Chapter 30 #2
His lips twitch upward, but he only says, “Then why’d you leave?”
“Can we have this conversation later? After we’ve gotten rid of the body?”
“No.”
“You left first, and you left so much earlier than you needed to, and I freaked out. You could’ve stayed and talked to me—demanded answers—but you didn’t.
And I saw the cop cars leaving your house.
And you didn’t mention them, and it was obvious you knew.
I panicked, and I left. And then I got to my office and realized how badly I’d fucked up by not just talking to you.
I shredded the other files I had, but I was planning to take yours back to your place.
I was going to be there before you even got home, and I was going to tell you everything.
Only—” I fling my arm back toward Garret’s body.
“But I’m in love with you, and I want to be with you! ”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” I shout at him. “Okay?”
“Okay. I love you, too.”
“Oh my god! You’re such a bastard!”
“Yeah, but I’m a bastard who’s going to help you cover up a murder,” he says, smirking.
“It was self-defense,” I grumble.
“What about the other four?”
“I didn’t say anything about the other four, did I?”
He snorts. “How hurt are you? Can I touch you?”
“Well, my face is…” I gesture at it. “My nose isn’t broken, but I’m probably going to look like a trash panda tomorrow. And I’ve got a couple of fractured ribs, and—”
“I’d kill him if you hadn’t already done it,” Mark interjects, looking like he wants to spit on Garret’s corpse.
“And my elbow is fucked again.”
Mark glances at my elbow and then back to my face, raising his fingertips to brush against my cheek. “Davidson?” he asks, referencing the cut that was there weeks ago.
I sigh. “Yes. Matt Davidson.”
“I knew that cut wasn’t from that morning.”
“Yes. Fine. You were right!”
“How’d you do it?”
“Help me up, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything, but we can’t keep sitting here next to a dead body just chatting, Mark.”
He nods as he gently wraps an arm around my waist. “Good?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I grit my teeth as he rises, pulling me with him. I stand there for a moment, braced against Mark, swaying on my feet. Everything hurts.
“Can you walk?”
“I’ll manage. Can you get him to the van?
Toss him in the back? We’ll leave our phones here and come back for them when we’re done,” I say.
I had a decent bit of time to figure out how to handle this while I was waiting for Mark to show up.
If we leave our phones here and get rid of Garret’s body somewhere else, hopefully it’ll look like we were never there.
If anyone ever checks our cell phone records, we can claim we were out here having sex in the park.
“I’ll drive the van, and you can follow in your car.
We’ll drive east thirty or forty minutes, find somewhere moderately secluded, douse the van with all the turpentine you brought, and set it on fire.
By the time the flames die out, it should erase any trace of me having been inside.
Then you drive back, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know. Deal?”
“Deal,” Mark agrees, grabbing Garret by the ankles and dragging his body across the lot.
Better him than me, but I still look away, remembering the sensation of blood running down my throat.
“You know, I’ve been on worse dates than this,” Mark throws out as I hold my ribs and shuffle toward the van.
“Oh yeah?”
“One or two.”
I turn down an old logging road, drive a few hundred feet and park the van, happy to be done. Every time I had to turn the steering wheel or check my blind spot, it hurt. The next several weeks are going to suck, and not only because of the broken ribs.
I can’t show up to see patients looking like this.
By tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to have two black eyes that no amount of makeup will be able to cover.
The sparring excuse isn’t going to fly with Teresa a second time.
I’ll have to claim I came down with the flu or something and cancel my patients for next week.
Maybe the week after that, with enough makeup, I could do online sessions without it being too noticeable.
And then it’ll be Thanksgiving. When the following Monday rolls around, I should be able to get away with going into the office.
Goddamn Garret Fischer. At least he’ll never be a problem again, I think as I get out of the van and lean against the side, waiting for Mark, who just came to a stop behind me. He gets out, leaving the engine running and the headlights on once again, and goes around to his trunk.
