Singleton looked at Calb and suddenly began bawling again. His mother muttered something and went into the living room, and Singleton wiped his eyes on his sleeves and got a bag out and bagged Gene Calb's head. Then he got a paper towel and the 409, cleaned a smear of blood off the floor, put the paper towel in the bag, and called his mother, and together they dragged Calb into the hall and left him next to his wife.
Back in the kitchen. "Goddamn, something smells good," Margery said, turning toward the stove where the casserole was still cooking, smacking her lips.
MARGERY MADE HIM clean the floor again; he was doing that, and she was back in the living room, "keeping an eye out," she said, when the doorbell rang. He was on his hands and knees and heard the door open, and his mother say, "Come in," and then, "Where's Loren and Gene?" and he recognized the voice and his eyes got wide and he lurched to his feet and called, "Katina?"
And at that very second, he heard the door close and remembered giving Margery the.380, and he stepped to the doorway with the towel in his hand and saw Katina looking at him, a question on her face, and Margery standing behind her, her arm pointed at Katina's head, and he shouted, "No… "
Bang!
Katina went down. Her eyes rolled and she went down on her face and she never twitched, and Singleton screamed something at his mother and started toward her, and she leveled the.380 at him and screamed back, "Get the fuck away from me, get away… "
EVERYTHING LOCKED UP. Then Margery said, quietly, "It's gonna take two of us to finish this. She had to go, because there was no way for you to break it off that wouldn't be suspicious. Now, you want to help, or you want me to finish you off, too?"
The gun never wavered.
"GODDAMN, THAT SMELLS good," Margery said. It had taken a while, but Singleton wasn't going to hurt her. Not now-or not yet. He'd started thinking.
She went to the stove, opened the oven, took a couple of hotpad mitts off hooks beside the stove, and pulled the casserole out. She turned the top burner back on, found a pan in the bottom of the stove, and dropped in the porkchops. She found plates and bowls and silverware, dumped some macaroni and cheese from the casserole dish into the bowls, fried up the porkchops and slid them onto the dish.
"Damn, that's good." Margery said. They sat in the semidark kitchen, and talked about what to do next.
Chest hurt.
They finished eating, cleaned up the dishes and put them away, threw the cooking trash in the garbage, and began ransacking the house. Two suitcases, clothes, shoes, jewelry, Gloria Calb's purse, cosmetics, some photographs-they took two photographs out of their frames, and left the frames. Threw it all into the suitcases and carried the suitcases out to Calb's Suburban. As they went through the house, collecting things that the Calbs would take with them to Hell, they searched it, looking for money.
If Calb had left money in the house, Margery said, and the cops found it, that could queer everything. They found nothing except two safe deposit keys for a bank in Fargo. Margery took them, put them in her purse.
THEN THE BODIES.
Gene and Gloria Calb went out to the Suburban. He humped them out as fast as he could, but Calb was heavy, and he wound up dragging him. Still, the effort nearly killed him, and Margery was no help at all. Singleton's chest felt as though it were tearing apart, and he hadn't yet gotten to the hard part of the evening.
Katina, in dying, had leaked onto the carpet. They left the blood spot and carried her upstairs, got a chair from the bedroom, pushed open the access hatch to the insulation space under the roof, and pushed her body up through the hole. She was wearing a sweater, and Singleton carefully dragged the sweater across a rough spot in the framing around the hatch, so that a few strands of wool were pulled out.
Back downstairs.
Forgetting something, he thought. Hurting. He needed another pill, is what he needed. Christ, this might be too much…
What was he forgetting? He walked through the whole scene, and remembered the shell from the.380.
Found it in the kitchen, carried it outside, rolled it through Gene Calb's fingers, and made sure he got one good right thumbprint on the cartridge, as it would be if Gene were pressing a shell into a magazine.
Carried the cartridge back inside and tossed it on the floor.
His mother had one last idea. Gene had a home office…
They went through a Rolodex, and inside found a Kansas City phone number for Davis. He dialed the number and a woman answered, "Hello?"
"My name's Carl. We are asking Kansas City people for donations to the Missouri State Law Enforcement Association, which supports your local state, county, and municipal law enforcement officers-"
"We gave some," a woman's voice said.
"Our records don't show that," Singleton said. "We feel our law enforcement officers… "
He strung the conversation out another ten seconds, until an increasingly irate woman said, "Go away," and the phone slammed down. There'd be a record that just before the Calbs disappeared, they'd called Shawn Davis in Kansas City.
Good enough.
In the garage, he got a shovel, and they climbed into Calb's truck. He had three hours before he went on duty. Needed another pill, too.
As they backed out of the driveway he thought, Goddamn, those pork chops were good. Then he thought, Katina.
Margery said, "Watch out for the mailbox, you dumb shit."
THE REST OF the evening was straight out of a horror film. By the time Singleton got home, he hurt so badly he could barely breathe. He peeled off his coat, peeled off the fleece under it, and found a three-inch bloodstain on his shirt. He took off the shirt, and his bloody undershirt, touched the bullet wound, and flinched. The scab over the hole had cracked open, and when he touched it, the pain flared through his rib cage, and ran around almost to his spine. At this rate, his arm would soon be useless.
He began sobbing as he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Katina. What about Katina? Was she in heaven? Was she looking down at him, knowing what he'd done?
He braced himself on the sink with both hands, and tipped his head down, and tried to cry, something more than the gasping sobs… nothing came out. After a moment, he pulled himself back together and began looking at the wound again. Something had to be done.
He carefully manipulated the bruised skin with his fingers, squeezing it, like a pimple, fighting the pain. The skin and fat wasn't particularly thick at the entry point, and he thought-could it be his imagination?-that he felt a lump. The lump didn't move, though.
Hurt. But he couldn't help himself. He went to the dresser and dug out a sewing kit, took out a needle, ran hot water on it for a moment, and then, using the eye end, probed the bullet hole. The probe hurt, but not as much as squeezing the wound. Holding his breath, he moved the needle around, then down a bit, maneuvered, felt as though he were pushing muscle aside-and hit something hard.
Didn't feel like bone. He moved the needle carefully now, judging the characteristics of the lump. Found the edges. "That's it," he muttered to himself. He found what he believed to be the center of the slug, and pushed on it. A little pain, but the lump didn't move. He found the edge of it, explored beside it. Brighter blood was coming out now, apparently from freshly pierced capillaries, and it made the exploration more difficult, the lump more slippery. But he found the side of it, and pushed with the end of the needle. It didn't move. He explored some more; he was sweating now, from the pain, but the pain was still bearable.
After a minute, he pulled the needle out and looked at it. The bullet, he thought, was stuck in a rib-hadn't gone through, but had gotten into it. Every time he breathed, or flexed, the motion was transmitted through his rib cage, and that was where the spasms of pain came from. He thought about it for a moment, then pulled on a sweatshirt and went out to the garage.