Never Saw It Coming

Nineteen

Kirk Nicholson was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, having breakfast. Or an early lunch. Brunch maybe. Whatever meal it was, it consisted of a bottle of Budweiser and a cream-filled Twinkie sponge cake. He had the TV tuned in to Family Feud, where a family of fucking inbreds, in Kirk’s estimation, was trying to guess how one hundred people had responded to the question: “What part of your body do you sometimes forget to wash when you have a bath?”

Kirk shouted: “Behind the ears!”

He was pretty good at Family Feud. It was his favorite game show because, unlike, say, Jeopardy! or Who Wants to be a Millionaire? you didn’t actually have to know anything, you just had to be able to guess what people thought the answer was. That meant Kirk often shouted out the correct response, which made him feel very good about himself.

He needed to feel better about himself these days.

Often, his gaze would move from the television to the shelf he’d set up on the adjoining wall to display the mag wheels he was going to put on his truck when the snow melted. These were 20-inch Mamba wheels, the M3 model, with eight spokes, finished in machine black. Normally, a set of four cost as much as two grand, but he’d managed to get these for three hundred off.

As much as these wheels were a sight to behold now, they were going to look awesome once they were installed. It turned out to be a blessing Keisha didn’t have a garage with this pipsqueak little house of hers. If she had, he wouldn’t be able to admire them every single day, and he didn’t have to worry about someone breaking into a garage and stealing them. What he did have to worry about was that li’l fucker, as he now thought of Matthew, going over and touching them, getting his greasy little fingerprints on them, maybe even knocking them off the shelf and breaking the little bastard’s foot.

That made him think of his own foot, which was feeling much better, thank you very much. Not that he wasn’t still limping around Keisha. He wanted to keep the sympathy going for as long as possible.

Anyway, back to that little bastard. That was the operative word. Keisha hadn’t been married when she’d had the boy, and the dad was long gone, so he felt well within his rights to call the kid a bastard, but the fact was, he liked li’l fucker better. Kirk expected the kid was going to be better behaved in the future, not touching the wheels or anything else of his, after the recent talk he’d had with him. No ten-year-old kid wanted to get sent to a military academy for pre-teens, and that was what Kirk had told the kid his mother was considering if he didn’t keep his nose clean and stay out of Kirk’s way.

But it was their little secret, Kirk told him. Your ma doesn’t know I’ve told you what she’s thinking. Stay out of trouble, keep the noise down, stay out of the grownups’ way, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll forget the whole thing.

It was working, too. The kid had been on his best behavior lately.

“Between the toes!” he shouted at the set, coming up with another answer.

He took a swig from the beer bottle and another bite of the Twinkie. Turned out he could have stayed in bed. Never got the “Nina” call from Keisha, which he guessed meant her latest target had bought her story hook, line and sinker. He wondered how much money she’d come home with today. They needed more food in the house. He’d looked all through the fridge and hadn’t found a single thing he wanted to eat. He was definitely going to have to have a talk with her.

He yawned, stared at the set like a lumbering bear. The Feud wasn’t holding his interest. Sometimes he found it a bit hard to follow.

He was reaching for the remote when Keisha burst through the front door.

Covered in blood.

He tossed the remote onto the coffee table and swung his feet down to the floor. “What the hell?”

There was blood on her face, on her throat, all over her blouse. There was blood on her hands and arms and some on her pants, as well.

“Help me!” she screamed at him, dropping her purse to the floor, standing there like someone who’d been thrown into a pool with all their clothes on, arms sticking out to the sides, away from her body, car keys dangling from the fingers of her right hand.

He ran over, but held up when he was about a foot away, afraid to touch her, she was such a fright. Kirk hated getting his clothes all messed up. “What happened? Were you in an accident? Where you bleeding from?”

“I’m not hurt-well, I am, but the blood, the blood’s not mine.”

“Jesus, woman, who the hell’s blood-”

“Shut up! Shut up and listen to me!”

“I’m just asking, what the fuck-”

“Shut up!” she screamed, much louder this time.

He wasn’t used to letting her talk to him this way, but the circumstances seemed to dictate that he do what she said, at least for now. So he shut up.

“Get a garbage bag,” she told him. “I’m takin’ my clothes off right here and bagging them. Then get some newspapers and put them on the floor so I can get to the bathroom without leaving any blood anywhere.”

He stood there, stunned, not moving.

“A bag!” she said. “Get a goddamn bag!”

