you the guy with the big plans to experience everything? How’re you gonna write about a thing like this if all you do is stand there and watch?”
“I’ve got an imagination,” Pete said.
But maybe Jeff was right. He should touch the body—not only to find out how a corpse feels, but to learn how it would make him feel.
I owe it to my art.
Right, he thought. That’d give me an excuse to do anything, no matter how rotten.
He stood there and shook his head.
“You’ll probably never get another chance like this,” Jeff said.
“Why do you care?”
“ ’Cause you’re my best friend. I don’t want you missing out on something this big. You know? You’ll end up regretting it. I mean, shit, you’ve got a murder victim at your feet and you won’t even touch her! Not to mention she looks like she might be a major babe.”
“I’m not touching her.”
“Hemingway would’ve.”
“Hemingway did lots of crummy stuff. I want to write like him, not act like him.”
“You are such a chicken.” With that, Jeff stood up and stepped over the body. He turned around, knelt by its right side, jammed his hands underneath the hip and thigh, and heaved upward.
The woman tumbled onto her back. The jolt turned her head toward Pete, flung out her right arm and leg, and sent a tremor through her breasts. She slid downslope a few inches, then stopped.
Her eyes were shut.
Her guts didn’t spill out.
Now that her head was turned, Pete couldn’t see any major wounds at all. But she seemed to have countless nicks and scratches and abrasions. Her face was puffy and her lips were split as if she’d been punched senseless. She had a thin, curving slit underneath her left breast. Most of her front was smeared and streaked with blood. Clinging to the blood were bits of weeds and leaves, powdery dust and grains of dirt. So much of her body was a mess that the few clean, uninjured areas of skin seemed strangely out of place.
She was a ruin.
But she was naked.
Pete could see everything.
Jeff, staring down at her, murmured, “Wow.” He sidestepped and crouched and peered between her legs.
“Don’t be disgusting,” Pete said.
Ignoring him, Jeff sighed and kept on staring.
“Stop that.”
“You ever seen one of these? You better take a good look. Never know when you’ll get another chance.”
“I’d rather see a live one.”
“Know what I’d really like to do?”
“No. And I don’t want to hear about it. I think it’s about time we go back to the house and call the cops.”
“What’s the big hurry?”
“We’ve seen her, okay? You turned her over. We’ve seen both sides, and—”
“I’m still looking,” Jeff said.
“Yeah, and you’re starting to get funny ideas.”
“Don’t know how funny they are.”
“Come on, let’s go.”
“What we really oughta do,” Jeff said, “is wash her off, see what she looks like underneath all this blood and crap.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Pete said.
“Maybe hose her down.”
Pete found himself wondering if the backyard hose would reach this far. Probably.
“Even if the hose is long enough…” Grimacing, he shook his head. “No way. We’re already gonna be in trouble with the cops. As it is, they’ll know we were hanging around back here. All these trampled weeds. They might even think we had something to do with killing her. All we’d need is to drag the garden hose back here and—”
“Who says they even have to find her here?”
“What?”
“Suppose her body gets found someplace else? Say, a couple of miles from here? Say, tomorrow?”
Pete gaped at him.
“We do it right, we’d be completely in the clear, wouldn’t have to worry about getting blamed for anything.”
“You’ve completely lost your mind.”
“It’d be easy, man. Your mom and dad aren’t coming home tonight, are they?”
“Not supposed to, but…”
“We can clean her up, hide her in your house, then take her for a ride sometime really late tonight. Find a nice, empty stretch of road and dump her out. Then she’s somebody else’s problem.”
“No! My God! If we got caught trying to pull a thing like that…”
“Who’s gonna catch us, man? This ain’t an episode of Homicide, this is real life. In real life, people get away with shit all the time.”
“We wouldn’t. We’d get nailed. Anyway, the whole idea is sick. You just want to keep her around all day so you can…I don’t know, look at her and stuff.”
“And you don’t want to look at her and stuff?”
“No!”
“Yeah, sure. You know damn well you’d love to. You’re just chicken.”