Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(3)

“Get away from me, you fat fuck!” Hemming screamed. She was wearing a burgundy-colored jacket and skirt, with a pale pink blouse and high heels. “You’re disgusting . . . you . . . fuckin’ . . . Bug Boy!”

Hemming wasn’t satisfied with humiliating him, screaming at him and calling him the hated name, she had to go one step further. He’d spread his arms, embarrassed enough, trying to quiet her, and she’d stepped right up to him and slapped him on the side of the head, raking him with her fingernails. Really put some weight behind it.

Stunned, he’d swung back . . . not really thinking.

He’d swung with the hand that held the bottle. In the movies, if you hit somebody with a bottle of wine, the bottle broke and the person went down and a moment later got up, maybe with a little trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

When he’d hit Hemming, the bottle went CLUNK! as though he’d hit her with a pipe. The bottle hadn’t broken. Hadn’t even cracked. Hemming dropped like a head-shot deer.

For the next couple of minutes, there was a lot of calling her name, pleading, and shaking—“Gina, come on, I didn’t mean it, get up. Come on, Gina, get up”—but the fact was, Gina Hemming was deader than the aforesaid deer, looking up at him with half-open blank gray eyes. Gina wouldn’t be coming back until she marched in with Jesus and all the saints.

—

Birkmann hadn’t really thought about what to do next, since it was all unplanned. He stared at her for a while, lying crumbled on the floor, then said, “Oh my God!” He thought about calling for an ambulance, but that would get him put in jail.

He already knew he didn’t want to go to jail—didn’t deserve it. She’d started the fight, had struck out at him. He’d not even swung the bottle, not really. He’d tried to block another blow, he thought, and the bottle sort of bumped her.

Deep in his heart, though, he knew he’d killed her.

He stood there and thought about it, turned, looking around the room, noticed the blond wooden railing of the stairway coming down from the second floor.

She’d tripped and fallen, he decided.

He swallowed back his nausea, pulled her body over to the bottom of the stairs, spent a moment arranging it. When he’d hit her, he’d literally knocked her out of her high heels. He picked them up—stylish tan pumps—carried one halfway up the stairs, left it on a step, put the other one halfway back on one of her feet.

Got close enough to notice that she still smelled good. He started to cry, tears running helplessly and hopelessly down his cheeks. He brushed them off with the sleeve of the green sweater, but, gasping with grief and fear and loathing, thought, What else?

Nothing else. Nothing more he could do. Wait: fingerprints on the back door . . .

—

Two minutes later, he was out the back door again, having carefully wiped the doorknob with a paper towel from the kitchen. He walked out to the van, settled into the seat, ran his hand through his hair . . . and it came away sticky with blood.

She’d cut him when she hit him, raked him with her fingernails. He still had the paper towel in his hand and he used it to wipe his hair. More blood, but drying. He again ran his fingers through his hair, found the cuts, two of them, a quarter inch apart. Raw and stinging now, but not bleeding much.

Because of his jobs, he kept a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer in the door pocket. He squirted some of it on the paper towel and used it to clean up his hair as best he could. When he was done, he touched the cuts again and came back with faint specks of red on his fingertips. Done bleeding, he thought.

A car went by, and he turned his face away from the headlights.

In another minute, he was driving out Maple, his mind churning. David knew his CSI shows: if the cops brought in somebody to check for DNA, they’d find his all over the place. And why not? He’d been at the meeting. He’d hugged Gina when he arrived. Well, he hadn’t, actually, but others had, and nobody would have noticed that he hadn’t. He was cool on the DNA.

At the intersection of Maple and Main, he stopped and looked both ways. To the south he saw the glittery lights of Club Gold. He almost froze at that point; almost fled home, to bury his . . . what? Angst?

He didn’t do that. He touched his hair again and this time his fingertips came back clean. After a moment, he drove down to Club Gold, parked in back, and walked over to the back door. The men’s room was there, and he went inside. He looked at his hair in the mirror. The cuts were invisible. He peed, zipped up, turned on the sink water, and waited.

None of it was thought out. He was acting purely on instinct. And from information gleaned from the CSI shows.

He waited some more and, after two or three minutes, heard cowboy boots coming down the hall. Here came a witness. He punched the soap dispenser and began washing his hands. Five seconds later, a guy named Cary Lowe bumped through the door, said, “Hey, Big Dave, how they hangin’?” and eased up to the urinal.

“Free and easy,” Birkmann said, as he rinsed his hands and dried them beneath the hot-air blower.

As Lowe continued to pee, he asked, over the roar of the blower, “You singin’ tonight?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

“Good luck, then,” Lowe said. “You do have the voice, my man.”

Karaoke every Thursday and Saturday night at Club Gold. Karaoke and a gold-plated alibi.