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“We can’t get rid of it all,” Carmine whined, running her hands down her blotchy beige-toned face.
“We’ll do most of it. Wash away the evidence. We can do enough that no one will notice when they pass. The rain—” She looked up at the cloudy sky, a promise of rain those in Dosserport were used to in the summer months, that there was no guarantee of sun and clear skies all the time. “—will take care of the rest.”
“C’mon, we’re wastin’ time,” Billie grumbled. “Let’s just fucking move, I wanna get out of here.”
Moveis exactly what they did.
Kate—with her arsenal of moonshine and water fished out from the camping gear packed up in the trunk of the wagon—took care in pouring it all out, spreading the crimson pool into more of a red-tinted watery spill.
Carmine helped Tonya with the tarp. They tucked it under the deadweight of Henry’s limbs, wrapped it firm around his head, and under his broken neck.
Billie came up to join Kate. Huddled in her arms was a pile of beach towels. She handed some off to Kate, and together, they laid out the towels and soaked up as much as the fibers could take.
All didsomething…
All except Gigi, who shimmied herself into the passenger seat—the safest distance from the corpse under the tarp in the back—and lit herself a joint.
The girls wrapped up and, one by one, rushed back to the car still at an angle in the middle of the road.
Billie could only thinkthank fuckthey were so late to the harbor party, otherwise they would have definitely been busted by someone long before they could climb back into the wagon.
Kate didn’t bite at Gigi for taking her spot. She, along with Carmine and Tonya, just… squeezed their way into the back of the wagon—with a corpse right behind their seats, hidden under camping gear. Not like they had much else of a choice. There was nowhere else to put him. And nowhere else for them to sit.
Mist gathered around the gravelly, worn-down tires. The vapors split, disturbed, as Billie jumped into the driver’s seat.
Murder was sobering. Cleaning up the scene was the most sobering.
And yet, she couldn’t kick the moonshine buzz as she yanked the steering wheel and, slowly, turned the wagon to go back the way they came.
Only, instead of going into the heart of Southside, they took a turn-off road so narrow and gravelly and overgrown that, if one didn’t know it was there it would have gone unnoticed.
They took the private dirt road to the Southside’s Mr. Fix It.
Just as Billie slammed her car door shut, the door to the lone trailer kicked open. Its creak was loud, almost louder than the harmony of groans from the wagon as all the girls spilled out into the damp plot of land out in the middle of nowhere.
That’s what it felt like to Billie.
Out in the middle of nowhere. Moonlight didn’t reach the mud squelching around her shoes. The noise from town or even the trailer park didn’t penetrate the thickness of the shrubs and trees surrounding the spot.
Mr. Fix It liked it out here.
The rumors said he came out here without any deed or government right and he just cut down trees, moved his trailer, and parked his swamp boat nearby at some dock he built himself. Around Southside, it’s calledthe pit.
For Billie, the swamp was so damn close that a gator could just wander its fat ass in here and chomp off her leg.
Turned out, it was worse than that fleeting fear, what happened that night.
Killing Henry Maxwell, cleaning up the blood, sitting with a corpse in the car—all that was nothing compared to what they had to do by the swamp.
Cletus—the resident Mr. Fix It—roped them in tohelpinghim. “Gotta move fast,” he told them. “More hands, faster work.”
That work was as grisly as it should have been—but not what Billie had imagined she’d be physically doing herself. In a dream world, she would have dropped off the body, made payment, and sped the fuck outta there.
Instead, she enduredpunishmentfor what she did.
Kate and Billie were the only ones to step up.
Kate, fueled by her icy side she slipped into whenever shit hit the fan, part of her self-preservation.
