Realtor Revenge Pt. 10

Right, the same optical illusion that made Flanagan look like Mark's doppelganger.

What if I did see what I thought I saw...

That would mean I'm losing my mind. On the brink of insanity. One step from the insane asylum.

Unless they weren't dead.

Which would mean I'm the world's worst shot, and Janis can live without food for over a month.

There was one remaining explanation. Ghosts. The driver of the red Mustang. The woman who removed the acupuncture needles. The bitch who strangled me with her scarf. They were all the ghost of Janis Moorehead. She decided to forego heaven and haunt me for the rest of my life.

And last night, Mark Seiman got a temporary reprieve from the devil so he could do in the afterlife what he didn't before he died. He finally fucked Janis.

Yeah. Nothing made sense. That's why I couldn't sleep and why I forced Flanagan to drive us back to the grave site as soon as the sun came up.

Well, not exactly at sunrise. Flanagan insisted on stopping for breakfast on the way.

"Eat up," he told me as I stared at a large plate of bacon and eggs. "We've got a big job ahead of us. You're going to need all the energy you can get."

"You surely don't expect me to help you dig."

"You bet your sweet ass I do. Once you experience how hard it is to dig down six feet, maybe next time you won't ask me to dig the same hole twice."

***

It had been well over a month since we buried Janis and a week since I last visited the site. The weeds were almost as tall as me and, if not for the small shed next to the grave, there was no way I would have identified the exact spot.

Flanagan pulled a gas-powered weed cutter out of his truck.

"Last chance," he said. "As soon as I cut away the weeds, anybody who looks at this field will know somebody's been here."

"I've got to see her. Let's do it."

He cleared a large rectangle around the grave, raked the cut weeds out of the way and handed me a shovel.

"Pointy end down. The ground's still wet from last night's storm, so maybe it won't be as hard as it was the first time."

My loose-fitting smock was obviously the wrong thing to wear for the occasion, but I had no idea I'd be forced into manual labor when I hurriedly dressed that morning. It would certainly be destined for the trash bin once the day was over.

Thirty minutes into the job, I was sweating like a sumo wrestler on a tread mill. My arms were tired, my back hurt and we were only two feet down.

"You got anything to drink?" I asked.

"There's water in the truck. Help yourself and bring me a bottle. We've still got a long way to go and don't want to get dehydrated."

I climbed out of the hole, rested my shovel against the ever-growing pile of dirt and fetched the water. I drank half of it in a single gulp, and in my haste, poured the remaining half down the front of my dress, making the already sweat soaked bra and dress even wetter. With the damp garments sticking to my shoulders and chest I was uncomfortable as hell.

Flanagan has his shirt off. Why should I suffer?

I hung the dress and bra on the sunny side of Flanagan's truck -- hoping they would dry out by the time we were done -- and went back to the hole wearing nothing but panties and running shoes.

"Looking to get a tan?" Flanagan asked as he accepted his water bottle. "Or are you hoping to get lucky?"

"I'm hoping I don't die of sun stroke. Now take your eyes off my tits and look where you're digging."

As we continued our labor, I noticed that Flanagan was making sure he didn't disturb the ventilation and water pipes. Which didn't make a lick of sense. Unless...

"You think there's any way she's still alive?" I asked.

"Doubtful. She's been down there for nearly two months."

"Then why are you worried about the pipes?"

He just shrugged and kept digging.

When we were three feet down, Flanagan climbed out of the hole and laid a wooden ladder across one end with a short rope attached to the bottom.

"You'll see," was his explanation to my questioning gaze.

It took us another hour to reach the top of the coffin. Once the lid was completely uncovered, Flanagan disconnected the air hoses and water pipe and then dug a small trench around the sides.

"Don't want to get any dirt inside when we open it," he explained.

Like Janis' dead body will care.

"You ready to do this?" he asked when he finished his house keeping tasks. "Ready to take a look inside?"

Of course, I was ready. I'd been ready for weeks. I wasn't afraid to see a dead and decaying body. Seeing what was left of Janis Moorehead was exactly what my psyche needed. Once my eyes saw her shriveled up body... Once my nose smelled the stench of her death... Once my brain finally realized that she was no longer of this earth... Only then would I be rid of the visions and dreams that haunted me day and night.

"Yes. Open it up and let's be done."

Using the rope, Flanagan pulled the wooden ladder into the grave. Once he climbed it, he pulled the ladder out behind him. Leaving me in the hole, alone with the casket.

"You surely don't expect me to open the casket," I said.

"You're the one who's seeing ghosts, so you get to do the honors."

Two months earlier, if somebody had said I would one day be naked at the bottom of a six-foot hole, straddling a casket as I pried off the lid... well, "insane" would have been the operative word. But there I was.

It was a split casket with upper and lower lids... designed for open casket funerals so the top half of the deceased's body could be viewed while the bottom half remained hidden. If that wasn't the case, there was no way I could have opened Janis' casket while it was still in the hole.

