I turned around, faced the wall as she dried some more of herself.
“Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took him to fill the hole. And he made sure I was packed in tight. At least at the shoulders. Didn’t even blink when I spit in his face. Do my back?”
“Sure.”
I turned around and she handed me the towel as she stepped out of the shower. I ran the thick terry cloth over her shoulders and then down along the muscles of her back as she twisted her hair in both hands and pulled it up against the back of her head.
“So, even though I was on this little shelf, there was still a good bit of dirt below me. And at first I couldn’t move, and I got terrified, but then I remembered what allowed me to stand on that rock with one foot for twenty minutes while Mr. Walking Dead buried me alive.”
“What was that?”
She turned in my arms. “You.” She slid her tongue over mine for a moment. “Us. You know. This.” She patted my chest and reached behind me, took the towel back. “And I moved around and twisted and more dirt fell below my feet and I kept squirming and, oh, three hours later, I started making some progress.”
She smiled and I kissed her, my lips meeting teeth, but I didn’t care.
“I was so scared,” she said, draping her arms across my shoulders.
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “Wasn’t your fault. My fault for not picking up Lurch on my tail this morning while I tailed Desiree.”
We kissed and my hand planed through some beads of water I’d missed on her back and I wanted to pull her body so tight it would either disappear into mine or I’d disappear into hers.
“Where’s the bag?” she said when we finally broke the embrace.
I lifted it from the floor of the bathroom. Inside were her dirty clothes and the handkerchief we’d used to wipe her prints from the handles of the hoe and the garden shears. She tossed the towel in and I added the facecloth, and then she took a sweatshirt from the small pile of Desiree’s clothes I’d placed on the toilet seat and put it on. She followed that with a pair of jeans and socks and tennis shoes.
“Sneakers are a half size too big, but everything else fits fine,” she said. “Now let’s go deal with these mutants.”
I followed her out of the bathroom, trash bag in hand.
I pushed Trevor into the study as Angie went upstairs to check on Desiree.
We stopped by the front of the desk and he watched as I used another handkerchief to wipe down the sides of the chair where I’d been bound.
“Removing any trace of yourself from the house tonight,” he said. “Very interesting. Now why would you do that? And the dead valet—I assume he’s dead?”
“He’s dead.”
“How will he be explained?”
“I really don’t care. They won’t link us to it, though.”
“Wily,” he said. “That’s you all over, my young man.”
“Relentless, too,” I said. “Don’t forget why you hired us.”
“Oh, sure. But ‘wily’ has such a ring to it. Don’t you think?”
I leaned against the desk, hands crossed over my lap and looked down at him. “You do the wacky old coot imitation very well when it serves you, Trevor.”
He waved at the air with the third of his cigar that still remained. “We all need our bits of shtick to fall back on every now and then.”
I nodded. “It’s almost endearing.”
He smiled.
“But it’s not really.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “You have far too much blood on your hands for that.”
“We all have blood on our hands,” he said. “Do you remember some time back when it became fashionable to throw away Krugerrands and boycott all the products coming out of South Africa?”
“Of course.”
“People wanted to feel good about themselves. What’s a Krugerrand after all in the face of such an injustice as apartheid? Yes?”
I yawned into my fist.
“Yet at the same time that the beautiful, righteous American public boycotts South Africa or fur or whatever they’ll boycott or protest tomorrow, they turn a blind eye to the processes which provide them coffee from Central or South America, clothing from Indonesia or Manila, fruit from the Far East, just about any product imported from China.” He drew back on his cigar and stared through the smoke at me. “We know how these governments work, how they deal with dissent, how many employ slave labor, what they do to anyone who threatens their profitable arrangements with American companies. And we don’t just turn a blind eye, we actively encourage it. Because you want your soft shirts, you want your coffee, and your high-top sneakers and your canned fruit, and your sugar. And people like me get it for you. We prop up these governments and keep our labor costs low and pass the savings on to you.” He smiled. “And isn’t that good of us?”
I raised my good hand and brought it down on my thigh several times, made the exact noise I’d make clapping both hands together.
He held his smile and puffed his cigar.
But I kept clapping. I clapped until my thigh began to sting and the heel of my palm grew numb. I clapped and clapped, filling the big room with the sound of flesh hitting flesh until Trevor’s eyes lost their gaiety and his cigar hung from his hand and he said, “All right. You can stop now.”
But I kept clapping, my dead gaze fastened on his dead face.
“I said enough, young man.”
Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
“Will you stop that annoying noise?”
Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
He rose from his chair and I used my foot to push him back into it. I leaned in and increased the tempo and the force of my hand against my flesh. He closed his eyes tight. I clenched my fist and hammered it on the arm of his wheelchair, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, five beats per second, over and over. And Trevor’s eyelids clenched tighter.
“Bravo,” I said eventually. “You’re the Cicero of the robber barons, Trevor. Congratulations.”
He opened his eyes.
I leaned back on the desk. “I don’t care right now about the labor organizer’s daughter you chopped into pieces. I don’t care how many missionaries and nuns lay in shallow graves with bullets in the backs of their heads because of your orders or the politics you entrenched in your banana republics. I don’t even care that you bought your wife and probably made every moment of her life a living hell.”