get…”

LESLIE LOOKED OUT the window and thought, We’re fucked. It was getting away from them, and he knew it. And with the bites on his legs, he was a sitting duck. He could run. They had a good bit of cash stashed, and if he loaded the van with all the highest-value stuff, drove out to L.A., and was very, very careful, he could walk off with a million and a half in cash.

It’d take some time; but he could buy an ID, grow a beard, lose some weight. Move to Mexico, or Costa Rica.

Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She’d run with him, all right, but then she’d get them caught. She’d talk about art, she’d talk about antiques, she’d show off…and she’d fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn’t want to do that again, but he’d be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…

He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…

AT THE HOUSE, Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”

Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped…keep going.”

BUT THERE was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren’t even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.

THE FARM WAS a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they’d had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They’d have a vegetable garden, eat natural food…Andwaterfront was always good, right?

Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.

But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow. Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.

The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”

“Got that right,” Leslie had said.

THEY PUT the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen branches and holes in the dark, and finally he said, “Fuck this,” and picked up the body, still wrapped in garbage bags, and said, “I’ll carry her.”

DIGGING THE HOLE was no treat: there were dozens of roots and rocks the size of skulls, and Leslie got angrier and angrier and angrier, flailing away in the dark. An hour after they started, taking turns on the shovel, they had a hole four feet deep.

When Leslie was in the hole, digging, Jane touched her pocket. There was a pistol in her pocket, their house gun, a snub-nosed .38. A clean gun, bought informally at a gun show in North Dakota. She could take it out, shoot Leslie in the head. Pack him into the hole under the girl. Go to the police: “Where’s my husband…? What happened to Leslie?”

But there were complications to all that. She hadn’t thought about it long enough. This was the perfect opportunity, but she just couldn’t see far enough ahead…

She relaxed. Not yet.

THEY PACKED the body in, and Leslie started shoveling the dirt back.

“Stay here overnight,” Leslie said. “Tomorrow, we can come up and spread some leaves around. Drag that stump over it…Don’t want some hunter falling in the hole. Or seeing the dirt.”

“Leslie…” She wanted to say it, wanted to say, “This won’t work,” but she held back.

“What?”

“I don’t know. I hate to stay here. It smells funny,” she said.

“Gotta do it,” he grunted. He was trampling down the dirt. “Nothing has been working,