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Brad Junior smiles as he gets out of his truck the moment we pull up beside him. Joanne practically jumps out of the new Jeep to greet him.
“Sorry we’re late, honey,” she says. “Remind me to give you a new key to the place now that we’ve had the locks changed.”
She kisses Brad on the cheek. He’s still wearing his green scrubs and crocs for shoes. His beard is black and thick, like his hair. His eyes are bloodshot, and he’s a little pale, like he hasn’t slept in two days. My guess is he hasn’t.
“Holy crap, dad,” he says. “Did you win the lottery or something? Where’d you get the Jeep?”
Before I can get my answer out, he takes a moment to look his mother and me over, not like he’s looking at his parents, but instead, two of his patients.
“And is it me? But are you guys actually getting younger? Mom, you look as good as I’ve ever seen you.”
“I’ve been working out with a personal trainer,” she says, a broad grin covering her face. “So is your father. We haven’t said anything about it until now, because we didn’t know if we’d stick with it. Turns out we’re addicted to our workouts.”
“Dad...working out and with a personal trainer?” Brad says, eyes wide, seemingly shocked. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Dad, but I always assumed your workouts consisted of walks to the refrigerator to grab a beer.”
I offer up a fake laugh.
“A man can change his stripes in his middle years,” I say. “You should know that as a medical doctor.”
That’s when Joanne tells our son not only about my retirement from the postal service a while back, but our having bought into a funeral home business plus a casket company. He pats me on the back.
“A funeral home and casket company,” he says not without a laugh. “Holy smokes, you guys have made some changes. Nice of you to let me in on this stuff. What do you know about the funeral business?”
“We don’t have to know anything,” I say. “It’s an investment we made with Sean MacDonald. It all just sort of fell into our laps, so to speak.”
“And honey,” Joanne says, “for the first time ever, we’re making ourselves a little money.”
“Fantastic,” Brad Junior says. “I’m really happy for you guys.”
“Let’s all head inside and have a drink while I cook,” Joanne says.
“I know I could go for a cold one,” Brad Junior says.
Joanne heads to the front door and disappears inside.
“Uh, Dad, before we head into the house...” he says, hesitatingly.
Naturally, I know what’s coming.
“...I might need a few bucks again,” he goes on while clenching his teeth, squinting his eyes and furrowing his brow, as if he thoroughly expects an incoming barrage of artillery. “Rents due, student loan is due, utilities are due...”
“How’s your girl?” I say.
His expression changes to one of surprise.
“Huh?” he says as if genuinely shocked I’m not jumping down his throat about asking for more money.
“Yeah, you mentioned a while ago that you were seeing someone. How is she? You still together?”
He smiles, not because I’m asking, but because I can tell he’s picturing his new girlfriend in his head. In my own brain I picture a stunning young blonde, or is she a brunette? Maybe she has auburn hair.
“She’s great. I’ve been seeing her for almost three months now.”
It’s then I realize I’ve only seen my son in passing in all that time. To give him a little cash and that’s about it.
I pat his shoulder. “Good for you, Junior. What’s her name?”
“Jill,” he says. “Jill Older.”
“Well, you make sure to tell Jill Older she’s always welcome to have dinner with us anytime,” I say, removing my hand. “And don’t worry. I’ll take care of you before you leave tonight. It will be our secret.”
“Jeeze, dad,” he says. “Is this really you?”
“Why do you say that?” I laugh.
“Well look at you. New body, new clothes. Cool clothes actually. That mailman outfit was getting old. New Jeep. New outlook on life. Retirement and your new business seems to agree with you.”
Glad someone thinks so...
“Come on,” I say, “let’s go grab a beer. That is, unless you’re on call.”
“I’m off for forty-eight glorious hours,” he says.
“Awesome,” I say. “Let’s get drunk.”
As he’s headed inside, I catch sight of a car moving very slow on our neighborhood street. It’s an unmarked police cruiser. When it goes to pass our house, it stops. The driver leans over the center console to get a better look.
Detective David Danish.
Back inside, Brad takes a seat in the family room on the couch that faces the wall-mounted television. It’s tuned to the Spectrum 24-Hour News, as always. When I head into the kitchen, I can see that Joanne has already started on boiling a big pot of water for the pasta. She’s also started on a salad. She’s got her smartphone pressed up against her ear, and when she spots me, she seems startled.
“I’ve got to go,” she says somewhat under her breath.
She abruptly hangs up on whoever she was speaking to and tries to paint a smile on her face.
“What is it, darling?” she asks.
“Who was that?”
“Oh, just one of those annoying spam calls, darling,” she lies. She goes to the refrigerator, opens the door, pulls out two Budweiser cans, and hands them to me. “Now go have a beer with your son and catch up already. We’ve hardly seen him at all in weeks and weeks.”
Do I tell her about Detective Danish scoping out our house? Or do I keep my mouth shut until later after Brad has gone home? One thing is for sure, the events of the day are coming back to haunt me. Everything seems so normal right now, it’s like the events never even happened. Who knows, maybe I’m in shock. I killed a man. We killed a man. Mere moments later, I find myself buying a new Jeep for full price, like it’s just another day for a man who is suddenly rich as hell and willing to flaunt it when I should be laying low with the purchases. After all, Sean warned us.
