Rage Against the Dying

Thirteen





What was it made me take a chance like that? Questioning him before he got a safety net in the criminal justice system and Miranda rights, that logic dissipated in the smell of warming blood. Logic. That’s right, I was trying to find out where he’d put the bodies. Or was it also, just a little, wanting to reassure myself that I was still physically strong enough to take down a guy like this without help?

Plenty of time to think about all that later. For now I crawled to the back of the van where I could avoid the blood still running through the grooves in the floor and allow myself to recover from a mild shock, concentrating on bringing my breathing rate down so my heart would follow suit. Trusting there was no one outside the confines of the van to hear me, I screamed as loudly as I could, which settled me some. Then it was time to face the music. I hate music.

First taking off my blood-soaked garden gloves and hooking them over the top of my cargo pants, I unsnapped my side pocket and pulled out my cell phone. It was important to appear cool and in control of the situation, like I was still a professional. I cleared my throat and practiced a couple times, “Hi, Max? This is Brigid Quinn. Hi, Max? This is Brigid Quinn,” until I could say it without choking. Max was programmed in, and my thumb shook over the Call button for a moment, thinking of how to spin this.

Then I thought, maybe not call Max first, maybe call Carlo instead. Explain everything to Carlo right off the bat before anyone else got to him and gave him the wrong notion of what had happened here, of what I had done in self-defense. I paused further, immobilized by the thought of Carlo coming down to the wash and seeing me awash in blood.

No, that wouldn’t work. Instead, I thought, I could sneak home, get cleaned up, and then, without the blood, explain rationally and calmly what had happened in self-defense.

I paused yet again.

In that pause, while I sat on the floor of the van gazing at the filthy dead thing, I remembered the moment when Paul, of the cello and truffle oil, looked at a crime scene photo and told me he couldn’t bear to have me in his world.

I’m sure there are other people who have experienced The Moment themselves. The kind where you’ve been one sort of person up to this point in your life. Then you’re in a doctor’s office, or at home, or at work, and someone, someone you might have always trusted, walks into the room and makes what is likely an offhand remark they’ll never remember, but the comment rocks you at your deepest, unhinging whatever you had been. You think you’re so tough, never realizing how fragile you are until you break. It happens that easily, that quickly. Paul was one of the moments. This was another, and beyond that, nothing can explain or justify what I did.

With an unbearable ache in my gut I thought about losing Carlo, and thought I would not, could not, survive the loss of the one happy thing in my entire existence. I’d waited too long for him and I would not drive him away the way I’d driven away every other civilian in my past. If I lost my husband I would not survive, and I would not take that chance. It would be so much simpler not to tell Carlo or anyone else about this.

How about I just say I panicked? And I went a little nuts. I tore my eyes away from the body, closed the phone that made the same soft click as a permanently closing door, and put it back in my pocket. And I put into play what was arguably the stupidest mistake of my life.

I considered my options, came up with three, decided. Made a plan.

Phase one: I opened the doors of the van and peered out. After the murky interior the light bouncing off the sand blasted my eyes. Then the wash came back into focus. I hopped out, unkinked my back, and got the liter bottle of water out of my backpack. I took off my gloves and dropped them in the sand. I washed some of the blood spurt off my face, then poured water over my blouse to spread the blood evenly through it, so it looked like darker denim. Rather than doing it in the sand I did this over a bit of scrub bush under the shelter of the bridge to hide the trace evidence in case they did a careful scene processing. Picking up my hat from where it had dropped in the struggle, I gathered up my bloodied hair into it. It didn’t take a mirror to tell me that anyone seeing me now, at least from a distance, would merely see a bedraggled woman, wilted from the heat.

A car drove over the bridge heading west but didn’t slow.

Phase two: I put my gloves back on, climbed in through the back of the van expecting to have to search the body for the keys, but I was in luck. He had left the keys in the ignition to make his getaway faster. I checked above the visors and in the glove compartment for a wallet, insurance card, vehicle registration, anything that might identify him and raise questions. All I found was an eight-by-ten manila envelope slid between the driver’s seat and the transmission console, which I tossed on the ground outside the van so I wouldn’t risk getting any blood on it.

Going back into the rear of the van, I opened the latch of a small cupboard attached to the wall. Among the contents was a pink Barbie Doll lunch box which I tried not to think about as I nosed around inside to find a box cutter. That would do nicely. I flicked up the blade of the box cutter, dabbed it in the man’s blood, made a couple experimental cuts in his wrists, and tossed it near the body to make it look like he sliced his own artery.

I nearly missed my walking stick, lying in one of the grooves, the raw wood stained now with blood that would never come clean.

Knowing every second was a chance taken, I looked around the interior as best I could trying to spot any other clues that I’d been there. It seemed clean enough.

