Break-ins happened. Ask Melanie Ledger.
The cleanup at Clay’s was going to take a bit more work.
Grade miscounted on the last step and stumbled for a second. He caught himself, but he dropped the corpse. The man’s head hit the ground with a sickening, meaty crack.
“Anything I can do to help?” Clay asked.
“Give me a minute,” Grade said.
He wiped his hands on his thighs, got hold of the corpse again, and hauled it down the hall to the garage. It wasn’t going to stay there for long, but it gave Grade a chance to grab the crowbar that was propped up against the wall in the corner. It was dusty and sticky with cobwebs under his fingers as he looked around for the hammer he eventually found on top of the freezer.
He carried them both inside and held them up.
“Any preference?” he asked.
Clay crossed his arms and leaned back against what was left of the couch. He cocked his head to the side.
“Leg-breaking, the crowbar is always a good choice. It gives you a nice swing, and it’s pretty intimidating,” he said. “If you’re going for joints, though, the hammer makes precision easier—”
“We’re pulling up the floor in the bedroom,” Grade said. That made Clay wince. Grade ignored it. “Crowbar it is. Come on.”
He shoved the tool at Clay and headed upstairs at a jog. After a second, Clay followed him.
“What happened to solutions of eighty-four percent hypochlorite and sixteen percent peroxide?”
“Hydroxide,” Clay corrected him. “And there’s no time for that. So if we can’t clean the evidence, we just get rid of it.”
“Then what?” Clay asked as they got to work. If they’d been trying to do a good job, it would have taken longer. Since they weren’t, the stack of splintered, broken floorboards built up quickly. “Bloody floorboards in the garage isn’t any less suspicious.”
Grade snorted. “Like Judge Parker reminded me, you can’t get away from your roots,” he said. They had to stop to move the bed, sheets already stripped and bleached. “We’re going to do what any self-respecting country boy does with household garbage. Burn it in a pile of old tires in the backyard.”
It took an hour and three texts from Ezra to strip the bedroom as the deputies carried out the warrants across Sweeny. They were lucky that there weren’t enough deputies, even with some drafted in from Dogleg, to hit every property simultaneously. Grade had his fingers crossed that Clay’s would be the last property on the list, but they weren’t that lucky.
The bonfire of wooden floorboards was stoked and burning when Harry texted Clay that the patrol cars had just turned onto the road.
“Shit,” Grade muttered. He tossed the bottle of kerosene to Clay. “Corpse is still in the garage. Stay here.”
He ran back into the house and through to the garage, nearly wiping out on the floor as a ripped-up rug skidded under his feet. It took—his brain clicked over remorselessly as he hefted the bundled-up corpse into a fireman’s carry on his shoulders—three minutes to get from where Harry had set up. That could work.
The corpse hung awkwardly over Grade’s shoulders as he staggered to the garage door and hit the opener with his elbow. The door took a moment to think about it and then started to rise smoothly.
Every cop show Grade had ever watched played out in his head as he stood there. In those, the cops were always on the other side, waiting smugly. Grade bounced his heel and tried to keep a grip on the slick plastic. In the end, the tick of lost time in his head was too much to ignore.
He dropped the corpse to the floor, pushed it out under the door, and then got down to roll out after it.
No deputies waiting for him.
Grade dragged the corpse over to the camper, yanked the back doors open, and hoisted the body up and over the faded nicotine-yellow carpet on the floor. He dropped the man’s head down just as he heard Clay’s voice, pitched to carry, as it filtered through the house.
“I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me,” he said. “I’ve inventoried the whiskey and the pharmaceuticals, so don’t try and help yourself.”
Grade scrambled over the body, the plastic slippery and the flesh rigor stiff under his trainers, and fell out the back doors. He landed hard on his hands and knees, scrambled up, and slammed the doors shut. The keys caught in his pocket as he dragged them out—Grade heard the fabric rip when he yanked on it—but he locked the doors just as a tall deputy walked around the side of the house.
She dropped her hand to the butt of her gun when she saw him. The twitchiness in her posture made Grade raise his hands smooth and slow.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, then didn’t wait for an answer. “Turn around and put your hands against the vehicle.”
Grade did as he was told. A shove between his shoulders pinned him against the doors of the camper, his cheek pressed against the glass of the window. He stared through a crack in the curtains he’d not noticed before at the trash-bag-covered foot of the corpse as an impersonal hand frisked him
