Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
“And even if it did, it would be after a frost and thaw. Not much would be left of it.”
“So I guess the question is… salt or fresh water?” he asked.
“I think anywhere salt will have cameras to worry about.”
“Fresh it is then,” he agreed.
“There’s no fresh water in the city. Central Park aside. And that’s never gonna work.”
“Looks like we’re taking a little road trip, love,” Dav said. “Should we stop for snacks?”
“Coffee maybe,” I said, feeling the exhaustion of the day starting to leech into my bones.
“You could sleep,” Dav said as if he was reading my mind.
“No, not yet,” I said. And when his hand moved out, landing on my thigh, I didn’t push it away.
Just one more night, I would let him be close.
Then, then I had to push him away again.
No matter how hard that would be.
How much it might hurt.
“Mood is getting all sorts of dark in here,” Dav said, glancing over at me.
“We do have a corpse in the trunk,” I reminded him.
“Does that mean it would be wholly inappropriate to put the music on?” he asked.
“Probably,” I agreed, but I reached for the volume myself, wanting something to distract me from the thoughts racing around in my mind.
It only took about an hour and a half of abiding all of the speed limits and traffic lights to reach Jersey. But another couple of hours to get from the built-up part of the Garden State to an area that actually had natural water features.
They were all closed for the year, but the legality of that wasn’t exactly a concern when we were, you know, carting the corpse of the man I’d murdered.
“Shouldn’t you have turned down the last street?” I asked, getting a raised brow from Dav.
“No.”
“I’m pretty sure the arrow said it was that way.”
“Didn’t we agree that your job was to control the radio?” he asked, raising a brow at me.
“Fine. Don’t blame me when we have to backtrack then.”
“You could get your license, and the next time we have to hide a body, you could drive.”
See, the thing is, when you’re doing something illegal, you couldn’t have your phone on you, let alone use GPS to direct you where you were going.
So, yeah, there’d been some snipping at each other during this little road trip.
Fine.
I’d been the only one doing the snipping.
Dav had been all affability, singing with the radio, stopping to get me coffee, taking my surly attitude with a grain of salt.
“So, is your objection to long car rides in general, or not being in control?” he asked, pointing out the dashboard to the sign for the stupid lake I’d just insisted was in the other direction.
“I just want this done,” I said, anxious now that we were close to being finished.
We’d stopped three times on the road.
To get fuel.
To get coffee.
And to get some rope and weights at an all-night box store.
“We should leave the car here,” Dav said, cutting off the lights and the engine on the stone road that cut off not far ahead of us. “No tracks,” he added.
“Ugh,” I grumbled, gauging the distance to the pond. With a heavy dead man. And weights to sink him in the pond with.
“I’ll do the heavy pulling,” he offered.
“You do realize the weights are a solid hundred pounds all together too, right?” I asked.
“So we get to skip the gym this week,” he said, grabbing more rubber gloves, slipping them on, cutting the engine, then climbing out.
Suppressing a grumble, I followed suit, slipping the rope over my arm, grabbing the stack of weights, then following behind Dav as he dragged the tub toward the pond.
“What are you looking at?” I asked when he paused a few feet from the edge of the lake.
“Sign,” he said, moving out of the way, so I could check it out for myself thanks to the way the moon was peeking through the clouds.
“What is red algae?”
“Never watch the news, huh?”
“New Jersey news? No. Why?”
“Red algae means no swimming. This sign looks of the permanent sort. Figure this has been going on for a few years. No one swimming… not much of a chance of ever knocking our little anchor loose.”
“Huh. Good,” I said, nodding.
Contrary to what popular movies suggest, it wasn’t exactly easy for the mafia to hide bodies. At least not in the city. Sure, sometimes we got lucky with groundbreaking on new construction sites. And, yeah, the ocean was always an option if you were careful.
I heard one of the other Five Families, the Costas, actually had a guy on the payroll whose only job was to clean up crime scenes and bury bodies.
Us Lombardis, though, we all handled our own bodies. Which wasn’t always easy. Especially when you didn’t drive.
As Dav opened the tub, then dragged out the body, I had to admit that I was really thankful for his help this time. I’m sure, if I tried hard enough, I would get the job done by myself. But every moment of it would suck.