I guess I killed her, thought Durham. I just murdered the fuck out of that bitch.
He dropped the gun back in his pocket.
He walked around the apartment for a little while. How long, he didn’t know. He searched her room and took her keys off her nightstand. He searched the room where her son slept. He looked under the boy’s bed and through his drawers. The usual kid shit was thrown around the room: CD cases and game cases and wires and controllers coming from the PlayStation he had hooked up to a small TV. Ticket stubs from a Wizards game. He had a Rock poster and a magazine picture of Iverson taped up on his wall, too. But no chronic and no money. He went to the kitchen and then the bathroom and searched through the cabinets and all but found not one thing. In the bathroom mirror he saw his face and noticed the dirt tracks on it. His forehead had sweat bullets across it and his eyes were bright.
He sat down on the toilet seat and wrung his hands.
He couldn’t just leave her here, that much he knew. Take her somewhere else, dump her body, let her go missing for a while until he figured out what to do. When they did find her it would look like she got herself killed at random. She’d said her boy would be with his uncle for a couple days, and that would give him some time.
He took the shower curtain down off its rings. Out in the living room he spread the curtain on the floor and picked Olivia up off the couch. She hadn’t gone cold yet and she wasn’t stiff like he’d thought she’d be. Blood trailed on the wood floor as he carried her and dropped her roughly on the curtain’s edge. He rolled her up in it and looked at the mess she had left behind.
He couldn’t take her down the front stairs. He went to the back door that led to a rickety old porch overlooking the alley. It was quiet back there, except for the dogs. A light from down the way showed that below the porch was a narrow yard of dirt. He knew what he’d do, but he wasn’t ready yet.
He found some Comet or something like it in the kitchen, wet some paper towels, and shook some of the cleanser on the couch where most of the blood was. He rubbed at it and it got soapy and also turned the brown couch to beige. Must’ve had some bleach in it or somethin’, and anyway, didn’t look like the blood was coming out. He got up what she’d spit out and all and used more cleanser on the floor, and that came out all right. But the couch was going to be a problem. He couldn’t bring the color back to it, that was a fact. He had fucked that up good. But he rubbed at it some more as if he could. Then he flushed all the paper towels down the toilet, one by one so they wouldn’t clog it, and waited to make sure they had disappeared.
He started to talk to himself as he worked. “You all right, Mario,” and “You okay, boss,” like that. He noticed he was sweating right through his jersey. His hands were slick with sweat.
Durham found a rag under the sink and went around the apartment wiping off his fingerprints at the places he could remember he’d touched. He must have touched damn near everywhere, he knew. Still, he did the best he could. He put the rag in his pocket, then went back out to the living room. The shower curtain was red where Olivia had bled out. He bent down over what had been Olivia and picked her up, lifting mostly with his legs. He had no bulk on him and little muscle, so it was hard. He felt his back strain as he carried her out to the porch. He looked around but not too carefully, as he knew now that the rest of it would run on luck.
He dropped Olivia off the back porch. She came out of the curtain halfway down. When she hit, the sound was dull, like she wasn’t nothin’ but a bag of trash. He thought he heard her moan for a second, but he knew that it had to be in his mind. There wasn’t no sounds out there, not really. The dogs that had been barking all night were still barking, and that was all.
AFTER turning off the television and stereo, and the lights, Mario Durham got Olivia’s Tercel and drove it back into the alley with its lights off. He rolled her back up in the curtain, noticing that one of her arms was bent funny and most likely had got broke from the fall. He had to fold her some to get her body in the trunk of the car. She still hadn’t gone stiff.
Durham drove into Southeast. He knew a place he could dump her there.
It surprised him, how calm he was. He was sorry he had killed Olivia and all, but he couldn’t take it back now, and anyway, he had done this thing for Dewayne. What else was he gonna do, go back to his brother with empty hands, tell him that Olivia had given his chronic to someone else and it was just gone? Dewayne had always taught him that when someone stepped to you, you had to step back. And when Mario had promised to square it, Dewayne had said, “Don’t tell me, show me,” and this is what Mario had done. Now, finally, Mario would be a man in his kid brother’s eyes.