Lincoln

 

There was so much blood. There was no way to clean it up. It congealed around my feet and sunk into the gaps in the tiles.I don’t know how long I just stood there, watching the blood turn black along with Norma’s lips but I didn’t walk away until the sun came up.

When I did, I walked up to the bedroom. Lying down, I stared up at the ceiling and pulled the covers up around my neck. They smelled like Etta, like what life was like only two days ago. I breathed in her scent and closed my eyes. Maybe if I breathed in hard enough she’d appear beside me.

Outside, I could hear the sound of a car pulling up outside the gates. For some reason, I imagined it was Pinstripe’s guys. I’d waited for someone to come and find me, come and interrogate me about his death but no one had arrived. Clearly they bought my story about a heart attack.

The memory of the basement came back to me now, the smell of fear and shit and the sound of the girls whimpering. I pulled the covers up over my face to block it out. It wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t go around saving everyone. No matter how much I tried, they always died anyway.

The car outside shuddered to a halt and there was the sound of the door slamming followed by quick footsteps. A moment later, the gate was squeaking open and the footsteps meandered slowly around to the pool. It wouldn’t be long until whoever it was found what was laying there.

“What the fuck?” came a familiar voice through the window. “Norma? Norma! Fuck!”

“Berger?”

With the covers still around me, I scurried over to the window and looked down. He was bent down by her body with his head in his hands. Sensing he was being stared at, he looked up and gesticulated wildly.

“Bosworth, you did this?”

“Slit her wrists? No, why would I do that?”

He stared at me for a long while, his arms still waving around in disbelief.

“Get down here, Bosworth.”

I dropped my covers to the floor and sighed.

“Be right there.”

He was still standing beside Norma when I greeted him with a bottle of vodka. He didn’t bother taking the glass, preferring to swallow a stomach full from the bottle.

“What are you doing back here?”

“Hey, nice to see you too.”

He continued to look into Norma’s face. I noticed his hands were shaking.

“Where’s Etta?” he asked.

“She’s doing some work in the lab.”

I don’t know why I said that. It just felt so natural to protect him from the truth.

“The lab?”

“I built a lab.”

“Jesus, Bosworth. What the hell’s been going on down here?”

“A lot.”

“Evidently.”

He sat on the nearby sun lounger and I took the one beside him. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was just two buddies having a drink in the sun, if it wasn’t for the body beside us.

“When did that happen?” he asked, pointing the bottle over toward Norma.

Being a hardened cop, the concept of corpses wasn’t unknown to him and now he seemed to be reverting to a classic policeman’s line of questioning.

“Last night.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

“In the basement.In the lab.”

“And Etta?”

“With me.”

“Did she say anything significant to you before she took her own life?”

I shook my head.

“She’d just had a drink. Popped some pills.”

“Pills?”

“Valium.”

“Where’d she get them?”

“Me.”

I threw the now empty bottle of vodka into the pool and watched it bounce across the surface of the water where the chlorine had mixed with Norma’s blood.

“So you came back,” I said. “You must have really missed me.”

He laughed, albeit caustically.

“You know, Bosworth, I kinda did.”

He lit a cigarette and reclined back in his seat. His face was unshaven and red and blotchy. His exhausted eyes were lined with new lines and his lips were chapped. Still, he kinda looked like the quintessential handsome, bad-boy, anti-hero.

“Miranda know you’re here?”

“Nope,” he said, blowing a smoke ring up toward the sun.

“Didn’t work out, huh?”

“Nope.”

He blew another smoke ring and looked over toward Norma.

“How’s Etta coping?” he asked.

“Eh?”

“With…”

“She’s fine.”

“Fine?”

“Well, not fine. She just, erm, needs some time alone.”

He could tell there were lies in my eyes but he couldn’t figure out why.

“Hmmm…”

He jumped back off his seat and crouched down beside Norma. There were flies gathering around her mouth and she was starting to smell bad. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care about it at all. My brain was frozen, my body as absent as my feelings. There was nothing in me by a pure kind of numbness that most people spend their lives trying to achieve. I wondered if I’d reached a state of Nirvana.

“How can you just sit there?” asked Berger.

I shrugged.

“I’ve seen it all.”

“She’s your fucking mother-in-law. Are you not going to call someone? Are you just going to leave her here?”

I shrugged again.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?”

He stood back up and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I’ve just dumped my girlfriend,” he muttered under his breath. “Driven thousands of miles and fucked up my life and now there’s this body. This fucking body. How could things get any worse?”

I knew how they could get worse. He could see what was beneath the sheet in the basement. He could see the hole in Etta’s head.

“Calm down, Berger. You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

He looked at me and shook his head.

“You’ve lost your fucking mind, Bosworth. You’re insane.”

“I think I lost my mind a long time ago,” I said. “Maybe I’m just coming to realize that.”

He tugged at his hair and let out a noise that could only be interpreted as a guttural growl of frustration.

“Shovel,” he said.

“What?”

“Get me a goddamn shovel.”

I nodded toward the outhouse at the far end of the pool and he took off, peeling off his leather jacket and dumping it on the ground where it spattered sweat onto the tiles.

“Actual fucking lunatic,” I heard him mumble. “Crazy motherfucker…”