On the edge

Chapter 6: Bits and pieces

"What should I do with his body? Is he dead?" Sue wondered quietly.
At a look of the growing puddle of blood at her feet, she then silently told herself that he was most definitely and very much dead. A verdict, which immediately introduced multiple other questions; How to dispose of the body? How to clean up all the blood? How to do all that without leaving a trace? And, of course, what money had the dead man in Sue's shop been talking about? The red-haired scratched her forehead and sighed loudly.
"I should see if he's got an ID on him..." she thought and began searching his pockets.
Sue eventually pulled a thin leather wallet out of one of his pockets. It was worn out and dirty, just like his shoes; actually, it kind of looked as if he had made it out of a spare piece of fabric from those old moccasins.
"Stephen Johnson," Sue read out aloud.
She looked at the dead body and then added dryly, "I told you we're closed, Stephen,"
Sue hurried to the front door and locked it by key, just in case anyone else would decide to disrespect her closed sign. She then decided to store the dead man in the back of the shop. Stephen, now that she knew his name, was well heavier than he looked.
"Dude, have you been eating stones for lunch?!" Sue cursed angrily, as she pulled the dead body to the storage rooms, leaving a trail of blood all along the way.

She opened the old deep freezer her father only ever used during the few hotter summer months, to store ice cream in it. The rest of the year, it would only stand there, consume a sickening amount of electricity and wait for the occasional deep frozen pizza. It took the young red-haired a whole fifteen minutes lift the body into the freezer. When she was finally done pushing and pulling Stephen around, so that his whole body would fit into his cold, temporary grave, Sue sighed heavily. She slammed the freezer lid shut and sat down on top. Just in case he wasn't really dead and would wake up, only to find himself in a tiny, pitch-black and very cold box, and try to get out. He didn't, and so Sue went on to mop up the floor as well as getting rid of the splashes on the walls and the shelves. She scrubbed everything with great care and scrupulous rigour, and a whole bucket of pure bleach, to not leave the tiniest of a trace that someone, anyone, had ever lost a single drop of blood in these walls. Not even from a papercut. She poured the strongly smelling, red liquid down her toilet; flushed and rinsed it with another half a pint of bleach. She'd repeat those steps every night for a weeks or so, that should get rid of every last bit of detectable evidence; even with a forensic examiner's methods. Sue threw the bucket, the mob, and a few cleaning rags she had used, into the freezer with Stephen. She'd need to get new ones for each time she'd clean the shop to make absolutely sure she wouldn't just be dragging the detectable particles around. Once Sue had gotten rid of the body, and she still had to figure out how on earth to do so, she'd also have to defrost the freezer and clean it up with bleach. Until then, she could only hope nobody would miss Stephen Johnson.

"Everything alright?"
"What?"
Sue turned her head into all possible directions, greatly confused and mentally far away.
"Are you alright?" James repeated, "You look... Tired."
"You don't have to be politically correct with me, you know," Sue replied.
"If I look like shit, you can tell me so," she added.
For a moment, the two stared at each other in awkward silence.
"I uh... I don't think you look like... That," James then said hesitantly.
"But if something's on your mind... You can tell me," he continued, "If you want to, of course."
Sue smiled at him; it was a tired and a worn out smile, but it also was honest and true, and James quietly melted away under its warmth. He could just have stood there and look at her for a little moment of eternity, and he probably would still, after all that time and even longer, notice something about her he hadn't really been paying attention to before.
And while he dwelled in these sweet thoughts, Sue asked herself for the eight-hundred-and-seventy-third time since she had woken up that morning, how long it took a human body to completely freeze. It had been two days that a stranger called Stephen was laying in the deep freezer in the back of the shop, and Sue still hadn't really figured out how to rid herself of the dead body. On Tuesday afternoon, she had driven fifty miles away to buy half a dozen mops and buckets; in the biggest supermarket she could find, so that nobody would concentrate enough on her to possibly remember her. She had also gotten a saw, unwilling to carry Stephen's one-hundred-and-fifty pounds heavy body as a whole again. Plus, if anyone were to see her, it would look well less suspicious to carry multiple bin liners rather than a single huge one; obviously too heavy for her.
"But where do I bury him?" Sue wondered, day in and day out, at almost every waking moment.
She looked at James, pretending to listen to his tale about spaceships, black holes, and extraterrestrial friendships when it hit her. How could she not have thought about it earlier?
"Canoe, deep lake."