The Art of Disposal (7 page)

“Thirty percent,” Eddie said.

Griffin Shaw laughed. A big hearty laugh like Santa might put out. He looked around at the lot of us, like he wanted one of us to laugh along with him. No one did, of course.

“I think you're one sandwich short of a picnic,” he said. “Thirty percent? What for?”

Eddie put his hands together, fingertip to fingertip, then placed the whole shuh-bang right up to his nose and took a deep breath through his hands. Then he slid them down over his chin.

“Thirty percent buys a lot,” he said. “Cops on the payroll. Greased skids. I always pictured West Virginia as a dirt hill of inbred Goobers with guns and motorcycles. Maybe I was right.”

You could see flames in Griffin's eyes, but he stayed calm.

“Twenty,” he said. “And that's only 'cause I'm in a good mood.”

“Twenty-five,” Eddie said. “That's bargain-basement prices.”

Barney the pug, always napping on a blue blanket near Eddie's desk, stood up, pushed out his front legs, and yawned. He shook his head and his tags jingled. He walked over to Griffin Shaw and sat at his feet, and Griffin petted him.

“He likes you,” Eddie said.

“I got a way with dogs,” Griffin said.

The meeting ended with a handshake and a cigar, but their business partnership didn't stay cordial for long. That younger kid, the one with the holes in his ears and the piercing through his eyebrow—that kid was trouble. He was the kind of punk kid who thinks they're tough just because they've been around tough people. Every time we stopped by that house to grab our envelope, Clayton Shaw gave us attitude.

And his beef with Moe was for real. Clayton Shaw wouldn't shake Moe's hand or even talk to him, just because he was black. That wasn't good for business. Moe worked a lot of ground for us, and now that Clayton was supplying his goods we had to see that the two of them could at least coordinate. I went over there a dozen times with Moe, just trying to make it work. But Clayton had joined up with a VolksFront chapter back in West Virginia. He even had an “88” tattoo on his neck. He was a racist dummy, so dumb that it never crossed his mind he was wearing tribal style African earrings.

I don't have a beef with any one race. Take any guy—White, Black, Mexican, Arab—I can almost guarantee that he's a dirty, sneaky, greedy rat. Seven billion dirty rats shredding up this one beautiful planet. Sure, you get your occasional Gandhi or Mother Teresa, but what good can they do against the rest of us, driving our gas-guzzlers and eating Chicken McNuggets? You're the problem, buddy. So am I.

Moe hated going over to that house, but Eddie told him to stick with it.

“He'll come around,” Eddie said. “You'll win him over. He's just a dumb kid who got in with the wrong crowd.”

“Nah,” said Moe. “I'll deal with that Wade. He's cool. But I ain't settin' foot in that house if that skinny fool is home. You tell Wade that I deal with him, and only him.”

Eddie set it up so Moe could pick up the stuff on Sunday nights. He told Wade Shaw to make sure his younger brother was always gone on Sunday night between eight and ten. And for a good few months, through the rest of that winter and spring and summer, it all ran as smooth as a well-oiled watch.

Then that awful Sunday night happened.

It was ten thirty, and I was cleaning the fifty-five gallon aquarium with my tiger oscar, Vern. My arms were sopping wet when my phone rang. And rang and rang. I knew it was something bad. Only Eddie will keep dialing like that, over and over again.

I dried off my arms and ran to the phone.

“Hey Champ,” Eddie said, “I need a favor.”

Fifteen minutes later, Ricky Cervetti rolled up in his Buick and we sped off toward the side of town where the West Virginia Boys lived.

“He probably went home and smoked a bowl,” I said, talking about Moe.

“But he calls Eddie every week, right after he gets the stuff.”

“People forget,” I said.

“Not Moe,” Ricky said. And he was right. Moe was clockwork.

The sky was as red as dark wine, but you could still see from the light of the streetlamps. A warm breeze shook the tops of the trees. And there was that same black cat again, sitting like a statue near their house, gently licking its paws. Ricky put his finger to his lips and drew his gun. We crept up to the front door. You could hear people arguing inside. The girl was shouting, and I could hear Clayton's deep voice saying, “Shut up! It's gonna be all right.”

Then the words got scrambled up. Ricky cocked his head to one side and his eye twitched. His lip raised up and went back down again, a spasm. I reached into my belt and took out my gun.

