It. We’d both noticed the switch.
“Where’s there a cliff?” I asked.
“Next to the main road—it’s so steep.”
“That’s a drop-off, not a cliff,” I pointed out. “They’ll find him as soon as the sun comes up.”
“You’re right.”
My mind had cued up a supercut, every disposing-of-a-body scene I’d ever watched. Noirs, reenactments, slick crime thrillers. “Isn’t there a dam?” I asked.
“A dam?”
“Someone mentioned it in Vicu?a. Where they dammed up the Elqui River.”
“Oh my God, you’re right.” She chewed on her lip. “We could—we could weigh it down. Like in Cambodia. Do you know where?”
I shook my head. “No idea. But I could look it up?”
“We’re not turning on our phones. Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t want anything definitively tying us here.”
We were trapped off the grid at the bottom of the world, on a different plane from our normal existence. The thought was another clanging bell: Shit, she doesn’t know I connected to the Wi-Fi to check my texts.
“The distillery.” Kristen sat up straighter. “They were digging. All the dirt will look…freshly disturbed, so no one will notice if we…”
I frowned. “You think we should bury him?”
“You just said it can’t be out in the open. There’s…there’s a reason people bury bodies.”
The room lurched again, a quick spin on an emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. “Okay,” I said, “but not at the distillery. They’ve seen us there, and they could dig it up in a second.” I locked my arms around my knees. “Somewhere far from here. We get in the car and drive out to the middle of nowhere. Between towns. In the pitch-black.”
“You’re right. That’s it.” She was quiet for a moment, then struggled to her feet.
I stared at Paolo, whose vacant eyes watched the ceiling. After a long moment, I stood too.
CHAPTER 7
How to transport the body: That was the first challenge, the first of many, cropping up faster and faster, multiplying like cancer cells.
We’d use the car, obviously. But how to keep his blood out of the trunk’s interior? Kristen first argued that we should steal a sheet, leave behind twenty bucks and a note apologizing for staining the linens with la sangre de la menstruación. But I pointed out that would only draw attention.
Then I had the idea of stuffing Paolo’s head into his emptied backpack so that the waterproof canvas would trap the blood inside. Better. We emptied the huge sack and positioned it on the floor near his crown, then held our breath as we each grabbed a shoulder. We counted down, then lifted his upper body and shimmied the backpack down over his damaged skull, Oh my God oh my God oh my God. We got it over his shoulders, the best we could do, and then we yanked it to the side and lowered it onto a clean patch of floor, lest it fall into the pool of sticky blood. I covered my mouth and fought down burps; Kristen let out a strange, throttled laugh. On the tile, Paolo now looked like a surrealist painting: Figure with a Backpack Head.
But the clock was still ticking, South America swiveling back toward the sunlight. I began sorting through Paolo’s things.
“What are you doing?” Kristen asked.
“Finding everything that makes him easily identifiable,” I said. “So we can burn it.” I felt surprisingly focused, uncannily alert. Kristen had come to my rescue when I’d been shattered in Cambodia, and now, I needed to do the same for her. Only one of us could fall apart at a time.
Kristen kept watching me, her hands clutched near her breast.
I sucked in a breath and reached into Paolo’s front pocket. I almost cried out—I could feel his hip beneath the fabric. Finding nothing, I moved onto the next pocket, then his back ones, the weight of his ass bearing down on me as I yanked out a wallet, then a cellphone—shit, a phone wasn’t good. I smashed it with a few hard stomps （Stop. Stop. Stop.） and added the shards to the burn pile, along with the passport and journal we’d shaken from his backpack. A journal—this set off a fountain of horror inside me. I couldn’t read the entries, but the handwriting, squared-off and small, made him real.
I noticed Kristen by her suitcase, methodically shunting clothes inside.
“What are you doing?”
She looked up, wide-eyed. “Packing.”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “Aren’t we getting out of here?”
Equally bewildered: “Not—not now.”
The argument was fierce and thrumming. She thought we should get out of town—throw Paolo in the trunk, pack our things, and leave a few hours early, burying the body at the loneliest stretch we could find along the way. But disappearing in the middle of the night when we’d requested a late checkout might prompt curiosity, perhaps a closer inspection of the room, even a bit of town gossip: ?Qué pasó con las dos gringas? We needed to arouse as little suspicion as possible.
“We’ll bury him tonight and then check out tomorrow morning,” I told her. “Like everything is normal. Think about it—it’s our best option.” She stared at me until I took a step toward her. “It’s okay, Kristen. We’re going to get out of this. You’re safe now. I’m…” I hesitated. It was like I was reading her lines. “I’m here.”
She swallowed. “How are we getting him into the car?”
In Cambodia, we’d simply dragged Sebastian, but that was out on an abandoned hill. I glanced again at the sheets. “We need to make some kind of sling.”
Kristen’s eyes lit up and she disappeared into the bathroom; I found her easing the shower curtain from its hooks. “And it’ll be another layer of protection for the trunk,” she said. I nodded, military-serious, and began unhooking the other side.
We pulled the door open and I dashed outside to do recon. I cocked my head, listening. The cold blackness boiled with insect sounds, screeching cicadas and rattling grasshoppers and katydids crooning together, a synchronous symphony. A breeze rippled the vines and trees, a fizzing, hissing sound coming from everywhere at once. Overhead, the stars looked on stoically. Far-off spotlights on our nightmarish tableau. No sign of other people—of witnesses—anywhere.
Two earsplitting beeps and the car’s trunk hinged open. “Quickly,” I whispered, pushing past Kristen in the doorframe. We’d spread the shower curtain along Paolo’s side and now we stepped onto its corners and dragged his body and backpack on top. We picked up the curtain’s edges, like two ladies folding linens, and counted to three.
Christ, it was heavy. Like we’d lifted a tarp filled with rocks. I felt it yanking away from me, back toward the earth, and thought wildly that this was weight I’d feel forever. The shower curtain tugged at our palms and we paused to make sure it wouldn’t rip at the bottom and spill pooled blood as Paolo rushed back to the floor. After a frozen moment, I murmured, “Let’s go.”
The load was bulky, awkward, swaying and knocking against our knees as we shuffled and whispered and stumbled outside. Oh God, was that Paolo’s head pushing against my shin, glued with blood to the inside of his backpack? My fingers cramped against the sweat-slick plastic, and the pain crept up my wrists, my forearms, my whole upper body tensing against the weight.