Free Hell on Church Street by Jake Hinkson Page B

clothes and got into the shower.
    Maybe taking a shower right then sounds crazy to you. Maybe it was, and maybe I am crazy. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have never been more rational than right after I killed the Cards. It was late and the neighbors were probably asleep. I had no reason to think the cops were on their way, and I calculated that staying and showering was a smarter risk to take than traipsing back through the woods soaked in DNA. Better to wash as much of the evidence down the drain.
    Taking that quick shower, I was as objective as I could be. It was like working out an equation. I ran the water hot and scrubbed off good, washing with soap and shampoo. Once the initial shock of killing the Cards had subsided, I was just a man trying to solve a problem. I didn’t have any experience with this sort of thing, of course. I hadn’t planned to kill the Cards, and I had made no preparations for it. I had to improvise, and I needed to do it quickly. By the time I was done with the little shower, I had it all figured out.
    I dried off and went into the Cards’ bedroom and put on a pair of Brother Card’s slippers, some khaki shorts and his red Ask Me About Jesus t-shirt. Then I dug out his darkest clothes: a pair of black dress shoes, black slacks, dark brown sweater and a black blazer. I lay them on the bed, and I walked back to the kitchen. It was a gruesome sight. The Cards were exactly as I had left them, their eyes open, vacant and rubbery-looking. It was bizarre, really, how they were no longer people. They were objects on the floor. They didn’t have breath or thoughts or a future. They were just objects. Messy objects. The whole place was covered in blood: dried blood and sticky blood and wet blood.
    I went out to the garage and rummaged around until I found a plastic container of gasoline three quarters full. I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the table.
    Then I dug out Sister Card’s salad tongs, went down the hall to the bathroom and plucked my bloody clothes off the floor like they were a science experiment. As much as possible, I tried to avoid any blood. I took out the envelope crumpled in my jacket. It looked like hell, but it wasn’t bloody. I left it with the clean clothes in the bedroom. Then I went back to the kitchen, threw the bloody clothes on top of the Cards and walked back down the hall to Angela’s room. It was what I’d thought it would be: girly, smelling of her perfume. There was a writing desk with a pile of school books . A big bed with a white comforter and a pink skirt. The walls were covered in pictures of river otters and dolphins, a map of the world and a poster of a shitty Christian rock band called By His Stripes.
    I opened her chest-of-drawers, went through her underwear, looked at her yearbooks (her photo was glum and made me sad, but there was a crown of hearts around Oscar’s photo and I threw the book down) and searched through her closets. I was hoping to find a diary of some kind, but she didn’t seem to have one.
    I pulled the comforter off the bed, turned off the light and carried the comforter back down the hall to the chamber of horrors. I doused the Cards in gasoline but made sure I didn’t use too much too quickly and didn’t splash any on myself. I ran a line of gasoline down the hall, splashing some in the bathroom on the dry towels and running a line into both bedrooms. I finally ran out of gas pouring it around the Cards’ bed. I looked under the kitchen sink and found some lighter fluid and went into Brother Card’s office and sprayed his papers and books, anything that would burn well. I did the same thing all over again in the living room, making sure to spray some on the carpet and sofa.
    Then I stripped off the t-shirt and shorts and changed into the darker clothes I’d laid out on the bed. I slid the Dyess envelope into the pocket of the blazer and walked carefully back down the hall. I stuffed Angela’s comforter in the