“Oh, God, Leslie, I'm frightened. I think…” Jane looked at the shadow on the floor.

What she thought was, This won't work.

But better not to tell Les. Not in the mood he was in. “Maybe. Maybe that's the best plan. I don't know if we should go away, though. Going away won't help us if they decide to start looking for us…”

“We can talk about that later. Get your flashlight, see if there're some garbage bags here. We gotta bag this bitch up and get rid of her. And we've gotta pick up this sewing shit… What'd you do, you dumbshit, throw it at her?”

“Don't be vulgar. Not now. Please.”

They scrabbled around in the dark, afraid to let the light of the flash play against the walls or windows. They got the sewing basket back together, hurriedly, and found garbage bags in a cleaning closet next to the refrigerator. They stuffed the lower half of Coombs's limp body into a garbage bag, then pulled another over the top of her body.

Leslie squatted on the floor and sprayed around some Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner, then wiped it up with paper towels and put the towels in the bags with the body. He did most of the kitchen floor that way, waddling backward away from the wet parts until he'd done most of the kitchen floor.

“Should be good,” he muttered. Then: “Get the car. Pull it through the alley. I'll meet you by the fence.”

She didn't say a word, but went out the back door, carrying the wicker sewing basket.

And she thought, Won't work. Won't work.

She moved slowly around the house, in the dark, then down the front lawn and up the street to the car. She got in, thinking, Won't work.

Some kind of dark, disturbing mantra. She had to break out of it, had to think. Leslie didn't see it yet, but he would.

Had to think.

The alley was a line of battered garages, with one or two new ones, and a broken up, rolling street surface. She moved through it slowly and carefully, around an old battered car, maybe Coombs's, paused by the back gate to Coombs's house, popped the trunk: felt the weight when the body went in the trunk. Then Leslie was in the car and said, “Move it.”

She had to think. “We need supplies. We need to get the coveralls. If we're going to dig… we need some boots we can leave behind. In the ground. We need gloves.

We need a shovel.”

Leslie looked out the window, at the houses passing on Lexington Avenue, staring, sullen: he got like that after he'd killed someone. “We've got to go away,” he said, finally. “Someplace… far away. For a couple of months. Even then… these goddamn holes in me, they're pinning us down. We don't dare get in a situation where somebody wants to look at my legs. They don't even have to suspect us-if they start looking at antique dealers, looking in general, asking about dog bites, want to look at my legs… We're fucked.”

Maybe you, Jane thought. “We can't just go rushing off. There's no sign that they'll be looking at you right away, so we'll tell Mary Belle and Kathy that we're going on a driving loop, that we'll be gone at least three weeks. Then, we can stretch it, once we're out there. Talk to the girls tomorrow, get it going… and then leave. End of the week.”

“Just fuckin' itch like crazy,” Leslie said. “Just want to pull the bandages off and scratch myself.”

“Leslie, could you please… watch the language? Please? I know this is upsetting, but you know how upset I get…”

Leslie looked OUT the window and thought, We're fucked. It was getting away from them, and he knew it. And with the bites on his legs, he was a sitting duck. He could run. They had a good bit of cash stashed, and if he loaded the van with all the highest-value stuff, drove out to L.A., and was very, very careful, he could walk off with a million and a half in cash.

It'd take some time; but he could buy an ID, grow a beard, lose some weight. Move to Mexico, or Costa Rica.

Jane was a problem, he thought. She required certain living standards. She'd run with him, all right, but then she'd get them caught. She'd talk about art, she'd talk about antiques, she'd show off… and she'd fuck them. Leslie, on the other hand, had grown up on a dairy farm and had shoveled his share of shit. He wouldn't want to do that again, but he'd be perfectly content with a little beach cantina, selling cocktails with umbrellas, maybe killing the occasional tourist…

He sighed and glanced at Jane. She had such a thin, delicate neck…

At the house, Jane went around and rounded up the equipment and they both changed into coveralls. She was being calm. “Should we move the girl into the van?”

Leslie shook his head: “No point. The police might be looking for a van, after the thing with the kid. Better just to go like we are. You follow in the car, I take the van, if I get stopped… keep going.”

But there was no problem. There were a million white vans. The cops weren't even trying. They rolled down south through the countryside and never saw a patrol car of any kind. Saw a lot of white vans, though.

The farm was a patch of forty scraggly acres beside the Cannon River, with a falling-down house and a steel building in back. When they inherited it, they'd had some idea of cleaning it up, someday, tearing down the house, putting in a cabin, idling away summer days waving at canoeists going down the river. They'd have a vegetable garden, eat natural food… And waterfront was always good, right? Nothing ever came of it. The house continued to rot, everything inside was damp and smelled like mice; it was little better than a place to use the bathroom and take a shower, and even the shower smelled funny, like sulfur. Something wrong with the well.

But the farm was well off the main highways, down a dirt road, tucked away in a hollow.

Invisible. The steel building had a good concrete floor, a powerful lock on the only door, and was absolutely dry.

The contractor who put in the building said, “Quite the hideout.”

“Got that right,” Leslie had said.

They put the van in the building, then got a flashlight, and Jane carried the shovel and Leslie put the girl in a garden cart and they dragged her up the hill away from the river; got fifty yards with Leslie cursing the cart and unseen branches and holes in the dark, and finally he said, “Fuck this,” and picked up the body, still wrapped in garbage bags, and said, “I'll carry her.”

Digging the hole was no treat: there were dozens of roots and rocks the size of skulls, and Leslie got angrier and angrier and angrier, flailing away in the dark. An hour after they started, taking turns on the shovel, they had a hole four feet deep.

When Leslie was in the hole, digging, Jane touched her pocket. There was a pistol in her pocket, their house gun, a snub-nosed.38. A clean gun, bought informally at a gun show in North Dakota. She could take it out, shoot Leslie in the head. Pack him into the hole under the girl. Go to the police: “Where's my husband…? What happened to Leslie?”

But there were complications to all that. She hadn't thought about it long enough.

This was the perfect opportunity, but she just couldn't see far enough ahead…

She relaxed. Not yet.

They packed the body in, and Leslie started shoveling the dirt back.

“Stay here overnight,” Leslie said. “Tomorrow, we can come up and spread some leaves around. Drag that stump over it… Don't want some hunter falling in the hole. Or seeing the dirt.”

“Leslie…” She wanted to say it, wanted to say, “This won't work,” but she held back.

“What?”

“I don't know. I hate to stay here. It smells funny,” she said.

“Gotta do it,” he grunted. He was trampling down the dirt. “Nothing has been working, you know? Nothing.”

The bed they slept in was broken down; tended to sag in the middle. Neither could sleep much; and Leslie woke in the middle of the night, his eyes springing open.