It had been a while. Not deliberately; things had just kept getting in the way. A problem with distribution a few towns over that the Catfish Mob expected sorted out as the price of doing business. Some biker’s old lady had run down a cop and needed her car deep cleaned before the cops impounded it.
Before he could do anything, Harry cleared his throat.
“I’m going to be honest,” he said. “You guys make a cute couple, but not sure that will help if we get caught.”
Grade stepped back from Clay, suddenly awkward. “We’re not a couple,” he said. “We just fuck.”
Clay frowned.
It was close enough to what Clay had said earlier, so he didn’t have reason to feel pissed off about it. Still was, though. It was lucky that he was jacked in the head and didn’t have a “good reason” for half the stuff he felt. Or if you listened to his therapist—which he tried to avoid—none that he was willing to deal with.
“Yeah, well, that’s worse,” Harry said. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of telling my wife that is what ended up with me in jail.”
“Don’t worry,” Grade said. “I wasn’t going to ask you to join in.”
“Sure, because ‘me and the corpse just watched’ sounds better,” Harry said. “That’s not going to end up in a meme somewhere.”
Grade ducked around Clay and headed back into the kitchen. “No one is going to get caught tonight,” he said. “It takes, on average, forty minutes for the local deputies to respond to a call about a household burglary. We’re still within our window.”
He disappeared through the door. When he came out a second later, he had a mini-cooler in one hand.
“Hungry?” Clay asked.
It started out sarcastic, but now he thought about it, he could eat. A couple of crackers and a single shrimp was not a meal. He still couldn’t believe Charity had made a big do like that and not even sprung for a tray of devilled eggs or something.
Grade looked confused for a moment and then hefted the cooler. “Oh, this?” he said. “No, this is the last touch, and then we can go. Someone lift her head?”
He didn’t nominate anyone for the job, and neither Clay nor Harry jumped in to do the needful. Clay supposed he could just tell Harry to do it, but that would make him look squeamish. He’d never live it down.
“How far up?” he asked as he knelt next to the dead woman on the floor.
Clay cupped both hands around her head. It felt weird. He’d killed people before. Some of it had been in the army and some for Ezra, and he’d probably have to add the Catfish Mob to that list sooner or later. That didn’t bother him.
Liar, liar. Pants on fire.The old rhyme skittered through his head on a manic singsong. He worked his jaw from one side to the other and ignored it.
This—the weight of the woman’s head, the slack, waxy slide of her face as she stared up—bothered him. But fuck that too, and the part of his brain that was nudging at him with the “why.” He didn’t need to know. In fact, probably better he didn’t. In Clay’s experience, men with complicated internal lives did not thrive in his line of work.
“Not like that. Your feet are in the way,” Grade said. He gestured with his free hand. “Stand over her.”
Clay rolled his eyes but did as he was told. He straddled her shoulders and cupped the back of her neck with one hand as Grade knelt where Clay had been a second ago. He opened the cooler and pulled out a blood bag.
“What the fuck?” Clay said. “Where did you get that? Is that yours?”
“What? No.” Grade swept up the dead woman’s hair in one hand to keep it out of the way as he emptied about half the bag onto the waxed wooden floorboards. “Maybe it didn’t come up in Doing Crime 101, but don’t leave your DNA at a crime scene.”
“So where did you get it?”
“It’s her blood. I extracted it back at the original scene.” Grade added another few drips to the puddle and then tied off the bag. It went back in the cooler. “You can set her head back down now. Gently.”
“Damn,” Clay deadpanned. He lowered the dead woman’s head. It squelched softly as it settled into the small pool of blood. “I was going to try and spike it like a football.”
Grade snorted and snapped the lid of the cooler shut.
“That’s it,” he said. “Now we just have to wait and see what ends up in the news.”
“Let’s get out of here, then,” Clay said. He straightened up, stepped away from the dead woman, and offered Grade a gloved hand up. “Just in case the traffic is good tonight.”
Harry glanced between them and then down at the dead woman.
