I smiled up at him. My own boldness-or was it pure desperation? — frightened me, not only because it felt dangerous but because it felt good. "In your freezer, Marty, naturally."
Martin clapped his hands together, tilted his head back and yipped into the darkness like a huge coyote. "I knew it! This first place I looked when I came up to your place two night ago? The freezer! The freezer I gave you! Damn, I just feel so good about myself!"
He howled and yipped again, and I taxed my mind for way-a plan-by which I could take my shovel to this lunatic homicide cop and bury him, too. Keyes was the problem though, as Marty had foreseen. I wondered whether I could fatally spear Keyes by throwing the pick, but it was a faulty ides because it was a stupid one. His eyes gleamed at me in the darkness.
"Why don't you say something, shithead?" I asked him.
He aimed an index finger at my face and released the thumb hammer.
"I can see a lot of brains in this one," I said to Marty. "Where do you get these guys?"
"Wald sends us his cream."
Keyes looked at me steadily.
"Keep digging," said Martin. "You're almost there."
A wisp of fog blew past him; I turned back to my hole and dug.
"Russell, it was a good idea to make it look like the Midnight Eye, but why go to all that trouble if you were going move the body?"
"You figure it," I said. "Earn your keep."
"Well, I've been trying to. What I figured was, you doctored up Amber's room to look like the Eye- Grace doctored it- before I got there on the third. Grace had bashed her earlier. It was easy enough to tell Alice was fresh. You had come back that night, when you saw me leaving, to check the work and realized it wasn't Amber at all-I suspect her message on the answering machine was one obvious indicator. So you figured, why leave the wrong woman there, done in by the Midnight Eye? It's too sloppy, too risky, and besides, you might have wanted to use the same trick on the right woman sometime. The best you could come up with was just to clean up the whole mess, which you did on the afternoon of the Fourth. You thought that I'd sit on the whole thing, especially with no body left. Another few days, you'd have buried Alice up here just like you're doing now, or dumped her in a trash can, or spilled her off a pier."
"What about that night-when I found you in Amber's bedroom with nothing on but your shorts?"
"You were making one last pass before Amber got home. Maybe figuring how to put on another coat of paint before she saw your Eye decor."
"You're good, Martin."
"You're damn right I'm good. Okay, friend-you're deep enough. Trade places with Alice and fill it back up. Double time, soldier."
I stood there, chest heaving, then climbed out. Both men were waiting for me when I righted myself on the lip of the grave. The sudden notion hit me that Keyes was going to shoot me through the heart and leave me with Alice, but it went away as quickly as it had come-nobody films a murder they're committing, do they?
Martin smiled and told me to put out both hands, palms up. My gloves were still on. Keyes moved to my side and his revolver barrel pressed again into my neck.
"Just a little sting, Monroe, as the doctors like to say. ^ Here-"
And with that, Marty's fist raked across my right palm, his knife leaving the glove leather split and a wash of blood oozing from the gash.
I yanked back my hand as the pain shot through it, but Keyes pulled hard on my shirt, my feet slipped, and I landed on my butt. Keyes, still behind me, took out a handful of my hair and sprinkled it into the open grave. I understood.
"For Dina," I said.
"For Dina," said Marty, folding up his pocketknife. "Give her something to remember you by."
I pulled off the cut right glove-the slice in my palm was long but not deep-and tossed it down to Alice. Plenty of blood for Dina to work with, if it ever came to that.
"Okay, Monroe," said Marty. "Put her in and pack it down hard. Chop-chop. Nighttime's a-wastin'."
Keyes taped the first few minutes of the burial. Alice Full sank one spadeful at a time into the sandy canyon earth. My palm tore and bled and burned. My balls throbbed; my stomach felt like it was trying to digest itself. My legs were weak and my arms ached as the middle finger of Alice's beckoning right hand finally vanished beneath the sand. Another half hour and I'd finished everything, right down to smoothing out the extra dirt and replacing-root balls and all-the three clumps of fuchsia gooseberry that Parish had ordered me to exhume before started digging. I replaced the boulders and rocks properly so their damp undersides were against the soil, where they be longed. I hauled some beaten dry grass and strew it around. Marty used a flashlight to make sure my shovel smoothed out the last of the footprints as I backed out. A coyote might have been able to tell we'd been there-a deer, maybe, or Black Death and his buddies, for sure-but few men I knew would ever guess.
I led the way back down the hills, the video light bouncing on the path ahead of me, then leaving me in darkness. The fog clung around us. The pick and shovel were balanced over my shoulder. My adrenaline was spent and a deep weariness spread inside me as I labored down toward my house. "Just for the record, Marty," I said, "if someone sees this video, who took it?"
"Grace."
"Why?"
"Because you two are sickos? How would I know? People make movies of girls getting their throats cut in coitus. Back down to your garage, Monroe."
I stashed the tools in a corner, then Parish motioned me over to my car. He pointed to the trunk. "Open it," he said.
"What now?"
"I spent an hour in your house tonight, looking for something that belongs to me. I think it's in your trunk. Open it, or I'll pry it open."
I fished out the keys with a raw, blistered hand and lifted the trunk door. Marty smiled, flipped through the contents of his evidence box, then lifted it out and set it on the floor.
"Amber's a fool," he said, that placid, heavy-jawed expression coming back to his face. "A beautiful, crazy fool. She always adored the men who treated her like shit. I tried, but I actually wasn't good enough at it. She must be nuts about you again. Go figure. But you're a fool, too, Monroe. You and Amber are a perfect pair. You can spend the rest of your lives trying to mess each other up. You deserve each other. My money's on Amber, though-she's got stamina and lots of cunning. You? All you've got are brief moments of inspiration."
"Why the change, Martin? A few nights ago you were down to your skivvies in her bedroom, ready to get it on with your memory."
Marty leaned back against my car and let his bloodshot blue eyes wander my face, then the evidence box, then the window against which the fog moved like a snake. "Amber came to me when she saw your lousy cover-up-the new nig, the bloodstain, the fresh paint. She needed me. And I was willing to put it all on the line for her. My heart went out, like it always did. Wish I'd learned earlier to control that thing. I showed her how you and Grace had tried to kill her. I offered to leave JoAnn and try to make it work again. Us, Amber and me. She listened. She agreed. Of course, Amber agrees to everything, then does whatever she wants, right So, in spite of all that, she ran off again. To you. To the son of a bitch who tried to kill her."
Martin's face was a momentary study in confusion and disbelief. But some inner strength-the sheer muscle of madness, I presumed-brought his confusion back under control and forced it to conform to something that could pass for reason.
"And somehow, when I realized she'd gone to you again, I saw myself from the outside. It was like a light went on. I saw myself standing there in my underwear, just like you saw me. I was ashamed. I was more than ashamed-I was nothing Then I was floating above it, and suddenly I was free. It all just snapped."
Snapped. How many times had Art Crump used that dire verb? The idea hit me then that Martin had already traced Amber to my father's cabin and done to her what he had meant to do to her the night of July 3.