Just Between Us

As she hurried inside, I found a large pair of scissors and a roll of duct tape on the workbench. Alison peered inside the car, bending down to look at the driver’s-side floor.

“Good, I don’t see any blood here, so we don’t have to worry about tracking it.” She stood up just as Julie returned with a box of black trash bags and a handful of small blue plastic grocery bags. “We’ll cover both of you,” Alison said to me, plucking a black bag from the box and cutting a scoop out of the bottom and on either side. “Here.” She tossed me the altered bag. “Pull this on over your head.”

We worked at a frantic pace, barely speaking, a tense silence punctuated by sounds of ripping plastic and duct tape. Julie helped me pull the bag on over my clothes while Alison made plastic sleeves that they then duct-taped to the shoulders of the bag and then around the wrists of my latex gloves. Plastic pants followed and then they taped smaller blue plastic grocery bags to my feet. Alison cut another large plastic bag and draped it over Viktor’s body.

“I feel like the Michelin man,” I said, crinkling as I moved. “How am I supposed to drive like this?”

“We don’t have an option,” Alison said, “so you just have to make it work.”

Heather returned in new jeans and a shirt, damp hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she’d put on shoes. “You need to cover your hair,” she said as I moved closer to the car. “I’ll get you one of Viktor’s hats.” She came back with a knit cap, which they pulled on my head because I couldn’t raise my arms high enough to do so without tearing the plastic suit.

“We’ll lead the way in my car,” Julie said. “That way, if we see any traffic or a police car—God forbid—we can distract them so you won’t get stopped.”

I felt squeamish as I stepped over Viktor’s extended leg and sat gingerly on the slim bit of driver’s seat not occupied by his body. I slid against the plastic covering it and grabbed the steering wheel to try to keep my balance, pushing back to maintain a grip on the seat and coming up hard against his body. I cried out involuntarily as Alison carefully bent Viktor’s leg, folding it up into the car, where it rested uncomfortably against mine. She closed the door and I struggled not to panic, breathing shallowly, trying to avoid sucking in the overpowering scent of blood. It was like a butcher shop. I hated the smell of raw meat, and this was meat that was starting to rot. Was this how an operating room smelled? Had Viktor been surrounded by this odor every day?

The keys were in the ignition. Blood had hit the embossed leather fob and it smeared against my glove as I turned the key and switched on the lights. The sound of the engine seemed too loud as I backed slowly out of the garage. Alison, Julie, and Heather followed me out and closed the garage door before getting into Julie’s car, and I let them lead the way slowly down the drive.

It was 2:30 A.M., the time of night when it’s utterly and completely dark, the heavy blackness penetrated only by the occasional security light on the houses we passed. In Sewickley Heights these were spaced few and far apart and well off the road. There weren’t streetlights out here like there were in the village, no sidewalks for late-night dog walkers. It was too early for the crazy runners who risked life and limb to run along these narrow, winding, hilly roads, and too late for the drinkers who’d already closed down the bars in town. The empty roads made it safer for us and yet I was terrified of the dark and the body pressing against me, only the lights from Julie’s car to let me know I wasn’t utterly alone.

I kept a few car lengths behind, careful not to let her car disappear over a hill and out of sight, but equally careful not to get too close. Julie was staying at the speed limit and I knew it was wise, but I still wished that she would just floor it and we’d get to where we were going as fast as possible. The knit hat was itchy and I felt claustrophobic, fighting a desperate need to get out of the car, away from that horrible stench of blood and decay, and tear all of the plastic off my body.

The brake lights suddenly went on ahead of me and I slammed on my brakes, too. I immediately reversed, jerking the car onto the side of the road and switching off the lights, straining to see what had stopped them. They didn’t move for a minute. If it were a cop, wouldn’t they have been pulled off to the side?

My palms were sweating and I instinctively rubbed them against my thighs, forgetting how I was dressed until I felt that awful sticky rub of plastic against plastic.

Some movement caught my eye, and then a raccoon scuttled into the glow of Julie’s headlights. “Everything’s A-okay, Viktor,” I said with a nervous laugh that fell flat in the deafening silence of the car. I swallowed down a wave of nausea, switched my lights back on, and cautiously resumed following Julie.

Several minutes later Julie braked abruptly again, before jerking her car to the side of the road. I was quick to follow suit, dousing the lights and the motor, and in the silence was suddenly aware of the loud hum of another engine before I saw the distant headlight glow and then a darker shadow as another vehicle passed by on the cross road about a hundred feet ahead. This time Julie waited longer to start driving again, clearly wanting to put distance between us and that other driver.

We followed a circuitous route for several more minutes, a blur of winding streets, before finally turning on to Fern Hollow. Tree-covered hills rose on either side of us, and we drove for only a few minutes more on the deserted two-lane road before Julie slowed and put on her turn signal to indicate that I should stop. I pulled Viktor’s car over to the side of the road, tires crunching against the pebbles and dirt. It sounded so loud—had anyone heard it? I peered out the windows and checked the rearview mirror as Julie pulled her own car over about twenty feet ahead. When I switched off the car, the headlights stayed on. As Alison and Julie hurried toward me, racing on tiptoe, I tried to carefully open the driver’s door without disrupting the body.

At that moment, we all heard the low rumble of an approaching engine. Julie stopped short, looking wildly around, while Heather headed back toward her car and Alison ran off the road and into the woods. I closed the car door quietly, fumbling for the light switch. The noise seemed to get louder for a moment and then it just stopped. No one moved for a long minute, all of us listening.

“Where is it?” I hissed as I quietly cracked open the door again, looking around for the source of the noise. “I don’t see anyone.”

“It must have turned up one of the other roads,” Julie said, opening the door the rest of the way, while I switched back on the lights and Alison stepped forward to catch Viktor’s foot, angling it so it hung out the door just as it had before. She then reached out a hand to help me out of the car, the sickening peel of the plastic too loud in the stillness.

I gulped the clean, fresh night air like a swimmer coming up from some deep, dank pond. Julie and Alison were lifting the plastic bags off Viktor’s body and folding them hastily into a trash bag they’d brought with them. I moved away from the car and began stripping off my plastic suit. “Be careful,” Alison hissed. “Don’t leave anything behind.”

“Should we leave the headlights on?” Julie whispered.

We debated it for a precious minute, trying to decide which way would make it look more like a carjacking. As we were arguing in whispers, the car suddenly answered the question itself, the lights switching off automatically.

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