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“If I sell the house, people will know that I’m broke,” Heath whined.
“Well, tough shit. That’s your problem.”
Hinton had reached the top of the stairs and turned to go down, and Heath, coming up from behind him, consumed with fear and anger, lifted one of his long legs and thrust it into Hinton’s back.
Hinton’s body arced down the stairway, like a Labrador retriever going into a lake, and Hinton dropped the cash envelopes and put out his hands to break his fall, but neither his hands nor his arms were nearly enough to defeat the law of gravity: his head hit one of the stair treads with the sound of a baseball bat hitting a cantaloupe.
He bounced twice and rolled and finally crumbled into a heap near the bottom. At the top, Heath, breathing hard, said, “Oh, good Lord.” He stood motionless for a moment, then hurried down, stepping carefully past Hinton’s unmoving body. “Bob, Bob, I’m so sorry, I tripped...”
But it was a body, now, a corpse, Heath thought; given the size of the dent in Hinton’s balding skull, and the blood pooling on the steps, it seemed unlikely that he could still be alive.
But he was.
He didn’t move, but he groaned, and Heath, transfixed, didn’t think it was some postmortem exhalation, it was a genuine groan; and then Hinton did it again, and one arm twitched.
Heath: “Oh, my God.”
He felt for the pocket where he always had his cell phone, and found, to his surprise, that he was wearing boxer shorts. Of course he was, he’d only gone downstairs to get a piece of toast. He turnedand ran back up the stairs, stepping over Hinton’s body. His cell phone was on the bathroom counter, where he’d left it after the shower.
As he picked up the cell phone—intending, he thought later, to call 9-1-1—he noticed the transparent plastic sack inside the bathroom waste basket. The sack was empty, having been emptied by the housekeeper that afternoon. He stood staring at the bag, said, “Huh,” then put the phone back in his pocket and pulled the bag out of the wastebasket and carried it back down the stairs.
He got below Hinton, who was now obviously breathing. Heath didn’t want to actually touch him, so he carefully pulled the bag over Hinton’s head and then tightened it around his throat.
And waited.
Three or four minutes passed, seeming like an eternity. Hinton’s breathing stopped and his body began to shake, trembling, dying. Heath gathered up the cash envelopes, ran back up the stairs, put them in the office safe, locked it, and pulled on chinos and a sweatshirt, socks, shoes. Got his wallet, keys, the gold pinky ring inherited from his father, which he always wore for good luck.
Back downstairs.
Thinking hard, all the time. How would he do this? Had to get rid of the body...
Hinton was now thoroughly dead. Heath went to the garage, climbed up a ladder to a loft, got a little-used sleeping bag, brought it back down, carried it to the stairway. After taking Hinton’s wallet and car keys, he spent a frantic, heart-thumping five minutes stuffing Hinton’s body into the bag.
That done, he dragged the body to the garage, and left it near the access door. Outside, he got in Hinton’s van, which Hinton hadparked in the driveway, and drove it to the garage access door. The back of the van was stacked full of clothing and other junk.
He spent three minutes taking it out, throwing it on the floor. He dragged the sleeping-bag-wrapped body to the van and hoisted it inside. He added a spade from the garage wall, in case that should be the disposal solution.
Bury it in the woods or a lonely piece of nonagricultural prairie. No, wait: he knew a place, where that idiot Morton had recruited him to launch his silly fuckin’ stripper canoe down below Hastings... Of course, he’d taken twenty-five thousand out of Morton for the Big Grin, for what that was worth.
Bury the body, maybe leave the van at the airport, catch a cab home. Throw all the crap from the van in a dumpster somewhere... or just throw it on a sidewalk in a less desirable part of town, from whence it would instantly disappear.
A lot to do and not much time to do it.
He had to be calm. None of this was his fault, this was on Dahl. Hinton. Entirely on Dahl. Hinton. And Hinton had been right about one thing: if Hinton disappeared the cops would have nothing on him.
Well: therewasDoreen.
He edged the van into the street and turned left.
13
Heath got to his office early the next morning. Doreen wasn’t in, not due for another hour. Heath began pulling up computer files, selectively deleting many of them, moving others to flash drives, which he would put in his car for later reference and possible editing.
Although he’d never actually had a job, Heath prided himself on membership in the executive class, and the night before, he’d executed. After recovering from theaccidenton the staircase, he’d realized that it would be more convenient for almost everybody if Hinton simply disappeared. Disappearing the body hadn’t been hard, one of the advantages of living in a largely rural state.
After loading Hinton’s body into the van, along with a gardening spade, he’d driven south along the Mississippi to a remote boat launch, dragged the body well away from the launch, and buried it in the muck. It was hard work, and he wasn’t accustomed to physicallabor, but he got it done. He was careful not to make the hole too grave-like: he carved out a square, dug down four feet deep, and folded Hinton’s body into it.
Adrenaline had helped. When Hinton’s hips were two feet below the surface, he threw the piled dirt back in the hole and tramped it down.
