Heads You Lose Read online

  “We have to move the body,” Paul replied.

  In silence, brother and sister returned to the house to prepare for the ugly task at hand. Lacey pulled her hair into a tight ponytail. She was twenty-eight years old, it occurred to her, and moving her first dead body. The calm and rational side of Lacey thought about DNA. She’d watched enough of those programs to know that she didn’t want hers sprinkling all over the corpse. Paul donned a baseball cap. Lacey pulled two sets of dishwashing gloves from the pantry. Paul grabbed a tarp from the garage. Lacey poured peppermint oil on a pair of earplugs and stuffed them up her nose. She offered a pair of the same to her brother. The silence was briefly broken.

  “These aren’t used, are they?” Paul asked, holding the earplugs at a distance.

  “What do you care? You’ve worn that same shirt for a week straight,” Lacey replied. The shirt was a blue variation on Mercer’s plaid flannel uniform. Last week it was red.

  “I don’t want your earwax up my nose.”

  “They’re fresh,” Lacey said. “I buy them in bulk. You have no idea how loud you snore.”

  “Well, you did play me that tape,” Paul mumbled.

  Another short patch of silence. Paul backed his blue Dodge pickup truck to the edge of the gravel driveway. He met Lacey beside the body. The tarp was laid next to the headless man.

  “You can have the feet,” Paul said, generously.

  “Thanks,” Lacey replied.

  Paul grabbed the body by the shoulders; Lacey took his feet. Having never tried to move a body before, neither sibling realized how immovable dead weight was.

  “Let’s roll him,” Lacey suggested.

  Paul and Lacey each secured the tarp on the ground with one foot and, with all their force, they pushed the body over once, then twice, until it was resting in the center of the tarp. Then they wrapped the plastic around the body and secured it with duct tape so no fluids could escape. They each grabbed a side of the tarp and lifted the body off the ground, carrying it to the truck. They dropped him on the ground to catch their breath. They had to somehow lift one hundred and eighty or so pounds onto the truck bed. Lacey was strong. Sometimes she had to carry giant sacks of soil amendments deep into the woods, but this would take all her strength. She rested for a bit on her haunches.

  “On the count of three,” Paul said. “One. Two. Three.”

  “Now what?” Lacey asked, after Paul secured the body in the truck bed.

  “We dump him.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere remote,” Paul replied. “We’re surrounded by acres of forest. If we pick the right spot, he might never be found.”

  “But don’t we want him to be found?”

  “Why?”

  “Because clearly he was murdered, and we want the murderer caught so his family, if he has any, can have some peace.”

  “You don’t even know the guy,” Paul replied.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Lacey said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t care where we dump him as long as it’s miles from here.”

  “I know a place,” Lacey replied.

  Paul drove their truck down the dark road. He turned on the radio to a country station. He thought the music might help. Lacey hated this song—pop masquerading as country. She knew it would always remind her of this night, so she was glad it wasn’t one she liked.

  There was an eight-mile path off a rest stop about fifteen minutes from their house. It wasn’t a popular hiking destination, but it got enough foot traffic that a decaying corpse would eventually be noticed.

  Paul pulled the truck into the rest stop and breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the parking lot was empty. Lugging the body off the truck was easier. There was no point being gentle with a corpse. But still, the thud when it hit the ground sent a wave of nausea through Paul. He wished he’d brought a joint to calm his nerves. He wanted to stay calm for Lacey, but his calm was wearing off. They dragged the body about a quarter-mile down the trail, unwrapped the corpse, and dropped it down a short embankment. The body ended up facedown, or would have if it had had a face. Paul folded up the plastic tarp. He pulled off his gloves and told his sister to do the same.

  “What will we do with all this plastic?” Lacey asked.

  “Burn it,” Paul replied.

  “We can’t burn plastic. Do you know how bad that is for the ozone layer?”

  “Our DNA is all over the gloves, Lacey. The ozone layer can suck it.”

  “We should have worn cloth gloves inside the plastic gloves. Then we could have burnt the cloth gloves and left the plastic ones with the body or maybe in a dumpster somewhere,” Lacey said.

