Page 5 of Winning Bid

“You did not see me do it? I am quick, but?—”

“I wasn’t paying much attention at that point. Mostly, I was trying not to freak out.”

“Ah. If you ever must do this on your own, there is a trick to it. Best to pierce both lungs and the intestines to prevent a gas build-up that makes the body rise in the water. Old boss of mine called it puncturing the pockets. Even weighed down, bodies float if you’re not careful. If animals eat away the weights, the body can rise to the surface. But I am always careful. I know I did it that night. I had to clean my knife when I came home. There is no reason this should have happened.”

“Good to know. Hopefully, I will never have to worry about that again.” My mouth went dry, and I thought I might get sick. “So, since you did that, what do you think happened?”

“I have a theory, but you turn green, so I do not know if you want to hear it.”

“Please. I just want answers.”

He shrugs. “Tiger sharks come up to Boston now, even in winter. Climate change makes water warmer, so they come here. They eat almost anything. They are large enough to swallow most of a man. So, they smell meat, they eat it. It does not settle for them, they vomit.” Another shrug.

“Fair play to you, you were right. I did not want to hear that.” My stomach twisted harder thinking about that. Now, my mental image of Neil’s bloated corpse included shark tooth marks.

“I did warn.”

The only question that matters at this point. “What do we do?”

“This I do not know. Stealing his body will only make things more suspicious?—"

“You think?”

“And his body is the only evidence of the incident that we know of. With luck, they will not be able to glean evidence from it. Too chewed up. Too worn. Without luck?—"

“We are fucked.”

He nods once. “Do you think anyone will be called in for questioning?”

“It is likely they will pull June in.”

“People see her with him, da?”

“Yeah. He was hanging out at the bar she worked at. They left together that night.”

He sighs through tight teeth like a hiss. “I feel we are without luck in this, Anderson.”

“What do we do without luck?”

“Pray.”

“I need to do something more proactive than prayer, Moss.”

He sits back and smiles. “We could always call your father?—"

“You knew my answer would be, ‘Fuck no, before you even opened your mouth.”

“Da, I did. But your father, for all his flaws, has valuable friends who may help.”

I run my fingers through my hair. It goes against every instinct I have to call on my father. The man helped to get me into this mess. I cannot count on him to get me out of it. If he deigned to do so, he would just use it as another blackmail tool, only this time, he’d have something over June, too. I could never let that happen to her. It is bad enough that he manipulates me.

“If worse comes to worse, and I mean the very worst possibility, I might call on him. Unless that happens, we need to handle things ourselves as best we can. Dead silence on the matter. You and I probably shouldn’t contact each other for a while, don’t you think?”

He shakes his head. “We have other reasons to contact each other, Anderson. If we end communication, that is suspicious. We carry on with our days as we usually do. No more, no less. They ask questions, we know June knew him, but you two reconciled. Anything else happen? We know nothing.”

Frustratingly, it is all we could do. “That is basically what June and I came up with. Glad to know we’re on the same page.”

He smiles and we say our farewells, and I should be comforted by the fact June and I came up with the same plan as a career criminal. Someone who knows what he’s doing in this kind of circumstance.

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