MIAMI, FLORIDA

JANUARY 1971

Mary…

Sam thought that had been her name. Was he hallucinating? He doubled back, back, back to the bar, the flaxen hair, the gold chain, the pale thick thighs covered with blue veins that looked like highways. Highways leading where?

Her lips had turned a similar shade of blue to the veins in her leg. Foamy, pink liquid spilled from the side of her slack bottom lip. Her eyes were open, staring at him, now ringed with crayon-red spots. He slid his arm from around her neck, and she slumped toward the door. Her arm was limp as an old rag. Drunk bitch, he thought, but then he realized he had seen many drunk bitches in his day. This one was different.

He shook her, slapped her cheek. He put his ear to her lips and heard nothing. The world was quiet and dark as a church at midnight. For the first time in Sam’s life, so was the restless world inside him. When the sound crept back in, it was the white noise of crickets, frogs, and wind-rippled water.

She looked cold. She had mentioned she left her coat at home. He wrapped his arms around her to warm her, nuzzled her chin, nibbled her crushed neck, sniffed her silken skin, salty like the ocean, sweet like some flowery perfume that belonged on a fifteen-year-old, and bitter with the unmistakable tang of fear. Fresh kill to a lion.

She was perfect. It was the first time he ever felt that about a woman. She was perfectly his. He had never loved before that moment. He told her so over and over. He finally said the words he had never spoken to a woman other than his mama. He finally understood what the whole world had been going on and on about like a broken record. All the love songs on the radio he blasted with the windows open. All the black-and-white movies with tough guys in fedoras, undone by bitches in dresses tight as lizard skin. He’d watched them and felt nothing other than that the guy was a sap. Now he was the sap. He finally understood what could bring you to your knees.

It was love. It was everything they said it would be. It was wonderful. “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

He put his mouth to hers and drew a breath in case there was a final ounce of oxygen in her lungs that he could take for himself. It was like breathing in a ball of electricity.

The scent of urine reached his nostrils. Only then did he fully comprehend she was a corpse. His beautiful moment with the lifeless body beside him turned to panic and then disgust. He had finally done it.

“What have I done, Lord?” he said aloud.

He was a pervert, sure. He jerked off over strangled and mangled bodies in the True Detective magazines he hid under his mattress. He wasn’t a killer. That was a terrible thing. Terrible, terrible thing, to take a life like that. He’d never do it again. He vowed to God right there and then.

If he just got away with it, he’d never do it again.

His next thought was—why did it take him so long?

He was used to trouble, but this kind of thing could get you into a different kind of trouble. He instinctively checked his six. He thought about the countless times he had seen those red and blue lights in his rearview, but tonight there was only blackness.

The love of his life instantly turned from an angel to a piece of refuse, and a heavy one at that. He grabbed it by one juicy hank.

You were supposed to bury a body. He could do that. He’d dug a hundred graves when he worked at a cemetery. He even worked for the sanitation department. He was used to disposing of trash.

He yanked it out of the car, and it bounced in a way he found comical, its head catching on the edge of the seat and then the floorboard. He dragged it through the dirt and awkwardly wedged it into some underbrush. He shoved it with his foot, but it kept rolling back.

He tested the unforgiving soil to see if he could scoop out enough of it with his hands to make a shallow grave, but it was hard as granite. There was no way. His only other solution was to run. He left the meat puppet tangled in underbrush and whore rags and drove the speed limit down the 27, thirty minutes or so, back to Coconut Grove.

It was nothing new for Sam to come home late and shuck his duds for someone else to launder. Not even much blood. He washed up and crawled into bed next to a sleeping Yvonne.

Sam replayed the night, vacillating between pleasure and fear. What had been her name?

Marcia? Madeleine? He remembered perfectly her doughy face, her frizzy blond curls that smelled like fresh shampoo, her neck that smelled like gin…

He got up just before dawn and kissed Yvonne goodbye, whispering he’d be going in to work early. He dressed in his green jumpsuit. On his way out, he got down on his knees and grabbed the shovel he’d seen under Mama’s porch. He drove back to the body, shovel in the trunk. The adrenaline of the kill was gone, and paranoia gathered in the vacuum. You didn’t get away with something like this.

A thought comforted him: that flat-footed ho wouldn’t likely be missed. She had told him as much. The night came to him like images in one of those old flip books, each picture leading to the next, creating the sensation of movement. Knew it was coming, didn’t she, somewhere deep down?

The radio went in and out as he approached the Everglades.

He slowed onto the turnoff at the dirt road, half expecting to see the familiar blue and red light show that had punctuated every few years of his life since he was thirteen. There was nothing but a thick woman’s calf, emerging from the underbrush.

He pulled over next to it, placed a boot solidly on its hip, and shoved until he cleared a space long and wide enough for at least a shallow grave.

How hard does a man have to work?

He rolled up his sleeves and plunged the shovel into the hard limestone soil.

The digging was a drag. Sam was strong on dramatic beginnings but lousy with follow-through. He left the discarded thing with its foot sticking out of the cold ground.

A few hours later, a garbage truck lurched down a wide boulevard lined with stately white houses. Sam was strapped into one of the side chairs on the exterior of the truck. The truck hit a pothole, and Sam nearly knocked heads with the two men strapped into the seats next to him.

“You heard they found a foot?” said the Cuban guy on his left.

“A what now?” chimed in the other trash monkey, as Sam thought of them. Fine enough guys, he supposed.

He had helium in his head that morning. Could have sailed over the rainbow, like that fat glassy-eyed bitch in the apron with the pillows for lips used to sing in the black-and-white movies. He imagined the strap that held him to the plastic seat on the side of the garbage truck was the only thing holding him down. He had to bide his time, play the game. He scratched the back of his neck, where he felt a tingle, like a premonition.

“A foot, my man. Glad it’s out of our zone.”

“What fool thing you talking about? Found a foot?” asked Sam.

“Out in the country.”

“They know who did it?”

“The fuck should I know.”

“Sure, sure.”

“I just know I don’t want to see no dead foot. I don’t like that creepy movie shit.”

“What movie?” asked Sam, sitting on his slightly trembling hands. That fucking foot. “The one about the kid who screws his mom?”

“Kills his mom.”

“Screws her and kills her.”

“Kills her and screws her.”

“Not throwing stones from here, man. Almost killed a blond once.”

“Only once?”

It was gossip, nothing more. He laughed along with the puerile jokes of the trash monkeys and did his day’s work. A day’s work was all they’d ever do. He now had a life purpose. He could feel it rising in his chest, heat high in his cheeks.

As Sam lay next to a snoring Yvonne that night, he thought over and over again about what’s-her-name Margaret. Thought about stroking his dick while he closed his iron fist around her throat and squeezed. Thought about the look in her eyes when she realized he wasn’t stopping.

He rolled on top of his girl and managed to finally fuck her. She snuggled up next to him after and dropped back off to sleep, her head on his chest. He’d done a good deed.

He knew what he’d done was wrong, but it wasn’t his fault. He wondered how sex and death and love and hate could get all twisted up inside a person. Hadn’t his ideas of right and wrong eroded long ago, starting at Boys’ Industrial School, where thirteen-year-olds who stole bicycles wound up fucked so many ways shit ran down their legs for days?

God made the paint on the side of that house. God made his mother and his sisters and brothers and the trees lining the road and the rows of shotgun shacks and the ocean and the sky and the mansions he slinked behind to pull away their trash. God made the presidents and queens and the hos on the stroll and the wheels on the bus. God made it all. If God made him exactly how he was, with the urges he had, then he and God had a special deal. He understood that now.

Lucifer was God’s favorite angel.