Page 42 of (My Accidental) Killer Summer

“Donate him to science?”

“They’d return him. Unusable specimen.”

“Feed him to cannibals?”

“That at least handles the slicing part.”

“Wonder how fresh a body has to be for that?”

“I’m sure Google knows, but I don’t want it in my search history.”

“You have teenagers. Your search history is already weird.”

“True.” I sigh. “What about lye and earthworms?”

Amy tilts her head. “That might actually work... if we had lye.”

I lean against the deep freeze, defeated. “This is hopeless. Any idea we have, I’ve already solved in the past by listening to Noah talk about his cases. He’s too smart, Ames. Noah will figure it out.”

“We can’t just leave Doug here,” Amy says, voice softer now. “Can’t we just tell Noah?”

“NO!”

“We need to figure out something,” she says.

“I know.” I glance at Doug’s plastic-wrapped corpse. “But every idea sounds worse than the last.”

She sighs. “If only I were Mr. Wolf fromPulp Fiction. Then I’d know what to do.”

“I’d miss Amy if you were.”

“Aww.”

“You know there’s only one real option,” I say quietly.

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“We have to cut him up,” I tell her. “That’s the only way this is going to work.”

twenty-two

. . .

Elle

I’m standingin the garage, surrounded by a sea of clear plastic sheeting that clings to everything like a second skin. The air is thick with the smell of fresh plastic and something else—something that makes my stomach churn. Like a much stronger eau-de-dead-Doug.

Amy is wrestling with a roll of tape; her brow furrowed in concentration.

“Do you think this is enough?” I ask, gesturing to the plastic draped over the floor and walls. It looks like we’re prepping for a bizarre art installation rather than a dismemberment.

“More than enough,” she replies, finally managing to secure the tape. “He’s not even really going to bleed, right? Because his heart isn’t pumping.”

“I guess. But won’t there be other stuff in there? Like, guts and…stuff?”

“I didn’t think of that.”

This is surreal. One minute I’m dealing with a creepy contractor who never finished my bathroom, and the next, I’m preparing to chop him into pieces in my garage.