paying with cash inside, but was glad that I didn’t have to. So far, no one had seen me in Maine, and I was planning on keeping it that way.
I drove north, toward the entrance ramp for I-95. I got off Micmac before hitting Kennewick Beach, knowing that if the police were onto Brad already, they were probably staked out in front of his cottage. I would have loved to go back there, get a few of his things to make it look like he’d truly made a run for it, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Before hitting the interstate, I pulled into a closed auto shop called Mike’s, one of those backwoods garages surrounded by junked vehicles. With my lights off I pulled into a row of junkers and got out of the truck. I found a car that looked as though it hadn’t been moved through at least two winters and, using my Leatherman, I removed its Maine license plate, then swapped it with the license plate from Brad’s truck. It took about five minutes, no sound except for that steady wind that rustled the remaining leaves in the trees. Licenses swapped, I got back in the truck, the cab light briefly illuminating Brad, his head now lolling unnaturally to the side. I turned away from him, and my eye caught the plastic E-ZPass transmitter glued to the inside of the windshield. There were tolls on the interstate, two in Maine, then another when the highway briefly passed through New Hampshire. I debated whether it was better to zip through tolls with the E-ZPass, and possibly be tracked, or whether I should remove it and go through cash tolls. I decided that paying cash was better and pried the transmitter off the windshield, throwing it into the woods next to the garage. Brad really did just look like someone’s husband sleeping off a drunk, and I would take my chances on anyone recognizing me. My hair was my most distinctive feature and it was hidden under my hat.
I didn’t need to worry. The tollbooth operators barely looked at either Brad or me on the entire four-hour drive to my old neighborhood in Connecticut. There was no one on the roads, and I could probably have made the trip in three and a half, but I kept strictly to the speed limits, staying in the right-hand lane while cargo trucks rumbled past me in the passing lanes. I kept the radio off, but somewhere around Worcester Brad’s body shifted and made a gas-expelling moan. I’d been prepared for this, telling myself that dead bodies make sounds, but I still jumped about two inches in my seat when it happened. After that, I turned on the radio, flipping between crappy stations until somewhere in Connecticut I found a late-night jazz show on a commercial-free station way left on the dial. I didn’t particularly like jazz, since it reminded me of my parents, but I could recognize a number of standards. “On Green Dolphin Street” by Miles Davis segued into Nat King Cole’s “Autumn Leaves.” I listened to the words, trying to keep my mind away from the fact that I was driving through the night with a dead man as my passenger. Even with the radio turned up loud, I heard two more expulsions, and the cab of the truck filled with the smell of both urine and excrement. I thought about that black stray cat I killed years ago when I was a girl, and the way I’d been shocked by the presence of shit. I remembered how the disgust over that dead cat had made me feel even happier that I’d killed it. It was the same with Brad Daggett next to me in the truck. He’d gotten what he deserved, maybe even better than he’d deserved. He was dead now, and couldn’t hurt anyone, but I still had to deal with his disgusting body. And I had to survive the remainder of this trip. I put a little more weight on the gas pedal, thought it couldn’t hurt to go a little bit over the speed limit. The miles ticked by, through “There’s a Small Hotel” and Chet Baker’s “Almost Blue” and Dinah Washington singing “This Bitter Earth.” The songs began to fuzz in and out of range as I got closer to home, but I didn’t flip away, preferring snatches of old music to furniture warehouse ads and bad talk radio.
I turned the radio off