“You,” he said, breathing heavily. “You are the craziest fucking bitch I’ve ever met in my life.” He rolled his eyes. “Christ…”
She stared at him, tears beginning to cloud her eyes. Twelve years waiting for this moment. “You shouldn’t have done that to me. You shouldn’t have left me like that.”
She slapped the tape back on his mouth and pulled the Walmart bag from her back pocket. She slipped it over his head just as his eyes went wide. She wrapped the bag tight around his face, knotting a ball of plastic at the base of his chin to cut off any air. She grabbed his nose with the other hand and pinched.
He thrashed, and all his strength, all his power, was immediate and visceral beneath her. He bucked and twisted, screamed into the tape, the sound baking in his throat. His head whipped back and forth and she lost her grip on his nose, tried to recapture it, but he fought her hand, ducking and dodging his head. She pulled the bag down harder and could see the place where his nostrils sucked the plastic against those two small dark holes then released it. Sucked it back, released it. He heaved, and she almost fell off. He tried to scissor his arms and legs while the tape screeched and cracked. She grabbed his head with both hands to try to keep the bag in place, and just when she thought he would give up, he jerked his entire body to the left and sent her sprawling into the grass. The bag opened around his neck, and he could get air again. His breath heaving. She’d banged her left wrist against the ground when she fell off him and could feel the sprain creep up into her arm and fingers. She couldn’t believe it: He had managed to work a good deal of the tape up his arms. He’d stretched it away from his body, so his forearms now had room to work, the duct tape having rolled into sticky threads. Even more unbelievably, he’d managed to get a foot out of his boot, and now the foot was caught in the bottom of his jeans but close to being free. Because his jeans and underwear were down around his thighs, he didn’t have far to go before he’d be able to pull it out and stand. All that strength and something else—some kind of fury deep inside him, a fury he’d used to knock that Marysville quarterback’s brain against the inside of his skull, a fury he’d used to pin her face to the window of his truck only a few miles from here—made her understand how quickly he could get free.
With his grunts and the squeak of protesting tape behind her, she sprinted to the car. In the trunk, she slapped aside blue plastic bags, scrambling, but there was nothing useful. Her panic surged when she heard his voice behind her.
“Help! Hellllllp!”
He had managed to work the tape off with his tongue. She thought of the shovel in the woods but it was so far, and she’d have to leave him alone for so long.
Then she remembered the tire iron.
She pulled it from the compartment beneath the floor of the trunk. A perfect cross of sturdy metal. She jogged back to 56, who’d rolled onto his back and nearly had his right leg free. He bucked and thrashed his legs to pull it from the last stretch of pant leg.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” he screamed. “I’m going to fucking snap your neck you fucking whore…”
And as he carried on in that manner she hit him on the head with the tire iron. The blow was too light, though, and he just grunted in pain and then screamed louder. She knelt on the ground and hit him again. He moaned, a high-pitched peal like a pig led to slaughter. His struggling slowed. So she hit him again, and the Walmart bag tore and collected a mist of blood on the inside. She’d found the side of his skull, the ear and temple. She hammered at it three more times, huffing with each blow. Finally, she heard a crack and felt the hardness of the bone go soft with a sound like a plate dropped on the kitchen floor. Then 56 was still. Motionless, pants now around his ankles, the semen on his belly glowed in the starlight.
She sat back in the grass, gasping, trying to think about how this changed her plan.
She examined the tire iron. Because he’d still had the bag on his head, there was no blood on it that she could see. She took it to the car and put it back in the trunk. What did she have to worry about? Blood. She had to move him before he bled too much.
She positioned the heavy-duty rope diagonally across her chest like she’d seen her father do when he dragged game. She’d chosen a precise spot where a natural slope allowed gravity to make an otherwise backbreaking task easier. Still, the rope bit into her clavicle as she began hauling him toward the woods. Near the end of the clearing she saw the branch she’d leaned against the tree to mark her way. From there it was only about five minutes to the depths of the woods, though several times she thought she lost the path. She followed the soft sounds of the Cattawa River. All this planning, and it hadn’t occurred to her to bring a flashlight.
A gray tarp near a pile of dirt stretched over the earth, weighted down with six large rocks. Two cans of gasoline sat nearby, a twenty-dollar bill and a note (Just paying you back for the gas and food. Thnx) poked out from between them. Her plan, when she’d dug the hole four days ago on her day off, was that if anyone wandered by, they’d think her little setup had something to do with camping. That person would take the twenty and she’d know her site had been compromised. As it stood now, no one had stumbled upon the scene, and the hole that took her an hour to dig, until her back and arms throbbed and she’d had to take one of her dad’s old Vicodins to dispatch the pain, was still her secret. She dropped 56 by the tarp, tossed the rocks off, and pulled it back. The cavity in the ground, maybe four feet deep, was noticeably darker than the woods around it. She peered in and could see some water had collected at the bottom but just a puddle. It had been a dry summer. She dragged 56 to the edge, and when she went to push him in, she heard his breath. It came in a ragged hiss that whistled against the bag tucked over his face. She peeled back the slippery blue hood to peek. One eye was blacked out, the nose ruined, and the hissing sound was his breath going through a gap where she’d knocked out several teeth.
She lowered her shoulder into him, and shoved him over the edge. He landed with a wet thud and an oomph. Another slow moan. Then he began to say her name.
“Tina.” It sounded surprisingly coherent despite the G and the work of the tire iron. “Tina, stop this. Go get help.”
She could hear the place where his teeth were missing.
She did not feel like climbing down into the hole with the tire iron. The plan had gone mostly right so far. No point in deviating now.
“Please get help… Tina.”
As he called her name again, she pocketed the twenty and tossed the note on top of him. She unscrewed the first gas can.
When the cold fuel splashed against him and the air filled with that pungent gasoline scent, as distinct as coffee or barbecue only dangerous, he started crying. She hadn’t planned on him being alive for this. He was supposed to pass quietly with the bag over his head. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “This will only hurt for a second.”
He was crying and apologizing and begging and finally, she knew, lying. Pleading, “I’m gonna be a dad a dad a dad…” over and over. She’d been watching him on her days off for nearly a year. It seemed like his only haunts were bars and his trailer. His only companions Ostrowski and the gray-haired mutt that lived with him.