Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

covered the bulge of cash. He checked the pocket to make sure he had his keys and said, “So, Keesh, be back in a bit, okay?”
    He went out the door, followed by Wedmore. Keisha, worried about anything he might say to the detective, stepped outside, wrapping her arms around herself against the cold.
    “You don’t have to worry about Keisha,” Kirk said. “She’s a good person.”
    “I’m sure,” Wedmore said as they approached the truck. “This what you have to deliver?”
    She pointed to the bag in the cargo bed.
    “Huh?” Kirk said, his hand on the door handle.
    “This bag here?”
    “More drop off than deliver. Just getting rid of some garbage.”
    “They don’t have pickup on this street?” Wedmore asked.
    “Oh sure, but sometimes, you have a lot of stuff, you don’t want to wait for garbage day.”
    “This is hardly a lot of stuff,” she said. “It’s just one bag.”
    “Yeah, but we had some fish, and you know, that stuff sits around, it gets pretty ripe by pickup day.”
    “In the summer, yeah, I could see that,” Wedmore said. “But you tuck that in a can, it’ll probably freeze these days.”
    Kirk shrugged, hauled himself up into the driver’s seat. “You know, everybody does stuff different.”
    “So you’re really going to make a trip to the dump for this one bag? Isn’t that kind of crazy?”
    Another shrug. “I just do what the boss tells me.”
    Keisha, watching this, knew it was all over. She wondered whether Kirk had been born this stupid, or if it was something he’d worked at over the years.
    “Where is the dump, anyway?” Wedmore asked.
    “Say again?” Kirk, evidently, had just suffered some partial hearing loss.
    “I said, where is the dump? In case I ever have a lot of stuff I have to haul out of my place. Where is it?”
    “The dump?” Kirk said. “You asking where it is?”
    Keisha thought about lawyers. She didn’t know any offhand. She didn’t want to just pick one at random out of the Yellow Pages. A personal recommendation would be useful.
    “That’s what I was asking,” Wedmore said.
    “You just go out Route One, up aways,” he said.
    “Open the bag,” the detective said.
    “I’m sorry, what?”
    “You heard me. Open the bag.”
    “It’s gonna stink to high heaven,” he said. “You sure you want me to do that?”
    “Yes.”
    Wedmore took a couple of steps back, giving Kirk room to slide out of the truck. He stood alongside the cargo bed, reached for the bag, lifted it out by the red ties, and set it on the driveway.
    “Mom, can I have something to eat?”
    Keisha whirled around, saw Matthew standing there. “Go to your room!” she shouted.
    The boy, startled, bolted.
    “Open it,” Wedmore said.
    The red ties were knotted, so Kirk had to poke a finger into the green plastic of the bag and make a tear in it. He glanced back at Keisha, giving her an apologetic grimace before enlarging the opening. Once he’d created a hole about the size of a paper plate, Wedmore asked him to step away.
    She leaned over the bag, peered inside, then looked at Kirk. “I don’t see any fish in here.”
    “No?”
    “No. I see a lot of pizza scraps, but no fish.”
    Kirk blinked. “I guess I got mixed up,” he said.

Thirty
    The dumb son of a bitch had grabbed the wrong bag.
    This had to be a first, Keisha thought. Kirk’s stupidity paying off. It would have been better if he’d come back without any bag at all, but if he had to bring one home, better that it be filled with discarded pizza.
    Of course, it meant that bag of bloody clothes was still in the Dumpster behind that pizza place. Maybe, Keisha prayed to herself, it would end up getting picked up on trash day without ever being discovered.
    The bag wasn’t her biggest problem at the moment, anyway. It was that damned card.
    If the card was the only thing that could place her at the Garfield house, Keisha believed she could ride it out. Couldn’t any lawyer with half a brain come up with a dozen ways it could have ended up in the dead man’s shirt pocket?
    She tried to stay composed as Wedmore, now wearing rubber gloves, sifted through the bag of garbage. There were pizza scraps, empty pop cans and water bottles, cardboard triangles for takeout slices, napkins.
    She could hear Wedmore asking Kirk more questions.
    “Where would you get all this?” she asked.
    “We had pizza the other night,” he said.
    “This isn’t garbage from one night’s pizza,” the detective said.