5. Eli
FIVE
ELI
Fuck
I can’t stop thinking about how small she looked. Barefoot on the boardwalk, drowning in my jacket, her arms wrapped around herself—my little savage in pink.
Shaking off the image, I scrub my hands over my face, cursing whatever Mercury Retrograde shit caused tonight’s fuck-up.
Brock’s in the trunk of the SUV, wrapped in the tarp we always bring and never expect to use. The guys put on painters’ overalls and hauled him up through the dunes while I was at the waterline with the woman.
The body is handled—for now.
I survey the sand under the jetty. It looks like a slaughterhouse floor complete with organs and all sorts of offcuts.
Milo sits on a rock, folding the suicide note into an origami chatterbox. Holden circles the perimeter, checking sightlines, his cop brain already running scenarios. Micah crouches near the water, rinsing blood off his forearm. Knox is on the girl.
Seriously. What a fucking cock-up.
“So,” Milo says, without looking up. “Tonight happened.”
“Yeah.” I keep my face neutral. Inside, everything that holds me together is one wrong breath from giving way.
It’s not that I feel bad for Brock. He earned the rope six times over. It’s the woman I feel sorry for—the way her eyes changed when she realized what he was doing, right before we hauled him up by his fucking neck.
I don’t lose sleep over the assholes we kill. I lose sleep over the survivors. Over the ones we don’t reach in time.
We should have killed him last week. She would have been spared.
Holden’s the first to break the silence. “If we’re lucky, the tide will clear most of the mess before sunrise.” He kneels by the blood, running his finger through it, then wipes the smear on his pant leg.
Grimacing, I weigh our options.
We’re gonna need to call in favors.
Shit.
“We may need Odin,” I say, already knowing how they’ll protest.
The boss’s name lands like a stone in still water. Everyone stops.
Milo cocks an eyebrow. “You want to call Odin and tell him we had a clean op that went sideways because a random girl in a party dress stole Knox’s knife and turned our target into a casserole?”
“Not unless we have to. But protocol says suicide, and this—” I gesture at the mess around us. “—is a freaking crime scene.”
“We need a woodchipper,” Holden says. “Feed him through, dump the slurry offshore. Fish food.”
“We’re not wood-chippering anyone,” I grunt, wishing I could slap them all over the head.
“Why not? It’s efficient.”
“We don’t have a woodchipper, Holden.”
Milo perks up. “Wait, I know a guy!”
I look at him. “You always know a guy.”
He presses a hand to his chest. “What can I say? People are drawn to me. I’m the human equivalent of an emotional support therapy dog.”
“You’re certainly a little bitch,” Micah teases, kicking sand at him. He glances at me. “We’ll do the pig farm. It’s about forty minutes from here, and pigs eat anything. Bones, teeth, everything. The body will be gone in a few hours.”
I stare at him. Micah—soft-spoken, gentle Micah. It’s weird to see him suggesting feeding a man to pigs with the same tone he uses to recommend cocktails.
“Da fuck dude? Where’d you learn that?” Milo asks.
He shrugs. “I watch documentaries.”
“Nobody’s getting fed to pigs.” I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“We’re not in a Quentin Tarantino film. We need some way to get rid of the body and make this look like a freaking accident and not a crime of passion.
We have to try and keep the girl out of this or this whole thing will be blown to shit. ”
Milo snaps his fingers. “I’ve got it.” He surges to his feet, dancing from foot to foot. “We Weekend at Bernie’s this shit.”
Silence.
“The movie,” he adds, like that clarifies anything.
“We know what Weekend at Bernie’s is,” Holden says, shaking his head. “We’re just trying to figure out why you think a comedy about puppeting a dead body around is relevant to our current situation.”
Milo starts pacing. “Listen. If we get rid of the body, Brock becomes a missing person. If he stays missing, every finger points back to that party—and to the woman last seen leaving with him. She becomes suspect number one.”
“He’s right,” Holden says. “I don’t want her tied to this.”
“Me either,” Micah adds. “We need to protect her.”
“Okay,” I say, hands on my hips. “So how does Weekend at Bernie’s keep our girl safe?”
Milo grins. “I love that you just called her ‘our’ girl.”
I roll my eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that. Finish your fucking thought.”
“Okay, fine—deny the multi-pronged love arrow that just shot straight through all of our black hearts. But anyway, the plan is, we make Brock look alive. At least until we can make it look like he left town.”
“How? He’s very dead,” I point out.
“He’s dead, yes. But his phone isn’t.” Milo jogs up the dune path to the SUV and comes back with Brock’s phone, holding it up like a trophy.
