I wanted to look tough, but his choice of alcohol tasted like buttered Windex. I spat it out and stood up.
“You may think this is over,” I said, “but you’re misunderstanding the rules. This isn’t over. This is page one.”
Chapter 16
I was driving the speed limit. Updike was next to me in the seat. And my trunk was full.
Of Milt.
After thirty minutes of very focused driving, I arrived at what I now hesitate to call “home.” The hardest part was getting him from his house to my car. Solution? Cut him in half. Just like they did Maria. Seemed only fair. I brought the first piece out in a suitcase, the second piece in a golf club travel bag. Each segment still weighed over a hundred pounds, so I’m not saying it was easy.
By now Updike was in sync with my erratic behavior. He himself became more erratic and, oddly, more cooperative.
“C’mon, pal,” I said toward his area of the backseat. “Don’t look at me like that.”
He did. He looked at me like that. The eyes of canine judgment. I could see them in my rearview mirror, gazing at me.
We were going thirty-four miles per hour in a thirty-five miles-per-hour zone. Cops do actually pull people over for going “too much” the speed limit. It’s what drunkards do. It’s what serial killers do. I’d already made up my mind at this point how I would handle the situation if I were stopped.
And I was stopped.
A cop lit up in my rearview mirror, visible just past the flattened ears of my nervous heap of a pooch. The new police cars have subtle, low-profile lights to fool you, to lull you into cop-oblivious behavior. I was pretty sure I was getting cited for running a light. What I wasn’t sure of was whether my trunk had drops of blood on the outside.
I slowed down. He followed me to the side of the road. I parked. He parked. Then came that ugly fifteen seconds when they just sit there behind you. When his door finally did open, he took a long time to approach.
“I will kill him, Updike,” I murmured out the side of my mouth. “You understand that, right? I’ll kill him, if circumstances demand it.”
Updike whined that signature dog whine and looked around for the nearest airport. I was sweating right up until the moment Officer Something-or-Other arrived at my door. Six two. One ninety. Mustache. He had a Beretta 9mm holstered. I calculated that I could have my own gun pointed toward his torso twice as fast as he could ready his.
If necessary.
“Good afternoon, sir,” I said.
“License and registration,” he said.
I complied and we traded the usual three minutes of dialogue. He left with my license but stopped to look at my plates, which to me felt like he was looking at the trunk.
“There’s no blood on there, Updike,” I said quietly to Updike. “I checked. No blood. Okay?”
Updike looked backward. He knew the cop was trouble.
My finger had already laid itself upon the trigger of my .38 Special. I could open my door. I could loudly say, “Officer, my left hand is bleeding.” He’d yell at me to get back in my car but for a split second he’d look at my left hand. He’d look for the blood, not the weapon. And I’d raise that weapon and power two slugs past the Kevlar, into the small clump of tissue just above the eye sockets.
“Sign this,” he said, suddenly back at my window, ticket clipboard in hand.
I must’ve blanked out for a moment. While I was sitting there, fretting over what he was seeing on my bumper, he had already journeyed all the way to his own car and back.
I signed the ticket.
“Please drive safely,” he said. “Life is precious.”
Then he walked away.
Done. Thank you for that fortune cookie’s worth of wisdom, sir.
When I arrived home—some two hours later, I think—I pulled out Milt: The Prequel and placed it near the rear bumper while I dragged out Milt: The Sequel in a second bag. I brought the complementary works of art down to the basement while Updike followed cautiously behind.
There wasn’t enough room next to my silent wife unless I took out a few of the boxes, so I did. I slid them to the middle of the basement, where I knew they’d start to smell within days.
“In ya go, Milt.”
I wasn’t operating on a “within days” timeline. I barely knew what the next three hours would hold for