The Dead Caller from Chicago

Twenty

The sky was dark, and clouds obscured the moon. Nothing moved in Leo’s neighborhood, yet I was sure I felt a hundred pairs of knowing eyes watching as I parked around the block from the empty bungalow where the dead man lay.

I dropped the shovel I’d brought next to the excavation and hurried up the steps of the vacant bungalow. Now hidden in the shadows of the front porch, I chanced a look at the dig next door. The wall forms still lay piled outside the hole, but the cement footings had been poured, and gravel had been roughly spread between them. All that remained was to pour the basement walls, and then the basement floor. With luck, it would all be done within a week.

All I had to do was make sure the dead man was a part of all that.

I went inside. The air still stank of the gunpowder from Leo’s revolver.

The dead man facing the wall was huge. He wore a leather jacket, dark jeans, and black sneakers.

I bent down. His was the face I’d seen by the ticket shack in Mackinaw City, the last face Arnie Pine had seen before he crashed his boat onto the rocks on Eustace Island.

I patted his pockets and found a penlight clipped on a key ring containing an electronic remote and a single car key. He carried no cell phone and no wallet. That was no surprise. The man was a professional killer.

I patted him down again, to be sure. He had no gun. I swept the beam of his penlight low across the floor, thinking it must have fallen out of his hand when Leo shot him. I saw nothing. There was no gun.

There was no more time, either. I jammed the key ring into my pocket, grabbed the man under his arms so I wouldn’t smear blood from his chest or his back on the floor, and began dragging him toward the front door. He was every bit as heavy as he looked, two hundred and fifty pounds at least.

I tugged him over the threshold and paused to look up and down the block. No lights were on, but here and there a glint came off a car parked along the street. The sky had lightened. A sliver of bright moon was peeking out from the clouds.

I went backward, pulling him behind me, and dropped him.

I was exposed now, out in the faint moonlight, and had to get him out of there fast. I grabbed his ankles, turned him around, and tugged. Air banged out of him as his back and head hit each step, gasps from a dead man.

At the bottom, someone started humming the heavy bass line of an old Bob Seger tune, Night Moves. I wanted to giggle. It was me.

I dragged him to the edge of the excavation, switched ends, and pushed at his shoulders until he tipped over the edge. He hit bottom with a horrible grunt. I grabbed the shovel, rolled onto my belly, and dropped into the hole.

Something moved on the gravel. I froze, unable to breathe until I realized it was my shadow. A bigger piece of the moon had slipped out of the clouds and was lighting the whole excavation with milky blue light. The good darkness was gone.

I bumped him over the low concrete footings to the center of the excavation and ran back for the shovel. After scooping away the surface gravel, I began digging like a crazy man. I had to go down four or five feet.

At two feet I hit hard clay, rock solid and frozen. Furious, panicked, I stabbed the shovel harder at the frozen ground. It was no use. Only tiny bits broke free.

The gravel around my shadow was getting whiter. The moon was now half free.

I dropped to my knees. Raising the shovel high over my head, I brought it down with all the force I could muster. Over and over, I attacked the frozen ground. Again and again, the shovel fell from my bloody hands, unable to cut in at all.

“Hey?” someone yelled. A house door slammed across the street.

I found a foothold in the dirt and pushed up just enough to see. A man was walking toward the street, a dark shadow in the moonlight. He was looking at the excavation. I held my breath. If he came over, he’d see the corpse lying uncovered in the moonlight.

“Hey?” he called again.

He’d stopped by a car. A minute passed, and then, satisfied he was alone in the night, he opened the car door and set a rectangular lunchbox inside.

He was so close I was sure he could hear me breathe.

He looked over at the excavation a last, long moment and then got in and pulled the door closed. A second later, he drove away.

My arms were shaking too badly from nerves and pain to strike at the earth anymore. I pulled the big hulking man into the shallow grave, spaded him over with frozen clay, and covered it all with gravel.

The moon was now as bright as an examining lamp. There was a slight mound where the dead man lay, but it cast no shadow. I could only hope the cement men wouldn’t think to work at leveling the gravel further.

I threw the shovel out of the hole, scrambled out after it, and shuffled across the snow to the abandoned bungalow. I’d never be able to get rid of the holes in the wall, or the splatter, but obliterating the drag marks might buy enough time to get the body cemented over without anyone thinking to inspect the inside of the bungalow.

I scooped up Leo’s clothes from the back bedroom, snatched up the shovel, and ran around the block to the Jeep. Five minutes later, I was back at the turret.

Leo still slept, in spite of the uncomfortable way I’d bound him. I cut away the tape and undid the rope. I left him in his coats. I was too tired to do anything else.

I left myself in my own coats as well and lay down in front of the stairs. He’d wake me if he tried to leave the turret.

In the brief seconds before I crashed into sleep, I supposed I’d been as cunning as I could be, in trying to hide a corpse in frozen ground.