John Dies at the End (37 page)

In the backyard now, dimly lit by a dusk-to-dawn light off my back door. Just enough light to see the pool of pink slush right in the middle of the snow. A metal wire tightened around my gut.

Did you actually feel sorry for yourself a few minutes ago, having to live your life in an institution or jail? That’s an actual girl’s actual blood, Dave. She was warm in her home and ready to curl up in bed and next she was wrestled away or knocked cold. What do you remember? You remember the flare of light and the gun jumping in your hand, then digging around the snow for the brass casing and not finding it, night-blinded from the muzzle flash, ears ringing with the sound. And just like that night with Jennifer, you knew it was the last thing you wanted to do but still you did it and did it and did it. You never stop, Dave
.

I reached the door and tried to wedge the key into the frozen padlock, my fingers shaking. I dropped the key once, twice, then wrapped the frozen lock in my palm to warm it. Finally I got the key in and twisted it and popped the lock free.

A burst of fire in the darkness, the sharp crack of a gunshot, night blindness, panic, frozen breaths, blue canvas—

I pulled open the door, scraping it along the frozen ground. The piano wire around my gut tightened again and I thought I would have been sick, had I eaten anything.

I have this tarp, a blue one, one I always used to keep my firewood dry before I ran out of firewood. Right now it was in a loose roll along the gravel floor of my toolshed, above another frosted stain of cranberry-colored slush. There was something wrapped in the canvas, something the size of a body, something I knew
was
a body, rolled up like—

A murder burrito!

—a gutted deer in the bed of a pickup. I could have confused this for a slain young deer, in fact, had there not been three pale fingers extending just over the edge of the canvas.

I turned away, stepped outside, put my hands on my knees.

Breathe.

Slow, deep breaths. I stood upright, let the steam rise past my eyes, my soul making a run for it. Knees felt like Jell-O. I lay back against the door frame of the shed, then felt it sliding against my back. My ass was cold suddenly. Snow soaking in. I was surprised to see I was sitting, legs splayed out in front of me, no strength to stand.

You guys know my sister, who’s back home at this moment. In that big, old house.

If one of you makes it out of this instead of me, I want you to look in on her, make sure she’s taken care of
.

She ain’t never been on her own
.

I want you to promise me
.

In the end, the people riding in the back of that beer truck couldn’t protect her. They couldn’t protect her from me.

There was no question in my mind I had done it. I didn’t want to do it, to be sure, but I had done it just the same. And the thought, the gargantuan thought that swallowed me the way the impossible idea of eternity will swallow me upon arrival in Hell, was that nothing would ever, ever, ever be right again.

Christ. The weight of it.

No shit, asshole. That’s why you have to act. She’s dead, you’re not. Think. Do you know what they do to guys like you in jail? The river isn’t frozen over yet, just take the body and dump it, cut off the head and the hands and dump it. This isn’t your fault—

No. I wouldn’t do that. I had a vision of friends and family—and she had to have family, somewhere—living the rest of their lives not knowing what happened to Amy Sullivan. No, they deserved to know. They deserved to know I did it and to see me strapped to a table with a needle in my arm.

I made myself breathe. One step at a time, that was the only way to handle things after they spun out of control. Step one: breathe. Step two: stand up. Go inside the shed, take a look, make sure it’s her—

Oh, hey, that’s right. You might have a whole collection of corpses stacked around here—

—then go to Amy’s place and tell John. Just tell him, no bullshit. Then call Drake and show him the body. Tell him the truth, tell him I blanked out and there she was. Let’s face it, if I’m this dangerous it’s better that I be locked up. For everyone’s safety.

I climbed to my feet, put my hand on the door—

Okay, fine, just go in and unwrap her and face this thing, just face what you did

——and closed it. I snapped the padlock shut, then trudged inside the house.

CHAPTER 11

By the way . . .

LOOKING BACK, IF
I had gone in and seen what was in the toolshed, I would have put a bullet in my own skull one minute later.

CHAPTER 12

Amy

I FOLLOWED MY
own tire tracks as I made my way back through town. I kept the dome light on and threw nervous glances behind me every four seconds or so. At Amy’s house I found John hunched under the hood of his Cadillac. I walked past him, the horrible news coiled inside me like one of those chest-bursters from
Alien
. I said, “Your battery dead?”

“I hope not.” I noticed a set of jumper cables coiled in the snow around his feet. Hooked around one elbow was a knotted string of what looked like Christmas tree lights. “Christmas is coming
late
for that motherfucker. As soon as I find it. You got my gloves?”

“Uh, no.”

“Okay . . . can I have a brownie?”

He caught a glimpse of my face as I passed. He stood upright, alarmed. “Dave? What’s up? Did you change your shirt?”

“Put that stuff back. I, uh, think I got it figured out.”

“What? You do?”

I stepped into the warm house, thinking this was going to be another of life’s little awkward conversations. I absently rubbed the cold from my fingers. I heard John approach the door and suddenly ideas hit me, quick and desperate. Panicked wild fastballs of thought.

I could tell them it was an accident.