Kirk ran into the kitchen and returned with a green garbage bag with a red plastic tie threaded into the top. Keisha dropped her keys to the floor and started to unbutton her blouse. She opened it up, slid the blood-soaked sleeves down her arms and dropped the top into the bag as Kirk held it open. Blood had soaked through her blouse and stained her white bra. She reached around her back, unsnapped it, slipped the straps off her shoulders and dropped the undergarment into the bag, noticing that even now, in the midst of something horrible Kirk still had no understanding of, he still took a second to look at her tits.

She slipped off her shoes, unzipped her pants, stepped out of them, panties too. Dropped everything into the bag.

She stood there, stark naked, and said, “Hand me the bag. Get the newspaper.”

Kirk wasn’t a newspaper reader, but Keisha always maintained a subscription to the Register for leads on possible clients. There was a stack of them under the coffee table and Kirk used half a dozen to make a path over the carpeting to the bathroom.

“Baby, you gotta tell me what happened,” he said as she walked tentatively down the hall.

“I went to see that guy, whose wife disappeared last week,” she said. “The one I had you on standby for?”

Kirk nodded. “Yeah. The one on the TV with his daughter.”

“That’s right. The son of a bitch did it. He killed his wife. He thought I’d figured it out and he tried to kill me.” She was in the bathroom now, looking at herself in the mirror. “You see the marks on my neck here?” She ran her hands under the tap, tried to wipe away the blood on her throat.

“Holy shit. He tried to strangle you?”

“Yeah. He’d just about finished me off when I got hold of this knitting needle and swung it back and got him in the eye.”

Kirk winced. “In the fucking eye?”

“That made him let go of me,” Keisha said, reaching into the shower to turn on the hot and cold taps.

“Wait, what are you saying?” Kirk asked. “You left the guy with this needle sticking out of his head? Did he go to the hospital?”

“He’s dead, Kirk.”

His head snapped back. “What?”

“He’s dead. This is what you have to do. You have to get rid of my clothes. At first I was thinking, burn them out back, but the cops, I’ve seen those shows, they can find blood on burned-up clothes, I’m sure of it. So you got to take that bag and drive somewhere far away, like go to Darien or Stamford or somewhere and throw that bag into a Dumpster with a thousand other bags, just someplace where no one is ever going to find it, you got that?”

“You killed this guy?”

“Are you listening?”

She stuck her hand in the water to test the temperature. She turned up the hot tap. She was going to burn this blood off her.

“Yeah, okay, I’m listening.”

“Once you get rid of the bag, you’re going to have to wipe down the car. Like the door handles, the seat. They’re vinyl, so anything on them you should be able to get off.”

Kirk was stupefied, shaking his head, still clutching the bag in his hand.

“Kirk, are you there?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”

“You understand what you have to do?”

“Get rid of your clothes, wash the car.”

“Not just wash it. You’ve got to go all over it. Like you were getting ready to sell it. Like you were cleaning your truck.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Shit, and my purse, too. Go get my purse.”

Keisha could hear his footsteps on the newsprint. She called out to him: “If you walk on the paper, you’re going to get blood on your shoes!”

“Oh, yeah.” A pause. “They look okay!”

He returned with her purse, smeared with Wendell Garfield’s blood. She took it from him and said, “Put all the newspapers into the bag.” He gave her a look that suggested he was tired of taking orders, but went.

She dumped the contents of the purse onto the floor. It had been on the floor by the chair she’d been sitting in at the Garfield house. When she’d thrust that needle over her shoulder and caught Wendell Garfield’s eye, blood had sprayed everywhere, some of it landing in the open purse. Tissues, her wallet, lipstick, chewing gum, a small container of Tylenol-almost everything had some small trace of it.

And there was that bloody parrot earring.

She grabbed her wallet, which contained her driver’s license, cards for everything from Social Security to Visa-even a Subway sandwich card-and set it on the counter by the sink. She saw Garfield’s cash tucked into the small pouch, ran her bloody hand under the tap and fished it out. A few droplets of blood. She’d go through the bills later, see if any of them could be saved. She’d have to throw out the check, of course, with Garfield’s name and signature on it, but not now. She couldn’t trust that Kirk, if he got his hands on it, wouldn’t be dumb enough to try and cash it.

Quickly, before he returned, she tucked the money in the cabinet under the sink, behind some extra rolls of toilet paper.

Kirk returned.