Fuck Sean...
You see, for all the money we’ve made thus far, for all the nice improvements to the house, for all the improvements to our physical health, for all the hope we now have for a future without money worries, I wish we never got Sean involved in all this. Or maybe I should say, I wish we never got involved with Sean. I wish we went straight to the police after Joanne killed the Perez brothers in what was clearly an act of self-defense.
The brothers worked for a Mexican drug cartel. They were dangerous gangsters, no doubt with rap sheets a mile long. Who knows how many women they raped, how many men they killed. The police and a court of law would have understood what Joanne had to do to protect her own life. A jury would have seen things this way: by getting rid of the Perez brothers, she had done our city, and society in general, a great favor.
Instead, we did not go to the police. We got rid of the bodies, buried what was left of them in the basement, took the drugs and the money, and created a cash monster of our own. We also became killers. We killed Mark, the Little’s Lake caretaker, and his wife. We killed Martin. In the final analysis, we didn’t get rid of the Perez brothers, so much as we became the Perez brothers.
I bring the beers into the living room, hand one to my son.
“I could sure use this,” he says, popping the tab and taking a long satisfying sip.
I pop mine and also take a deep drink. Deeper than I should, because Brad Junior gives me a look.
“Jeeze, pops,” he says. “You downed half the beer in one gulp.”
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I issue a small belch and grin. “I guess I better slow down.”
Then, on the TV, a face that has become far too familiar to me. Detective David Danish. I just saw him cruising around outside our house, so this must have been taped earlier. But not that much earlier because he’s being interviewed at the New Karner Postal Distribution Center, outside the shattered front glass door.
“...Based on trace physical evidence uncovered at the scene of the victim’s murder,” he says into several reporter’s microphones and smartphones, “we now believe there could exist a direct relationship between it and the murders of Mark and Melanie Camp.”
My stomach sinks to the floor, and I chug the rest of my beer. No wonder Danish is scoping our house. Maybe the time has come to run away. But then, if we run away, that would make us look guilty as hell. So long as we stay put, we maintain our...what do Sean and Joanne call it...plausible deniability.
“How can you be sure, Detective?” one of the reporters blurts out.
“This is not the time or place to discuss it,” he says.
He thanks the reporters and the video switches back to the attractive young black female journalist who has been covering the Camp’s Little’s Lake murders, plus the Perez brother’s killings.
“The plot thickens tonight while we now not only have three unsolved murders involving seemingly innocent people, but we can add to that the two unsolved killings of the Perez brothers who, along with their alleged attachment to a dangerous drug cartel, has the entire city on edge.”
She signs off and the report switches to a story about an inner-city school lockdown due to a gas main leak. Gabbing the clicker, I shut off the TV.
“Hope you don’t mind, kid,” I say. “Sometime the news depresses me.”
He just looks at me with wide eyes, like he knows for sure, something else is bothering me besides the news.
“Look,” I say, “how’s your beer? I’m gonna grab another. And also something stronger if you want some too.”
“Something stronger?”
“I have Irish whiskey,” I say, crossing over the dining room and then into the kitchen where Joanne is pouring cooked pasta from the pot into the colander in the sink.
“Dinner in five,” she says Betty Crocker politely. “Maybe you can open the wine, Bradley.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, grabbing two more beers.
Heading back out of the kitchen, I head back down into the family room, set a fresh beer on the coffee table directly beside the one my son already has going.
“You trying to get me drunk, dad?” he says.
“Why not?” I say. “It’s your night off.”
Heading back into the dining room where we keep the bar, I open the wine to let it breathe. Then, I pour myself a whisky and drink it down in one gulp. I pour another shot and drink that one too.
Brad spots me from the family room steps. “Holy crap, dad. Drink much lately?”
The whiskey is already going to work on my nerves.
“Sorry, kid,” I say. “It’s a habit Sean and I picked up lately.”
It’s a lie, but what the hell. After what we’ve done since late summer, a little lie about my whiskey habit is tiny potatoes.
“Anything I should worry about?” he adds.
“Not at all, Doctor,” I say. “I won’t have any more than that. It’s just a special occasion thing.”
“You had me worried there for a second,” he says again, sounding not like my son but my personal physician.
That’s when my wife comes into the dining room holding a huge bowl of spaghetti and meatballs in colorful heat mitt-covered hands.
“Who’s hungry?!” she barks.
Definitely not me...
We all sit down at the dining room table, like a normal, happy family.
“So then,” Joanne says, “who would like to say grace?”
“I will,” I say. Lowering our heads. “Dear God, may you forgive our horrible, inhumane sins, and save our wretched, damned souls when we die. Amen.”
Heads raised back up, my wife and my son just stare at me for a few beats like, What the hell has gotten into dad?
Until Joanne breaks the silence by saying, “Oh, I almost forgot the garlic bread. I hope I didn’t burn it.”
Like I said a long time ago, Joanne has been getting forgetful lately.