Ricky hit the buzzer. We waited.

The deadbolt turned and Clayton Shaw was there in a wrinkled t-shirt, his face as sweaty as an Arizona roofer.

“Where's Moe?” Ricky said.

Clayton looked at our guns. “Probably back home eating a watermelon.”

“Listen up Adolf, I ain't one of your Aryan Nation boyfriends. Moe was s'posed to call. He never called.”

“Bummer,” Clayton said.

Ricky Cervetti punched the kid right in the gut. We rushed in and slammed the door behind us. Ricky aimed his gun at Clayton, who was doubled over moaning and gripping his belly with both hands.

“You should learn some manners, kid.”

The psycho pink-haired doll came running down the hallway, screaming and flailing her arms like the devil was in her. Ricky swatted her down like a bug.

“Is Wade home?” he asked Clayton. “Hey Wade!” he yelled when the kid didn't answer.

Me and Ricky walked into the living room. Moe was on the floor, a bullet hole in his forehead and one in his gut, deader than a roadkill robin. There were towels under his head, to keep the blood from messing up the carpet.

“Jesus,” Ricky said.

Moe had this weird look on his face: a pinched grimace that he never wore in life.

Then there was a sound like something from outer space—a warp-speed drive, a rubbery
thhhmmmmp
—a sound I somehow knew. Ricky cried out. I spun around and saw Clayton Shaw propped up on one elbow, holding a pistol with a silencer.

Some moments really do play out in slow-motion. It must be a thing with the human brain. If you've ever been in a car wreck, you know how those crunching, glass shard, metallic seconds go on for years. Yet they're also over in a second. The mind makes slow work out of fast and scary data, and that's how it felt as I raised my Beretta and fired three rounds at the scrawny kid. They tore right through him, and he withered into a bloody mess on the hallway floor.

“Goddammit!” Ricky said, “that big-eared mother shot my leg.”

The pink-haired broad crawled right on top of that scrawny piece of dead meat, and she sobbed and howled like a demon, and the things she was babbling would have fit nicely in a padded room at the nuthouse. Maybe she really did love that kid. I guess we all need someone to wrap our arms around, even if you have stretched-out earlobes and pink hair.

She stood up and looked at us. I think she must have taken a snort or two of something before we got there. She sprinted toward us with her hands stretched out. It looked like Satan himself had given her a push, and I swear if I'd have seen actual claws coming out from her fingertips I wouldn't have thought it unusual.

Ricky blasted her like he was shooting a rat in a junkyard. Pop, pop, pop: he put three right into her. Then he limped over and kicked her corpse in the gut.

“How's about that, you pink-haired nut,” he said.

He grabbed a dirty dishtowel from the kitchen and tied it around his leg. Then he plopped down on the sofa.

“I always hated that kid,” Ricky said.

“What about Wade?” I said.

“He's gotta go.”

“Tonight?”

“Figure it out. I'm going to Mac McDyer's. Get this leg taken care of.”

Mac is a veterinarian, but he's not opposed to doing unlicensed medical work for some extra cash. Ricky stood up and limped down the hallway, cursing his luck for having to step over the corpses he'd helped create.

“Get Dan the Man,” Ricky said. “He'll know what to do.”

That was how I ended up sitting alone in the West Virginia Boys' house, my only company the corpses of Moe and Clayton and some pink-haired, nameless broad. I talked to Moe just to pass the time. I asked him if there really was any tunnel of light, and if we ever get any answers. But that grimace on his face sure wasn't selling me on the afterlife. If he'd seen anything on the other side, he sure didn't like the looks of it. I watched a housefly walk around on his nose and lips. Sometimes it stopped its fidgeting, rubbed its legs together, and prayed.

Then I pictured Marcia, at home on the sofa with a glass of wine and her chump husband rubbing her feet. I thought about all kinds of things, like whether or not there are parallel universes bumping up right against our own, and if there are, maybe in the other one I'm some kind of famous ichthyologist, well-respected and published in scientific journals.

I thought about that summer when my foster Mom dropped me off at my Aunt's house in the country, because she was just too busy and sad to deal with me. Then I revised that whole part, and made it so she kept me with her because she loved me so much.

I can think my way into all kinds of swell worlds where I've done important things. I bet that's what everyone does. Hell, the grease-covered guy who's changing the oil in your car is probably living a whole different life in his head. Maybe he's a famous photographer, or an actor on the big screen. This life is far too short. There are so many things we'll never be.

