“You keep these with you?”
“Always.”
It was a slick way to read the names on the mail inside the boxes, because no one would roust someone for hand-delivering such flyers.
I took the right section of boxes, she the left. Five minutes later, she said, “Step it up, Dek; we’re done.” She’d found Andrew Fill, on the top row.
We jammed flyers into the rest of the boxes and got back in her Prius. “Space twelve,” she said, starting the engine. We followed the road to the left, reading the numbers. There were no cars parked in the little enclave, no towels hanging on any lines. And there were no people.
“Ghost trailer park,” I said.
“Beach access, down the road and on the cheap. The place must come alive just on weekends.”
The trailer at number twelve was small, like all the others. Once bright white, it had faded to the same chalky gray as its corroded aluminum windows and sat slightly tilted, barely a foot above its slab. A disconnected telephone wire dangled limp from a pole twenty feet away. It did not look like a place someone with a half-million dollars would ever return to.
“I can’t imagine he’s there,” Jennifer said.
“I’ll deliver a pink flyer anyway.” I started up to knock on the pitted aluminum door.
“He ain’t home,” a voice, squeaky for a man’s, said behind us.
At least I supposed it was a man’s voice, because when I turned to see who had spoken, I saw someone who was barely five feet tall. His hair, such as it was, was pulled taut into a pattylike clump on the top of his head. He wore blue jeans and an oversized plaid work shirt. A plastic bag filled with crushed aluminum cans dangled from the handlebars of a boy’s black bicycle.
“We’ll try to reach him at work,” Jennifer said to the little man.
“What do you want Andrew for?” he asked.
“He called, said he might have seen this dog.” Jennifer walked the few feet to the street, holding out a pink flyer.
“You said he called, from here?” As the bike rider looked up at the disconnected phone wire, his voice registered disbelief. “When?”
“Some time ago,” I said. “We’ve come by before, but we never seem to find him at home. So we thought we’d leave flyers. Maybe one of his neighbors saw the dog.”
“He’s just here weekends. He’s got another place somewhere in Chicago.”
“Do you know where?” I asked, because it was expected.
The bicycle rider leaned down on the handlebars, studying the picture. “Andy seen this dog?”
“Some time ago. We’re hoping he might know who has him now.”
The bike rider looked up, into my lying eyes. “Andy ain’t been around, not for a month, maybe more, judging by the cans.”
“Cans?”
He tapped the bag hanging on the handlebars. “Cans. Andy’s always good for a dozen Mountain Dews every weekend. Been no empties for weeks.”
I pulled a fifty from my pocket and handed it to the rider.
“What’s this for?” the man asked.
“Help with the cans.”
The rider gave a small snort, took the bill, and pedaled, strangely and silently, away.
“That was a man, right?” I asked.
“I think so.”
We stood watching until he turned the corner.
“For a guy who can’t afford heat, you were generous,” Jennifer said.
“It might erase a memory of us being here.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to break in. I caught a smell when I was close to the door.”
“What kind of smell?”
“Bad.”
I walked back up to the trailer door. The latch gave with a whisper; the door swung out.
I stepped into a trailer that was swarming with flies and stinking of life gone away.
The place was as neat as Andrew Fill’s apartment. No food lay out in the galley kitchen; no dirty dishes were piled in the tiny stainless steel sink.
Yet there were flies, thousands of them, and the smell that was sticking onto the back of my throat. I looked past the kitchen.
It only took a few steps to get to him.
He was lying on his back. His face was red and raw, pocked long and deep by the swarms of flies. Waving my left hand to keep them from my face, I jabbed my right hand under him and found a wallet in his hip pocket. A quick flip opened it. His driver’s license was beneath a little plastic window in the worn black leather.
Hurrying past the tiny kitchen, I grabbed a neatly folded dish towel, wiped the door handle, and pushed it open. Down on the ground, I made a fast wipe at the outside door handle as well, rubbed my hands with the towel, more for my mind than my skin, and threw it underneath the trailer.
It might have been the horror on my face. It might have been the stench of too-long-dead flesh that followed me out of the trailer. Or it might have been the furious way I toweled my hands before damned near running for her Prius. Whatever it was, it was enough for Jennifer. She hurried to get in behind the steering wheel and started the car.
It wasn’t until we’d breezed five miles with all the car’s windows open that she chanced a look at me.
“Andrew Fill is gone,” I said.
CHAPTER 29.
“Why won’t that damned smell go away?”
Her voice came unnaturally high, and her hands were shaking jackhammer hard on the steering wheel. I told her to pull over, onto the narrow shoulder of Route 12. Neither of us had said a word for the first miles, speeding away from Fill’s trailer.
She shut off the motor and put her forehead against the wheel. “What the hell, Dek?” she said, her voice lower now.
“Andrew’s wallet.” It lay on the floor behind her. I hoped the stench came from the wallet, and not from me. I didn’t want the smell of Andrew Fill’s corpse to be on me.
“Why do you need his wallet?”
“See what’s inside.” My words somehow sounded ridiculous.
She raised her head to look at me. “I’ll pull into the next gas station so you can look. Then throw it away.”
“No gas stations. They’ve got security cameras.”
“We’ve got gas, right? Christ, I can’t even remember that.”
I looked at the display on the dash. “Three-quarters of a tank.”
“Enough to get us to California, in this car. Let’s run.” She giggled.
I touched the back of her neck. At first she stiffened, but then her skin warmed. She straightened back from the steering wheel and turned toward me.
I turned toward her, until our faces were but a couple of inches apart.
Our ghosts came then, hers and mine.
I laughed, sort of. She laughed, sort of. I got out, and we switched places, and I sped us west onto the expressway, away from the dunes and away from the heat of an instant, momentarily as giddy as fools.
I got off at the first exit on the Illinois Tollway and pulled into a parking lot in front of a church. She had a flashlight and tissues. We went through Andrew Fill’s wallet on the hood of her car, extracting its few contents carefully, as though each had been coated with anthrax. He had a Visa; a membership card to the East Bank Club, a high-end fitness center in Chicago; the Illinois driver’s license; two twenties and two singles; a State Farm Insurance card showing he drove a Volvo; and one scrap of paper with a phone number written on it. It was George Koros’s number. I ripped it up and scattered the pieces.
I put the cards and the driver’s license back in the wallet and tossed it into the bushes. The forty-two dollars got walked to the mailbox in the door of the church. Then I rubbed my hands furiously on the grass, thinking for an instant of the day I’d met Jennifer Gale, and the agent who’d palmed Elvis Derbil’s head. He’d been desperate to do what I was now doing. Except he was trying to rid his hands of coconut hair spray. I was trying to rub away death.
When there was nothing more to rub off but skin, I drove us back onto the Tollway.
“His car should have been at his trailer,” she said.