An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) (19 page)

     He swept around the dead man, wondering how long it would take him to thaw, and how hard it would be to lay Mikey out flat enough to bury him.

    “I hope you’re not stuck in that position forever, my friend. It would make burying you a lot harder.”

     Burying Mikey was obviously something he’d have to take care of before he set out on his journey to find his family. But he also knew it would delay him. He’d either have to wait until the ground thawed enough to dig a grave before he left, or find another means of disposing of the body.

     For reasons he couldn’t comprehend, he just couldn’t drag the body to the street or to another house to rot when warm weather returned. He didn’t know if his refusal was because of the good Christian values instilled in him as a boy. Or more probably the guilt he still felt for shooting the young man. Perhaps it was because he himself wouldn’t have wanted to be abandoned if the situation was reversed.

     “Of course,” he scolded Mikey as he finished his sweeping, “
I
wouldn’t have been shot while breaking into somebody else’s house.”

     Then he thought about his words and saw the folly in them. The truth was, if he and Sarah had been like most of the rest of the world and not prepared for a disaster, they’d have been in the same desperate situation all the others shared. And under those circumstances, he damn sure would be out there foraging for food and water to provide for his family.

     What puzzled Dave was that Mikey wasn’t stealing food. He was stealing valuables. Dave couldn’t understand why, in such a desperate world, anyone would place more value on gold and silver than on life-sustaining food.

     The only reason he could imagine was plausible, but way off the mark. Dave decided that he was bartering the gold and silver for food for himself and his family. Perhaps with a gang of thugs who had taken over a Sam’s Club or a Walmart.

     In the end, Dave decided, he didn’t blame Mikey for breaking in and stealing their things. Under different circumstances, he might well have resorted to the same desperate measures.

     No, the only thing he blamed Mikey for was his carelessness.

     “You should have made sure the house was empty before you started rifling through it, Mikey. There are probably thousands of houses out there with dead bodies inside of them, where the owners no longer cared what you took from them. You should have found those houses.

     “Instead, despite all the effort I went through to keep people out of here, you chose mine. You paid a heavy price for your carelessness, my friend.”

     Thinking of Mikey’s mission the night he was killed reminded him that he’d never removed his and Sarah’s belongings from Mikey’s backpack. He’d rifled through the pack the morning after he shot the man, and seen Sarah’s jewelry inside it. But he was so distraught at the time that he’d left it there.

     He took the backpack from where it lay beside Mikey’s body and dumped its contents on the dining room table.

     Some items he recognized as Sarah’s. Some he didn’t. There was a man’s watch he knew never belonged to him, so Dave knew Mikey had visited at least one other house on the night he was shot.

     It would have been easy to keep everything, but that would be somehow wrong. He’d remove the items he knew had belonged to him and his wife. And he’d bury the rest with Mikey. He died collecting the items. He might as well have something to show for it. Not that they’d do him much good where he was going.

-36-

     Dave was puzzled, and at the same time intrigued.

     Was his wife a secret drug dealer, who led a second life he never knew about?

     Here before him, still sealed because he was afraid to open it, was a packet that looked just like the ones they used to show on the evening news, every time they had a major drug bust at the Texas border with Mexico.

     Wrapped tightly in several layers of translucent plastic, it was roughly the size and shape of a brick. He seemed to recall that’s what they always called the bundles of drugs they confiscated from the drug dealers.

     He lifted it in his hand and tried to estimate its weight. A couple of pounds, maybe a little bit more.

     Like maybe 2.2 pounds? A kilo?

     Was he holding in his hands a kilo of cocaine from Colombia or one of those other God-forsaken countries down there in South America who transported their illicit goods north to the United States?

     His mind went wild, conjuring up images of his sweet and gentle wife toting a machine gun, slicing off the heads of rival cartel members. Perhaps laughing to her friends about her gullible gringo husband back in the states who knew nothing of her real profession. Who believed she was a church-going school teacher and mother who winced when she had to swat a fly and made Dave remove the fly’s carcass because she was too squeamish to deal with it.

     Was his whole marriage a scam? A lie, perpetrated by a vicious woman who just needed a front to hide her activities?

     Then he laughed at his stupidity. Whatever this was, it wasn’t cocaine. That just wasn’t his Sarah.

     Still, it looked just like the ones on the television. Even had some numbers written on it in black marker. Just like the ones on the news.

     He’d taken Sarah’s jewelry upstairs to the master bedroom to put it away.

     He almost put it in her jewelry box, but stopped. What if there were more Mikeys out there? What if someone else would have the nerve to just walk into his home at some point in the future and try to take this stuff again?

     He needed to find someplace where a looter would never check.

     Like the back of Sarah’s lingerie drawer. No self respecting looter would ever think to look in such a place for jewelry.

     He opened the drawer and took out one of Sarah’s nightgowns. It was the one she’d left on the bed the day she got on that plane. He’d taken it a few days later, folded it and placed it in the drawer. He held it to his face. It still smelled like her.

