In the Shadow of Angels (20 page)

Once the screeding was complete, Brent grabbed another darby and started working it from the opposite side of Jimmy. They worked in silence, each of them focused on finishing the process while the concrete was still plastic enough to work with. They had the slab finished in under an hour start to finish. Remarkable time, all things considered.

Once they had the slab smoothed out, they began cleaning up the tools and work area as they waited. The slab would need to bleed out and then reabsorb the water before they could finish it. Jimmy was careful not to add too much water to the mix. Even with Brent’s injury, he knew they would be able to work quickly with all their experience and too much water in the cold air could make the process take hours instead of minutes.

They used the hose to wash off all of the tools that they used and started moving them into the gardening shed. They left out the rounders and magnesium floats for the finishing process, but cleaned up and stowed all of the other equipment. Once they had everything put away other than the excess cement and mixer, they changed out of the rubber boots and gloves and washed them off as well.

The concrete wasn’t quite ready for the finish when they were done cleaning up the site, so they went inside to get a beer and get themselves cleaned up. Brent picked up Dr. Stephens’ wallet and Devin’s gun before they went inside. A quick assessment in the light of the kitchen showed that aside from a powdering of dust from the concrete premix, they were remarkably clean. It seemed that they were embarrassingly good at this. That was good though, as neither of them had a change of clothes here. They cleaned up their hands and faces, but their clothes were going to be a bit dusty until they could get home and changed.

Jimmy got them each a beer from the fridge, cracked his open and took a long pull from it. The cool liquid felt refreshing after all that work.

“I don’t know about this, Brent,” Jimmy said, “It seems like there are just too many moving parts for us to get out of this.”

Brent was nodding in agreement, “Yeah, this getting rid of our best friend’s mistress’s body thing has gone south in a hurry. But we don’t have much choice here, we have to play the hand we have, not the one we wish we had.”

“So what does the wallet have to do with the car?”

“Well, with the other two, we are making sure they will be found and the evidence points away from us. Since this guy is, hopefully, never going to be found, I’m hoping to steer the evidence toward him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we have the girl that was fucking him for drugs found dead on one end of town, the guy who had pictures of it found dead at the other end. A guy in that situation would have a lot to lose.” Brent paused, still piecing together the specifics of his plan, “So we mail the pictures of him and Jezebel to the cops. If we do it this morning, they won’t have any way of knowing they were sent after he was already dead.”

“Oh, I see. If they find his car somewhere, with his wallet and ID in it, maybe they’ll think that he disappeared on purpose.”

“Right. If they don’t find his wallet, I think they might think something happened to him too. Hopefully if they do, that will make him look guilty enough that any suspicion they have about the other two will go against him and not us.”

Jimmy was nodding. It did seem like a good plan. So much happened in the last few hours that it would be foolish to think that they executed it perfectly. This could be, very literally, their get out of jail free card.

“We’ll just run it past Devin when they get back, but it seems pretty solid to me,” Brent said.

“I wonder how he’s doing with the car fire thing. It’s been over an hour since Beth left. I would think he would just want to get the fire started and then run like hell.”

“Well,” Brent replied, “nothing else has gone right tonight, so I think it’s a fair bet that it didn’t either.”

“You’re probably right. Should we go check up on them?”

“No, we need to wait until that concrete is ready, get the edges rounded and the surface floated. One thing at a time.”

Brent picked up Devin’s gun and popped the cylinder open. He removed the live shells and spent casings. He could at least get the gun cleaned up and loaded while they were waiting on the concrete. 

“I bet he keeps his cleaning kit in the drawer with the gun.” Brent said, “Can you go see if you can find it? And swap out the spent casings for live rounds.” Brent was equally sure that Devin would be the type of person to recycle the brass. Many people try to destroy the casings to hide the crime, but in this case, if the body was found, the casings wouldn’t matter. There’s no explaining away a body found freshly buried under a concrete slab that you just poured - shell casings or not.

*****

“What has gone horribly wrong?” Devin asked.

“Well, I killed Dr. Stephens,” Beth answered, very calmly.

“What?!”

“Yeah, I guess he had a gun and he got into a fight with BrentandJimmy. He broke Brent’s hand, maybe his leg too. He was about to smash Jimmy over the head with the baseball bat when I picked up the gun and shot him.”

“You shot him? Are you sure he’s dead?”

“Yep,” she replied, still eerily calm, “I shot him in the head. Then, when he was dead on the ground, I shot him again, just in case.” She said
just in case
, but the reality is that it was far more about the satisfaction of revenge than the fear he might walk away.

“Jesus Christ, Beth, are you okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine. It’s like I told BrentandJimmy, I’m done with emotion for tonight.”

“So where is his body?”

“I don’t know, Devin. I told BrentandJimmy to take care of it. Can we just torch this bitch and get back to the house already?”

This was the only truly traumatic experience Devin ever saw Beth involved in and it was frightening. At first, she reacted as he expected - all tears and fears. This new, cold-blooded version of Beth was making him nervous. Certainly, she couldn’t have just decided to turn her emotions off. This was going to have to come out eventually and there was no telling how. Time was wasting though and he didn’t want to be standing around at the end of a dead end road with a corpse in the trunk of his car for any longer than was strictly necessary.

Devin shook his head to try to shake the thoughts out.

“All right. I guess I can probably get her into the car myself.”

“I can help. I’m well past the freaked out by corpses phase. This will be the third one I’ve seen tonight.”

Devin popped the trunk of the Sunfire and walked around to see Jezebel’s body still staring back lifelessly. For some reason, now that she had been dead for a few hours it seemed much creepier than when he put her in the trunk in the first place.

