He walked down the stairs slowly, thinking; the way the body was lying there didn't scare him so much as it pushed him deeper into panic. He knelt by the body and started going through the pockets. First the right pocket—car keys. Then the left pocket—seventy-two dollars and thirty-five cents. "Take what you can get," he muttered, and stuffed the money into his own pocket. After he turned the body over, he took a wallet from the left back pocket. He checked the inside carefully. He pocketed the two hundred forty-seven dollars in the wallet too, then looked at the ID. When he saw the name on it, he let out a "Ah, fuck."
"Sami Bernthal? Sami fucking Bernthal? What kinda fucked-up name is that?" he thought. "He said Theo is my uncle's son'"—that's what Sami had said before he died—and he'd told the truth. They had the same last name. But had Sami's family known they were tracking Brian? Had he warned them? "If I don't make it back, know that Brian did something to me." Brian couldn't shut down those thoughts in his head; he was panicking, wondering what to do. His right knee was on the rug, his left foot on the floor, standing like that in front of the body.
But he didn't have any more time to wait—he had to do something now. He had to be at work in three or four hours, and Vivian would be coming to babysit Love. Brian couldn't quiet the dark thoughts in his head; while he was thinking what to do, he was outta options. He dragged the body straight down to the basement. Then he went out of the house and got in the car—he had to find a place that was open at this hour. The place he'd just been was half an hour away. A round trip would take an hour; not only would his daughter be alone at home, there'd also be a body lying out in the open in the basement. He opened his phone, checked nearby stores on the map, and saw a gas station just five minutes away. He opened directions and headed for the gas station. Even though there were cars on the road at this hour, Brian still felt like he was drawing way too much attention. Like every car was looking at him, everyone was honking and yelling, "THERE'S A KILLER IN THIS CAR!" He managed to get to the gas station. He went in and asked, "You got a basket? Or a shopping cart? Whatever, doesn't matter." The clerk snapped at Brian, "You can't see that thing behind you?" Clearly the guy had been working for hours and looked like someone with zero patience for people.
"Motherfucker," Brian thought to himself, but didn't say anything out loud. He wasn't in a place to start a fight with anyone. He grabbed a cart and started loading up every bag of ice in the coolers. He bought so much ice that by the time he filled his car, the ones on the bottom had already started to melt. When he went to the register, it was the same clerk as before. The cashier gave Brian a weird look at all that ice and said, "You got some kinda mental problem or what?" Brian was trying to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. Then he slowly lifted his head and locked eyes with the cashier. "I didn't catch that," he said. The cashier stared more seriously and asked, "What the hell you gonna do with all this ice?" Like he was mocking Brian. Brian took a deep breath but never broke eye contact. "Just ring up what I'm buying and do your job," he said. He said it calm but with a solid punch to it. The guy was surprised for a couple seconds that Brian said that, then he started doing what he was told—he hadn't expected that kind of pushback. Brian kept staring right at him the whole time. As the man scanned each bag of ice one by one, Brian didn't break eye contact, working the guy over. He'd pulled the man into his field and left no escape route in his head. The guy getting rattled and scared of Brian was inevitable now.
"Receipt?" the cashier asked. Brian didn't answer, still locked on him. The guy held out the bags he'd put the ice into and said, "Thirty-one dollars, ninety cents." Brian took forty dollars from the cash he'd lifted off the body and smacked it down hard on the counter in front of the cashier. Then he grabbed the bags and left the gas station. "Little punk."
When he got home, he headed straight down to the basement with the ice. He tore the bags open and dumped the ice over the body, one by one. The plan was to keep the body cold so it wouldn't stink until he got back from work, and not make Vivian suspicious. Then he set up the cheap but effective camera he'd bought at the gas station. "Alright then, good luck, Brian."