When he reappears, he’s carrying a large jug of turpentine in one hand and a five-gallon bucket of deck stain in the other.
“You okay?” he asks when he nears me.
“I’ll be better once this is done, but I’m okay.”
“Good,” he says, pausing long enough to lean in and kiss my forehead. “Turpentine or stain on the seats?”
“Which one’s more flammable?” I ask, hoping he knows, because I have no idea.
“Turpentine.”
“Put that on the seats, and then we’ll strap Garret into the driver’s seat and douse him and the rest of the van in the stain,” I say, moving out of the way.
I’m not going to be much help. It’s going to hurt to lift anything heavier than a glass of water for the next few weeks. “When did you figure it out?”
“A couple of weeks ago. After Halloween. When they found Miller. Two’s a coincidence, but three’s a pattern,” he says, echoing Jeanette’s words from dinner two weeks past.
“And you’ve just been waiting for me to tell you I did it since then?” I ask, watching him pour turpentine onto the van’s seats.
He glances over his shoulder and shrugs. “I dropped some hints.”
“Yeah, well, clearly I didn’t get them,” I mutter. “What gave me away?”
“I had wondered after you first told me about Katie at Outsiders, but then it was only Carmichael and Davidson, and they were saying Davidson’s death was an accident, so I wrote it off.
But when we were sitting on the hood of my car after The Rose Room, you had a smudge of white paint on your jaw, next to your earlobe.
I thought it was weird because I also thought the bottle girl who was wearing white face paint and sitting on Brandon’s lap looked a lot like you. ”
“Damn,” I huff. “I saw you watching me. I’d hoped you wouldn’t realize.”
“I tried to talk myself out of believing it was you initially, since she was curvier, but then there was the paint. And the very fresh scratch on your arm. Then Miller turned up dead after leaving with the bottle girl. When they showed me the picture, I was pretty sure.”
“And you stayed.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t give a fuck about any of those assholes. You had a good reason for killing them, and the world is better without them in it. Just like the world is better without my dad in it.”
“Yeah,” I agree. It makes a twisted kind of sense considering that he has relevant personal experience. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I’m so tired.
“Plus, I knew your feelings for me were real, even if you hadn’t admitted it yet.”
“What made you so sure?”
“You introduced me to Vaughn and Katie and invited me to meet your dad,” Mark replies. “And I know you well enough to know that’s not a thing you do lightly.”
I nod, and Mark is silent for a moment before asking, “What about Katie?”
“What about her?”
“Was she in on it?”
I shake my head. “No. But she figured it out around the same time you did. She saw me in my costume before I left.”
“Is that why she’s in California? Giving interviews?”
“Yes.”
Mark nods and resumes covering the seats in turpentine. A minute later, he’s dragging Garret’s body into the driver’s seat for me, dumping stain onto it, and then coating the rear of the van. “Be right back,” he says, heading to his car once the five-gallon bucket runs empty.
“What’s that?” I ask when he returns carrying another jug and a paint can.
“Acetone and shellac,” he says, as he tosses the unopened containers into the back. “The acetone is used for cleaning up the shellac. They’re both also highly flammable.” He removes a matchbook from his pocket and passes it to me.
“The line between potential arsonist and DIY home improver looks thinner and thinner by the second,” I murmur, striking a match and holding it to the matchbook. The cardboard smokes, and the flame catches hold, twisting up it, racing toward my fingers.
I throw the matchbook onto Garret Fischer’s corpse at the same time Mark’s arms wrap around me, scooping me up. He turns and runs.
“Ow, ow, ow!” I shout. There’s a loud whoosh as the fire catches hold and oxygen is sucked from the air.
He sets me down when we reach his car, and I wrap an arm around myself, trying to remember how to breathe around the pain.
“Sorry, but you wouldn’t have shuffled away fast enough.”
“A little warning would’ve been nice!”
“Yeah. It would have been,” he says, glaring at me.
“You handed me a matchbook! What did you think I was going to do with it?” I grumble as he helps me into the car.