with you?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe they just wanted to eat at the diner.”
“What about your girls? You think they’d know?”
“I’m not their social manager. All I know is that when they head out, I’d better be ready.”
“You want to get back to it?”
I shrugged. “If those two had given you a ride, would you want them to leave without you?”
“Heh, I guess not. I’m going to check the other rooms. Sometimes people break into one, try to sleep in it without paying. Like it costs that much!”
I didn’t say that it cost a whole hell of a lot when what you’ve got is nothing. “I’ll straighten the room up, save you some time on cleaning it.”
“Hell, we don’t clean these rooms until the girl comes on Monday. Til then, we just don’t rent them out.”
“What happens if you get more customers than you have clean rooms?”
He laughed. “It ain’t happened yet!”
I nodded with an acquiescing smile. “You’d better hurry. That guy could’ve had a dream already.”
I closed the door, leaving him figuring that one out.
I opened the bathroom door. Lia wasn’t in the bath. She sat on the toilet, butt on the closed lid, her feet so close to the still body that if it was a snake, it would’ve bitten her.
Looking at her, I was struck by her beauty, but in a way no woman ever had before. A dangerous way. Like you’d find a jellyfish beautiful. A fire. Her skin was back to its attractive bronze cast, her expression was neutral and showed off her lovely features rather than any turmoil at work. She had gone back to being gorgeous the same way she’d gone into being a sweet little fuck right after that troublesome man was dead… I didn’t know what to make of it.
For something to do—because surely I couldn’t just stand there with the body on the floor, not like she had—I went to the tap and turned it on. I splashed my face with water, then lathered up with the complimentary soap. It wouldn’t be the best shave I’d ever taken, but less stubble could only make me look more normal. I couldn’t be unshaven and look as haggard as I was feeling; someone would arrest me on suspicion of being a walking corpse.
“What’s his name?” I asked. I couldn’t have taken it if she asked who, so I added “The dead guy. Him on the floor. Who is he?”
“Justin Pryor.”
“Okay. Pryor. The clerk saw his car. He’s looking around for him.”
I took the switchblade from my pocket, popped it, and dragged the blade across my jaw. I needed to buy at least a safety razor, a little thing of shaving cream. A backpack to keep all the other essentials in. I was tired of owning only the clothes on my back and the dick in my pants.
It was the least of my worries, but I rammed myself into it regardless. It felt better to tongue the cut on the roof of my mouth than to touch the stump where my hand had been cut off.
“We can’t hide this, Lia. It’s murder if we try to hide it.”
“We’re already hiding it,” Lia pointed out, and I shaved some more. I didn’t know what to do, but my hands did. They moved the filthy blade down and cleaned it off in the running water like I’d been doing this a lot longer than I had.
“We need to hide it better.”
Lia nodded. “The window’s big enough for him. It opens up in back of the place, there’s nothing back there. If we pull the car around and then drop him there, we can get him into the trunk in less than a minute.”
God help me, as horrible as it felt to be a murderer, it felt good to be solving something. Like pus gushing out of a burst cyst. As disgusting as it is—how satisfying it manages to be. And no one can want to leave all that stuff in their body.
“We’ll need to get rid of his car too.”
Lia leaned down to the body and rifled through his pockets. Holy shit. “One of us will just have to drive it when we leave.”
“And if the clerk sees? He already knows we came in only one car.”
Lia pursed her lips. “I’ll check out. You get his car. Mommy gets our car. He won’t notice anything but me. I’ll be sure of it.” Then her mouth formed a funny sort of smile. “That’s good thinking, Roy. You’re good at this.”
“Yeah? And what about Mommy? What makes you think she’ll go along with this?”
“I’ll ask nicely,” Lia teased me, then leaned back against the toilet’s cistern. She tossed the keys up and down in her hand. “She hated him more than me. And an investigation might bounce back on her. They’ll say she put you up to it.”
I held up my hand. “Enough. Enough. I don’t give a shit what they’ll do if the cops find out, because the cops won’t find out. No one’s finding out. Go get your mom and bring her here. And try not to tell her what’s going on in public. We don’t need her making a scene.”
“She won’t make a scene,” Lia promised me. Then: “You look good with a clean shave.”
I rubbed at my cheek. I’d finished my shave without realizing it. I turned the tap off.
She got dressed. I caught a few fleeting looks through the bathroom door. I could’ve gotten a better look, but it seemed… blasphemous, in a way… when the body was there on the floor. I’d done the thing, but I wanted to be a good enough person to live in the guilt of it. Not to get a hard-on first thing.
But I supposed it was a little late for that.
Lia put her sandals on last, then flounced back to kiss me on the cheek. “I can see what Mommy sees in you. You’re cute, you’re smart, and you’re hung real good. I hope you ride with us a long time.”
“Get going,” I told her.
“I’ll be right back.”
She left. I looked at the body again. Physics problem, I told myself. The hard part’s over. He’s stopped being a person. There’s no more dealing with him—there’s just the physics of it.
Thankfully, he was a skinny boy. And he’d stopped bleeding. No heart to keep things moving.
I thought of men I knew who’d gone away for murder and men who’d gotten away with it. How’d the cops identify bodies? Fingerprints, obviously. Those would have to go. And dental records. I’d need to smash his teeth. Any old rock could handle that.
After that, the important thing was to stash him somewhere he could decay in peace. At least long enough for the trail to go cold. If some hiker found his bones in five years, the cops would barely even pretend to give a shit. They’d know there was no chance of building a case out of it.
So my goal now was buying me those five years. And his goal was to stink and bloat and draw flies.