Bad Blood

Already half of it was gone: he stirred himself, said, “Move, you dumbass.”
    He bent over the older man, lifted his head and slammed the back of it against the grate, hard as he could, as though trying to crack open a coconut, and at the same time, trying to hit at the precise point where the bat had. He’d thought about this, had lain in bed and planned it out, visualized it, the way he would a pass pattern. He was right on schedule.
    With Flood profoundly unconscious, or maybe already dead, Tripp lifted the man and pushed him into the grain flow, face up, reached out, and pulled his mouth open. Soybeans were spilling from the truck like water from a pitcher, flowing around the unconscious farmer, filling his mouth, nose, ears. They gathered in his eye sockets, and in his shirt pockets, and in the John 3:16 hat. They squirted down into his overalls, slipping through the folds of his boxer shorts, hard and round, looking for a resting place in a navel or a fold of skin.
    Tripp watched for a minute, then hurried back to the side of the elevator to make sure there were no more trucks coming, then went inside, washed the bat, stuck it under the mat in the trunk of his car. Back inside, he filled out the paperwork on Flood’s visit. Five minutes passed.
    Had to be dead, Tripp thought. He went outside and looked at the man on the grate. His eyes were open, but there was nothing going on. Tripp leaned forward and put his hand over Flood’s mouth, and pinched his nose with the other hand. No reaction. Held them for a minute. Nothing. He was dead. He hadn’t seen many dead bodies that he could remember: his grandfather, but he’d been in a coffin and looked more waxed than dead. He’d gone to a couple more funerals when he was a kid, but he could hardly remember them.
    But this guy was dead.
    Tripp stood, caught sight of the hat, said out loud, “Three:sixteen, my ass.” He knew what it meant—“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life.”
    He knew what it meant, but it didn’t apply to Flood. Tripp bent over, grabbed the farmer by the feet, and dragged him off the grate. Watched him for another moment, thought, Shit, if he’s not dead, he’s Lazarus.
    He called 911 from the old Western Electric dial phone in the office. He’d been frightened by the killing, by even the thought of the killing, and he’d known that he would be, and he’d known there’d be a use for his fear and anguish: he let it spill out when the cop answered.
    “Man, man, this is Bob Tripp, there’s been a bad accident at the Battenberg elevator,” he shouted into the phone. “We need somebody here, we need an ambulance, man, I think he’s dead. . . .”
     
     
    THE NEXT SATURDAY. End of the golf season.
    Lee Coakley collected twelve dollars, her biggest score of the year, and almost enough to get her even. She had a last Sprite, and looked at the gray wall of clouds in the western sky, and said to the others, “I’ll see you girls on April Fools’ Day, if I’ve spent all this money by then. It’s such a bunch, I probably won’t.”
    “Stay out of Victoria’s Secret,” one of them said.
    “Right. I’ll remember that.” Walking with a grin through an indelicate stream of scornful comments, she carried her golf bag out to her car and threw it in the trunk, with only a mild pang of regret. She’d been golfed-out for a month, and though she’d be right back at it in the spring, the winter break was always a relief. When she took her two weeks in Florida, the clubs would stay at home.
    In the driver’s seat, she opened the center console and checked her cell phone: two calls, one from Darrell Martin, her private attorney, who was, she thought, looking to assuage her grief over the divorce—probably at the Holiday Inn in Rochester, far enough away that his wife wouldn’t hear about it—and one from Ike Patras, the medical examiner in Mankato. The call had come in forty minutes earlier, about when she’d been standing on the eighteenth green, waiting to putt out.
    Coakley thought, Huh. Working on a Saturday.
    She punched redial, and a woman answered, and she said, “This is Lee Coakley down in Warren County. I’m returning a call from Ike.”
    “Yeah, just a minute, Lee,” the woman said. She added, “This is Martha, Ike’s in the back. I’m gonna put the phone down—”
    “What’re you doing working on a