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In fact, I retrace my apartment complex route, tearing every FBI Wanted poster from the vestibule bulletin boards. I shove them all inside one of the empty mail bins, shove it onto the floor beside the driver’s seat, and drive away knowing that Tom will probably want to get another look at the poster after his nap and it will have mysteriously disappeared. What if he thinks I’m the one who pulled it down? He’d be right, of course. But if he thinks I did it, maybe he will start to believe I’m not the mild-mannered, deliver-his-mail-on-time everyday guy he thought I was. Maybe he’ll think I’m some sort of serial killer.
As I drive, I decide I can’t worry too much about things I can’t possibly control. My morning route is finished. Normally at this time, I head to Jack’s Diner on Central Avenue across from the police station for some eggs, toast, and coffee. I normally wouldn’t admit this, but it sort of gives me a rush to wear my post office uniform besides all those cops dressed in their dark blue uniforms. Makes me feel like I’m one of them, I guess, minus the gun. But I’m not sure being close to the police is a good idea at this point if the FBI has gotten involved and are presently spreading mine and my wife’s likeness all over the city and the suburbs.
I know it’s a cliché for a criminal to always return to the scene of a crime, but there’s something inside me that’s pulling me back to the spot where Joanne killed the Perez brothers. It’s not far from the apartment complex. Only about a mile away. But before I get there, I pull out my phone, speed-dial Joanne. She answers after the second ring.
“What is it, Bradley?” she says, annoyed. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“The fucking FBI has gotten involved, Joanne!” I bark.
“Stop yelling at me and calm down,” she says.
Her voice is partially drowned out by the annoying sounds of a construction crew going to town on the new bathroom. Electric saws, hammers, and loud, deep, manly voices fill the airwaves.
“Wanted posters are posted everywhere, Jo,” I go on. “They were tacked to every bulletin board at the Dutch Village Apartment complex down the road from where you killed the Perez brothers.”
I sense the hesitation in her voice. I also hear more of the construction work.
“Bradley,” she says, “once and for all, I did not kill the Perez brothers. Hector’s death was an accident and as for Julio, that was a case of self-defense.”
The mail truck is approaching the wooded Little’s Lake property and the roadside spot where the killings...errr accident and self-defense...took place. I pull off the road and park a few yards down from the exact site. To any passer’s by, I’m just a mailman using my cell phone, safely and according to the law.
I throw the truck in park, let the engine run.
“Yeah, but the FBI,” I say. “They play for keeps. They will get to the bottom of things, Joanne, and we will go to prison for like, forever.”
“They will never know it’s us, Bradley,” she says. “They don’t have enough information to go on.”
“You should see the computerized likenesses printed on the posters!” I shout, while reaching down with my free hand, grabbing one of the ones I pulled down from the apartment bulletin board. I stare at both of our faces. “They look just like us. Shit, even old Tom in Building twelve recognized me.”
I hear her exhale loudly over the phone. I also hear the saw again.
“What do you mean he recognized you, Brad?” she asks. “How is that even possible?”
“He said if he didn’t know me, he’d believe I was the killer. And his eyesight can’t be all that great at ninety-whatever years old. That’s how much the renderings look like me...like us.”
She hesitates again, like she’s thinking things through on a more logical level, as opposed to my more emotional level. I listen to the sounds of the construction crew. Soon they will be starting on the basement renovation too.
“Plausible deniability,” she says after a time.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Jo?”
“It means if someone accuses you or me of being the people in the wanted poster, we just laugh in their faces. Until last week, we were just your average lower middle class boring suburbanites waiting out our days until we could collect social security and maybe visit Florida for a few weeks in the winter. That is, we save our pennies.”
“And this week we’re drug runners and money launderers,” I interject. “We’re about to open up a casket and a funeral home business that’s attached to a Russian gangster named Carcov—a man who wants to do business with the big brother of the two cartel gangsters you killed.”
“Will you stop it already with the killer thing, Bradley? You’re giving me the creeps. We’re still Catholics and I still plan on going to heaven when the time comes. What happened to those gangsters was not mine or your fault. They had it coming plain and simple. And besides...”
Her voice trails off.
“Besides what, Jo?” I ask, my eye on the very spot where she ran over Hector Perez, practically cutting him in half.
“The Perez brothers were gangsters...gangbangers. Who knows how many women they’ve raped, how many men they’ve killed. They were going to rape me, Bradley. At least that’s what Hector was threatening me with. Rape by he and his brother. And you know what they would have done when it was over?”
My stomach does a sickening flip when she talks about the threat of rape from likes of the Perez brothers.
“I’m not sure I want to hear it, Jo.”
“They would have put a bullet in my brain and dumped me in a ditch like common trash. Because that’s what men like them are all about. They are animals through and through.”
“Well, when you put it like that...”
“Yup, we’re still on track for heaven’s gates, Bradley. We did God’s work when we killed and disposed of the Perez brothers. Don’t ever forget that.”
“What about selling the drugs? That’s not God’s work.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Brad, lighten up, will you? It’s a free-market economy last I heard and there’s a market for our product, so why not make a little money in our middle-age? If people choose to do drugs that’s their business. It’s not like we’re force feeding them.”
She has a point. As usual, Joanne makes everything seem logical and even optimistic. I could use a dose of optimism right about now. More sounds of construction coming from the background.
“Listen, Brad,” Joanne says, “I’ve got to go. I promised the guys I’d head out to the Dunkin Donut for coffee and donuts. It’s breaktime and it’s my treat.”
“Sure,” I say, feeling a bit dejected. “See you at supper.”
“I’ll have a cold one waiting for you.”
“Don’t let Sean drink it on me.”
“I’ll try not to, dear,” she says, cutting the connection.