The Fairlane had sunk, and the battered grille of the Zäh stuck out of the muddy water defiantly. Brody and Thorp stood on the banks of the cranberry bog, Thorp saddled atop Maribel. Thorp had offered to allow Brody to ride Carol, but he had never ridden a horse in his life and thought it wasn’t exactly the appropriate time to learn.
“We have to get out there,” Thorp said.
“How deep does the bog go?” Brody asked.
“Four feet mostly, but it gets up to about eight out there in the middle.” Swinging his leg up and over, he dropped off the horse and guided her to the water’s edge. “We can’t have the car sticking out of the water. It’s obvious they put them here to drop the dime on us. When the cops show up, if the vehicles are hidden at least it’ll buy us some time while they’re looking.”
Thorp threw Maribel’s reins on a leafless branch of a shrub and waded into the water. He took in a quick gasp through his teeth once the water had spilled in over the top of his boots.
“Get out of the water,” Brody said, hands in pockets.
“What?”
“Get out of the water,” Brody repeated, harsher.
Here and there a sheet of ice had developed, forsaken, shriveled cranberries suspended within. Even with the sonar, the water was clearly cold—it didn’t move like the lakes and rivers of Minnesota when it was warm. The wind passed over the bog’s surface and the water didn’t move freely; it moved as if in slow motion. It was on the edge of freezing over, a mere half-degree change from crystallizing.
“It’s not worth it,” Brody said. “Let them call it in. Let the cops show up.”
Thorp stepped out of the water, groaning with his numbed feet, his pant legs darkened halfway to his knees. “Okay, so who is it that needs the pep talk, me or you?”
“I’m most likely going to prison. And you said yourself that you can’t even make a cop arrest you. You couldn’t do any time if you asked. So, fuck it.”
“Fuck it?”
Brody waved his hand at the leering, broken mouth of the Zäh. “I’m not going to waste my time with this. They want to plant evidence on us, let them. Let them fucking rain down a hundred dead cars on us. We’re going to start working on that Darter tonight.” He walked away.
Thorp untangled Maribel’s reins from the shrub and guided her along, following Brody up the dirt path.
“I’m glad you have the fire going in you and everything, but I don’t think it’s the dead cars they wanted in the bog.”
“We both know what happened to them happened because it had to,” Thorp said. “But we have to think about what happens after all this. What if Hark is planning to report us to the cops?”
“There’re no tracks,” Brody shouted. “They dropped the cars out of the fucking sky. It’ll be inadmissible in court, not even evidence. How did we get them out here? Neither of us even owns a car. They can try to incriminate us all they want; we can get around this one no problem. It’ll take time, but what they did here tonight is just plain sloppy. You got money. We can get a decent lawyer.”
“I had money coming in, but that’s a thing of the past now. And we don’t have time to go to court for this. Tomorrow will make it twenty-five days that Nectar has been missing.”
Brody sighed, launching a burst of steam into the air. “If Hark calls it in, if the cops show up and start poking around, it looks bad; that’s for sure. But there won’t be enough linking us to them. They’ll see that there wasn’t time for us to get the vehicles from the field down here, and with no tracks, yeah, their trying to get one over on us is completely shot full of holes.”
“My gun,” Thorp said. “The one Seb took from me at the field.”
At that, Brody’s stride halted.
Brody groaned. “Your goddamn Franklin.”
“Afraid so.” Thorp nodded. “I’ll get a saddle on Maribel, and maybe together the horses can pull the cars out and—wait, what are you doing?”
Brody threw his coat aside, stomped down to the edge of the bog, and kicked off one boot, then the other. He tossed Thorp his phone, wallet, and lighter. He pressed his thumb against the sonar to make sure it was going to stay stuck. He splashed only three steps out into the water before the temperature hit him. His steps became slower. Each time his socked feet landed on half-frozen mud at the bottom, it was like his soles were struck by lightning. Radiating agony that reverberated through him—up his shins, to his knees, and into the muscles of his thighs, awakening the newly notched flesh in the crook of his crotch.
His voice jittered uncontrollably. “Any idea where the Fairlane might’ve ended up?”
“I saw some bubbles a second ago over to your right.”
Brody moved that way, the black water crawling up to his waist. His exhales came out in contracted jerks, puffs of steam washing over his face in the wind—the smell of his own breath, musty with tobacco and sweet from the last coffee he’d had. His teeth chattered fitfully like a malfunctioning typewriter.
“Do you want me to come in?” Thorp asked.
“No point in both of us getting hypothermia,” Brody managed to say.
The ping played over the surface of the bog. In wire frame it became a colorless checkerboard. He trudged another couple of feet, the half-developed sheet of ice cracking as his chest pushed through. He kept his arms high, let out little snarls and grunts he couldn’t help as he stepped farther and farther, deeper and deeper. Again, he thumbed the sonar. The water, rife with rock-hard cranberries, was at his armpits.
His knees hit the bumper.
“Is he in there?” Thorp asked from the bank.
“Hold on.”
When Brody lifted the trunk lid, Spanky drifted out and bobbed to the surface. Brody saw his head push through the white gridded bog, close enough to the sonar that the minutiae of Spanky’s face could be found—the texture of his dead, sunken cheeks, the five-o’clock shadow poking through like cactus quills. The bumpy, swirly road map on his eyelids like subdermal worms bending themselves into cursive: Never. Dead.