Phase three: I got into the driver’s seat and peered through the front windshield to see if anyone had been watching me. Finding the coast clear, I turned on the engine and turned the van onto a dirt road that ran along the top edge of the wash. Luckily the wash and the road veered hard left, and I traveled around the curve until I felt the van would be well out of sight from the bridge where I was known to do my rock hounding. Also luckily, here the river had caused a higher drop from the edge where the water had rushed around the bend in times past, carving out the sand at the curve.

I carefully maneuvered the van closer, closer to the edge of the wash where there was an opening between the mesquite trees that clung stubbornly to the earth despite the erosion of the sand beneath them. When I felt the tires begin to sag dangerously on the driver’s side, leaving the vehicle in drive, I pulled up the emergency brake, crawled over the console and out the passenger side. It would have been more convenient if I were on the left bank of the river and could punch the gas with my walking stick. Instead, I released the brake, pushed on the open passenger door, and prayed for the strength I needed as well as maximum rollover so the drop and tumble would justify the condition of the corpse.

The technique worked. The van fell the eight feet or so into the riverbed, twisting as it dropped so that by the time it hit the softest sand it was lying on its roof, the engine still humming. Holding my breath, practically holding my heartbeat, I stopped long enough to listen if any observers had noticed the accident and were screaming and running toward the wash. There was no sound except one delayed thump like a sack of cement mix falling in the back of the van. The scumbag’s body, I reasoned, which must have caught on something before making the drop.

It had taken less than fifteen minutes to reach the point of no return from my decision.

Ideally it would be at least a week before the van was discovered, decomposition and insect activity obliterating the slashed artery. If not, this could be judged a suicide of a derelict John Doe. They wouldn’t look closely enough to see some of the cuts were postmortem; he’d be stored in the morgue fridge and no one would ever ask for him.

I went over the scene carefully in my stocking feet, leaving the tracks that showed my presence in the wash but dragging the backpack behind me to obliterate his footprints near the bridge. That brought me back to where the van had originally been parked, and I saw the manila envelope on the ground. Staying to look inside, removing it from the scene, both were risky. I picked it up and put it in my backpack.

When I hefted the backpack over my shoulder, I noticed it was lighter than usual. I had been in the wash about ten minutes before the perp showed up and had only gathered a half dozen or so rocks. Questions would be asked if I returned home after such a long time with so little. I picked up the rose quartz and a few others.

Phase four: rather than taking the main road home, I trudged up out of the wash about a hundred yards past the bridge and crossed Lago del Oro Parkway. Morning rush hour was past, so the dozen cars it comprised and any hope of their providing rescue was long gone. If some other woman had been down there, she would be lying in the back of the van right now, broken. Because it had been me, the man was broken instead. That comforted me.

Other women. Unfortunately, I had accidentally silenced the a*shole before I could find out about those other women. But more important, there wouldn’t be any others, ever again.

Listening to my ragged breathing and trying for a time to cleanse my mind of death, I looked again at the nearby mountains about three miles to the east. They had that whole purple-mountains’-majesties thing going for them. That thing I thought I was going to defend in my more naive days as an agent.

I made my way across the arroyos separating Lago del Oro Parkway from the edge of my housing development. Only a quarter mile as the crow flies, but it was some rough going, sliding down the gravel on one side of a narrow gulley and having my back spasm as I dug with my stick into the other side for the climb back out. There were about six of these, each one higher up than the last so that at the very top you’re looking back into a small valley that the river had carved over millennia.

Other than that there was nothing, nothing but desert scrub highlighted by occasional orange-red blooms blasting from the top of a barrel cactus and the track of horseshoes, but my nervous system couldn’t seem to get out of hyperalert mode. Peering through scraggly tree branches and behind low hills, I kept my stick ready and stayed on the balls of my feet. Every sound, from a motorcycle roaring on the road that ran parallel to my route to the rustle of a rabbit in the brush made the nerve on the side of my neck spark.

I could have disabled him in the wash and then called for backup. That’s what I should have done.

The 10 percent humidity and dehydration began to affect me, making me a little woozy. My blouse was already dry, stiffened a bit by the blood saturating it. I craved water but wouldn’t open my lips to drink, aware that the dead guy’s blood cells, a few of which had probably collected in the corners of my mouth, were likely infected with something.

Despite the wooziness, when I came to the last arroyo before the house, I buried my bloody walking stick in the softer sand on the side toward the top, where it would not likely be washed away in the next hard rain.

When I finished, and started once more to pull the backpack over my shoulder, I remembered the envelope. I was mildly curious about its contents, but needed to get into the house and cleaned up without Carlo seeing me. Phase five: Carlo. I foolishly thought that this would be the greatest challenge, not to bring a scumbag to justice, but to forever hide from my husband and the world the ghastly thing I had just done. Killing the guy, that was the easy part.