Yeah. You can make it work. You can march people up to testify about the time you severed an artery in your arm trying to carve a pumpkin. You can pull the emergency room records from the time Jennifer had to rush you to get half a cup of candle wax scraped off of your scrotum. There was the hot glue-gun incident. People would believe it, would see that you’re not a murderer but are merely an incredible dumb-ass. You see, officer, I was driving past the house and I observed through the window what appeared to be some kind of shaved baboon, apparently escaped from a nearby circus. The animal was clearly thin and malnourished, which I believed made it an even greater threat to the inhabitants of the home. Naturally I produced a weapon and subdued the creature with a single gunshot. Now, interestingly, it was at this moment that my penis accidentally fell out and I found myself—

CRUNK. CREEE-UNK.

Above me.

Creaking floorboards.

I stopped, held my breath, listened. The wind? Above me, a door clicked shut.

I stepped quickly and softly toward the stairs, eyes on the darkened doorway at the top. I glanced back at John, the startled look on his face told me he hadn’t invited any company over. I pulled the Smith from my coat and pointed it up the stairs.

Come on down, fuckers. Come on down. Come see David on the worst day of his life, destined for forever in jail or worse, still with fourteen bullets left to spend. Whatever you are, you picked the goddamned staircase on the wrong goddamned day.

Come on down.

I heard another door open, then close. Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don’t?

I eased myself up the stairs one at a time, softly. My feet hit the creaky wood floor of the hallway. Every door in the hall was closed but one, the bedroom. The library seemed like the logical one to check first. I quietly cranked the brass knob until the door clicked free. Nothing but darkness. I tried the light and it came right on.

No jellyfish.

I backed out, took a step and tried the door on my right. The bathroom. No need for the light. I could see right away that the room was empty and—
look at that
—the fat bag was gone.

Toward the bedroom now, the gun in front of me in both hands, arms rigid, like the turret on a tank. The old sensations again, blood pumping past my ears, sparks flying in my brain, that cool sweat again. My clothes must have stank of it.

Something moved in the shadows.

A thin figure, almost as tall as a man.

A gray torso, like a rhino.

It saw me and froze.

A trickle of sweat crawled down my forehead, landing as a burning speck in my left eye.

Holy shit! It’s a shaved baboon!

Through the sights of the pistol I saw a young, very thin and pale girl draped in a gray University of Notre Dame sweatshirt that she wore like a dress.

I said, “Oh! Amy! Hey!”

An avalanche of relief buried every thought in my mind.

Amy took several steps backward. She was holding a toothbrush and was nervously rubbing the bristles with her thumb as she retreated toward her door. Her other arm ended in an empty sleeve.

“Hi,” she said, in a too-loud squeak. “Can I, uh, help you?”

“No, no. It’s fine. We were just worried about—”

I made a huge mistake. I reached out, casually, I thought (it’s hard to come off casual with a gun in your other hand, I guess) to take her arm. I had to see if it was her, if she was solid.

I wrapped my fingers around a very solid and very real forearm, but then she pulled away and when I went to catch the spot where her hand would be, I grabbed only air.

She ducked back through her bedroom door and slammed it shut. I looked stupidly down at my empty fingers and realized two things:

Amy Sullivan was alive, and she no longer had a left hand.

“Wait! Hey!” I said, screaming and pounding on the door while wielding a handgun, in exactly the way an armed rapist would. “It’s me!”

“Okay!” She said as I heard something scoot across the floor and jolt the doorknob. She had braced the door with some piece of furniture, probably the chest of drawers.

“No! It’s fine! I’m not armed! I mean, I’m armed, but not in a bad way. We’ve been looking all over for you.”

“I’m here!” She said in the artificial-sweetener tones you’d use to soothe a rabid dog. “You can leave!”

I stuffed the gun in my jacket pocket and leaned toward the door. “Hey, where have you been?”

Nothing from inside. I could hear her talking faintly in there, like she was mumbling to herself. Poor kid.

I wandered back to the stairs, one question answered with several dozen new ones replacing it. First off, who did I kill?

John came up the steps, saying, “Who was talking up here?”

“I found her. She was in her bedroom.”

He glanced that way and said, “Damn. You’re good. So, she was here the whole time? Like, folded up in a desk drawer?”

“I don’t know, John. And I don’t care. She wants us to leave.”

“You sure?”

“John, we have to talk.”

I turned him around and we stepped down into the living room, just in time to see red-and-blue lights pulsing across the bay window. We reached the front door just as Officer Drake pushed his way in.

“What’s the deal?” Drake said, brushing snow off his shoulders. “We got a nine-one-one call from Amy saying there was an armed man in the house.”

DRAKE WENT UPSTAIRS
to calm Amy down while John and I waited down at the diner-style chrome-and-green table in her kitchen. John pulled out a small package of what looked like tobacco and asked, “You think she’d mind if I smoked in here?”

“John, I killed somebody.”

As the words hung in the air I had a split second to wonder how many people had ever uttered them and still gone on to live happy lives.

I said, “There’s a body in my toolshed.”

“Is it Jeff Wolflake? Does that mean the manager job is open?”

“No. A guy showed up, a guy but maybe not a guy, on the way home. He put a thing on me like a slug or something and asked me a bunch of questions.”