The phone would not stop.
I picked it up with a rag from the workbench. Two missed calls. A text. Where r u. Food court doors. Then a call from a number labeled Dispatch. Then a name that was probably his wife.
I did not answer the wife.
I stood in the dim with the rag around the phone and listened to the Saturday on the other side of the door. A basketball. A mower. A kid yelling that a shot was in when it was not. Nobody knocking. Nobody screaming. The absence of screaming was a kind of weather.
I answered the food court because a missing shuttle is a question, and questions travel faster than vans.
I made my voice tired, busy, a little like his. Not a performance. A smear. “Five minutes. Stay by the doors. Light brown.”
She said okay in the tone of a person who has already started walking. She did not ask who I was. People hear a van and a time and they stop asking. I hung up before my throat could invent an accent I did not own.
My hands were shaking again. I put the phone face down on the workbench and washed in the utility sink until the water ran clear enough to lie. Pink, then not. The knife went into a jar of mineral spirits I had bought for a deck I never stained. I watched it sink and told myself that was a plan.
I changed shirts. The old one went into a trash bag I tied twice. I found the spare opener on the hook where it had always lived, a plastic thing the color of old butter. Towels from the dryer, still warm, smelling like the detergent I bought because it was on sale, not because I cared about scent. Bleach from under the sink, the cheap kind that promises a kind of innocence it cannot deliver. I poured it on the floor mat and the smell punched the garage so hard my eyes watered.
I poured more than I needed. Excess felt like competence.
I wiped the dash where the coffee had run. I wiped the clipboard and left a streak that looked like weather. I wiped the sliding door handle even though I was going to use it again. Television had taught me to wipe things. Television had not taught me that bleach has a smell you cannot explain to a cop as a hobby.