  “Let’s remember that for next time,” Paul replied, his patience waning.

  Lacey took the flashlight from Paul’s hand and said, “We better double-check and make sure we haven’t left anything behind.”

  She beamed the light over the body, which was now tangled in brush. While Paul worked to dislodge a thick branch, Lacey gingerly hiked down the embankment to the side of the body. She scanned the area around the corpse with the flashlight. That’s when she noticed it. The watch.

  She’d seen it before, lots of times. An old Seiko with a new leather band. One of those watches that supposedly winds itself through regular movement, although most people end up shaking their arm to wind it up. It never kept exact time. Lacey studied the body again. It was the right size. The clothes were the same, although all the men in Mercer seemed to dress alike. Holding her breath, she unclasped the watch and viewed the inscription on the back under the glow of the flashlight:

  4 D LOVE D

  “Paul,” Lacey said. Panic was edging into her voice, tears catching in her throat.

  “Where are you?” Paul said, peering over the embankment.

  He saw his sister standing over the corpse with the flashlight.

  “We know him,” Lacey said. “It’s Darryl. It’s Darryl Cleveland.”

  NOTES:

  Dave,

  Okay, back to you. I think it’s time for a little backstory on the siblings. Maybe you can take care of some of that.

  Also, I’ve decided Lacey should be studying botany. You might want to get started on the research since you’re good at that sort of thing. Mind setting that up in your chapter?

  Also, I didn’t mention how the parents died. I’ll leave that detail to you. I don’t care how. Just don’t go crazy. Leave the mafia out of it. Capiche?

  Good luck,

  Lisa

  Lisa,

  Nice job. I’m reminded how succinct and propulsive your writing can be. Don’t worry about backstory—I’ve already got a novel’s worth in my head.

  Just a note for both of us to keep in mind as we continue: Let’s make sure we don’t start taking sides, with you favoring Lacey and me favoring Paul. That’s the kind of predictable gender stuff that derailed us back in the Fop days (although I stand by my allegiance to Lucius Van Landingham). I think we’re both above that now.

  Dave

  CHAPTER 2

  “Dude grew fucking honeydews in Qua-tar.”

  That’s what Paul’s friend and mentor Terry Jakes used to say about Darryl Cleveland. Spoken in Terry’s unplaceable twang, it was the first thing to pop into Paul’s head when Lacey identified the body. Then he pictured Darryl in elementary school, a quiet blond kid always attached to his beat-up ten-speed. After high school, Darryl went straight into the Marines. “The few, the proud, the available,” Lacey said at the time, though Darryl, a former mathlete and an instinctive gearhead, was in fact a pretty smart guy.

  In the Marines, Darryl had worked on irrigation systems somewhere in the Middle East—maybe not really Qatar, but definitely not Iraq or anywhere too dangerous. He came back to take care of a family property up in Tulac. Now Darryl lived with his stepmom and worked for growers, including the Hansens, as a kind of overqualified freelance water consultant.

  One of the more persistent conundrums s
urrounding Mercer was that the residents of so rainy a place could be so preoccupied with the acquisition, storage, and allocation of water. Another one was that the natural serenity of the place seemed to foment1 anxiety and despair more efficiently than any urban housing project. A third was that no one seemed to ever visit or even talk about Mount Shasta, although there it always was.

  Even before he enlisted, Darryl seemed to have a knack for getting water from one place to another. At one of Terry Jakes’s most remote plots, the property owner kept chopping up the hoses they’d run from a nearby spring. Darryl had the idea of buying an old waterbed mattress, filling it up, and taking it to the plot on old fire roads in the back of his Chevy LUV truck. Darryl had paid Paul twenty dollars and all the PBR he could drink round-trip, to help him machete a couple of thick patches so the truck could maneuver to the plot. After that, the yield turned out to be a monster.

