Page 75 of Need Him Like Oxygen

“Never watch the news, huh?”

“New Jersey news? No. Why?”

“Red algae means no swimming. This sign looks of the permanent sort. Figure this has been going on for a few years. No one swimming… not much of a chance of ever knocking our little anchor loose.”

“Huh. Good,” I said, nodding.

Contrary to what popular movies suggest, it wasn’t exactly easy for the mafia to hide bodies. At least not in the city. Sure, sometimes we got lucky with groundbreaking on new construction sites. And, yeah, the ocean was always an option if you were careful.

I heard one of the other Five Families, the Costas, actually had a guy on the payroll whose only job was to clean up crime scenes and bury bodies.

Us Lombardis, though, we all handled our own bodies. Which wasn’t always easy. Especially when you didn’t drive.

As Dav opened the tub, then dragged out the body, I had to admit that I was really thankful for his help this time. I’m sure, if I tried hard enough, I would get the job done by myself. But every moment of it would suck.

Dav was as chipper as ever, though, as he took the weights, then began tying them to the arms and legs of the corpse.

“What in the Boy Scouts?” I asked at his effortless rope tying.

“Handy skill to learn,” he said, shrugging it off. “So, what do you think? Weights good enough, or should we slice open the stomach, so it doesn’t bloat up? What?” he asked, looking up at me from his squatted position, head cocked to the side.

“Just… every once in a while, one of us will say something that reminds me how fucking insane our lives are,” I admitted. “This is one of those moments. But, ah, I think he might have enough holes in him.”

“Fair enough,” Dav said, looking at the body. “Alright. If you can carry two of the weights down the dock, I can take him and the other two.”

So that’s what we did, grunting and grumbling and sweating through our coats and gloves.

In the end, the body flew over. Half a second later, all the weights were in too, and we stood there at the end of the dock, panting for breath and watching him disappear.

Dav lowered down onto the dock, exhaling hard.

“Fuck,” he sighed, slipping off his rubber gloves, and shoving them into his coat jacket, then taking off said jacket to rest it on the dock and lay back on top of it.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a nice night. Trees. Sky. Fresh air.”

“Pesky, rotting corpse just underneath us…”

“Get your pretty ass down here and enjoy it for five minutes,” he demanded. When I didn’t immediately move to do just that, he reached up, snagged my wrist, and pulled me down next to him.

I shrugged out of my jacket, spreading it beside Dav, then moved to lie flat as well, reminding myself that I was allowed to have this one last night before I pushed him away again.

“Okay. It is pretty. Corpse aside,” I agreed, looking up at the moody night sky, the clouds moving across the moon, giving it a spooky look as the wind kicked up, surrounding us with scents of dirt and leaves and water. Things the city didn’t really have to offer.

“Ever want to move out of the city?” he asked.

“No,” I said immediately. “But to be fair, I’ve spent almost no time outside of it.”

“I don’t really ever either. But that one summer in rural Pennsylvania had me wishing for a change of pace for a while. Sun, long days out by the pond, riding bikes, four-wheelers, local wildlife that wasn’t rats the size of your average cat…”

“When you were a teen, right?” I asked, remembering his story about his cousins and the porn.

“Yeah. Just the one summer.”

“Why?”

“Because my old man was locked up for knocking around my mom. And my mom was in the mental institution for trying to kill herself for the third time. Either my aunt had to step up, or I was going to go into foster care. And since next to no one wants a teenage boy, I would have been in a group home.”

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