With my ass firmly planted on the muddy lower half of the casket, I got a grip on the edge of the upper lid and gave it a good yank... which broke the seal but only moved the lid an inch or so. Surprisingly, the expected overwhelming stench of a decaying body never reached my nose. Readjusting my body, I got a better grip on the lid and, with a grunt of effort, swung the lid fully open. I took one look inside the casket and gasped as I drew back to the far end of the grave... the end where Janis' feet should have been. But they weren't, because...

Janis wasn't in the casket.

Mayor Stuffit was.

"No, that can't be." I tried to jump out of the grave, but I couldn't. I was in a six-foot hole and Flanagan had the ladder.

"Not quite what you expected, is it Raven?"

I looked up from the grave to see Janis Moorehead standing over me. The morning sun backlit her face making her blonde hair glow, like a halo of gold. Unlike the last several times I saw her, she wasn't naked with her hands cuffed to the steering wheel of a Mustang. She wasn't plucking acupuncture pins from my body, nor was she carrying the silk scarf she used to strangle me at the Russian party. Dressed in a simple white dress, she looked like an apparition from above.

While my mind was trying to make sense of the unexplainable, Mark Seiman walked into my view and put his arm around Janis. His large frame blocked out the sun and I was able to see Janis for what she really was. Not an angel descending to deliver justice, but just a normal looking woman in a pretty dress... which wasn't right. Because she was dead... as was Mark.

"Good morning Miss Hardwood," Mark said. "I trust you slept well last night."

"This... this isn't possible. You're dead. You're both dead."

"I'm happy to report that we're not. In fact, I haven't felt this alive for years."

"How about him?" I asked, pointing to Mayor Stuffit.

"Not to worry. He's just sleeping," Mark said. "We gave him the same drug you gave Miss Moorehead just before you put her in the grave... the grave that you and Mayor Stuffit now occupy. But we'll get to that later. Right now, since we're on the subject of the Mayor, I have one last favor to ask before we decide which of you remains in the grave and who gets to cover it with dirt.

"I understand how you got the city council to turn against Miss Moorehead... Blackmail. Or to be precise, you made them falsely believe Janis was blackmailing them. But I haven't been able to figure out what power you have over the Mayor. Please enlighten me."

I hesitated before answering. Sitting naked at the bottom of a six-foot hole didn't put me in much of a bargaining position. So, I tried a tact that was slightly foreign to me. I told the truth, hoping the news would make Janis want to take out her revenge on the Mayor and not me.

"He killed Janis' parents." I paused, watching their expressions as the words sunk in.

"Go on," Mark said.

"I saw him do it."

"Okay, now we're getting somewhere. But, instead of letting you blackmail him for the last eighteen years, why didn't he just do to you what you tried to do to Janis? Why didn't he make you discreetly disappear?"

"I'm not only an eyewitness to the murder. I also have the missing security camera video that recorded the crime."

"Let me guess. You don't have the video in your home or even in a safe deposit box in the bank. With a simple warrant, a man as powerful as Mayor Stuffit could get access to both. I bet you left the video tape with somebody you trust. Somebody out of state, or maybe even in another country. And whoever is guarding the video tape has instructions to make it public if something happens to you."

"It's with a law firm on the west coast," I said, confirming Mark's suspicions. "If I don't contact them every Monday, they try to contact me. If they don't hear from me for two weeks straight, they send one copy of the tape to the FBI and another to the press."

Mark nodded as if he understood the situation and then turned to Janis.

"Here are our options my dear. We can leave Stuffit in the coffin - a fitting punishment for his crime - and turn Raven over to the authorities to face five charges of blackmail and two counts of attempted murder.

"Conversely, we can let Stuffit stand trial for the murder of your parents and let Raven take his place in the coffin.

"Or, and this is my recommendation, we shove Raven into the coffin with Stuffit, nail it shut and be done with it."

Not good. I was either going to spend the rest of my life in prison, die the painful death I had planned for Janis or, even worse, spend my last days buried alive with an overweight sixty-year-old man who suffered from severe flatulence. But there was one more option. One that Mark had somehow overlooked.

I was not alone in my crimes. In return for several nights in my bedroom and a promise to promote him to Chief of Police, Officer Flanagan was just as guilty as I. He helped me bury Janis. He trained me to shoot Mark and he was a willing participant in the blackmailing of the city council. No matter what Mark and Janis decided my fate should be, they would eventually have to deal with my slightly crooked cop.

Mark certainly couldn't let Flanagan live after witnessing Mark commit a murder. And even if they decided to turn both me and Stuffit over to the authorities, Flanagan had to know I'd try to lay as much of the blame as I could on him. So, unless the circumstances changed, and quickly, his fate would be the same as mine. Death in the pasture or a life behind bars.

The quick-witted policeman obviously came to the same conclusion. I knew this because, just as Janis was about to pronounce my sentence, Flanagan drew the gun from his holster, aimed it towards Mark and Janis, and pulled the trigger.

The End

***

This is the end of Realtor Revenge but not the end of the story. There is one more voice to be heard... one more side of this tale to be told. I hope to publish the final book of the "Realtor Series" in January 2021.

Thank you for your patience.