I kept my gun on my lap and I daydreamed that way for quite a while, just watching that fly work its way down into Moe's open mouth and back out again.

Then my phone rang, and I answered it.

“It's me,” Dan the Man said. “Make sure the door is unlocked.”

I crept down the hall and turned the deadbolt. Ten seconds later, Dan the Man was inside of the house. He put his hands on his knees, leaned over and studied the corpse of Clayton. Then he walked over to the girl, crouched down, pulled out the silver Cross pen he carried in his coat pocket, and pushed it through a swatch of her hair like a forensic scientist who'd just found an important clue.

“What is it?” I said.

“Pink hair. Where's Moe?”

We went to the living room. Dan the Man studied Moe's troubled corpse.

“That kid was a good earner,” he said. “Let's get these bodies into the kitchen, so the brother don't see 'em when he moseys in.”

We finished dragging the bodies, and we found some bath towels and wiped up the hallway blood. It was the kind of housework that can only be done on your hands and knees. No cutting corners. Dan the Man found a blue plastic bucket in the pantry, and we filled it with hot soapy water.

“I'm gonna use the wire,” he said when we were done cleaning. “When we hear his car pull up, I'll get by the door. You wait here at the kitchen table. If you hear anything at all, the slightest peep, get out there and blow his brains out.”

Dan the Man flopped into the recliner and took out his garotte. Each end of the tarnished wire was bolted through a stubby dowel, and the tool looked like some kind of antique toy, or something to slice through a giant block of cheese.

“It's a Low-E,” Dan said as he pulled it taut.

“A Low-E?”

“Old bass guitar string. My kid plays music.”

“Is he any good?”

“Not really,” Dan the Man said.

Headlights flooded through the little window near the front door, and the engine of Wade's Chevy Nova may as well have been a phone call letting us know he'd arrived. You could even hear the arthritic crunch as he engaged the parking brake.

Dan the Man disappeared. I took my spot near the kitchen table, gun drawn, heart beating.

The sound of the key in the lock.

The twist of the deadbolt.

The creak of the door.

I waited and waited, thinking that I would at least hear some footfalls, a quick gasp, a struggle. The silence was awful. After some ponderous seconds, I walked into the hallway with my gun drawn.

Wade was up off the floor by about a foot, trying desperately to stop the wire that was taking the life from him. But the E string was too deep into the flesh; his fingers just danced along the wire's edge, caressing the fine metal grooves, walking the length of the string, attempting to decode the death-song.

Dan the Man's eyes were sharp and cruel. His tongue rolled out like some strange lizard, and it curled downward and licked the stubble right above his chin. His nostrils flared. He grinned like a snake. Wade's fingers stopped plucking at the string, and his arms dropped to the sides of his body like the soft wings of a killed bird. Dan let the body fall to the floor. A cold breeze sailed through the hallway and carried his words.

“Problem solved.”

Dan the Man said we'd have to take Moe, since the body would get tied back to us. The cops knew Moe, they knew his associates: it was too risky to leave him there. So we rolled him up in a blanket, and Dan the Man backed his Camry up into the driveway, and we tossed Moe into the trunk. I said that we should just wipe things down and get out of there, but Dan had other ideas.

I scoured the garage for flammable liquids, and the West Virginia Boys didn't disappoint. Hillbillies and dangerous chemicals go together like oysters and hot sauce. I found two cans of lighter fluid, and a one gallon square can of kerosene, in a damp cardboard box.

I soaked the upstairs. Dan did the ground floor.

“My life has come full circle,” I said, imagining Bing Crosby crooning into a purple wooded night, while I lay in the snow, an infant, slowly dying.

“This might be good for you,” Dan the Man said. “Catalytic.”

“Cathartic,” I said.

He handed me the box of matches.

On the drive back to the office, it felt like the long fingers of the trees were reaching out from the edges of the road, and Moe's corpse haunted me from the dark of the trunk.

“What are we gonna do with him?” I asked Dan the Man.

“You know,” he said.

And that was all we said about it. In some rundown apartment building, Moe's Mom or sister or brother would never really know what had happened to him. They might spend years putting up flyers and asking questions. But he would never be found. I kind of wished I could tell them he'd be gone forever, just so they wouldn't waste so much time.