“Yeah,” Brody said, “he’s in here.”
He pulled Spanky around and shoved him through the water. The corpse pushed a wave of water out ahead of him and drifted languidly toward the bank. Brody watched to make sure he wouldn’t change course and go in the wrong direction, then watched Thorp crouch to receive the corpse. He looked disgusted.
Brody stepped around to the side of the car and opened the door with some difficulty. Seb bobbed out as well. Brody dragged the giant man along by the hood of his jacket onto the muddy shore.
Upon pulling himself from the water, Brody flapped Seb’s waterlogged coat open and retrieved Thorp’s handgun. “Here.” He shoved the ice-cold thing against Thorp’s chest and walked up the hill, fighting with his coat.
The wind tore across his damp clothes, and his body felt as if it were imploding, bones telescoping down into themselves, his flesh crawling like it was recoiling from the muscle, folding up and racing to the core in a frantic dash of self-preservation. Each step roared. “I got to get to the house. I can’t be out here.”
“But the power’s off. There won’t be any heat.”
“We’ll handle that in a m-minute. I need to make sure I’m not going to lose my f-fingers.” He tottered along with everything numb, socks squishing with each step. “You said you got a space heater, right?”
“Pretty much confirms that they’re onto us, huh?” Brody said, driving the shovel down to take another bite out of the frozen dirt. It came away in chips, splinters—frosty brown sheets. He cast the shovelful aside. He stopped for a moment to flex his hand and slap his palm against his knee. He wondered if the loss of sensation would be permanent.
“Let me take over,” Thorp said.
Brody stepped aside and picked up his coffee from the ground, finding it had gone cold. They were in the trees, about half a mile within the more forested and far-flung portion of Thorp’s property. It smelled to Brody like Mother Nature’s Womb—if the gardening shop also happened to be a place to store dead bodies. He glanced down at the corpses. The discharge they had let loose when their souls were shoved from their bodies was palpable on the air. He turned away.
His face warmed suddenly. He must’ve come out from behind a tree trunk’s shadow. The sun was up but was about as useful in warming them as saying the name of the distant star over and over, but he could feel it on his face faintly, knew it was there—and stared into its assumed location with clouded eyes with no fear of it damaging anything. He and Thorp had been at this all night, and now it was threatening to eat into yet another day.
Thorp pressed his foot atop the shovel blade, driving it in deep. “I always hated this part.”
With the sonar, Brody examined the depth of the rut Thorp was finishing. “Let’s not talk about that now,” he said, setting his coffee down. “That’s good. That’s deep enough. Here. Get his legs.”
They slid Seb over and placed him in the hole, then Spanky next to him. The top of the burlap sack was open, and an arm splayed out. A hand with the fingers squeezed tight in a bloodless fist. Thorp edged it back in with the side of his boot.
The grave was shallow. It took only a few minutes to fill it back in with icy dirt.
Brody stood, leaning on the shovel handle, eyeing the mound as Thorp kicked some half-rotten dead leaves over it. He bent and gathered up a load of sticks, leaves, tore some green underbrush from the earth, and dispersed it on the heap. He took a small bottle from his coat and poured its contents around and over the grave. Brody detected the odor: ammonia.
When finished, Thorp asked, “Suppose we should say something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, man. They’re dead. Just because we weren’t on the same side doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show them some respect.”
“We buried them in bags that horse food came in,” Brody said. “I think we’re a little bit past the showing respect portion of this ordeal. If it were them up here and us down there, I’d understand. Can’t exactly give a proper burial when all of this other shit is going on.”
“But look at it,” Thorp said. “It’s like they were a couple of dogs or something.”
“Don’t,” Brody said. “It only makes it worse.”
Thorp swallowed. “This isn’t right.”
“No, it’s not. But, you know, shit happens.”
Thorp shook his head. “Wow. I know you were always cool as a cucumber, water off a duck’s ass and all—but even for you that’s pretty cold. They were people.”
Brody scattered the dregs of his coffee aside into the carpet of dead leaves and snow. “Like you pointed out, Spanky would’ve shot us if you hadn’t stopped him—and Seb, well, that was just a case of trespassing gone awry.” He took up his shovel, coffee cup hooked on his index finger.
“You think it was … something else that made him come back?”
“Who?”
“Him.” Thorp nodded at the mound. “Them.”
“What do you mean?”
“How they dropped him off. You think it was all just them trying to pin it on us or … something else? I deserve to have to deal with it, I guess. I did kill him after all.” He coughed once, raspy.
“It’s done,” Brody said. “You threw down the ammonia so if the cops bring dogs they won’t find shit besides the cars. We got your gun, these two’re buried, and scents are covered—it’s through.” He waved his hand. “Okay? Through.”
“I got to answer for this,” Thorp said.
A beat passed. The last of the crickets tuned themselves down, then out.
“I’m going inside. I still can’t feel certain parts of myself, and if they were to fall off I’d be rather upset.” Brody walked away, shovel handle resting on his shoulder.
“I told God I’d never kill anyone ever again,” Thorp shouted after him.
Brody’s strides faltered. He hesitated, then continued walking. He didn’t answer because he didn’t have an answer to give.