"It's five flights down, and I don't think I can carry him that far," Alcide said. "He needs to go at least some of the distance in the elevator. That's the most dangerous part."
We kept discussing and refining, until we felt we had a workable procedure. Alcide asked me twice if I was okay, and I reassured him both times; it finally dawned on me that he was thinking I might break into hysterics, or faint.
"I've never been able to afford to be too finicky," I said. "That's not my nature." If Alcide expected or wanted me to ask for smelling salts, or to beg him to save little me from the big bad wolf, he had the wrong woman.
I might be determined to keep my head, but that's not to say I felt exactly calm. I was so jittery when I went to get the shower curtain that I had to restrain myself from ripping it from the clear plastic rings. Slow and steady, I told myself fiercely. Breathe in, breathe out, get the shower curtain, spread it on the hall floor.
It was blue and green with yellow fish swimming serenely in even rows.
Alcide had gone downstairs to the parking garage to move his truck as close to the stair door as possible. He'd thoughtfully brought a pair of work gloves back up with him. While he pulled them on, he took a deep breath-maybe a mistake, considering the body's proximity. His face a frozen mask of determination, Alcide gripped the corpse's shoulders and gave a yank.
The results were dramatic beyond our imagining. In one stiff piece, the biker toppled out of the closet. Alcide had to leap to his right to avoid the falling body, which banged against the kitchen counter and then fell sideways onto the shower curtain.
"Wow," I said in a shaky voice, looking down at the result. "That turned out well."
The body was lying almost exactly as we wanted it. Alcide and I gave each other a sharp nod and knelt at each end. Acting in concert, we took one side of the plastic curtain and flipped it over the body, then the other. We both relaxed when the man's face was covered. Alcide had also brought up a roll of duct tape-real men always have duct tape in their trucks-and we used it to seal the wrapped body in the curtain. Then we folded the ends over, and taped them. Luckily, though a hefty guy, the Were hadn't been very tall.
We stood up and let ourselves have a little moment of recovery. Alcide spoke first. "It looks like a big green burrito," he observed.
I slapped a hand over my mouth to stifle a fit of the giggles.
Alcide's eyes were startled as he stared at me over the wrapped corpse. Suddenly, he laughed, too.
After we'd settled down, I asked, "You ready for phase two?"
He nodded, and I pulled on my coat and scooted past the body and Alcide. I went out to the elevator, closing the apartment door behind me very quickly, just in case someone passed by.
The minute I punched the button, a man appeared around the corner and came to stand by the elevator door. Perhaps he was a relative of old Mrs. Osburgh, or maybe one of the senators was making a flying trip back to Jackson. Whoever he was, he was well dressed and in his sixties, and he was polite enough to feel the obligation of making conversation.
"It's really cold today, isn't it?"
"Yes, but not as cold as yesterday." I stared at the closed doors, willing them to open so he would be gone.
"Did you just move in?"
I had never been so irritated with a courteous person before. "I'm visiting," I said, in the kind of flat voice that should indicate the conversation is closed.
"Oh," he said cheerfully. "Who?"
Luckily the elevator chose that moment to arrive and its doors snicked open just in time to save this too-genial man from getting his head snapped off. He gestured with a sweep of his hand, wanting me to precede him, but I took a step back, said, "Oh my gosh, I forgot my keys!" and walked briskly off without a backward glance. I went to the door of the apartment next to Alcide's, the one he'd told me was empty, and I knocked on the door. I heard the elevator doors close behind me, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
When I figured Mr. Chatty had had time to get to his car and drive out of the garage-unless he was talking the ears off the security guard-I recalled the elevator. It was Saturday, and there was no telling what people's schedules would be like. According to Alcide, many of the condos had been bought as an investment and were subleased to legislators, most of who would be gone for the pre-holidays. The year-round tenants, however, would be moving around in atypical ways, since it was not only the weekend, but also only two weekends before Christmas. When the creaky contraption came back to the fifth floor, it was empty.
I dashed back to 504, knocked twice on the door, and dashed back to the elevator to hold the doors open. Preceded by the legs of the corpse, Alcide emerged from the apartment. He moved as quickly as a man can while he's carrying a stiff body over his shoulder.
This was our most vulnerable moment. Alcide's bundle looked like nothing on this earth but a corpse wrapped in a shower curtain. The plastic kept the smell down, but it was still noticeable in the small enclosure. We made it down one floor safely, then the next. At the third floor, our nerve ran out. We stopped the elevator, and to our great relief it opened onto an empty corridor. I darted out and over to the stair door, holding it open for Alcide. Then I scampered down the stairs ahead of him, and looked through the pane of glass in the door to the garage.
"Whoa," I said, holding my hand up. A middle-aged woman and a teenage girl were unloading packages from the trunk of their Toyota, simultaneously having a vigorous disagreement. The girl had been invited to an all-night party. No, her mother said.
She had to go, all her friends would be there. No, her mother said.
But Mom, everyone else's mom was letting them go. No, her mother said.
"Please don't decide to take the stairs," I whispered.
But the argument raged on as they got in the elevator. I clearly heard the girl break her train of complaint long enough to say, "Ew, something smells in here!" before the doors closed.
"What's happening?" Alcide whispered.
"Nothing. Let's see if that lasts a minute longer."
It did, and I stepped out of the door and over to Alcide's truck, darting glances from side to side to make sure I was really alone. We weren't quite in sight of the security guard, who was in his little glass hut up the slope of the ramp.
I unlocked the back of Alcide's pickup; fortunately, his pickup bed had a cover. With one more comprehensive look around the garage, I hurried back to the stair door and rapped on it. After a second, I pulled it open.
Alcide shot out and over to his truck faster than I would have believed he could move, burdened as he was. We pushed as hard as we could, and the body slowly retreated into the truck bed. With tremendous relief, we slammed the tailgate shut and locked it.
"Phase two complete," Alcide said with an air that I would have called giddy if he hadn't been such a big man.
Driving through the streets of a city with a body in your vehicle is a terrifying exercise in paranoia.
"Obey every single traffic rule," I reminded Alcide, unhappy with how tense my voice sounded.
"Okay, okay," he growled, his voice equally tense.
"Do you think those people in that Jimmy are looking at us?"
"No."
It would obviously be a good thing for me to keep quiet, so I did. We got back on I-20, the same way we'd entered Jackson, and drove until there was no city, only farmland.
When we got to the Bolton exit, Alcide said, "This looks good."
"Sure," I said. I didn't think I could stand driving around with the body any longer. The land between Jackson and Vicksburg is pretty low and flat, mostly open fields broken up by a few bayous, and this area was typical. We exited the interstate and headed north toward the woods. After a few miles Alcide took a right onto a road that had needed repaving for years. The trees grew up on either side of the much-patched strip of gray. The bleak winter sky didn't stand a chance of giving much light with this kind of competition, and I shivered in the cab of the truck.