I waited for nausea to set in. Even opened the toilet seat. But nothing came up. Maybe the arousal had fortified me. Blown out whatever… spasms of wrongness would otherwise be littering my system. I was maybe in a little bit of shock, but otherwise I was clear and cool and working the problem. Like I was taking a test and I knew how to solve an equation, I just had to add everything up until I was at the answer.
Lia still wasn’t back. I reached into Pryor’s pockets. He had no phone—I guess he didn’t want to be tracked—but he did have a wallet. I took the money out of it. Three twenties, a ten, two fives, three ones. Probably the least someone had ever been paid to kill someone in the continental US.
I took out all the ID and credit cards and tossed them in the sink, on top of a dry towel. Then I took my lighter, emptied some of the fluid onto the towel, lit one end of it, and stepped back to let the whole thing burn.
Goodbye, Justin Pryor.
Another minute passed like an hour. I felt tired. I wanted to sit down. I didn’t. I feared I would pass out if I rested my weight on the bed. Coffee. Be sure to guzzle some coffee on the way out of this mess.
A thought hit me. What if Lucy and Lia had simply checked out, piled into the car, and driven off? But no, they couldn’t have done that. Their luggage was still here. If they left me with the body, I could just finger them to the cops. Hell, I could say that I stayed with the body while trusting them to go and inform the authorities.
Except for the burning.
I looked at the sink. The fire had burnt out. There was nothing but ashes and shriveled bits of plastic. I dumped the larger pieces in the toilet and flushed them. The rest I washed down the drain. I gave my hands a going over with soap. Then I went to check the luggage.
The suitcase on the bed: I lifted it up. Some of the bloodstain it had covered painted the Naugahyde; I scrubbed at it with the adjacent covers. Some of it came off. What was left on blended with the fraying brown leather.
I stripped the sheets, then the mattress pad. The blood had soaked through to the mattress, but it was joining several other stains. I wadded the sheets and pad up, scrubbed at the new stain as best I could, then went through the luggage. By shuffling things around, I was able to empty out the Naugahyde suitcase, fill it with the bedding, and put everything else into their other bags. The Naugahyde would have to go wherever we left the body. Even if it didn’t look it, I couldn’t have my girls carrying DNA evidence around.
My girls. It felt odd to think of them that way. But not wrong.
A key scurried its way into the lock. For a moment, I had a nightmare vision of Bill the Clerk as an avenging angel, coming in with a shotgun to make me pay for my crimes. Then it was open and Lucy burst in, Lia trailing after her to be sure the door was shut and locked.
“Oh, Roy! Thank God for you! Thank God for you, Roy!”
She hugged me. She kissed me. She pressed her body against me like a promise of more, a reward that was mine to have and only waiting to be delivered. Maybe not even that. Maybe I could have her on the bed right now, either of them, and even on the bed Pryor had died in.
But no. I had enough craziness in the air. If I let out anymore wildness, there was no way I’d be able to keep any in, not ever again.
“You’re onboard for this?” I asked her.
“We have to do what we have to do, Roy. Lia told me everything. You were so brave…”
Everything? I doubted that.
We went over the plan. It was real simple. Lucy would drive the car to the back of the building.
I’d toss Pryor out, follow myself, we’d get him into the trunk, then I’d go for Pryor’s car.
Lia would go and check out for us.
Lucy would pick her up.
I’d drive Pryor’s car out.
Wait for them a few miles down the road.
Then we’d drive together to somewhere we could leave the body.
Anywhere should do; no one came by here to notice something in the first place. But I wanted somewhere we wouldn’t have to worry about vultures circling and giving away the body.
Lia got out her phone and downloaded a map of the surrounding area; Google Earth. I looked around it for a few moments before settling on a place. A watering hole, twenty miles down the highway and a couple more miles off the road. No one had posted any pictures of themselves posing by the place, so it might as well not exist. Get comfortable, Pryor. You’ll be spending a long time there.
I went to the bathroom and set about lifting the corpse. I had to set it back down again; the window was still shut. Stupid, Vasey, stupid. Can’t slip up like that, not now. There’s forgetting to get milk at the store and then there’s getting away with murder.
I picked up the body again. Felt the cold skin, the cold flesh through clothes that had never been meant to be worn like this. Dead human felt like nothing at all. Maybe wax, only wax is supposed to be cold.
Kissing Lia had been a mistake. I was filled with the memory of her skin: warm, supple, the way another body is supposed to feel. And now, this. Nothing like it was supposed to be. Leaden and formless and all dead weight. My strength had a kind of hysteria to it. I got this weight… this undifferentiated madness of things that had once gone into making a person before being disassembled… up onto the windowsill and then out. Five feet down to the ground and thank fuck they weren’t staying on the second floor.
“Come on, come on,” Lucy said from outside, like she could lift this motherfucker better than I could if it were her in here.
I pulled myself up, through the open window, and tumbled without dignity headfirst to the ground. Lucy didn’t laugh. She had the trunk open and her hands on the body’s feet. I got his arms. Together, we lifted him up, got him into the trunk. We didn’t even go one-two-three. Just heaved him into the gaping abyss that was waiting for him and slammed the lid shut like that was the end of him forever. Out of sight, out of mind.
I brushed off the sand that had gotten on me in my fall. I couldn’t get it all. And I couldn’t get any of my memories of how that body had felt against my skin.
“Let’s get you to the jeep,” Lucy said.
I reached into my pocket, felt the keys Pryor had had on him. I was tired, but the cold of the metal infused me with a sort of purpose. No rest until I had this thing done. It was like a leech sapping my strength. I had to pull it off before anything else happened. Because if I let it keep going, I would be dead before I knew it.
I laid down in the convertible’s backseat. The minute it took to drive around the building to the jeep didn’t seem to take up any time at all. Maybe because I didn’t have to do anything for this part of it. Just let Lucy do her thing. It was over too soon.
There was no one around the jeep, only the desert on all sides and the motel seeming less than real with the heat of the day making the air hazy. But I knew there were people to see what I was doing, to question what had happened. The employees in the restaurant. The clerk in the motel. I cursed them for existing and being a danger to me—cursed them more for hiding, like assassins in the night, not even facing me while they threatened my life.