“You learned something from us old-timers,” Hank said appreciatively.
I nodded.
Hudson couldn’t take his eyes off Hank. “I’m a killer now too,” he said. It was his turn to have a soft, measured, shellshocked voice.
“Oh yeah? Who’d you kill?”
“Her.”
“Her?”
“That’s what I said—”
Hank backhanded him.
Hank has big, sharp rings on his fingers. He calls them his class rings, because they “educate others when they be needin’ it.”
Hank rubbed his hand. “No back talk, and it’s ‘yes sir’ here on out. Now who’d you say you killed?”
“The girl on the bed,” Hudson replied through his bloody lips. He pinched his face with effort as he grumbled the word “sir.”
I guffawed when I heard him say it.
Hudson shot me a look.
“You don’t say,” Hank retorted. He lifted up the bedsheet to take a long look.
Hudson shifted uneasily, as if a powerful stranger was checking out his girlfriend on a lonely street corner.
“I know dead, son,” Hank intoned. “And she ain’t it.” He felt her neck. “There’s a pulse. Strong too.” Hank slapped her lightly. “Wake up, pretty princess.”
Hudson turned gray. He fell back against the wall. “What is this?” he gasped. “What the hell is this?”
Hank examined her neck. “You bruised her, but you didn’t break the hyoidal bone. That’s what shows death by strangulation. Reckon you was too weak.” He felt the top of her blonde head. “Bump on her noggin too. That’s what knocked her out.”
Hank ran a finger down a crack on the mirror, just out of sight below the mattress. “For an old guy, you did a number on her.” His laugh was a series of wheezes.
Hudson took a faltering step toward her.
“Jeannie...”
“With the light brown hair,” Hank sang. He walked over to the minifridge and pocketed the salt shaker sitting on top. “This and some ammonia should wake our sleeping princess right up.” He turned to me. “Keep an eye on him. And keep him away from the girl. He’s done enough to her.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Don’t ’plex up, Josh. I’m coming right back.” Hank handed me the gun and stepped out of the room.
“We can still get out,” Hudson whispered. “You can’t trust him. He’s an ex-con, full of tricks.”
“I can trust you?”
“I made a mistake. Jeannie’s alive now. Can’t you see the ground’s shifted?”
I studied him. The man’s man took out his pipe.
“Our word against his, Josh. They’ll believe any story we agree to. He’s a nonbeing.”
“And Jeannie?”
“She’s alive. She doesn’t know anything except we got a little overzealous in the sack. There’s been no crime, you idiot. Can’t you see?” Hank puffed empty pipe air. “I guess I love her, Josh.”
My foot throbbed painfully, but not nearly as bad as when I was pulling my pants off. “You shot me,” I whispered. “That’s got to be a crime.”
“Right,” he said. “Right. I’ll fix everything, Josh.”
I looked at him, but I wasn’t seeing him anymore. I was seeing me, in that bed, and Sarah finding out.
And funny enough, I thought of my guys from the doc. My guys, and how they had made the cruel guards plead.
“I’m a legend in my field, Josh. Things will happen for you under my guidance. But we might have to shoot him.”
Guidance. I’d so needed it, someone to take an interest. Someone to help me get ahead.
“Don’t be buying his wolf ticket, Josh.”
Hank strode back in the room, holding a bottle of ammonia. He set it and the salt down on the fridge. “Smelling salts.”
Hudson looked sick.
Hank took the gun. “Unless you want to hold onto it.”
I considered it. “That’s okay.”
“Had to drain the weasel too,” he explained. “Happens every hour, these days. So what you wanna do, Josh?”
“I guess we call the police,” I said half-heartedly.
Hank took a deep breath.
“Josh,” Hudson pleaded. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Tenure, whatever you want, it’s yours. Please.” He was sniffling. Minutes ago, he’d called me a pussy.
“I don’t know what this ‘tender’ is he’s offering,” Hank said. “I found you naked. He was going to smoke your ass, boy. Who knows how this’ll all play out.” Hank put his hand on my shoulder. “Now, if you could do anything you wanted, anything, what would you do?”
Hudson would’ve killed me. He had wanted my Sarah. I was still shaking.
I realized someone had shown me the way.
They all had.
You dip into the dark place. You reach out and grab it.
“They should find him in women’s clothing,” I blurted.
There was a silence in the room.
“Done,” Hank said. “Some kind of kinky, left-wing sex-murder-suicide dilly. The reporters will love that.” He smirked. “Makes me wish I went to college myself.”
Hudson all but peed his pants.
I looked at Jeannie.
Hank nodded in her direction. “She’s the price of doing business.”
Hudson stepped forward. “You can’t touch her. I won’t let you.”
“I can do anything I want.”
“I, I won’t let you,” Hudson repeated weakly. This may have been his finest moment.
There was a pause, broken by Hank’s wheezed laughter. “I can’t keep it up no more. She’s dead. Was from the start. Cold as a rack of lamb.” He rubbed the back of his creased neck. “Just a little test, Josh. See if you’d turn on ol’ Hank.” He settled down, then turned to Hudson. “Go through her closet. Pick something pink.”
“And frilly,” I added.
Later, Hank and I drove his 1972 VW van to Hudson’s to retrieve my car. Hank had tended to my foot, but Sarah was going to have to clean it up. I’d have some explaining to do. Hank didn’t think I’d need to go to the hospital.
“I just hope I beat Sarah home,” I said.
“Sarah already came home.”
I looked at Hank. His eyes stared back, distorted and enlarged by his broken, prison-issue glasses.
“She was there when I knocked.”
I was clutching my seat.
Hank looked me over. “Look like you seen a ghost, boy.”
“You said Sarah...”
“Yeah, but she wouldn’t let me in. I don’t think that wife of yours trusts me.”
I exhaled, deeply relieved.
“Anyway,” Hank continued. “I know you always like seeing me when I turn up. So there I was, and here I am. You’re gonna have to have a talking to her, do something about her attitude.”
I was definitely going to have to do something.
The house is beautiful, a two-story Craftsman from 1912 with polished hardwood floors you can slide ten feet on in your socks. Sarah briefly tended her rose garden in the back, but the weeds have gained the upper hand since she moved in with her mother in Newport.
There’s a guest house in the back, with its own bathroom and even a little yard of its own.
That’s where Hank lives.
I couldn’t really explain to Sarah why I had allowed Hank to live in the back. Hank and I are like blood brothers now, he explained to me later. We’d both rescued each other, me from certain death, him from loneliness and obscurity. Maybe suicide. Now we got each other’s backs, he said.
Sarah thought it particularly bizarre how Hank would sit there cackling on his porch over that old copy of the Orange County Register. The one with the headline, Dress-Clad Prof and Coed in Murder Suicide.