Once the red rear lights disappeared down the block, Patrice opened the iPad and scanned the map quickly. “The maintenance building is on the far end,” he said, pointing toward the mausoleum.
The maintenance shed was a prefab beige metal building, two stories high and fifty feet long. As big as the mausoleum, but it had been tucked behind a line of trees so it disappeared in the night. Apollo was sure it was there only because of the bright yellow Caterpillar backhoe loader parked at the edge of the trees.
“I could run that backhoe,” Patrice offered.
Apollo kicked at one of the enormous tires. “That probably won’t make much noise at twelve-thirty at night.”
Patrice simply blinked at him.
“We need the old-fashioned tools,” Apollo said.
They walked the perimeter of the building. It had a rectangular shape, and on one of the longer sides sat three sets of garage doors. Apollo went along trying to lift each one, but all were locked. At the last garage door, Apollo lost his shit for about ten seconds and rattled at the door handle as if he could shake it open.
“There’s going to be an alarm system,” Patrice warned.
Apollo let go of the door handle and stared back at his friend. Patrice hadn’t been scolding him but was thinking out loud. Patrice moved along the side of the building, but he wasn’t bothering with the doors. Instead he scanned the upper corners of the building. He pointed to a corner where a gray box the size of a router had been affixed to the wall.
“Now let’s say they’ve modernized this place in the last few years and someone convinced them to go from a wired alarm system to a wireless alarm system.”
He flipped on the iPad and swiped through grid after grid of applications. He tapped an app and tapped twice more, then watched as a series of numbers appeared in a box toward the bottom of the screen.
“This is some late-nineties technology they’re using. I kind of feel bad for them. They probably paid some dude more than they should have for some shit that stopped being effective fifteen years ago. They heard ‘wireless alarm system’ and just nodded and signed the check. Our money says, ‘In God We Trust,’ but technology is catching up.”
He laughed at this quietly, a proud member of an upstart faith.
“Now what we’re going to do is pretty simple. I’m going to use this app to send some radio noise back at the central control system. It’ll be like I’m playing my radio a lot louder than the alarm system’s radio. When we push open this door, that radio signal will die out, but my radio will be playing so loud that the system won’t be able to tell that its radio has gone quiet.”
Patrice tapped once on his screen, and a small blue circle in the upper-right corner throbbed. He set the iPad face up on the ground. Then he threw his hip against the door, and after one pathetic squawk, the perimeter was breached. Sure enough, the night’s silence remained.
Had there actually been a working alarm system at all? Apollo couldn’t say. But he skirted his way around the little tablet on the ground anyway just to be sure he wouldn’t interrupt its wizardry. He followed Patrice inside. The iPad stayed outside standing guard.
PATRICE CARRIED THE flat blade shovel, the crowbar, and the ax. Apollo had taken only one tool from the maintenance building, a mattock, heavy as the shovel and ax combined. A four-foot wooden handle topped by a two-headed metal device. One end sharp like a pick, and the other was called an adze. The adze looked like an ax head but instead of being vertical, it was horizontal, like a weapon out of the Dark Ages, something for smashing through armor. It was made to dig through hard-packed dirt like the kind they were likely to find here in winter. Apollo had the iPad tucked under his free arm.
Apollo scanned the rows of gravesites as they moved. Brian Kagwa had a grave marker instead of a tombstone. Twelfth row, and nine grave markers in. There it was. He felt compressed, all out of breath, seeing the name. Brian.
Brian.
“Are we really going to do this?”
Apollo didn’t understand it had been him asking the question until Patrice responded. “We don’t have to, my man. We can get back in the whip right now.”
Apollo nodded absently. That’s what they should do. Sure. Right. He stared at the plot and practically heard his nerves playing like cello strings in the night. “You gotta give me a little help,” he whispered. He wasn’t sure what he was asking for.
Patrice dropped the tools and slipped the iPad free. After a few taps, he read from the screen. “I found instructions. Okay, remove the sod using a flat blade shovel.” He looked at Apollo. “I don’t know how to do some shit like that. Maybe I can find a video.”
“Military man,” Apollo said.
“I could defuse a roadside bomb if you had one,” he offered.
Apollo dropped the mattock and pulled the shovel from Patrice. He placed the thin edge of the shovel to the ground, then pressed down with his right foot until it sank into the dirt. After the head of the shovel went about two-thirds deep, he pulled the handle back, causing a crunching noise like a paper bag being crumpled. He slipped the shovel out, moved one step to the right, and did the same again. Within twenty minutes he’d pulled up the whole top layer of sod over the grave. It was easy to pick up the clumps and toss them aside—they looked like used tea bags in the dark. By the time he’d finished, his arms pulsed with fire. Too cold out to really sweat, but his face went clammy. His breathing had grown so loud, he sounded like a panting dog. When he finished, he found Patrice gawking.
“Where’d you learn to do that shit, city boy?” Patrice asked.
“Me and Emma used to watch those home improvement shows,” Apollo explained between gasps.
Patrice nodded. “Me and Dana watch those, too.”
Apollo tossed the shovel away. “Now hand me that thing.”
Patrice gave Apollo the mattock. Neither of them knew what it was called. It certainly had never been used on the home improvement shows, but Apollo intuited its method. He turned the adze end of the head so it faced the rectangle of dirt he’d uncovered, the soil so dark, it looked like a pool of black water. When Apollo stepped in, Patrice expected him to sink.
Apollo raised the mattock and brought it down hard into the earth.
“We can take turns,” Patrice offered.
Apollo nodded. “When I can’t lift my arms anymore, we’ll switch.”
“You need light?” Patrice asked. “I got this app. One of mine. I mean I wrote it myself. It’s called Daylight.”
“Maybe you could save it till we get deeper down,” Apollo said. He didn’t notice the pride in Patrice’s voice. He had his own work to do. Patrice nodded softly, embarrassed by how much he’d been fishing for praise.