Beth joined him at the back of the car. “I guess I’ll get her legs,” She said.

Without waiting for a response, Beth grabbed her legs. Devin, who wasn’t quite mentally ready to move her, had to grab her torso quickly as Beth started trying to yank her from the trunk by the legs. The Sunfire was only a few steps from the Fiero, so the moving process went very quickly. It took another minute to get her propped up in the driver’s seat and get her legs into position on the pedals.

“So do we light it up here or after the crash?” Beth asked.

“Well, we will need the car to be in gear with the ignition on when we start the fire. I think we have to roll it down the hill and do it after.”

“Are you sure it’s going to roll into that outcropping? It seems like a pretty small target from this distance.”

“I’m hoping gravity will take care of that. If it rolls even fairly straight it will hit it.”

“Maybe you could stick her arms through the wheel to keep it from turning too much?”

“We can do that. I don’t think it matters though. The outcropping is a lot bigger than it looks from up here. Every car I’ve ever heard of missing the end of the road has hit it.”

They rolled down the windows of the Fiero so they could push it from the doorframes instead of the back of the car. This was for practical purposes on Devin’s side. He needed to be able to steer it until it started careening down the hill. Beth was pushing from the frame on the passenger door just because she hadn’t pushed a car before, so she mirrored his actions.

It took very little force to get the small car to the edge of the hill. Devin looked at the positioning from both sides of the car, shining his light down the hill to try to see the outcropping. He could barely make out the shape of the outcropping near the bottom, but not clearly enough to be of much use for aiming. Finally, he decided that it would have to be good enough.

“Okay. Push, I guess.”

Devin had seen his fair share of summer action movies and expected this thing to make a hell of a racket as it shot down the hill. The reality was not even close. There was virtually no sound as it rolled down the side of the hill. Occasionally one of the shocks would bottom out, making a bit of a thud, but other than that there wasn’t a sound until it hit the outcropping. Even that seemed understated. He was sure that it crashed into the outcropping though, otherwise it would be taking glancing blows from the trees beyond and that would be more of a scratching sound than a twisted metal one.

When what little sound there was had ceased completely, he looked back to Beth and said, “I’ll go start the fire, you can wait up here.”

Devin picked up the gas can and, using his phone again as a flashlight, he made his way slowly down the hill to the wreckage. Upon reaching the outcropping, he found the word
wreckage
to be vastly overstating it. Something he had not considered until that very moment was that when cars generally smash into this outcropping, they are travelling at least thirty or forty miles an hour before they go over the edge. In this case, it had been travelling zero before it went over the edge. The difference in destruction was notable.

What he expected to see was an accordion-shaped hood, crumpled back into a shattered windshield, with maybe just enough room left in the cabin to hold a body - especially without the engine block in the front to absorb the blow. What he actually saw was a smashed up front end that looked like he would expect to see resulting from a fender bender in a school zone.
It’s a good thing I’m burning the car,
he thought to himself,
there’s no way that crash would have killed anyone.
But it wasn’t as if he could roll it back up the hill for a redo.

He looked inside the car to see how Jezebel’s body settled after the crash. It was all wrong. Even though he thought there was no way they would believe this impact had broken her neck, he still wanted to do his best to make them at least consider it. She had fallen over the center console on the way down and now her body was lying on its side with her head on the passenger armrest. He picked her up and positioned her head forward over the steering wheel - hoping it would seem plausible that her chest hit the wheel on impact and snapped her neck. It didn’t need to seem likely. It only needed to seem plausible.

Satisfied with the position of the body, or as satisfied as he could be given the lack of impact damage, Devin turned the key to the on position and put the car in fourth gear. Thinking about it though, he took it out of fourth and slid it instead into second. There was also no way they were going to believe she was in high gear when she went over the edge with the lack of damage.

Still trying to keep with the spontaneous engine fire theme, Devin started dousing the exposed wiring harness and engine block with gas. He splashed it about liberally, but wasn’t sure just how fast it would go up, so he stopped at a few cups. He absently checked his pocket for a lighter, which he hadn’t carried since college, before kicking himself for not remembering this detail. He leaned back into the car through the driver’s window and, luckily, found a lighter in the center console.

He checked the position of the body one last time before he backed out of the window. Then he put the lighter to the wiring harness. In a huge flash of light, the gasoline burned up quickly. Unfortunately, once the gas was gone there was no fire left behind. He splashed more gas on the oily engine block and tried again with the same result.
And these things are supposed to be burning up spontaneously?
He thought to himself.

He couldn’t leave without a result though. The car had to be burned at this point. Otherwise it would just looked like a horribly botched attempt to cover up a murder - which it was, but that was beside the point. He put the gas can inside the cabin and started splashing it about just as liberally on the seats and carpeting. He hit that with the lighter to an immediate result. There was the same flash of light as the gas ignited, but the fire continued burning inside the car once the accelerant was gone. Slowly at first, but building.

He watched it burn for several minutes just to make sure it wasn’t going to go out. After a few more minutes, it was clear that the fire was going to burn until there was no more fuel for it. That thought made him wonder where the gas tank was on this thing. He thought he remembered reading that it was under the center console. The fire was picking up momentum in that area and he figured he better start backing away.

He turned to walk back up the hill, but stopped. This was the last time he was going to see Jezebel and he had already seen Dr. Stephens and Digby for the last time, but he was still carrying the memory card tying all three of them together - and to him. It seemed like it would be best to get rid of it. The fire was as good a place as any. He pulled out the plastic sleeve with the memory card inside, turned back to the car and tossed it into the fire.