11. Milo
ELEVEN
MILO
“Let’s put some life back in those cheeks, buddy.”
I swipe some foundation across Brock’s jaw, rubbing it into the flaccid skin. The car hits a pothole and his head lolls sideways, his left cheek smearing across the headrest of Holden’s Audi.
Oops.
“Milo,” Holden glances back at me from the driver’s seat. “I swear to god if you get corpse juice or makeup on my leather—”
“Relax, I brought a drop cloth.”
“You brought a—Milo!”
“I’m not an animal, Holden. I plan ahead.” I smooth the sponge across the dead rapist’s cheekbone, blending downward toward the jaw. He’s cold. Not room-temperature cold—freezing cold.
He spent the day in a meat locker, courtesy of Hank, a guy I know who doesn’t ask questions about what goes in next to the brisket.
Micah and I prepped him there—wrapped his middle in plastic so he wouldn’t leak on the move, dressed him in a fresh outfit and cut his tongue out since it wouldn’t stay in his mouth after the noose.
Hours of work leading to this moment. He’s held the chill nicely.
It’s kind of like taking a steak from the fridge, except this steak used to have fucked-up opinions on his right to a woman’s body.
“Sage might not have been your first, but she certainly made sure she was your last.” I tsk at him as I apply more makeup. “You got all you deserved and more, you evil motherfucker.” I boop him on the nose with my index finger.
The tricky part of making a dead man with strangulation face appear human isn’t the foundation. I matched his skin tone from photos, corrected the blue around his lips, and did what I do best: made a nightmare look like a bad decision.
I call this the “basic bro complexion” and it’s a goddamn work of art.
The real tricky part is the neck. The deeply bruised rope marks don’t want to blend.
They sit in the skin like a signature, and no amount of full-coverage concealer is going to make them disappear.
So I’ve wrapped a charcoal cashmere scarf around his throat and paired it with one of those god-awful hipster beanies that makes a man look like he owns three vinyl records and calls it a personality.
He’s exactly that kind of guy.
Sorry, was.
“You know I gave up watching Sage to be here tonight. She’s currently alone and terrified and—”
“Knox is watching her.”
“Like I said, alone and terrified. How much longer?” Holden asks. “I’d like to at least be back on watch by the time she wakes up.”
“Be there? Holden. My dude. Your version of ‘being there’ is sitting in your car with binoculars trained on her windows.”
“I’m giving her time to get used to me. Now answer the fucking question—how long?”
“Three minutes. I need to get this boob tape to stick between his lips.”
Dead silence from the driver’s seat while I attach one side of the tape to his teeth. “Boob tape?”
“Yeah. Girls use it to avoid the dreaded nip-slip with certain outfits. My sisters use it all the time.”
“And why are you using it on his lips?”
“Because they’re blue and limp, Holden. He looks like a gaping fish.” I peel the film away and pat his lips in place, happy when they secure nicely. “I’m also putting on a tinted lip balm. It’s very subtle. Very masculine. Very ‘I definitely didn’t die twenty-one hours ago.’”
Holden’s blue eyes stare at me in the rearview mirror.
“Plus,” I add, “I need him smiling for the photos.”
“Do I even want to know how you’ll achieve that?”
“Facelift tape. Mom swears by it.” I waggle a strip of transparent tape between two fingers like a magician showing the card before the trick. “Two behind his ears, pulls the skin up and back. Instant grin. Not a natural one—more ‘guy who’s off his face’—but for a photo at arm’s length? Sold.”
“How is facelift tape different from boob tape?”
I stare at him via the rearview. “What is wrong with you, Holden? Boob tape is double-sided.”
Holden’s knuckles crack against the steering wheel. He does that when he’s calculating whether the prison sentence for murder is worse than the prison sentence for accessory to whatever the fuck I’m doing right now.
“You realize you were supposed to have his car dumped at the airport by now,” he says finally. “Phone trail running, you and Micah halfway to the desert with shovels. That was the timeline. Instead I’m using my car to drive us to a dive bar while watching you contour a dead man.”
“You’re watching me work.”
“Work faster. This feels way more risk than reward.”
I blend down Brock’s jaw one more time. “I’ll be done when it’s right, not when your spreadsheet says so. Geez. Micah is way more fun than you.”
“Then maybe you should have done this with him.”
“He’s got work. Just like we do. So, chill Detective Stick-up-your-butt.
This is all planned out.” I set the sponge aside and work on making sure there’s the perfect amount of hair sticking out from the beanie.
“You rush a disappearance, you get gaps. A phone in two places at once. A sighting that doesn’t line up.
