The Sound of Broken Ribs(55)

“What are we going to do with her?” She’d asked this question roughly as many times as he’d announced Jack Kennedy’s lack of vital signs.

Carl nodded. Again. Like he had the last million or so times they’d had this very same back and forth.

“We have to decide on something and decide on it now. We’ve been sitting here for almost two hours and she’s no less dead. The sun’s starting to come up.”

Carl glanced at the closed curtains, nodded, and went back to gazing at his jeaned knees.

“Carl!” she barked.

He startled. “Sorry. Yeah. Um… Yeah… We should probably move her.”

“Where?” She drew the word out for a good three seconds.

“The bathtub?”

“How would that help?”

“Well… Well, for one, if the maid comes in or something she wouldn’t automatically see her.”

Belinda said, “We don’t have to worry about housekeeping. I plan to hang a Do Not Disturb sign when we get out of here.”

Carl nodded.

She continued, “She’s paid up for the next six days. Meaning, no one is going to check on her until then. As far as the author bitch is concerned, we have no idea what she knows or if this private eye has even had contact with her because we can’t get into her fucking phone!” They’d found Jack Kennedy’s hotel receipt in her purse, but the phone had provided little more than frustration. Belinda gripped and squeezed, hoping to crush the fucking thing in her palm, no matter how unlikely such events would be. She barely had enough strength to talk, much less crush Jack’s phone.

Carl said, “I never killed someone before.”

And there it was, out on the table for everyone to see. Belinda said, “We didn’t kill her.”

“We didn’t. No.” He shook his head. “I did.”

“Don’t be like that. It was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“Yeah.” But not even Belinda was sure anymore.

“Then what were you going to do with her once she told you everything you wanted to know?” Belinda did not miss the sudden switch back from the plurals we and us to the singular you.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. And I would have helped you. Just like that. Because we’re”—he met her eyes— “because we’re friends.”

“I say we just leave her. If someone comes looking for her, they’re not going to get in. They’ll have to either call the front desk or the cops. And if that happens, we’ll know.”

“And what do we do when that happens?”

“We run for it? I don’t know. I’ve never been much of a planner.” She almost added that Dan had been the planner. Why he was on her mind so much now, after two-and-a-half years, she didn’t know. But, if she hazarded a guess, she thought that maybe he’d popped back up in her head because the author bitch had popped back up in her life. The two seemed connected by fate—joined at the hip and intent on ruining each other. Now the bitch was back and Belinda wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if Daniel Walsh had come through the door to Jack’s hotel room with cops in tow. “Look what we have here!” he’d say, brandishing his award-winning smile.

“Whatever.” Carl sighed. “Whatever you want to do, I’m down.”

“Come on, then.”

Carl’s knees popped so loudly when he stood up that Belinda heard them all the way across the room—firecrackers in a pond. He stretched his arms out and leaned. His back crackled like cooking popcorn. “I’m so fuckin’ stiff.”

Belinda wasn’t very limber either. She’d sat too long on the edge of the bed and her tailbone hurt. Her shoulders were tight. Tendons creaked when she rolled her neck.

She peeked through the window. It was still dark outside, but the eastern sky above the rim of the hotel was starting to purple. No one walked the grounds of the hotel. A car across the lot near the inner elbow of the L the hotel created coughed blue smoke from its exhaust pipe. The brake lights came on, and then the reverse lights followed—demon’s eyes with white pupils. A second later, the car backed out and drove away. The driver was likely on his or her way to work and would never know that they’d been close to witnessing a pair of murderers leaving the scene of a crime.

That thought rocked Belinda and seemed to tear down some kind of dam within her mind. She let the curtain flutter closed while the sheer number of ways they could get caught flooded in.

Someone could look out of their window at the same moment they left Jack’s room.

Someone could come out of their hotel room.

Someone could pull into the lot.

The desk clerk might be out having a smoke.

Housekeeping could be getting an early start.

Any of those things and more, more, more…

And that’s all it would take. Just one person seeing them leave this room.

But what other choice did they have?

None.

Carl stood at the door with his bare hand on the knob. “Ready?”

“Goddamn it, wipe that off!” Belinda snatched the sheet off the bed and shoved it at him.

“Bee…”

“What!”

Carl gave her a sad smile. “There’s no telling what all we touched in here. The door knob ain’t gonna matter. I’m sure there’s some of us some of everywhere.”