“All this stuff,” she said, pointing to the items on the floor, including the tissues, lipstick and gum, “has to be thrown out.”

Kirk scooped the items off the tile floor, shoved them into the bag. “I think that’s everything.”

“I dropped my keys by the door. You’re going to have to rinse those off.”

“Yeah.” His eyes held hers. “So, just what kind of shit you getting me into here, babe? Am I, like, covering up a murder?”

“He was going to kill me if I didn’t kill him.”

“Well, I guess then, it’s cool.” He certainly wasn’t inclined to call the police. If they came and arrested Keisha, what would happen to him? Would he have to look after her kid? Would he have to go live someplace if she lost her house? If she got taken away and wasn’t making any money, how was he going to live? How would he pay for improvements to his truck?

No, turning her in was not an option.

“Kirk, you can do this, right?” she asked. “You can get rid of that bag?”

He gave her a smile, but his eyes looked dull. “Hey, I scratch your back, you scratch mine, right?”

Keisha didn’t like the sound of that, but right now, Kirk was all she had. She needed him to do these things for her, and she needed him to do them right now.

He left the bathroom. She listened until she heard him pull the front door closed. As she was about to step under the spray, it hit her, everything that had happened in the last hour, and she took two hurried steps to the toilet, lifted the lid frantically, dropped to her knees and threw up. Three good heaves.

She unrolled a couple of feet of toilet paper, dabbed her face, flushed the toilet, and allowed her body to collapse against the cold tiled wall.

I nearly died.

I killed a man.

Her breathing was quick and shallow, and she wondered whether she might pass out. Hold it together, she thought. Suck it up. Kirk would get rid of the evidence, clean the car.

She hoped to God he didn’t fuck it up. It wasn’t like she’d sent him to the store with a list of ingredients to make rocket fuel. He ought to be able to wash a car and get rid of a bag.

Slowly she pulled herself to her feet and got into the shower. The hot water felt good hitting her skin. She poured some shampoo into her hand, washed her hair, rinsed, shampooed it again. Then a third time. By the time she picked up the soap to start on her body, the blood was washed away, but that didn’t stop her from nearly scrubbing herself raw.

She stood under the water until it started to go cold. When there was no hot left, she turned off the taps, reached beyond the curtain for the towel, and dried herself off.

Out of the shower, she studied her naked body in the mirror. She thought there was a tiny spot of blood on her right shoulder, rubbed it with the towel, realized it was a mole.

She was confident she’d gotten every trace of Wendell Garfield off her.

Still naked, she gathered up the towel and bathmat and walked it down to the basement, shoved everything into the washing machine, poured in some soap, and hit the start button.

Back upstairs, she went into her room and dressed herself in fresh clothes. She found a blouse with a high collar, which she buttoned to the top to hide the bruises on her neck. Then she slowly walked the route between the front door and the bathroom, looking for any traces of blood. The newspaper seemed to have done the trick. She got some paper towel and Windex from underneath the kitchen sink and squirted the tiles inside the front door. She cleaned them three times, just to be sure, then flushed the paper towels, one at a time so as not to cause a clog, down the toilet.

Then she thought, what about when she ran from the car to the house? It was such a short distance, she was confident no one had seen her. If anyone had, they’d surely have called the police. But there might be blood out there.

She opened the door. The light snow that had fallen overnight had melted on the driveway and the path from it to the house, but everything was so wet, she didn’t think, even if some blood had somehow dripped from her clothes, that anyone would be able to find a trace of it out here.

She went back inside, picked up her wallet by the sink, and rubbed it all over with several dampened tissues. Took out her driver’s license, Social Security card. Made sure everything was clean.

Then she leaned against the bathroom counter, put her face in her hands, felt some relief slowly washing over her. She was done. So long as Kirk did as he was told, she was good.

Time for a drink.

As she entered the kitchen, the phone rang. It wasn’t a sound that normally made Keisha jump, but she nearly hit the ceiling on that first ring. She looked at the caller ID, but it came up as unknown.

No one knows. No one knows anything about what happened. Certainly not yet.

Keisha picked up. “Hello?”

“Oh, hey, Keisha? It’s Chad and-”

The health store owner in Bridgeport who needed her advice every time he met a new man. “Chad, I don’t have time today.”

“But I met this guy, he came into the store, and I think we kind of clicked, and I found out his birth date and I’m not sure we’re compatible because I’m a Virgo and-”

“Not today,” Keisha said and hung up.

