He’d learned early on that you had to complete things. If you let go of stray ends they came back and choked you.
He’d buried her. But he hadn’t killed her.
When they reached San Diego he’d checked them into a quiet motel a few blocks from the beach. He thought he’d only stay with her a couple of nights but it turned into a week. There was plenty of business to be done in Tijuana, people to meet. In the evenings he’d cross back over the border and return to their motel. He often found her inside the room crying and he’d hold her until it got dark and then take her out to the pool and float around in it with her. He could’ve done it then, he remembered thinking later. She was drunk enough most nights. The cops would just think it was an accident.
One night she told him she couldn’t go through with it. That she wouldn’t survive living like fugitive. Without her daughter in her life. She told him she’d rather die.
He didn’t know what to say to that. He’d been alone on his own for so long that he could only imagine how deep the hurt must have gone.
He tried to think of what else they could do. He told her that with his connections he might be able to help her relocate in Mexico. Eventually get the girl down there with her. But it was only an idea. It would take time. A lot of things would have to be arranged. And it would take some money to make it work. Money he didn’t have right now.
It was late one night when he got back to the motel, too late to go out to the pool and drink with her. As soon as he opened the door he realized something was wrong. She was gone. Hadn’t packed anything. He told himself not to panic. Walked around the motel thinking he might see her coming back from the gas station store with cigarettes. An hour later he checked a couple of bars near the motel. Nothing. She’d vanished.
He kept looking but still couldn’t find her. Sat up all night waiting for her to come back. Calling the police was out of the question. By morning he left her a note on the bed and took a drive down to a strip of seedy bars. He went into some and asked around. After midnight he went inside a dive they’d been to a couple of times. Everyone sitting at the bar turned around and stared at him. Old men elbowed one another and laughed, and a big man with tattooed arms sneered. When Mikhail stared back the man paid and left, the geezers turned back to their drinks. He talked to a cocktail waitress who said Ann’s mother had come in the night before. Dressed only in a bathrobe with a bathing suit underneath. She’d ignored the glances of the men sitting around and ordered several drinks. The waitress said she’d catch cold if she wasn’t careful and the woman had laughed. Had told her that where she was planning to swim was always warm.
He went down to the beach to look for her but couldn’t find her. But by the next afternoon surfers reported seeing her body drifting out past the last breakers. She’d looked peaceful, as if she were asleep on her back. Except for the birds having taken her eyes.
Her body was taken to the city morgue. She had no identification. And after her fingerprints and photos were compared with missing persons reports, they’d decided to put her on ice, shoved her into metal-locker limbo. On the chance that something would change. That someone would come forward and claim her.
It took him a few days to get her out of the morgue. The janitor wasn’t cheap, had treated him as if he was just another sick customer. Mikhail made a mental note to come back and kill the man. He’d loaded her body into the trunk of his car and drove several hours into the desert and buried her before sunrise next to a cluster of Joshua trees. He wasn’t going to let her stay in the cold morgue forever. It was the least that he could do.
It had taken him all night to dig a proper burial hole, much longer than he’d imagined it would. He’d found lots of cans and bottles under the sand, tattered newsprint and windshield glass. And bones. Bones of all shapes and sizes. He could hear coyotes in the distance. Knew that the rocks he’d stacked on top of her would not keep them from her for long.