“Oh, well, sure. No problem. We could do that on the way.”

We wrapped the body in the bedclothing; the plastic cover I’d put on the bed was dark green, and not only held in the mess, but made for a nice dark bundle that would look relatively inconspicuous, should we happen to be seen depositing it in the back of his station wagon. The wagon was parked beyond the bushes that separated my property from the road. I am on the outskirts of a town of less than one hundred population, so the road is lit, but not particularly well traveled, especially in winter, in the early predawn hours.

There are a lot of sand and gravel pits along the Wisconsin and Illinois border. The greatest number are near Woodstock, which is thirty or so miles from my cottage. The abandoned pits fill with water, and there was one of those, a large one, a mile and a half from me. In the summer the tree-encircled, water-filled pit is used by kids of various ages for skinny dipping. In the winter it isn’t used for much of anything.

Around a year ago August some teen-agers were swimming there and some kid with good lungs went tooling way down underwater to see what he could see. What he saw was a car with three bodies in it. The bodies were floating around inside, bloated, decomposing, full of bullet holes.

The authorities called it a gangland killing, which it probably was.

I didn’t have to mention any of this, of course. We both knew that we were close enough to Chicago to be able to dump a shot-up corpse about anywhere and have it called a gangland killing.

He was still talking, but I wasn’t listening. I had him drive, just to keep his hands busy, and interrupted him with instructions when necessary, which he followed cheerfully. We were on a gravel side road, now.

“See that little inroad, up there?” I said. “There between those two big trees?”

“I see it.”

“When you get there, back in, slowly.”