She opened the fridge. She needed something strong to drink but there was nothing in there but Kirk’s bottles of Bud. That would have to do. She plunked herself down in a chair, cracked open a bottle, and took a long swig.

Never again, she told herself. Never again.

The thing was, Keisha didn’t know what other line of work she was suited for. Sales? Working in a department store? Greeting people as they came into Walmart? Didn’t you have to be a hundred to do that? Yeah, she’d cleaned houses once in a while, but even that was never entirely honest work for Keisha Ceylon. She found it hard not to take a peek into the backs of dresser drawers, in case there was something valuable stashed there, something she could help herself to that when the owner finally went to look for it, they’d have no idea when it actually went missing.

She wanted to blame her dead mother at times like this, but Keisha knew, in her heart, that she was an adult now and responsible for her choices. The good ones, like keeping Matthew and doing her best by him even when his father didn’t give a damn. And the bad ones, like getting taken in by Kirk’s charm, and now having to live with the consequences. But Jesus, her mother really was a piece of work, and Keisha felt entitled to lay at least some of the blame at her door.

The way they lived. Always moving from town to town, Marjorie surveying the local papers for obituaries to find men who’d recently lost their wives and just happening to show up on their doorstep, offering her services as a housekeeper, but not before putting on her lipstick, letting her hair fall down around her shoulders, and unbuttoning that top button on her blouse. “Your wife just died?” she’d say, with a hint of Alabama in her voice. “I had no idea I was troubling you at such a time. I’m just looking for some work to support myself and my daughter here, but I won’t trouble you a moment longer… What’s that? Why, I must confess, I wouldn’t mind a glass of lemonade.”

Marjorie’d worm her way into some lonely man’s heart just long enough to gain his trust, and access to his bank account.

And then they were off to the next town.

“Can’t we live in one place for a while?” Keisha’d ask her mom. “So I could go to school and make friends?”

The longest they stayed anywhere was when Marjorie got a job managing a rooming house in Middlebury where almost all the residents were elderly, living alone, and scraping by on their Social Security checks, out of which they paid the rent. Marjorie had been thinking of quitting-the owner, who lived down in Florida, didn’t pay her much to run the joint-but then one of the residents died in his sleep one night, and Marjorie had an epiphany. If she didn’t report poor old Garnett’s death, and got rid of his body, she could cash, and keep, his Social Security checks when they arrived each month. If she rented out the room to someone else, she could pocket the entire amount.

With Keisha’s help-the girl was now in her teens-Marjorie removed the body from the house late one night and buried it in the woods outside Middlebury. It was Keisha’s job to endorse the checks when they came-her mother, who had a very shaky hand, was very particular that the signature look just like Garnett’s, and made Keisha practice over and over again before actually signing the check.

Over the next six months, two more residents died. The scam expanded. Marjorie now had three Social Security checks coming in, plus her wage for managing the rooming house.

A pretty good living, until one day a woman dropped by, looking to reconnect with her long-lost uncle Garnett, and when she couldn’t find him, said she was heading to the police station to file a missing person report.

“Pack your bags,” Marjorie had whispered to her daughter the moment the woman left. “We’re leaving town in five minutes.”

The police never did catch up with her. When Marjorie died, of liver cancer, she’d never spent a single day in jail.

Keisha’d known it was wrong, but what was she supposed to do? Turn her mother in? Then what?

So maybe the cards were stacked against her when it came to making an honest buck, but today, well, today was one hell of a wakeup call. Surely there had to be something she could do-something legitimate-that employed her skills.

Politics, maybe.

She almost laughed. The thing was, what she’d been doing with all her variations on a theme was selling people outrageous notions. That she could help them talk to deceased relatives. That she could give them a glimpse of their future by reading the stars. That she could use her psychic gifts to help track down missing loved ones.

If she could sell people that kind of malarkey, how hard could cars be? Or insurance? Or carpeting?

Keisha told herself she could do it. She had to do it. Not for herself, but for Matthew.

She couldn’t be much of a mother from behind bars.

She had to turn over that proverbial new leaf. She had to rid herself of Kirk. But first, she had to get out of this current mess she’d gotten herself into. Then, she could start thinking about a new career. Get herself some new clothes. Less funky, more conservative. No parrot earrings. Maybe a different hairdo. A more professional look. And of course, she’d have to get some new business No. No no no no no.

She’d given him her business card. Wendell Garfield had tucked it into his shirt pocket.