But Mitch was watching Kevin. “Yeah,” Kevin was saying into the phone. “I took him in my car and we buried him. I mean, I buried him. In a yard.”

Mitch could hear the other person talking; Kevin was nodding. Then he hung up. “That was weird,” he said.

“Do you want coffee?” Doug called again.

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” Mitch stood up.

“The cops found Scotch Parker’s body. He had a collar on him with a phone number. That was Mrs. Parker. She wanted to know why the cops came to her house this morning asking about her dog being buried in that guy’s yard.”

“The cops came? Over a dog?”

“Huh?” Doug shouted from the kitchen. “What’s this about a dog?”

Mitch felt his heart start thumping again, like it had a few moments before. He searched for an excuse that would make everything all right. “Maybe the guy was just pissed… about the dog being buried in his yard. Maybe…”

“She said there were three cops. They were very serious.”

Doug came out into the living room and saw the looks on Kevin’s and Mitch’s faces, confused, yet worried. “The cops went to that old dude’s house?” he asked.

They began finishing each other’s sentences again. “Which means-”

“They found the car.”

“Fuck!” yelled Kevin. “I told you we should have found a ravine. You gotta have a ravine. You can’t just leave a getaway car just sitting there.”

“But…” said Mitch slowly, still piecing things together, “… they knew to go to the lady who owned the dog.”

The three of them stood in the living room in silence while this information sank in, staring at each other, each hoping another would say something obvious and comforting which would make everything OK.

“And the lady must have given them your number,” said Mitch.

“She did,” said Kevin.

“We are fucked.” Mitch sat down heavily on the couch.

“After all that. A fucking dead dog,” marveled Kevin. “I shoulda just thrown his body out the fucking window.”

“OK, we’re fucked,” said Mitch, his paratroop commander persona taking over. He jumped up and flung open the closet door and took out his coat and started looking around for his shoes. He found them and put them on. “Here’s the deal,” he began while hurriedly tying them. “You give us up. We’ll be ready for it. All your money’s hidden. Just say you drove us out there to buy the car and that was it. Go walk dogs.”

Kevin turned to go. “Sorry, dudes,” he said.

“Sorry, man,” said Doug, still holding a coffee pot in the kitchen doorway.

“Later, man.” Mitch was a blur of activity, flying around, getting everything together. He opened his duffel bag and saw the money, the socks, and the underwear. He tried to decide if he needed another pair of jeans. Fuck it, he had enough to buy a new pair if it came to that. Kevin was still standing in the doorway.

“Gimme that weed back, man,” Mitch said. “The cops’ll be going through your shit later.”

Kevin, whose hand was noticeably shaking, handed the little baggie back to Mitch.

“Get outta here. Go walk dogs.”

As they heard Kevin’s truck pull out of the driveway, Mitch turned to Doug, who still hadn’t moved.

“Dude, last chance. I’d come with me if I were you.”

Doug didn’t look panicked or even slightly freaked out. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, coffee pot in his hand, with a serene smile on his face. “Nah, man. I’ll be OK.”

“You know you’ll go to jail. You’ll wake up in jail by tomorrow morning.”

Doug nodded. Mitch went over and shook his hand. “Later, dude.”

“Later.”

Mitch turned to leave, then turned back. “I gotta be able to get in touch with you, to pay for a lawyer.”

Doug shook his head. “I’ll have Kevin handle that.” They stared at each other for a few seconds, then Doug asked, “Where are you gonna go?”

“I dunno.”

“Good luck.”

“Same to you.” The door slammed, and he was gone. As he was running down the steps and out into the street, Mitch thought, Guess I’m not going to get a chance to paint the ceiling.

THEY CAME FOR Kevin when he returned from walking dogs. The whole time he was walking Duffy, the St. Bernard, he had been expecting cop cars to come screeching up to him. But they had just sat outside his house waiting for him to come home.

They were very polite and Kevin was very prepared. He was expecting to be wrestled to the ground and have his face pushed into the wooden floor of his porch, his mouth filling with paint chips, as had happened when they busted him for pot. But the detective was the kindly looking older man he had seen on TV and he just showed Kevin his badge and asked a few questions.

“How are you today, Mr. Gurdy?” the detective asked.

Kevin nodded. “Is this about the dead dog? Because Mrs. Parker just called me,” he said, looking at the three police officers. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know there were all these laws about dog burial.”

The detective gave him a skeptical smile and nodded. “Where were you yesterday afternoon at about three P.M.?”

Kevin gave the prepared answer: walking dogs. He described the schedule exactly. He had, of course, walked his dogs an hour early that day. Once again, the detective looked skeptical.

“When you bought the Impala, who was there with you?”

It hurt to do it, but it had been the plan all along. Kevin gave them Doug and Mitch’s names. He stressed that Doug had just been laid off from his job and that his car had been impounded, and he tried to think of other things to say which might give the cops a better impression of the two. Then he remembered to ask the question that only a guilty man would forget to ask. “What’s all this about? We just buried a dog.”

DOUG WAS SITTING on his couch watching television when the cops arrived. After Mitch had left, Doug made the coffee and tried to figure out the only thing he still had control over-what exactly he would be doing when they came for him. He imagined a few different poses. He could be reading. He could be smoking pot. (What difference would it make at this point?) He could be watching TV. He could be cleaning the apartment, but clearly there was no point to that, as he would not be around to enjoy the cleanliness. Why go through the misery of cleaning unless you could enjoy the fruits of your labor?

It struck him that it might be a good day to go down to the convenience store and ask out the Mexican girl. He realized that the reason he had never done it before was that he lacked the confidence of a man who knew what he would be doing tomorrow. Today, he had that confidence but he decided not to bother because it just seemed like a bad way to start a relationship.

Perhaps she’d still be there when he got out.

He finished his coffee and smoked a bowl, then hid all the bongs and bowls, and put the last of his stash in the garbage. It hurt to throw the pot away but he decided he was in enough trouble as it was, so why make it worse?

Then he settled in to watch television, one ear tuned to every vehicle turning onto the street.

Around noon, he heard it and knew right away. Two cars, both with large engines, but not large enough for them to be trucks. They were driving slowly, as if checking addresses. Doug turned the sound down on the television, which he hadn’t really been watching, just staring at it as if it were a campfire. He felt strangely serene.

The engines stopped. Doors were opened and closed.

He clearly heard one police officer walking around to the back of the house, trying to be quiet about it, but his feet crunched in the new-fallen snow. That, Doug figured, was in case he tried to bolt out the back door.