The Bodies Left Behind

found anything at all.
    They disconnected and she turned to her husband to give him a summary of what had happened. He closed his eyes and rocked back. “That’s okay,” he said, cutting her off. “I got enough.”
    She touched his leg. He didn’t respond. After a few minutes, she lifted her fingers away and called the neighbor where Joey was staying. She talked to her son for some moments, telling him the truth—that they didn’t know anything yet about his grandmother. She let him ramble on about a video game he’d been playing. Brynn told him she loved him and hung up.
    Husband and wife sat in silence. Brynn looked at her husband once then shifted her gaze down at the floor. Finally, after an eternity, he rested his hand on her knee. They remained that way, motionless, for some minutes—until a doctor came out of the double door. He looked at the man with the hurt arm and then walked directly toward Brynn and Graham.

    HART GOT RID of the car he’d hijacked on the interstate.
    He did this as efficiently as he knew how: He parked it in the Avenues West area of Milwaukee with the doors locked but the keys in the ignition. Some kids wouldn’t notice and some would notice but think it was a sting and some—in the quickly redeveloping area—would notice but would do the right thing and pass the car by.
    The car, however, would still be gone within one hour. And harvested for parts in twelve.
    Head down, exhausted and in agony from the gunshot and the other trauma of the night, Hart walked quickly away from the vehicle. It was a cool morning, the sky clear. The smell of fires from construction site scrap teased his nose. His instincts were still running the show and were directing him underground as fast as possible.
    Walking along the sparsely populated streets he found the Brewline Hotel, though it was nowhere near the Brewline. It was the sort of place that thrived on business by the hour or by the week but rarely by the day. He paid for one week in advance with a bonus for a private bath, and was given a remote control and a set of sheets. The overweight woman clerk took no notice of his physical condition or absence of luggage. He trooped up the two flights of stairs and into room 238.He locked the door, stripped and dumped his fetid clothes into a pile that reminded him very much of Brynn McKenzie’s soaked uniform at the second house on Lake View Drive.
    He pictured her stripping.
    The image aroused him for a few minutes until the throbbing in his arm tipped him out of the mood.
    He examined the wound closely. Hart had taken paramedic training courses—because his job often involved physical injuries. He now assessed the wound and concluded that he didn’t need a doctor. He knew several medicos who’d lost their tickets and would stitch him up, no questions asked or gunshots reported, for a thousand bucks. But the bleeding had stopped, the bone was intact and, though his bruise was impressive, the infection was minor. He’d start on antibiotics later today.
    Hart showered under a stuttering stream of water, doing his best to keep his arm dry.
    He returned to the bed, naked, and lay down. He wanted to consider the night, to try to make sense of it. He thought back several weeks—to a Starbucks in Kenosha, where he was meeting with a guy he’d worked with a few times in Wisconsin. Gordon Potts was a big, hulking man, not brilliant but decent and someone you could trust. And he could hook you up with dependable labor when you needed it. Potts had said he’d been approached by a woman in Milwaukee who was smart, tough and pretty. He vouched for her. (Hart now realized that Michelle had bought the credentials with a blow job or two.)
    Hart was interested. He was between jobs andbored. There was a deal going down in Chicago but that wasn’t until mid-May. He wanted something now, needed some action, adrenaline. The same way that the tweaker Hart had killed in the state park last night needed to slam meth.
    Besides, the job was a lark Potts told him.
    A few days later Potts had hooked him up with “Brenda”—the fake name Michelle had offered—in a coffee shop in the Broadway District of Green Bay. She said, “So, Hart. How you doing?”
    She shook his hand firmly.
    “Good. You?”
    “I’m okay. Listen, I’m interested in hiring somebody. You interested in some work?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. So how do you know Gordon Potts? You go back a long ways?”
    “Not so long.”
    “How’d