  Paul remembered it so clearly because it was the first time he left the house after the cabin incident. He’d wondered at the time if Darryl had even heard about it. Bad news traveled fast in Mercer, but Darryl kept to himself. That made it easier to be with him than with any of Paul’s real friends, who didn’t have much experience hanging out with a seventeenyear-old whose parents had just died. And it beat hanging around the house with his comatose sister and the relentlessly nurturing aunt who’d come to live with them during “this challenging time.” Aunt Gwen put a lot of stock in the healing powers of chamomile tea; Paul found Pabst more effective.

  Paul and Lacey had both been relieved that they weren’t expected to accompany their parents to the family’s cabin down by Wallis, an hour south of Mercer. They needed some alone time, their parents said. Paul looked forward to a weeklong slow burn of a party. Lacey just welcomed the break in her mom’s surveillance.

  During the vacation, a generator under the cabin leaked carbon monoxide into their parents’ bedroom. When a week passed and no one heard from them, Lacey and Paul called the sheriff, who drove up to the cabin and found the bodies. It was a couple of years before carbon monoxide poisoning became a big public health scare. And that was it. Their dad’s sister came down from Bend, Oregon, to live with Paul and Lacey for the rest of the school year. Then Paul went off to college, and Lacey, with one more year of school remaining, moved in with her best friend’s family in downtown Mercer.

  Senior year Lacey met Hart, a sandy-haired rich kid from the Central Valley with a rebellious streak. Lacey was the only girl in school who didn’t seem impressed—a fact that drew him to her irreversibly. For Lacey, Paul thought, the appeal was just as simple. He was the one guy in Mercer who wasn’t of Mercer. Hart had been all over, even to Europe, and loved to talk about the trips they’d take. Within a month, he and Lacey were inseparable. In two years, they were living together on the outskirts of town. Paul noted that Hart seemed more intent on traveling inside his head, via whatever substance was available, than ever taking Lacey anywhere, but he kept his mouth shut. Once Lacey had made up her mind about something—in this case that Hart was what she needed—there was no point talking about it.

  Five years later, Paul came back from college with some basic horticultural knowledge, but without decent job prospects. What he had was land and unlimited access to Terry Jakes, who seemed to know everything there was to know about growing pot, indoors and out. Darryl helped out with the water during a leave from the Marines. By the summer after graduation, Paul was in business. In the five years since then, he’d managed to build up a steady little client base. Lacey had been back with him almost a year. She didn’t exactly embrace the business, but for now it was all they had. And at least she was back with family.

  “I’m sorry it’s Darryl,” Paul said, standing over the body now. “But it doesn’t really change anything. Put the watch back on him, leave him here, get rid of the tarp and gloves, wait for someone to find him.”

  “I guess. But I hate to think—”

  “There’s nothing to think about except getting away from this and staying there.”

  Lacey returned the watch to Darryl’s cold wrist and Paul gathered up the tarp. They got home with five minutes to spare before Cudgel, the show where people tried to complete an obstacle course while being pummeled by giant mechanical clubs. A stocky receptionist from Michigan took the early lead. The low-center-of-gravity types always beat the natural athletes, Paul noted to himself.

  Lacey waited until the commercial break. “So, what now?”2

  “Jesus. Is that your new catchphrase?” Paul replied.

  “Nope. It’s still ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

  “Standard,” Paul said. “He’s not going to get any less ripe, especially if it stays hot. I bet someone finds him and calls the cops before his stepmom even notices he’s gone.”

  “What about the you-know-what?”

  “The head? We’re not being recorded, you know. I’ll look around in the morning, but I doubt it’s anywhere near here. Let’s not go sneaking around with flashlights again.”

  After Cudgel they sat through a whole Mythmatch rerun, the one where Dracula beats Poseidon, a highly questionable upset in Paul’s book. It was becoming clear that they were both just delaying going to bed. Not out of fear of a killer lurking in the woods—by now they were used to a sort of constant low-level fear (“alertness,” Paul called it)—but because they knew what to expect in their sleep.

