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concerned. She
had lent a great deal of emotional support to Nolte via phone calls, and that,
in and of itself, could be construed as evidence of foul play. The
penitentiaries were full of hapless murderers, foolish enough to leave a phone
record trail for the cops to follow.
    Perhaps it was paranoia or oversimplification on her part,
it really made no difference, Alice knew in her heart of hearts, if the old
fool was found belly up, the investigators would be able to sense her guilt and
with their gut instincts alone, have enough to haul her off to the crowbar
hotel. They would skip right over church lady Martha, and slap the cuffs on
Alice so fast her head would spin. A quick stop at the courthouse to pick up a
guilty verdict, and then off to prison where fat black women would rape her
with a broom, she couldn’t risk it; the thought of prison terrified her. The
thought of fat black women terrified her.
    Oh well, who cares? None of that mattered now that the big
day had finally arrived. That sorry sonofabitch was no more, he was worm food.
No more middle of the night ‘Nolte’ calls, to ask if her pussy was lonely and
in need of some company. No more fabricated complaints: someone was putting
Kleenex in the lint basket, someone was putting lint in the Kleenex basket,
someone had put the beer on the second shelf of the fridge, someone was drinking
his mescal, or he was pitching a tent in his diaper and wanting her to go
camping with him. The man was shameless, insane and completely void of any
moral values. Creepy and filled to the brim with shit and nasty, was what he
was. Not nasty in an unclean way, but unclean in a nasty way.
    None of that mattered now, the fat lady had sung, and Nolte
was gone, pushing up daisies. He’s off to face the music. She’d hate to be in
his shoes right now. She took a long slug of her beer and smiled at the thought
of Satan castrating Nolte with toenail clippers. Maybe Satan would mouth rape
Nolte with his devil dick. Alice jerked her mind out of the fantasy and scolded
herself. A good person wouldn’t think these things; a good person would feel
grief. Suddenly Alice felt guilty for not feeling guilty and for her
unChristian thinking.   She also felt the
hint of a beer buzz coming on. She chugged the rest of the beer and belched a
bubbly hiss, through closed lips.
    Alice thought hard, she knew that if she really put her mind
to it, she was capable of feeling bad. Deep down, she was sure there was some
sort of grief buried beneath the relief she felt. There had to be, she wasn’t a
heartless bitch. She cried at the right places in movies and worried about the
homeless when it got really cold out. There weren’t any homeless where she
lived, so she worried from afar, and that had to be worth more than up close
worrying. It stood to reason, that since she had overcome the mental obstacle
of out of sight, out of mind, a greater value should be placed on her worries,
than regular worries. The grief was there somewhere, she was sure of it, it
probably had a big scientificated name that she didn’t know, was all.
    After some deep introspective thought, another beer, and a
quick search of her soul, she had decided she did have some grief, it wasn’t
much, but it was there all the same. It wasn’t ‘curl up in a ball and cry
yourself to sleep’ stuff, but Alice felt it qualified as grief and or sorrow.
It was really more along the lines of sadness, like the sadness she felt when
the neighbor’s dog was run over. What she felt on that particular day, might
have been grief and or sorrow, it was, she finally concluded, definitely grief
and sadness. It had been the deep kind which, really hurt badly.
    Scout the dog, had been sunning himself against the curb,
most likely in peaceful buttery slumber when the mail lady backed over him in
her mail jeep.
    Alice had secretly despised mail jeeps, long before the day in
question, every time she had seen one prior to, or after that fateful day,