The two men squared off. Randall hovered nearby, feeling the static charge in the air. Karl’s skin reddened and a vein began throbbing in his temple.
Randall tried his best calming voice. “Okay, listen, if we can just—”
“What’s he saying?”
“Nothing. I told you, he’s drunk. Now if you—”
“What did you do to my boy?”
Grayson began weeping again. “It wasn’t my fault.”
Karl launched himself at Grayson, tackling him down to the pool deck. He straddled the weeping caretaker and smashed his head against the pool coping. Randall reared back from the sound of bone hitting concrete.
“What did you do to my son?” Karl spit out the words on a string of saliva that dripped from his mouth. His face flared sunburn red and the tendons on his neck were taut like guitar strings. He pounded Grayson’s head against the edge of the pool again.
Randall saw blood drip into the clear water and dissipate into a deep purple cloud. He stepped forward, then halted when he heard new sounds of anguish and rage coming from deep in Karl’s throat.
“Stop.” Randall knew his words meant nothing to the grieving father.
“He was here. What did you do?”
Again, Grayson’s skull cracked against the hard surface.
Randall stood rooted in place, unsure of what to do with the wild animal in front of him. He didn’t want to risk having Karl turn his vicious anger on him and had no idea how to stop him.
Karl stood up, huffing out breath like a bull in the ring. He spun and retreated into the pool house. Randall went to Grayson and turned him over. His forehead had a deep dent in it and his eyes were open and glazed over. Blood leaked from his mouth and from behind his left eye.
Karl came back out to the yard. Randall looked up and saw the gun in Karl’s hand.
“You tell me what happened to my son, you bastard.”
For the second time, Randall found himself on Route 74 on his way into the San Jacinto Mountains. Finding the shovel had been easier this time since it was no longer buried under other unused junk in the garage. He wasn’t so sure he could find where they’d buried Mickey, though. The gun pointing at him from Karl’s hand in the passenger seat gave him sufficient motivation to try. One thing he was definitely not sure of was whether he would return to his beloved Tennis Club neighborhood alive.
The smell of fresh blood leaking from Grayson’s skull filled the car. Randall had had the Rover detailed when he got back to LA. Now Grayson knocked around the same dark space spreading blood that would be much harder to remove.
Karl hadn’t said anything since they got in the car. His mouth hung open as he breathed, and his eyes were far away. Randall didn’t trust the gun in his hand with that lost look on his face. His son was dead, and two strangers had covered it up. Where was a father to go from there?
Randall cursed his foolish decision not to go to the police. A few weeks’ embarrassment, a few awkward interactions with the neighbors, what would it have hurt? Now he was at risk of either being turned over to the cops looking guilty of nothing less than murder or being killed by a distraught and angry father.
Randall could hardly even blame the man.
“It’s been... hard,” said Karl.
Randall turned and Karl kept his eyes staring into the blank distance out the windshield.
He spoke, but not really to anyone. “Mickey had issues with drugs. A suicide attempt.” He cleared his throat, the words seeming to get stuck there. “Two, actually. I always knew... I figured, anyway, that I’d find him like this. Dead somewhere. All I... all I wanted was for him not to be alone at the end. To tell him that I love him.”
Karl fell silent again, his eyes never wavering from the dark road ahead.
“I think this is it,” Randall said.
Karl looked at the bleak landscape lit by the headlights. Randall knew he was thinking how his son didn’t deserve this as a final resting place. Nobody did.
He turned the Rover off the road and found the grooves his tires had left before. Around the bend and away from view of the road, he stopped. They sat in the car for a long time, the headlights illuminating a tunnel in the darkness and at the end of the tunnel — a small mound of earth.
“This is where my boy is?” Karl said.
Randall nodded.
“Get out.”
At gunpoint Randall walked to the mound that hid Mickey’s body. He held the shovel in one hand and stared at the ground, expecting a bullet in the back at any moment.
“He’s in there?” Karl asked.
Again, Randall nodded.
“Dig.”
It didn’t take long. The shallowness of the grave was like an insult. He uncovered an arm first and Karl let out a pained wail and turned away.
“Get him out. You get him out of that fucking dirt. I’m taking him home.”
Mickey’s flesh had gone from gray to dark. The stench was overpowering, and Randall had to stop several times to retch. Karl stood back with the gun in hand and watched.
Randall opened the back to the Rover and dragged Grayson out into the dirt to make room for Mickey. He had no choice but to bear-hug the corpse and lift it into the back.
The smell would never be out of his nose. The feeling would never leave his skin. The guilt had a physical sensation, a rank stench of death. He would never leave this moment, even if he somehow managed to live beyond the next few minutes.
“Am I supposed to put him in there?” Randall asked Karl, looking down at Grayson’s body as he gestured toward the shallow grave.
“You do what you want.”
Karl had wandered to the back of the Rover and stood looking at his son. Randall had placed him awkwardly in the back, a tangle of limbs and dirt-crusted skin.
Randall dragged Grayson by the ankles to the hole and pushed him in. He took up the shovel and threw a clump of dirt over the body. He glanced over his shoulder to where Karl stood in darkness, entranced by the sight of his boy coiled lifeless in the back of the car.
Taking the shovel in hand, Randall crept away from the hole. A light wind around them filled the air with a low static hum. Now and then a bird called out. They were close enough to the road that when a car did happen by, which wasn’t often, they would hear it as a rush of air rising and falling in pitch.
As he grew closer, a look of resolve crossed Karl’s stoic face. He was looking at the inevitable. A moment he had expected, though maybe not in this way. His son, lost to him. It would have happened one way or the other.
Randall saw his worst decision laid out before him. He’d further tortured a man who had suffered already with a son struggling with addiction. And Randall had thought only of himself when he’d chosen to hide the boy’s death from the world.
It hadn’t made the problem go away. It still led Karl to his door. But after Karl, who else would there be? The one man looking for Mickey was here. The one link to the houseguest.
Randall gripped the shovel. He could still make it all go away.
He’d already done the worst, hadn’t he? He’d made his choice for self-preservation.
He lifted the shovel and swung.
He crossed back over Belardo and into his neighborhood. He stood under a stinging-hot shower for a half hour. He rinsed the shovel off with a hose and stored it in the back of the garage behind several boxes of old books.
Randall poured himself a bourbon, no ice. His skin itched with the touch of three dead bodies. His head filled with the smell of fresh blood and two-week-old rotting flesh. His ears replayed the crack of bone as the shovel blade connected with Karl’s skull.
A single cricket needled his song into Randall’s brain.
It would be with him forever, the guilt. The memory. Stench, sound, touch of cold flesh.