  The only uncanny sibling weirdness they shared was that whenever something big happened, they had the same dream. Or not exactly the same dream, except for after the cabin incident, but always close enough to be creepy. “What are we, twins?” Lacey had said after the first time, echoing Paul’s thoughts with irritating precision. They quickly discovered that the phenomenon was boring to reasonable people who had lives and endlessly fascinating to long-winded stoney types, of which Mercer had no shortage.

  Paul started to drift off and Lacey hit the mute button, waking him immediately.

  “So,” she said. “Why did they cut off his head?”

  Paul cleared his throat. “Either a. That’s where the bullet was lodged and they wanted to remove ballistics evidence, or b. Maybe they wanted a souvenir.”

  Among the many verbal habits of Paul’s that irked Lacey, only a few inspired true loathing. Speaking in outline form was number one, followed by the use of horseracing odds to describe the relative likelihood of anything.

  “They should have taken his fingers, too,” Lacey said, without contemplating how ghoulish that sounded.

  “Fingerprints only matter if he’s in the system,” Paul reminded his sister.

  “Right. But why leave it on our property?” she asked.

  “Either it was random or they knew what they were doing,” Paul replied, trying not to think too hard about it.

  “They, not he?” she asked.

  “Darryl’s not exactly svelte. Anyway, I’d make option a the 3 to 2 favorite, with b at 4 to 1. Anything else, c through z, 10 to 1 tops.”

  Lacey and Paul sat there in silence, but neither of them could settle into their usual state of benign mutual irritation. And for the first time, they missed it.

  Paul gave in first, with his usual “Night, Lace,” and then lay in bed thinking of the trident in Dracula’s chest. The wrong tool for the job.

  In his dream he was walking down rows of different kinds of melons. The oleaginous3 redheaded detective from NYPD Blue and that forensics show was walking next to him in his sunglasses, whispering, “That’s a cantaloupe, Paul. That’s a casaba. Do you know the difference? Do you like casabas, Paul?” Lacey’s dream was simpler. She was cutting up melons; inside was just sand.

  It was still dark when she got up for her run. She felt the gravitational pull of the tarp and gloves in the garage but stuck to her standard route—they’d agreed to wait for burn day. Halfway through the run was a ridge where she always paused to look out over the house, the town, everything as the sun was coming up. She had an urge to get up there fast just to see if
everything still looked basically the same. It did, which was no comfort.

  For the rest of the run, she recounted the milestones of her days with Hart. She often did so when she started questioning her move back into her childhood home. First was “I failed Botany 1A at Las Piedras Community College,” which had felt like the bottom at the time. Then it was “I lived in an actual trailer park.” Finally, for the last few months of the relationship, it was “my perfect boyfriend Hart cooks meth.” Yep, her current living situation was still better. But the past was narrowing the gap all the time.

  When she came through the screen door, Paul perked up, just barely.

  “Melons and Caruso?” he mumbled into his coffee.

  “Just melons.”

  Then they both heard gravel spitting into mud flaps. Someone was coming up the hill.

  NOTES:

  Lisa,

  You want backstory, you got it. I can already see how we’re going to complement each other, what with your plotting expertise and my eye and ear for detail. I can’t believe how easy this is. Although beginnings were never the problem, if I remember correctly.

  Dave

  Dave,

  Thanks for all the backstory. Since it gives us a solid foundation, feel free to ease up on it a bit next chapter. Also, since I’m on the subject of cutting back, can we maybe keep the made-up TV show references to a minimum? A little goes a long way.

  I also want to follow up on my request about Lacey’s botany studies, given her sudden failure of Botany 1A. It’s fine that you didn’t go with my suggestion, as long as there was nothing passive-aggressive in your decision. We’re in this together.

  Terry Jakes is going to make an appearance, right? Let’s not make him like Professor Solemni from The Fop—quoted but never seen.

  Still, I’m feeling positive. We’re off to a good start!

  Lisa

  P.S. I’m curious where you learned all this stuff about growing marijuana plants. It would explain some things in our history.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lacey ran to the window and peered through the blinds. Her heart was racing until she saw the mud-whipped truck. An old Ford, green beneath the dirt, but you’d never know that. From now on, every time an engine stirred in their driveway Lacey would assume it was the cops.