Joe Hill - Horns

“You want to call the cops, I won’t stop you. I’ll go with you to meet them at the foundry,” Lee says, “show them where to find her. But you better know what I’m going to tell them before you pick up the phone, Terry.”

Terry takes the steps in two bounding leaps, crosses the porch, jerks open the screen door, and pushes the front door in. He takes a stumbling step into a dark front hall. If there’s a phone here, he can’t see it in all the shadows. The kitchen is through to the left.

“We were all so drunk,” Lee says. “We were drunk, and you were high. She was the worst, though. That’s what I’ll tell them first. She was coming on to the both of us from the moment she got in the car. Ig called her a whore, and she was determined to prove him right.”

Terry is only half listening. He moves swiftly through a small formal dining room, barking his knee on a straight-backed chair, stumbling, then going on, into the kitchen. Lee comes after him, his voice unbearably calm.

“She told us to pull over so she could change out of her wet clothes, and then she put on a show, standing in the headlights. The whole time you didn’t say anything, just watching her, listening to her talk about how Iggy had a few things coming to him for the way he treated her. She made out with me a while, and then she went to work on you. She was so drunk she couldn’t see how angry you were. In the middle of giving you her little lap dance, she started talking about all the money she could get, selling the story of Terry Perrish’s private gang bang to the tabloids. That it would be worth doing to get even with Ig, just to see his face. That was when you hit her. You hit her before I knew what was happening.”

Terry is in the kitchen, at the counter, his hand on the beige phone, but he doesn’t pick it up. For the first time, he turns his head and looks back at tall, wiry Lee with his crown of golden-white hair, and his terrible, mysterious white eye. Terry puts a hand in the center of Lee’s chest and shoves him hard enough to slam him back into the wall. The windows rattle. Lee doesn’t look too upset.

“No one’s going to believe that horseshit.”

“Who knows what they’ll believe?” Lee Tourneau says. “It’s your fingerprints on the rock.”

Terry pulls Lee by the shirt, away from the wall, and smashes him into it again, pins him there with his right hand. A spoon falls from the counter, strikes the floor, rings like a chime. Lee regards him, unperturbed.

“You dropped that big fat joint you were smoking right next to the body. And she’s the one gave you that scrape,” Lee says. “Fighting you. After she was dead, you cleaned yourself off with her underwear. It’s your blood all over her panties.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Terry asks. The word “panties” also seems to ring in the air, just like the spoon.

“The scrape on your temple. I cleaned it with her underwear, while you were passed out. I need you to understand the situation, Terry. You’re in this thing as much as me. Maybe more.”

Terry brings the left hand back, squeezing his fingers into a fist, then catches himself. There is a kind of eagerness in Lee’s face, a bright-eyed anticipation, his breathing shallow and fast. Terry doesn’t hit him.

“What are you waiting for?” Lee asks. “Do it.”

Terry has never hit another man in anger in his life; he is almost thirty years old and has never thrown a punch. He has never even been in a school-yard brawl. Everyone in school liked him.

“If you hurt me in any way at all, I’ll call the police myself. That’ll make things look even better for me. I can say I tried to defend her.”

Terry takes an unsteady step back from him and lowers his hand. “I’m going. You ought to get yourself a lawyer. I know I’m going to be talking to mine inside of twenty minutes. Where’s my coat?”

“With the stone. And her panties. In a safe place. Not here. I stopped somewhere on the way home. You told me to collect the evidence and get rid of it, but I didn’t get rid of it-”

“Shut the fuck up-”

“-because I thought you might try to put it all on me. Go ahead, Terry. Call them. But I promise if you lay this shit on me, I’ll drag you down with me. Up to you. You just got Hothouse. You’re going back to L.A. in two days to hang with movie stars and underwear models. But go ahead and do the right thing. Satisfy your conscience. Just remember, no one will believe you, not even your own brother, who will hate you forever for killing his best girl when you were drunk and stoned. He might not believe it at first, but give him time. You’ll have twenty years in jail to pat yourself on the back for your upstanding morals. For the love of God, Terry. She’s been dead for four hours already. If you wanted to look clean, you should’ve reported it while the body was still warm. Now it’s bound to look like you at least thought about hiding it.”

“I’ll kill you,” Terry whispered.

“Sure,” Lee said. “Okay. Then you’ve got two bodies to explain. Knock yourself out.”

Terry turns away, stares desperately at the phone on the counter, feeling like if he doesn’t pick it up and call someone in the next few moments, every good thing in his life will be taken away from him. And yet he can’t seem to lift his arm. He is like a castaway on a desert island, watching an airplane glitter in the sky forty thousand feet overhead, with no way to signal it and his last chance at rescue sailing away.

“Or,” Lee says, “the other way it could’ve happened, if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, is she was killed by a random stranger. It happens all the time. It’s like every Dateline ever. No one saw us pick her up. No one saw us turn in to the foundry. As far as the world knows, you and I drove back to my place after the bonfire and played cards and passed out in front of the two A.M. SportsCenter. My house is on the exact opposite side of town from The Pit. There’s no reason we would’ve gone out there.”

Terry’s chest is tight, and his breath is short, and he thinks, randomly, that this must be how Ig feels when he’s in the grip of one of his asthma attacks. Funny how he can’t get his arm up to reach for the phone.

“There. I’ve said my piece. Basically, it comes down to this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you. Trust me, though. Cowards have more fun.”

Terry doesn’t move, doesn’t reply, and can’t look at Lee. His pulse trip-traps in his wrist.

“Tell you what,” Lee says, speaking in a tone of soothing reason. “If you took a drug test right now, you’d fail. You don’t want to go to the cops like this. You’ve had three hours’ sleep, tops, and you aren’t thinking clear. She’s been dead all night, Terry. Why don’t you give yourself the morning to think about this thing? They might not find her for days. Don’t rush into anything you can’t take back. Wait until you’re sure you know what you want to do.”

This is a dreadful thing to hear-they might not find her for days-a statement that brings to mind a vivid image of Merrin lying amid ferns and wet grass, with rainwater in her eyes and a beetle crawling through her hair. This is followed by the memory of Merrin in the passenger seat, shivering in her wet clothes, looking back at him with shy, unhappy eyes. Thanks for picking me up. You just saved my life.

“I want to go home,” Terry says. He means it to sound belligerent, hard-assed, righteous, but instead it comes out in a cracked whisper.

“Sure,” Lee says. “I’ll drive you. But let me get you one of my shirts before we go. You’ve got her blood all over that one.” He gestures toward the filth Terry rubbed off on the front of his shirt, which only now, in the pearly, opalescent light of dawn, can be identified as dried blood.