     He could have gotten lost in the moment, but he was running out of daylight and he wanted to get this finished.

     One by one he took Sarah’s “toys” out of the drawer and examined them. Most he knew about, of course, but there were a couple of them he’d never seen before.

     Of course, a woman who led a double life and was really a murdering drug kingpin was bound to have other secrets as well. So he didn’t dwell on it much.

     Until he picked up the last one. The last one made him scratch his head. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was intended to do. He’d never seen anything like it before. It was just… bizarre. He made a mental note to ask Sarah to show him what it did after he brought her home.

     As he placed her jewelry and other things back into the drawer, it dawned on him that there was way too much light coming into the room. It took him a moment to figure out why, and then he realized that the blinds had been opened all the way.

     He exclaimed aloud, “Damn it, Mikey, you son of a bitch.”

     In the early days of the blackout, Dave had taken great pains to make his house appear to be vacant. He emptied the front room downstairs of every stick of furniture and took everything off the walls. He raised the blinds all the way up, to encourage looters and bandits to peek inside and see that no one lived there.

     In all the other rooms, he closed the blinds. It was that way in most vacant houses in the neighborhood. Sarah told him that realtors preferred it that way when they showed the homes to prospective buyers. Something about artificial light not showing dust and carpet stains as well as direct sunlight. He couldn’t remember exactly.

     He was upset to see that Mikey had opened the blinds the night he stole Sarah’s jewelry. Obviously to allow more moonlight into the room.

     That had been weeks before.

     Dave was conflicted. Had any of the neighbors noticed the difference? Had any other looters? Would he do more harm than good by closing them now? If he did, he’d give passersby or the neighbors something else to notice. If one of them had seen the blinds open the day before and then closed the next day, they’d know someone secretly lived here.

     In the end, he decided to leave them alone. The windows were far enough away from the bed and dresser to prevent anyone from seeing him as he walked around the room. At least as long as he remembered not to go near the windows.

     The safe room was downstairs and on the other end of the house, so there was no chance the light from the safe room would be visible through these windows at night.

     In the end, it was best just to leave it the way it was.

     He found the brick of cocaine as he hid Sarah’s jewelry beneath her lingerie, and took it and the nightgown downstairs. He put the brick on the kitchen counter. He’d check it in a minute.

     First, though, he took Sarah’s nightgown, the one that still held the faint scent of her perfume, and took it into his safe room. He placed it over his pillow as though it were a pillowcase.

     He didn’t know how long Sarah’s sweet scent would remain on the nightgown, but he liked the idea of savoring the smell as he lay down his head every night to sleep.

     That done, he returned to the kitchen and took a small filet knife from the utensil drawer.

     He wanted to find out if the brick was really cocaine.

     He held his breath and sliced open one end of the brick.

     Then he laughed out loud.

-37-

     Hi Sarah.

     Do you remember when we used to put the girls to bed, and then snuggle together in our own bed?

     Well, sometimes we didn’t snuggle, we did other stuff. More about that in a minute.

     But anyway, we used to snuggle and talk and watch old TV shows until we got drowsy, remember?

     One of our favorite things to watch were the old black and white
I Love Lucy
shows. We always laughed at the trouble Lucy got into, and I always told you she reminded me of you.

     Do you remember when Ricky would walk into their apartment and call her, and she’d come out of the kitchen with a guilty look on her face?

     He always said, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

     Well, my dear Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.

     Last night I was in our bedroom, trying to find a good place to hide the jewelry that Mikey had taken, so that someone else didn’t take it again. I decided to hide it in the drawer where you keep your “dainties,” as you call them.

     Anyway, I found what appeared to be a brick of cocaine tucked in the back of the drawer under your nightgowns and stuff.

     Maybe I’ve been drinking too much nasty and stale coffee lately and my brain was working overtime. Or maybe I’m just going nuts. I don’t know. But I started imagining all kinds of things about you leading a double life, and having a secret identity that I knew nothing about.

     I thought maybe you were secretly a Mexican drug lord, running a big cartel or something.

     I know, I know, you’re not Mexican and can’t speak a word of Spanish. But when my imagination runs away with me, it doesn’t stop to pack things like logic or common sense. It tells me to leave the suitcases behind, get in the car and we go.

     So, I was imagining that you were rich and powerful and had secret villas all over the world and now that I knew your secret you were going to have me killed and have my body parts spread out all over the desert for the coyotes to munch on.

     I imagined that you had a Latin lover named Juan and another named Carlos, and I even looked at the pictures of Lindsey and Beth to make sure their eyes were blue instead of brown.

     Then I stuck a knife into your brick of cocaine. I figured that if you were going to kill me anyway, I might as well die of an overdose. At least I’d die with a smile on my face.

     I have to say I was more than a little relieved when it wasn’t cocaine that poured out onto the counter, but rather coffee beans.

     I’ll have you know, Lucy, that I’ve been looking for those beans for months. I wanted to find them when I planted everything in the spring. I looked in every nook and cranny in the house (or so I thought), and never found them.