I’d hoped for six feet—deep enough to keep the farm machinery from accidentally tilling up his corpse, but my back was already on fire, I had a cramp in my side, and I hadn’t even cleared the first foot. At this point, I’d settle for four.
Impatient, Vero grabbed the pink trowel and jumped into the field with me, scooping up the small mounds of dirt that cascaded over the sides of my shovel.
“Next time we do this—”
“There isn’t going to be a next time,” I panted, glaring at Vero sideways as I dug faster, anxious to be done with it and get home. “This was an accident. That’s all.”
“Maybe the world could do with more accidents,” she said under her breath. “If I had as much money as Patricia Mickler, I probably would have hired you, too.”
I paused, letting the shovel rest against the ground. I’d assumed Vero had so readily signed up for this because of the money. I hadn’t stopped to consider the money wasn’t worth the risk for either of us. That maybe she had her own reasons for digging herself into this hole with me. She threw me a sharp, urgent look and shoveled faster with her trowel. My own hands were already stiff and sweaty inside my gloves, and the skin was raw with searing, fresh blisters. I kept digging anyway.
“Who would you have gotten rid of?” I asked between scoops.
Vero only shrugged. “I’m just saying, there’s no shortage of assholes out there. And in this town, there’s no shortage of money either. I say we corner the market while it’s hot.”
I dumped a pile of dirt beside the hole, the edge already level with my knees. “Easy for you to say,” I said between labored breaths. “You have the small shovel.”
“Exactly why we need one of those.” She pointed her tiny pink trowel at the hulking outline of the front-end loader Zach had been so eager to climb only hours ago.
I held out the big shovel, swapping it for the pink trowel, hoping after fifteen minutes of heaving dirt she might feel differently about the likelihood of a “next time.” Or maybe because I was worried I might start feeling differently about that front-end loader if I had to shovel any more. I checked the time on my phone. An hour had already passed. At this rate, we wouldn’t be home until dawn.
“We don’t even know how to drive one,” I reasoned.
She jammed the shovel into the ground, her sneaker braced against the blade, grunting as she heaved out a scoop. “There’s nothing you can’t learn on YouTube,” she said between ragged breaths. “My cousin Ramón learned how to hot-wire a car. How hard could it be?”
Her cousin sounded like he should be the one out here digging the hole. “We are not adding grand larceny of farming equipment to our growing list of felonies.”
“Think about it.” She leaned against her shovel, her face coated in grime. “We could have had this entire hole dug in five minutes with one of those things. I learned about this in economics class. It’s the time value of money. If we’re going to be professionals, we need to start acting like professionals.”
“And professional contract killers bury bodies with front-end loaders?”
“I’m just saying, we should be working smart. Not hard.”
“Killing people for money is not smart!”
Vero clapped the dirt from her gloves and hauled herself out of the waist-deep hole. She traded me the shovel for the little pink trowel and pointed it at me. “We’ll see how you feel when you’ve got your fifty thousand dollars.”
She popped the trunk of her car. I climbed out of the hole and peered over her shoulder, sighing at the human-shaped lump wearing my table linens.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing the bungee cord around his ankles. “Let’s bury this pervert and get out of here.”
Together, we heaved Harris Mickler out of the trunk, balancing his weight against the lip before dumping him to the ground and unrolling him. Vero bundled the linens and stuffed them back in the trunk. I took Harris’s phone, car keys, and wallet from his pockets and passed them into her waiting hands.
“Shouldn’t we burn off his fingerprints and yank out his teeth or something?” she asked.
I threw her a sharp look, even though she was probably right. If anyone did find Harris Mickler’s remains, even without his wallet and phone, it wouldn’t be hard to identify him.
I grimaced as I took Harris under the arms. His hands were already cold, his fingers and neck slightly rigid, his arms and legs grossly limp. “Digit removal and dentistry are where I draw the line,” I said through a grunt as we dragged him to the edge of the hole.