"I can handle that. Kirk?"
I hesitated. I'd never in my life been so glad to see anybody as Madbird right now. But from this point on, anybody who helped me or even knew about Kirk was on felony turf.
"I've gotten you in too much trouble already," I said.
Madbird acted like he hadn't heard me. He strolled over to the remains of the fire and paced around its perimeter, here and there nudging a clump of wood with his boot toe, each time releasing another cloud of charred dust to crawl up into my nostrils-little reminders that I wasn't the guy who'd started this trouble.
When he came full circle, he looked straight at me and gave me that grin.
"You can't go leaving me half jacked off," he said. "That'd hurt my feelings."
I made the same walk around the fire, kicking at chunks and thinking. Some of the embers were still warm.
"All right, let's take another drive," I said. "Maybe I've got something to show you, but maybe things turn out like last night-it's not there. If you don't see it, you're out of this."
We took his van again We wouldn't be trespassing this time, but my truck was the kind of vehicle that people might remember or even recognize.
Disposing of a corpse wasn't an easy thing to do, I had started to realize. Burying, burning, submerging, every method like that had some weak point that was vulnerable to discovery. Trying to increase the safety net required significant time and preparation. I didn't have a D-8 Cat and several thousand acres of private land handy, and Gary Varna was breathing down my neck.
I'd done my best to cover my tracks last night, starting by transferring the beer cans and pistol to Kirk's Jeep, then driving it half a mile farther along the lakeshore and dumping it over a cliff where the water was twenty feet deep. It made a pretty good splash. Sooner or later it would be found, but time and damage would be on my side.
I'd jogged back, shoveled up all the bloody earth I could find and thrown it in the lake, and scattered loose dirt and brush to make the site look undisturbed. It wouldn't fool search dogs, but unless he'd told someone exactly where he was going, there'd be no reason to look there.
Then I'd turned to Kirk. Especially in my frantic rush, I couldn't come up with anything smart. The single thing I most wanted to avoid was leaving a scent trail to my place that dogs might be able to follow, so I decided to take him in another direction. I had no choice but to carry him in my truck bed, but I wrapped him up good in a nylon tarp, and figured I'd slosh gasoline around the bed when I got home, as if it had spilled. Any scent that came through would be faint, and I could say he'd hopped in for a lift at the ranch a while back. Before I got inside the truck, I changed into spare clothes and boots and stuffed the old ones in a duffel. Later, I scrubbed myself as clean as I could in the shower, and took the final precaution of fishing through my dirty clothes for jeans and a gray T-shirt like the ones I'd been wearing earlier. I smeared them with ashes from the fire, as substitutes for the ones that were soaked with Kirk's blood.
Those I'd stashed temporarily along with his body, a couple of miles up an abandoned logging road the next gulch over. The area was national forest, empty of habitation and generally deserted. But hunting season would start soon, with sharp-eyed men scanning the brush closely, and there were occasional hikers with dogs. If I left him where he was now, critters would scatter body parts and bones, making discovery likely.
Digging a grave deep enough for security would take several hours; and in this kind of stillness, the sound of metal hitting stone could carry for a mile or more. If someone heard it-say, a forest ranger or game warden-they'd come to find out who was excavating on national forest land. Trying to take him someplace else left all the same problems and added the risks of transportation.
When Madbird and I got to the spot, I was still coming up empty.
We parked the van and I led him into the brush to where I'd carried my burden a few hours earlier. I knelt beside Kirk's head, loosened the tarp's folds, and pulled them out of the way.
Madbird gazed down at the pale face and slashed neck, raggedly streaked with congealed blood. Then he knelt, too, and lightly pushed Kirk's eyelids closed with his fingertips.
"You better understand something, Hugh," he said. "You just walked into a different world. Ain't nothing ever going to be the same again."
Neil McMahon – Lone Creek
"How's it looking?" I said.
Madbird leaned back and eyed the cliff face critically. We were dangling ten feet down into a little coulee, roped to a tree, wearing the harnesses we used for bridge work. Kirk was wedged upright into a fissure in front of us, covered with a mixture of sticky foam insulation, dirt, and rocks several inches thick.
"You missed a spot over by his left ear," Madbird said. "The rest ain't bad."
I got another can of foam from the sack hanging off my belt and popped the seal. The gunk came out in a thin rope like toothpaste from a tube and quickly swelled to several times that size, an expansion that was powerful enough to bow window and doorjambs. I filled the divot and packed it with soil to match the surroundings.
He grunted OK. "I'll throw you some brush," he said, and hauled himself up his rope hand over hand.
This time he hadn't just helped me out. He'd flat saved my ass-sized up the situation, muttered that if the old downtown bars were still open we could just set Kirk on a stool and nobody would ever notice, then drove us to town for a quick supply run. When we got back we carried Kirk half a mile farther into the woods, lowered him over the cliff, and started foaming him in.
I took the handfuls of brush and duff that Madbird dropped down to me and created a tangled little deadfall in the narrow cleft above Kirk's head. Then Madbird trotted around to a vantage point and gave me directions while I dusted the foam once more with scree, trying to make it look like the natural result of years of rain and erosion. Within an hour it would harden like lightweight concrete, and hold its shape after the flesh decomposed. Big animals wouldn't have any perch for digging him out, and varmints or ravens weren't likely to chew their way through several inches of toxic polyurethane embedded with rocks. The foam dried to about the same color as the soil, so any that showed through would barely be noticeable. The rare human who might happen along would see only another debris-choked crevice in a cliff. An earthquake might shake him loose, but this wasn't earthquake country. I was willing to take my chances there.
When we got back to Madbird's van we spent a couple of minutes trying to scrub hardened foam off ourselves, without much luck. You couldn't walk across the street from the stuff without getting it all over you, and although we'd worn rubber gloves and long-sleeved shirts, it had managed to sneak inside them. Gasoline or WD-40 would cut most kinds of gunk pretty well, but it barely touched the top layer of this stuff. The rest came off only with your skin.
But that was only a nuisance. The really bad part had been facing Kirk from only a foot or two away while we'd walled him in. We'd kept him wrapped in the tarp to avoid getting scent on us, but I'd felt him as clearly as if I could see through it. Neither Madbird nor I had suggested turning him around. That would have been like burying somebody facedown in a coffin.
It was starting to come home to me that I had made a living human being dead-someone I'd known all my life. I'd pitied him more than I liked him, but in some strange way, that almost made it worse.
I screwed the top back onto the red plastic gas container and stowed it in the rear of the van.
Then, out of nowhere, I started crying. Blubbering like a little kid.
After a minute or so I was better. I blew some snot onto the ground and got my eyes clear. Madbird was leaning against the van with his arms folded.