"I'm glad this is finally settled. Tell her to give you half the money on Friday, and bring it here. But when do we get the other half?"
"As soon as we notify her that it's done. She'll have to take our word for it; I made that clear. We'll wait a couple of days. He'll be missing, so she'll know the job is done."
"We have to decide how to dispose of the body. This is important. We want to get rid of it, without a trace, and we want to be absolutely sure."
"Yeah. But people do this all the time. Think about how many murder victims are never found. It can't be all that complicated. We should just consider all of the different ways we've heard about people getting rid of stiffs, in movies and TV shows and famous crime stories on the news. We just pick the best way, that's all."
"Problem with that, though, it's a good idea, don't get me wrong, but the problem with that is that if we've heard of it, it's probably not the best way. If we've heard of it, the cops have heard of it too. The best way is probably some way nobody ever heard of, because it was done by pros who got away with it, and they were smart enough to keep their mouths shut afterwards, so they could use it again."
"That's a Catch 22. We can't dispose of the body in some way we've never heard of. Not unless we invent a new way, and it just happens to be the same way those pros do it. But we'd never even know, would we?"
"Let's not get obsessed with that concept. But if we do invent our own way, we're basically trying something that's untested. Which means we might get tripped up by some little detail, and be kicking ourselves afterwards. In jail. It's probably best to stick with some of the disposal methods that we've heard of from famous cases, but if the killers got caught, we can analyse why. Maybe they did everything right except for one little thing, and all we have to do is reproduce their method, and correct that mistake, and then we'll get away with it."
"Okay, I'll make a list. We'll keep adding a bunch of plans to the list, and then narrow it down to the best ten or so, and then work from there."
"Good idea. But there's another name for that list, you know. It's called `evidence.' We'll make a list, but in our heads only. Don't write anything down. Shhh, here comes the waitress."
"Yes. I'll have a large bean and mushroom salad with no mayonnaise, and a side of cottage cheese and fruit."
"I'll have two bacon cheeseburgers; Swiss cheese, with Dijon, onions, sour pickles and nothing else. But could you bring me a bottle of Worstershire sauce? And I'll have a full pint of dark ale."
"Okay. Anything to drink, m'am?"
"I'll have a demi of red wine. Thank you."
"Okay, she's gone. Are you sure nobody's on the other side of these plants?"
"I'm sure. I can see through, right here. Nobody is within earshot."
"We could throw him into a furnace."
"That never works. There are always bone fragments."
"They'll never find the bone fragments if they have no reason to search in that particular furnace. Something has to lead them to the furnace, like if the prime suspect is a janitor who maintains that furnace."
"Or if the victim is the janitor."
"Still, how do we get uninterrupted access to a furnace?"
"That's right. I think I lean more towards hiding him deep in the woods somewhere."
"But how do we get him out there without being noticed?"
"I thought of that. In a canoe. We could load the body into the canoe at home; tie it securely inside with duct tape or something, then put the canoe on top of the car. Make sure nobody is around when we put the canoe into the water, and cover the body with camping equipment. We could attach some big rocks to it and dump it into a deep lake. And we could have a nice camping vacation at the same time."
"That's a good idea. How long has it been since we went camping?"
"We used to camp and hike and canoe six or seven times a year, when we first got married. We loved it. What's happened to us?"
"Rat race. But if we pull off this big score, we'll be able to get away from it all, more often."
"Come on. It's not that much money."
"If we pull it off, it eases the financial pressure. We could buy a cottage."
"No, really. Maybe a cottage is more our speed, at our age."
"I wonder if dumping him in the lake is a good idea. Something tells me that a lot of people who try it that way end up getting caught. Like the body rots apart, and pieces of it start to surface."
"We could carry it into the woods. I thought another good way would be to bury it deep in the woods, under rocks so animals won't dig it up, and then hide it by piling rotten braches and other yucky things on it; things that people won't want to touch."
"I like this idea, but it won't be easy to carry him. He's gotta weigh at least two twenty or so."
"We could cut him in half and each carry half."
"You couldn't even carry half, I'm sure."
"Okay, big man, we don't have to cut him exactly in half. We could cut off his legs. I'll carry the legs and you carry the rest."
"This is getting awfully complicated. Don't you think cutting him in half would leave some traces behind? Where would we do it, in the woods?"
"I guess so. You know, another thing we could do is sort of a compromise between the camping thing and the furnace thing. We could bring him out camping, and after dark when nobody's around we could burn him up in a big bonfire. You know when you throw leftover steaks or pork chops into the fire, so they won't attract animals? We could do that with his body, and the next day we could gather up the bone fragments and smash them into powder with rocks. Whatever's left over we could burn the next night. Hell, we could stay at the same campsite for several days if necessary, and every day we clean up. Every night we burn more. And in the end we could even gather up the coals and the ashes from the fire, and dump them in the woods. There would be absolutely no trace."
"It would take several days. That's a lot more meat than a few pork chops. But it sounds like a good idea. We have to choose a campsite with an awful lot of good firewood around, though. That's gonna take a ton of wood."
"How about that place we used to go when we were dating? The lake with all the beaver dams."
"Good idea. But remember, this is only one idea. We have to consider some others, so let's get away from the camping ideas for a while. It has risks, too. We could get in some fender bender on the way out, and cops might arrive, and here we are with a corpse in our canoe."
"Even that would have to be well planned. Leave at dawn when there's no traffic. be extra careful tying the canoe onto the car. Double-tie it. But you're right. We have to think of more ideas. Like ideas that eliminate the need for travel."
"I have one. We could cut him into little bits and flush him down the toilet. what do you think of that?"