He stepped into his shorts and pulled them up, then went down the hall to the living room. The dogs were napping side by side on the couch.
“How you guys doing, huh?”
They lifted their heads.
“Outside? You wanna go outside?” He opened the door, then the screen. “Huh? You wanna go outside?”
They stared at him sleepily, then put their heads down again, uninterested.
“Okay, suit yourselves.” He closed the doors, then went to the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and drank it.
He thought of all the noises of opening up Steven Regent and stuffing his abdomen with weights.
The damp whisper of cutting him open.
Reznick turned on the faucet again.
The wet smacking sounds.
He filled his palms with water.
The farting sounds.
He bent down and splashed the water on his face and scrubbed his hands up and down a few times.
He closed his eyes and saw the body lying before him in the beam of the flashlight that Anna held. It had been opened up, its dark guts glistening, milky eyes staring, mouth yawning open.
Reznick put both wet hands on the edge of the counter and leaned forward, let his head dip low between his shoulders. He felt nauseated. Part of it was the booze. It had been awhile since he’d had any. Yeah, that must be part of it.
But part of it was also those images on the backs of his eyelids, the memory of what he’d done the night before.
His temples began to throb. An ache developed behind his eyes. He frowned as he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, then rubbed hard circles on his temples with his fingertips.
“Marc?” Kendra called. “Where’d you go?”
Suddenly, he did not want to go back to the bedroom. He’d had his fill for now. He felt far away from amorous. A shadow had fallen over him, a deep, dark shadow that had obliterated his desire.
He sighed and went down the hall to the bedroom.
“Time for you to go home, Kendra,” he said.
“Aw, c’mon, not already,” she said. Her whiny voice made her sound like a little girl, and it rubbed him the wrong way.
“No arguing. You need to get cleaned up and sober for when Mommy comes home. Eat some peanut butter, make sure your breath’s clean.”
“She might go dancing tonight. Can we get together then?”
“Maybe. But for now, you need to go home.”
She sighed as she got out of bed slowly. She came around the bed and pressed her body against his. “You sure.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her away. “Positive,” he said. “Get your clothes on.”
“But I thought we were – “
”Get your clothes on,” he shouted.
Kendra flinched and her smile shattered and she stumbled backward.
Reznick immediately regretted snapping at her. He stepped over to her and put his hands on her shoulders again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got a bad headache. I didn’t mean to bark at you like that. Get dressed and go home, and we can get together tonight while your mommy’s working. Okay?” He tipped forward and kissed her forehead.
Her smile slowly returned. “Okay,” she said. “I… I had fun today.”
“So did I. You’re a beautiful, incredible girl, Kendra.”
She smiled and bowed her head in embarrassment. “I’ll get dressed now,” she said in a whisper. “Hey,” she said as she dressed, “you wanna coupla my pain pills for your headache?”
Reznick nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take you up on that.”
Kendra carried Dexter home and Reznick followed her. He got a couple codeine pills from her, then went back to his own trailer. He drank them down with a glass of water, then went to the recliner and stretched out, turned on the TV.
He frowned the whole time. His lips were pressed together tightly. He couldn’t get those images and sounds out of his mind. All the blood. The smell of the blood. The reek of fecal matter. Those milky, staring eyes and that yawning mouth – as if it were trying to scream one last time but had no voice, no breath.
Reznick got up and paced for a while.
He went to the refrigerator, took out a cup of blueberry-flavored yogurt, and ate it. He tossed the cup into the garbage, washed the spoon, then paced for a while.
Outside, the wind continued to blow. Even as preoccupied as he was, he could hear the trees whooshing in the wind overhead outside.
Conan went to the screen and walked in lazy circles, then sat facing the door.
“Need to go outside, boy?” Reznick said. He opened the screen door and Conan shot out of the trailer.
He tried to leave the screen door open, but the wind slammed it around, so he closed it and listened for Conan’s scratching as he continued to pace.
Open eyes… open mouth… open abdomen… glistening black guts… wet, farting sounds…
Conan scratched at the screen door and yapped once.
Reznick let the dog in, then closed the screen door. He closed the door halfway, leaving it open to create a draft.
He went to the kitchen and found the bottle of vodka. He got a glass from the cupboard, some ice from the freezer, and poured some vodka over the crackling cubes. He put what was left of the vodka in the freezer. He took the glass to the living room and stretched out on the recliner again. He let the vodka stand on the lamp table for a while and chill.
He browsed the TV stations for something to watch and settled on an old movie with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. He watched the movie for awhile, tried to immerse himself in it.
Finally, he took the glass from the lamp table and took a sip. Then a gulp.
“Aaahh,” he sighed, looking at the glass with its beads of sweat dribbling down the sides. “It’s good to have you back.”
Twenty-Four
The day had been hell for Anna.
It had been next to impossible for her to think straight all day. She could not get her mind off the previous night. The events of the night haunted her, at times scorched the inside of her skull with their screams.
You’re a murderer, she thought again and again. Sometimes it was a nagging whisper, and sometimes it was a thunderous bellow that deafened her for a moment.
All day she had felt like someone with attention deficit disorder. But she did her best to hide it, and she was pretty sure, as she drove home, that she’d pulled it off.
At the wheel of her car, her hand relived the sensation of stabbing Steven Regent. Her ears heard the blade going in again and again.
She jerked her head back and forth, shook her thoughts up.
Anna stopped at the trailer park’s entrance to see if Kendra had gotten the mail. She had not, just as she’d promised. Anna got the mail – junk and bills – got back in the car, and drove to her trailer.
Inside, she found Kendra asleep on the couch with a game show running on TV. Anna decided not to wake her. The codeine pills made her very sleepy. It seemed the cut – which had been quite severe – had taken a lot out of her, as well.
Anna changed into shorts and a T-shirt, then got a beer from the fridge, sat down at the kitchen table, and lit a cigarette. She closed her eyes and went through it again. Her right elbow rested on the table, her hand up, the cigarette between her first two fingers. The cigarette trembled there in her shaking hand as it all happened again in Anna’s mind. The string of smoke that rose from the cigarette jittered in a zigzag pattern as her hand shook.
She realized how much she owed Marc Reznick. She would be in a huge mess without him – and he could be in a huge mess because of her. But throughout the day, it had begun to dawn on her that Reznick now had a terrific amount of power over her. She realized that, if he wanted to, he could destroy her with an anonymous tip to the police. So far as Anna knew, no one even suspected that Steven Regent was dead yet. But there was a bloody, gory mess in his trailer, and if he wanted to, Reznick could point the police straight to it. But why would he? He might be getting himself into some pretty deep shit, too. Unless he simply denied it. He’d covered his own ass pretty well all along. He was a detective, he knew how to do that. She only hoped he never decided to take advantage of his position over her.