“Yeah, well, I’ll be paying interest until I’m fifty.”
“Assuming we don’t get arrested first.” We both stared at the messy enchilada on the floor.
There was no way we were unrolling him—it had been hard enough to roll him up the first time—but he’d be far too unwieldy with his feet dangling out. Rummaging through the contents of Steven’s old workbench, I found a lone bungee cord in a bucket of rusted nails. The hook on one end was missing, which was probably the only reason he hadn’t taken it when he’d left. I wrapped the elastic around Harris’s ankles and tied it in a knot, leaving the single remaining hook wobbling off the end.
“I have to pick up the kids at my sister’s house,” I said, afraid to check the time on my phone.
Vero gestured to Harris. “What do we do with him?”
I couldn’t put him back in the van with my kids. But I couldn’t leave him lying in the middle of the garage where they might see him when they got home.
“We’ll put him in your car.”
“My car?” Vero’s eyes flew open wide, her ponytail swinging with her recoil. “Why my car?”
“Because you have a trunk. Everyone knows dead bodies go in the trunk. Don’t look at me like that. What do you want me to do? Strap him in Delia’s booster seat? His shoes are sticking out!”
Vero muttered a string of expletives in Spanish as she pulled her keys from her pocket. We snuck out the side door, where I waited in the rhododendron bushes, watching for faces in the neighbors’ windows as Vero crept to the street and backed her Honda tightly to the door of the garage. We turned off the porch lights and the lights inside the garage, and by the dim glow of the streetlamp at the foot of my driveway, together we heaved open the broken garage door and attempted to hoist Harris Mickler into her trunk.
“I think he’s gotten heavier,” Vero said after our third breathless try. My hands were raw and red with the effort. Damp flyaways had come loose from my mom-bun and were plastered by sweat to the side of my head. “How did you get him in the van by yourself?” she asked.
“I lured him with promises of sex,” I panted. Vero quirked an eyebrow, unconvinced. Clearly, amateur-killer-in-sweaty-yoga-pants was not my best look. I rolled my eyes and said through a huff, “He was under the influence of drugs, okay?”
Vero snorted.
She was right though. There had to be an easier way to do this.
“Grab Delia’s skateboard,” I said. More likely, it was the bourbon talking when I pointed to the hot pink plastic deck propped against the far wall.
Vero wheeled it alongside Harris. “Did you get this idea from one of your books?”
“Not exactly.” I was pretty sure it came from an episode of Sid the Science Kid. At this point, I didn’t care as long as it worked.
On the count of three, we hefted Harris onto the board and rolled him to the open trunk of Vero’s car. Using the bumper for leverage and Harris’s head as a counterweight, inch by inch, with a lot of cursing and grunting, we managed to stuff him inside. When it was done, I leaned against the rear quarter panel of the Honda, dripping sweat and feeling a strange sense of accomplishment.
Vero grabbed the small pink trowel from the workbench and tossed it on top of him.
“What’s that for?” I asked as she slammed the trunk closed.
“What else do we have to bury him with?” She shrugged and got in the car.
CHAPTER 11
According to our parents, the first question out of Georgia’s mouth the day I was born was, “When can we send her back?” Georgia had never asked for a baby sister, and in her defense, she’d only been four years old at the time. But this remained the defining question of our relationship until the day Georgia left home for the police academy. As kids, I had always been the bad guy—the one person in the house Georgia could point a finger at whenever anything went wrong. But once Georgia became a cop, it was as if she’d suddenly run out of fingers to point at me. The bad guys were everywhere else, and by comparison, I guess I wasn’t so bad.
Only it didn’t feel that way as I stood in the doorway of my big sister’s apartment, smelling like vodka and sweat and Harris Mickler’s saliva, fully aware that his body was probably slowly decomposing in the trunk of Vero’s car. Hopefully, Georgia would be so relieved to see me, she wouldn’t notice anything odd.
Zach was splayed on her shoulder when she answered the door. She wrangled my limp toddler into her arms, pausing as I leaned in to take him from her. She wrinkled her nose. “I thought you said you were working.”