Free Mystic River by Dennis Lehane Page B

to bother her. When you complained to someone, you were, in a way, asking for help, asking for that person to fix what troubled you. But Dave had never needed her before, so he’d never complained, not after lost jobs, not while Rosemary had been alive. But now, kneeling before her, saying, desperately, that he may have killed a man, he was asking her to tell him it was all right.
    And it was. Wasn’t it? You tried to mug an honest citizen, tough shit if it didn’t go the way you planned. Too bad you might have died. Celeste was thinking, I mean, sorry, but oops. You play, you pay.
    She kissed her husband’s forehead. “Baby,” she whispered, “you hop in the shower. I’ll take care of your clothes.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What are you going to do with them?”
    She didn’t have a clue. Burn them? Sure, but where? Not in the apartment. So that left the backyard. But it occurred to her pretty quickly that someone would notice her burning clothes in the backyard at 3 A.M . Or at any time, really.
    “I’ll wash them.” She said it as the idea came to her. “I’ll wash them good and then I’ll put them in a trash bag and we’ll bury that.”
    “Bury it?”
    “Take it to the dump, then. Or, no, wait”—her thoughts going faster than her mouth now—“we’ll hide the bag till Tuesday morning. Trash day, right?”
    “Right…” He turned on the shower, looking at her, waiting, that gash along his side darkening, making her worry about AIDS again, or possibly hepatitis, the many ways another’s blood can kill or poison.
    “I know when they come. Seven-fifteen, on the dot, everyweek, except the first week in June when all the college kids take off, leave all that extra trash and then they’re usually late, but…”
    “Celeste. Honey. The point?”
    “Oh, so when I hear the truck, I’ll just run downstairs after them, like I forgot a bag, and toss it right in the back of the compactor thing. Right?” She smiled, though she didn’t feel like it.
    He put one hand under the shower spray, the rest of him still turned back toward her. “Okay. Look…”
    “What?”
    “You all right with this?”
    “Yeah.”
    Hepatitis A, B, and C, she thought. Ebola. Hot zones.
    His eyes went wide again. “I might have killed someone, honey. Jesus.”
    She wanted to go to him and touch him. She wanted to get out of the room. She wanted to caress his neck, tell him it would be okay. She wanted to run away until she could think this through.
    She stayed where she was. “I’ll wash the clothes.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Yeah.”
    She found some plastic gloves under the sink, ones she used when cleaning the toilet, and she put them on and checked for any tears in the rubber. When she was satisfied there were none, she took his shirt from the sink and his jeans off the floor. The jeans were dark with blood, too, and left a smear on the white tile.
    “How’d you get it on your jeans?”
    “What?”
    “The blood.”
    He looked at them hanging from her hand. He looked at the floor. “I was kneeling over him.” He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it splashed up, like on the shirt.”
    “Oh.”
    He met her eyes. “Yeah. Oh.”
    “So,” she said.
    “So.”
    “So, I’ll wash these in the kitchen sink.”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay,” she said, and backed out of the bathroom, left him standing there, one hand fluttering under the water, waiting for it to get hot.
    In the kitchen, she dumped the clothes in the sink and ran the water, watched the blood and filmy chips of flesh and, oh Christ, pieces of brain, she was pretty sure, wash down the drain. It amazed her how much the human body could bleed. They said you had six pints in you, but to Celeste it always seemed like so much more. When she was in the fourth grade, she’d been running through a park with friends and she’d tripped. As she was trying to break her fall, she drove the center of her palm through a broken bottle that was pointing straight up out of