The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(114)

Into the trunk goes the shovel, along with a headlamp purchased from an online camping supply store.

Now comes the hard part.

Alex returns to the house with a coil of sturdy rope and a lightweight hand truck stolen a while back from a careless deliveryman who foolishly left it unattended behind the supermarket. It’s come in handy. Alex is strong—but not strong enough to drag around well over a hundred pounds of dead weight.

Well, not dead yet.

The figure lying prone on the sofa is passed out cold, courtesy of the white powder poured into a glass of booze-laced soda that sits on the coffee table with an inch or two of liquid left in the bottom.

Alex dumps the contents into the sink, washes it down the drain, and scrubs the glass and the sink with bleach.

Then it’s back to the living room.

“Time for you to go now,” he whispers, rolling the hand truck over to the sofa and unfurling a length of rope. The end whips through the air and topples a framed photo on the end table. It’s an old black and white baby photo of Carmen, a gift from Alex’s mother-in-law the day after their son was born.

“He’s the spitting image of my Carmen as an infant, isn’t he?”

On that day, gazing into the newborn’s face, all patchy skin and squinty eyes from the drops the nurses had put in, Alex couldn’t really see it.

But as the days, then weeks and months, passed, the resemblance became undeniable. Strangers would stop them on the street to exclaim over how much parent and child looked alike. At first it was sweet. But after a while Alex started to feel left out.

“He looks like you, too,” Carmen would claim, but it wasn’t true.

“You’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“No—he has your nose. See?”

“It’s your nose, Carm. It’s your face. Everything about him is you—even his personality.”

The baby had been so easygoing from day one, quick to smile, quick to laugh . . .

Like Carm. Nothing like you.

Alex leaves the photo lying facedown on the table.

Carmen—even baby Carmen—doesn’t need to witness what’s about to happen here.

Five minutes later the car is heading north on the Taconic Parkway, cruise control set at five miles above the posted limit—just fast enough to reach the destination in a little over an hour, but not fast enough to be pulled over for speeding.

Even if that were to happen, nothing would appear out of the ordinary to a curious cop peering into the car. Alex would turn over a spotless driver’s license and explain that the sleeping person slumped in the passenger seat had simply had too much to drink. No crime in that statement, and quite a measure of truth.

Three hours later the first traces of pink dawn are visible through the open window beyond the empty passenger seat as Alex reenters the southbound lanes on the parkway. All four windows are rolled down and the moon roof is open, too, despite the damp chill in the March wind.

The radio is blasting a classic rock station. Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” opens with a powerful electric guitar; eerie, wailing, lyric-free vocals from Robert Plant.

The fresh air and the music make it better somehow. Easier to forget throwing shovels full of dirt over the still unconscious human being lying at the bottom of the trench. Easier not to imagine what it would be like to regain consciousness and find yourself buried alive.

Maybe that won’t happen. Maybe it never has, with any of them. Maybe they just drift from sleep to a painless death, never knowing . . .

But you know that’s not very likely, is it, Alex?

Chances are that it’s a frantic, ugly, horrifying death, clawing helplessly at the weight of dirt and rocks, struggling for air . . .

Alex reaches over to adjust the volume on the radio, turning it up even higher in an effort to drown out the nagging voice.

Sometimes that works—with the voices.

Other times, they persist, refusing to be ignored.

Not tonight, thank goodness.

The voices give way to the music, and it shifts from Led Zeppelin to the familiar opening guitar lick of an old Guns N’ Roses tune.

Singing along—screaming, shouting along—to the lyrics, Alex rejoices. There is no more fitting song to punctuate this moment.

It’s a sign. It has to be. A sign that everything is going to be okay after all. Someone else will come along. Another chance. Soon enough . . .

“Oh . . . oh-oh-oh . . . sweet child of mine . . .”





Chapter 1

“No, come on. That one wasn’t good either. You look annoyed.”

“Probably because I am annoyed,” Gabriella Duran tells her cousin Maria, watching her check out the photo she’s just taken on her digital camera.

Yes, digital camera.

Gaby had assumed a few snapshots on a cell phone would suffice, and would make this little photo shoot far less conspicuous. But Maria, who took a photography class at the New School not long ago, insisted on using a real camera, the kind that has a giant lens attached. It’s perched on top of a tripod, aiming directly at Gaby.

Which might not be a terrible thing if they were in the privacy of her apartment. But in the middle of jam-packed Central Park at high noon on the sunny Sunday before Memorial Day . . .

Yeah. Definitely a terrible thing.

“Can’t you please just smile for two seconds,” Maria says, “so that I can get a decent shot? Then we can be done.”