The pain in the ass part came next, and I’ll spare you most of it. I had to get the keys for that gate out of his jacket pocket, then had to walk down through the cornfield to my car and bring it around and go through the gate routine myself and then back the Sunbird up to the rear steps.
Finally I dragged the kid across the ancient linoleum-he made a snail’s trail of blood slime-and down the steps, his head bumping and clunking down, and pretty soon I had him up and in the trunk.
An argument could be made for leaving him there on the dirty kitchen floor, but I felt I wanted his body in the trunk, in case later on I needed to make a point.
It got your attention, didn’t it?
Chapter Two
The sky was full of stars with a nearly full moon that gave the outdoors a nice ivory tinge. I was floating on my back in the Wheelhouse Motel pool, feeling pretty mellow for a guy who had just killed somebody. A guy who before long would probably be killing somebody else.
I could even see my Sunbird from here, parked at Unit 28 on the same wing of the motel where Monahan’s Buick still occupied Unit 36’s slot. The adjacent slot yawned empty. I figured the blond kid had checked out before he went over to take his farmhouse stakeout one last time; with the job set for dawn, he would have had no reason to go back to the motel.
And yet he had come back in a way, because right now he was in the trunk of that Sunbird. But who could argue that-one way or another (to quote Debbie Harry)-he hadn’t already checked out?
In my mellow, floating state, I wondered if I was getting over-confident, even cocky. I had checked into the same goddamn motel as Monahan…with his dead partner in my trunk. Of course, my other choices would have been to stay across the river in River Bluff at a Holiday Inn or some shit, or risk the sperm-infused sheets of the Eezer Inn (and I was way too squeamish for that).