Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [105]
“Nice guy,” Hart said. “It’s a shame he had to die. Under a different set of circumstances, we might have become good friends.”
Until this point, Paul thought he was looking at a ghost. When he realized he was looking at a killer, rage took over.
Paul launched himself at Hart and tackled him onto the coffee table. He landed a few rough blows before Hart could retaliate. But Hart had been getting in scrapes since he was five. Hart kicked Paul in the groin and threw him off. While Paul was curled in a fetal position, moaning, Hart kicked him in the kidneys. When Paul rolled over on his back, Hart stomped on his ribs.
Paul opened his mouth to scream for help, but got clipped in the jaw by Hart’s steel-toed boot. Hart then rested his knee on Paul’s broken ribs and pummeled his face until it was covered in blood.
“Stop,” Lacey said, standing over the two men. Her expression was even—the only evidence of fear was the slight rattle of the gun in her hand. Lacey pulled back the hammer on Sook’s gun and aimed it at the center of Hart’s chest.
Hart looked at Lacey, amused.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Don’t aim a gun at a man unless you plan on using it,” Hart said, getting to his feet.
“You think I won’t shoot you?”
“You don’t have it in you, Lacey.”
“Now I do,” Lacey replied.
She pulled the trigger. Hart looked down at the hole in his belly and smiled, as if he suddenly realized that he and Lacey had more in common than he thought. Lacey pulled the trigger again because the smile unsettled her. Then she pulled it one more time because Hart was still standing.
And then he wasn’t standing anymore.
While Paul held an ice pack to the side of his face and winced from the collection of injuries he had amassed, Lacey told him everything she knew. Every unsolved murder was now solved. There was no audible clicking, but it’s fair to say everything did indeed click into place. Now there was only a mess to clean up.
“What now?” Paul asked.
“We could call the cops,” Lacey said.
“We could do that,” Paul dully replied. “Any other options?”
“We could bury the body, clean up this mess, and get out of town.”
Paul was stumped. “How do we decide?”
Lacey pulled a quarter from her pocket.
“We could leave it up to chance,” she said. She interpreted Paul’s silence as agreement. “Heads we bury him. Tails we call the cops. Okay?”
Lacey flipped the coin and smacked it on the back of her hand.
“Heads,” she said, stuffing the quarter back in her pocket. “Well, at least this time we know what we’re doing.”
Paul would never learn that the quarter came up tails.
Lacey and Paul got a second wind when they realized that there was an end in sight. Lacey stuffed her hair into a baseball cap, donned gardening gloves, and covered them with plastic dishwashing gloves. Paul pulled an old tent from the garage and used it as a tarp to wrap up the body. He pulled the truck deep into their driveway in a direct line from their back door. They dragged the dead weight through the kitchen and along the back porch to the truck. Lacey counted to three and they hauled the body onto the truck bed.
At no moment did Lacey even think to cry. As far as she was concerned, Hart had been dead for months. She couldn’t begin to imagine what she ever saw in that guy.
Even though he’d thought Hart dead for weeks, Paul found himself wondering if anyone would really miss Hart. His mother was the only person who came to mind. He pitied her, but after all the damage Hart had done, he couldn’t summon any emotion other than that.
The living room had that distinct metallic odor of blood. A thick pool of deep crimson began to seep into the hardwood floor.
“How will you clean this up?” Paul asked.
“I like how you assume that I’m going to clean it up,” Lacey replied.
“I am severely injured,” Paul said.
Neither of them made a move. They had watched far too many episodes of Nightcrimes to know that this amount of DNA would be impossible to wash away.
“I have an idea,” Paul said.
Lacey packed her car with