A grieving mother asking the wrong question of the right cop.
” I pull the lip color from my kit. “Art takes time, Holden. Nobody rushed the Mona Lisa, and she’s just a woman with no eyebrows. ”
“What happened to Plan A? The deepfakes.”
“That’s still happening,” I say. I smooth the lip balm over Brock’s lips, nodding when it turns them a healthier pink.
“But when I put the plan to Loki, he said we needed to wait on Fenrir—like I couldn’t pass it off believably on my own.
” I shake my head. “Still, we need something to post in the meantime, and they said they were fine if we had real photos. So, here we are.”
“Wait. Your backup plan is literally Weekend at Bernie’s? I can’t imagine any of The Norse Gods okayed this.”
“They didn’t. And if you call them and make them stop me, Holden, I will never forgive you.”
He grumbles under his breath. “Your backup plan’s gonna get us caught.”
“My backup plan is genius.”
I think about the folding wheelchair in the trunk that I borrowed from the community theater’s prop closet. It’s got a squeak in the left wheel, but otherwise it’s perfect.
“We’re taking him on a tour. The story is we’re on a bro’s trip and he’s had one too many drinks. We wheel him around in a chair, put sunglasses on him, and generally make it seem like we’re having the time of our lives.”
“And when someone tries to talk to him?”
“Please,” I scoff. “As if anyone will speak to him when we’re around. We’re like a hundred times more attractive than him.”
“Great. So they can give descriptions of us as well.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh ye of little faith. I’ve got prosthetics and wigs, you fucker. No one will know it’s us.”
Holden mutters something under his breath.
I turn back to Brock and tilt his chin up to examine my work. Not bad. In dim lighting—and every bar worth drinking in has dim lighting—he could pass for drunk. Glazed expression, slack jaw, thousand-yard stare. I’ve seen living men look worse at last call.
I dig through my bag. I’ve packed it like a go-kit for the world’s worst field trip: sunglasses, makeup, tape, cologne (Dior Sauvage, because of course Brock wore Dior Sauvage), spare shirts in case of leakage, ice packs against his torso to slow decomposition.
Also a granola bar, because I skipped dinner.
“Where are we going?” I ask, pulling the scarf straight.
One of the ice packs shifts against Brock’s ribs and I tuck it back into place under his shirt.
His arm swings loose and slaps against the door panel.
I grab it and fold it back into his lap.
“Sit still! God. I’ve never known a dead man to fidget so much. ”
“Murphy’s. It’s a dive down near Founder. Dark, loud, nobody looks at anyone too hard.”
“Perfect. Do they have food? I’m starving.” I eye Brock. “I’d kill for a steak.”
Holden doesn’t answer. I take that as a yes.
Murphy’s is perfect: dark, loud, sticky with spilled beer, and blessedly camera-free. Exactly the kind of place where a drunk Brock Davis could be seen without anyone looking too closely.
Getting Brock inside will be the hard part. Dead bodies don’t walk, which seems obvious, but movies really like to skip the logistics. A man with no muscle control is basically a bag of wet sand shaped like a person, and Brock is already stiffening enough to make every step a negotiation.
Holden pulls the car around to the side entrance and we get dressed in our costumes. A fake nose and mustache for me, a full beard, glasses, and a wig for Holden. He looks surprisingly excellent as a man with an ’80s mullet.
It takes a minute or five, but we manage to wrangle Brock into the wheelchair.
“Ready?” I ask Holden.
He stares at me. He has this look—I call it his Murder Contemplation Face—where his jaw goes tight and his eyes go flat and you can tell he’s running scenarios. I’m sure half of them end with me in a ditch.
“I’ll be at the bar,” he says. “If anyone looks at you too long, I’ll redirect. You have ten minutes.”
“Fifteen.”
“Ten. You want to hit more bars tonight.”
“Twelve minutes and I’ll never mention to the guys the time you cried at that fabric softener commercial.”
“That was allergies.” He levels me with a look. “Twelve minutes.”
He takes off toward the main entrance, and I spin the wheelchair toward the side.
Brock’s head drops forward. I catch it, tilting it back, wondering if I should use the facelift tape and a stick shoved into the back of the scarf to support his neck.
In the end, I just angle it so it looks like he’s asleep in the chair.
“Come on, big guy. Let’s get you a drink. ”
The side entrance opens into a corridor by the bathrooms. Nobody’s there. I navigate us past the men’s room, which stinks of bleach, and into the main bar. Holden’s already on a stool near the front. The moment he sees me, he flags down the waitress to give me cover.
Grumpy as that guy is, Holden’s always got your back.