Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [7]
“I guess. But I hate to think—”
“There’s nothing to think about except getting away from this and staying there.”
Lacey returned the watch to Darryl’s cold wrist and Paul gathered up the tarp. They got home with five minutes to spare before Cudgel, the show where people tried to complete an obstacle course while being pummeled by giant mechanical clubs. A stocky receptionist from Michigan took the early lead. The low-center-of-gravity types always beat the natural athletes, Paul noted to himself.
Lacey waited until the commercial break. “So, what now?”2
“Jesus. Is that your new catchphrase?” Paul replied.
“Nope. It’s still ‘Shut the fuck up.’”
“Standard,” Paul said. “He’s not going to get any less ripe, especially if it stays hot. I bet someone finds him and calls the cops before his stepmom even notices he’s gone.”
“What about the you-know-what?”
“The head? We’re not being recorded, you know. I’ll look around in the morning, but I doubt it’s anywhere near here. Let’s not go sneaking around with flashlights again.”
After Cudgel they sat through a whole Mythmatch rerun, the one where Dracula beats Poseidon, a highly questionable upset in Paul’s book. It was becoming clear that they were both just delaying going to bed. Not out of fear of a killer lurking in the woods—by now they were used to a sort of constant low-level fear (“alertness,” Paul called it)—but because they knew what to expect in their sleep.
The only uncanny sibling weirdness they shared was that whenever something big happened, they had the same dream. Or not exactly the same dream, except for after the cabin incident, but always close enough to be creepy. “What are we, twins?” Lacey had said after the first time, echoing Paul’s thoughts with irritating precision. They quickly discovered that the phenomenon was boring to reasonable people who had lives and endlessly fascinating to long-winded stoney types, of which Mercer had no shortage.
Paul started to drift off and Lacey hit the mute button, waking him immediately.
“So,” she said. “Why did they cut off his head?”
Paul cleared his throat. “Either a. That’s where the bullet was lodged and they wanted to remove ballistics evidence, or b. Maybe they wanted a souvenir.”
Among the many verbal habits of Paul’s that irked Lacey, only a few inspired true loathing. Speaking in outline form was number one, followed by the use of horseracing odds to describe the relative likelihood of anything.
“They should have taken his fingers, too,” Lacey said, without contemplating how ghoulish that sounded.
“Fingerprints only matter if he’s in the system,” Paul reminded his sister.
“Right. But why leave it on our property?” she asked.
“Either it was random or they knew what they were doing,” Paul replied, trying not to think too hard about it.
“They, not he?” she asked.
“Darryl’s not exactly svelte. Anyway, I’d make option a the 3 to 2 favorite, with b at 4 to 1. Anything else, c through z, 10 to 1 tops.”
Lacey and Paul sat there in silence, but neither of them could settle into their usual state of benign mutual irritation. And for the first time, they missed it.
Paul gave in first, with his usual “Night, Lace,” and then lay in bed thinking of the trident in Dracula’s chest. The wrong tool for the job.
In his dream he was walking down rows of different kinds of melons. The oleaginous3 redheaded detective from NYPD Blue and that forensics show was walking next to him in his sunglasses, whispering, “That’s a cantaloupe, Paul. That’s a casaba. Do you know the difference? Do you like casabas, Paul?” Lacey’s dream was simpler. She was cutting up melons; inside was just sand.
It was still dark when she got up for her run. She felt the gravitational pull of the tarp and gloves in the garage but stuck to her standard route—they’d agreed to wait for burn day. Halfway through the run was a ridge where she always paused to look out over the house, the town, everything as the sun was coming up. She had an urge to get up there fast just to see if everything still looked basically the same. It did, which