“Fresh corpse means Face ID still works. We unlock it, change his passcodes, and build a ghost trail. ATM withdrawal here, one two towns over, another near the highway. Drive his car to long-term parking. Pack a bag from his place. Send a few texts. Make it look like he chose to leave.”
He’s grinning now. It’s the kind of grin that makes you wonder if he was always like this or if there’s something specifically broken in him.
We’re all broken, but Milo’s has a special flavor.
“People do it all the time,” he says. “Quarter-life crisis. Gone. Nobody panics because there’s evidence he’s alive and well.”
I look at the others. Holden has stopped pacing, which means he’s thinking about it. Micah is nodding slowly. Even Knox would see the logic if he were here.
“The wounds,” I say. “If anyone finds him—”
“No one will. We bury him out in the desert. By the time anyone seriously wonders where Brock went, the trail will already be cold. He ghosted. It happens.”
It’s insane. It’s also the first idea tonight that keeps the girl out of the crosshairs.
Milo is vibrating. “We’ll need to plant more than ATM slips. We’ll need DMs, texts, a couple selfies of him wherever we ‘see’ him. Bonus points if it’s with another girl. Brock was a piece of shit, but he’s a vain piece of shit. People believe what matches the brand.”
“How the hell are you gonna get some girl to pose with a dead guy?” Holden grouches.
Milo shrugs, already typing on his own phone.
“First of all, he’s a fresh corpse. We could totally play him off as drunk if we saran wrap his insides—the leaking would give it away.
But long term we use deep fakes, dummy. I’ll put his photo into AI, generate some bar shots.
No one ever checks the metadata. Bing, bang, boom. ”
Micah nods. “I hate to say it, but I think he’s onto something.”
Holden finally cracks a grin, slapping Micah on the shoulder hard enough to sting. “Look at us. The best little crime club on the coast.”
I drag a hand down my face. A stress headache flickers behind my eyes. “All right, say we do this. We need to start tonight. Step one is getting his car and packing his shit without drawing attention. Step two is getting into his phone.”
“I’m literally already in there.” Milo’s nodding, fingers flying over Brock’s phone as he rapid-fires off some message.
I turn to Micah and gesture toward his arm. “You okay to drive?”
He glances at the open wounds—one clean cut and a decent-sized bite mark—then at me.
“Sure.”
“Okay. Do it,” I say. “Start with—”
Brock’s phone buzzes in Milo’s hand. He glances at the screen.
“Text from someone named Stephen.” He reads it out. “‘Waiting for you.’” He looks up. “Plus eggplant and water emoji. Brock had a boyfriend?”
“Looks that way,” Holden says, reading over his shoulder.
“Huh.” Milo shrugs and types out a reply, thumbs moving fast. “‘Can’t. Something came up.’ Send.” He glances at me. “Should I add anything? Sorry? Rain check? Limp flower?”
“Don’t overthink it.”
“I never overthink. If anything, I’m a proud under-thinker.” He pockets the phone and glances up toward the SUV. “We should move. Face ID has a window on dead tissue. I want to get into his banking app before his face stops being viable.”
Jesus Christ.
“Problem,” Holden’s voice cuts through the planning.
“What now?” I say.
He crouches near the edge of the jetty, then straightens with a small pink beaded clutch in one hand and a cracked cell phone in the other.
“Sage,” he says.
We all look at him.
“Her name,” he says, holding up the ID he’s found inside, “is Sage.”
The name settles into the silence.
Sage.
“We’ll need to get that back to her,” Micah says.
“And I need to run her information,” Holden says, digging through the bag and coming out with a tube of lip gloss and a set of house keys.
“What we need is to keep eyes on her,” I counter. “Knox is on her tonight. After that, we rotate. She’s a loose end until we know she’ll keep this shit locked down.”
“She’s more than a loose end,” Holden says, appreciation sharpening his voice. “That girl is a fucking hand grenade. Reckon I’ll be jacking off to the memory of her turning that guy into pulp until the day I die.”
“She’s a girl who just got assaulted,” Micah says, quiet and sharp. “She also watched five strangers hang the guy who did it. So maybe we pump the brakes on the objectification?”
Holden holds up his hands. “I’m not objectifying. I’m appreciating. Even a die-hard feminist like you can appreciate the difference.”
“When you’re standing there with a hard-on, there’s literally not,” Micah says.
“Children,” Milo interrupts, already heading back up the dune path to the SUV. “Can we fight about gender politics after we Kermit the Frog a dead man across the country? Time is literally of the essence.” He turns back, walking backward as he makes a droopy face. “Decay waits for no man.”