Callie’s Last Dance

18.

IT ISN’T MUCH of a sandwich, but Callie gets it down, tosses the empty bottle of water in the trash, goes back to the laundry room. She removes the explosive disk from the dog’s collar, tosses it in her backpack, takes out a prepared syringe and injects the dog to deepen the dosage. Walks to the nightstand in the master bedroom, where she’d seen Angie’s sleeping pills on a People magazine earlier. She bites the top off the plastic medicine bottle and tosses it to the floor, scattering the tiny pills across the carpet. Then she tosses the magazine on the floor and rips several pages from it, puts two pills in her pocket, and two more on the hallway floor by the laundry room. She scatters the magazine pages, inspects her work, and decides it’s not quite right, so she wets a paper towel and dabs the pages and pills till they’re soggy.

The idea being the De Lucas will come home, find the dog passed out, see the sleeping pills on the floor, think the dog got into the pills and fell asleep. Angie will count the pills she can find and determine two are missing. She’ll want to take the dog to the vet, but Frankie will say, “Are you kidding me? Who’s gonna carry a hundred and thirty pound dog after drinking all day and half the night? Two pills is nothing! Let him sleep it off.”

With any luck, that’s what will happen. Callie will hide in the hall closet and wait for the De Lucas to come home. When they fall asleep, she’ll make her move. If they freak out over the dog, she’ll jump out of the closet, kill them, and manufacture the evidence she needs to convince Sal that Frankie was skimming money.

Since either development requires her to wait in the hall closet for what could be many hours, she goes to the powder room and pees, then enters the closet, removes some coats from their hangers, and positions them on the floor for maximum comfort.

She takes her position among the coats, covers herself with two of them, and runs through her mental checklist. Did I turn on any lights? If so, did I turn them back off? Check. Did I wipe down all the surfaces I touched in the kitchen and elsewhere? Check. What about the toilet seat? Yup, did that. What about the handle when I flushed? Yup, got that.

She reminds herself to wipe down both sides of the closet door knob after killing Frankie.

It’s pitch black in the closet. She closes her eyes. May as well catch a few minutes of sleep till the De Lucas arrive. When they do, they’ll certainly make enough noise to wake her up.