by Brett Baker
“And how do we do that?”
“There’s no ‘we’ here, Buster. You know that. If you could do any of this for yourself you wouldn’t have called me. Leave the tough stuff to me. You can start getting these chairs out of here though. Put them down the hall.”
Buster stood up, took off his suit jacket, and draped it over a chair. He rolled up his sleeves, and felt a strong sense of relief. Doing something, anything, made him feel better. Inaction worried him.
“Do you have some gloves you can wear? From the janitor’s closet or something. I don’t want to have to clean your fingerprints off of everything, too.”
“I own the place, Wenzao. My fingerprints are everywhere.”
“You push those chairs down the hall and you’re going to leave fingerprints on them. Won’t they find it unusual that your prints are on every chair?”
“You think they’re going to dust every chair for fingerprints?”
“If we do this right then no one’s going to do anything,” Wenzao said. “But you’re paying me to protect against everything, including the worst case scenario. If we fuck this up and the police come in, we don’t know what they’re going to dust. Let’s not take any chances. Find some gloves.”
Buster nodded, left the conference room, and found a pair of cleaning gloves in the janitor’s closet at the end of the floor. After he put on the gloves he cleaned the door handle, and returned to the conference room.
Wenzao had dragged Li to the end of the room, away from the window, leaving a trail of blood on the carpet.
“Don’t step in that,” he told Buster as he left the room. Get the chairs out of here and then just wait in the hall. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“Wait, you’re leaving?” Buster asked. Wenzao nodded. “Where are you going?”
“Stop asking so many questions.”
“Well what do I do if someone comes up here?”
“I don’t give a shit what you do,” Wenzao said. “But what you better not do is tell them I was here. No one’s coming though.”
Wenzao left and Buster went into the conference room and moved the first chair into the hallway. As he walked back to get the second chair he thought about New York and wondered what Li’s contacts there would do when he didn’t show up. Preventing Li from leaving the conference room only solved one part of the problem. If he had already divulged his plan to his partners in New York, Buster had many more problems to solve.
9
Chapter 9
Twenty-five minutes later, as Buster sat on the carpet, his legs pulled up to his chest, and his heart racing at almost two-hundred beats per minute in anticipation of Wenzao’s return, he heard the elevator door ding and then buzz. He perked up and hoped to see Wenzao when the door opened.
Instead he saw a tall, burly Chinese man with a shaved head. Buster felt a wave of panic wash over him, until he saw the ax that the man carried in his right hand. Wenzao followed just behind him, a toolbox in hand.
“Over here,” Wenzao said, as he passed the big guy. He walked to the conference room, the door of which Buster had propped open with a box of copy paper. The two men ignored Buster as they walked into the conference room.
“What took so long?” Buster asked. “You’re five minutes late.”
“Actually, I’m fifteen minutes late. I thought I’d only be gone ten minutes, but we had to wait in the lobby for some guy in a suit to leave. We didn’t want him to see us bringing an ax upstairs.”
“Someone saw you?”
“Didn’t you just hear what I said?” Wenzao asked. “I just told you that we waited so he wouldn’t see us.” Wenzao shook his head. “No. No one saw us.”
Wenzao fell to his knees and crawled under the conference room table. He opened his toolbox and began loosening bolts. The other guy walked over to Li and looked down at him. If the scene disturbed him he didn’t express it on his face.
“Who’s this?” Buster asked, pointing to the other man, even though Wenzao couldn’t see him from under the table.
“Sid.”
“Sid?” Buster asked. “Is that his given name?”
“What the fuck do you care what his given name is? His name’s Sid.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s the man who’s going to make everything all right.”
“What’s the ax for?”
Wenzao put down the wrench he was using and crawled out from beneath the table. He stood up, and wrapped his arm around Buster’s shoulder.
“Did you or did you not call me to take care of this?”
“I did. I needed your help.”
“I’m helping you. Sid is helping you. We’re going to take care of this. But I’m going to help you in another way.” Wenzao led Buster through the conference room door and toward the elevator. “It’s time to go, Buster. Sid and I will take care of this. You show up for work tomorrow morning, and everything will be fine. After you come to work and discover that everything is fine, just as I said it would be, we can discuss what you’re going to do for me. But I think it’s time for you to be on your way right now.”
“What about the carpet?” Buster asked.
“No more questions,” Wenzao said.
“Well, how are you getting Li out of here?”
“Buster, do you want to do this, or do you want us to do this?”
“I understand that you’re doing this, but this is my fucking life we’re talking about here. If you fuck this up, I’m the one going to prison. I’m the one with blood on his hands. So I need to know how you’re planning to handle this.”
“Let it go, Buster. We’ll take care of it. Come back in the morning, and it will seem like nothing happened.” Buster said nothing. He looked toward Sid, and took two steps back toward the conference room before Wenzao grabbed his arm. “Out!” He pushed the elevator button and didn’t let go of Buster’s arm until the elevator doors opened.
After Buster disappeared behind the doors, Wenzao returned to the conference room. Sid had crawled under the table and loosened the rest of the bolts. The two men carried each of the table’s three pieces into the hallway.
“Chengcheng’s on his way?” Wenzao asked.
“Any minute.”
Just as Sid uttered the words the elevator doors dinged and buzzed. Chengcheng, dressed in blue jeans and a plain red t-shirt stepped off, and waved at the two men. He hustled toward the conference room, where the two men met him at the door. Sid stood behind Wenzao to block Chengcheng’s view of the room.
“Thanks for coming,” Wenzao said. “This is a big favor, but we’ll make it worth your while.”
Wenzao knew Chengcheng from five years earlier when both men worked non-stop to make a living on the streets of Quanzhou. He knew that Chengcheng would do anything to make a buck, and Wenzao relied on that mercenary spirit in this situation.
He explained the situation and Chengcheng didn’t flinch. After Sid moved out of the way, Chengcheng walked into the room, looked around, took some measurements, and said he thought he could help. He’d be back in an hour with two more guys. They’d want it worth their while, too. Wenzao assured him that he need not worry about money.
Chengcheng left, and Wenzao turned to Sid and said, “Are you ready?” Sid nodded, and walked toward Li. He grabbed the dead man by the ankles and dragged him into the middle of the now-empty room. Wenzao handed him the ax.
“Do you want to be in here for this?” Sid asked.
“Should I be?”
“I don’t care if you’re here or not. I’m used to this. But you can’t unsee this. Once it’s in there, it’s in there.” Wenzao shrugged his shoulders, but didn’t leave. “Suit yourself.”
Sid spread Li’s feet apart, and placed his foot on Li’s ankle. He took a wide stance, raised the ax over his head, and in one powerful strike the ax cut through Li’s leg, just below the knee cap. The crack of the bone echoed through the room, and a stream of blood oozed onto the carpet.
Sid t
ossed the half-limb to the side, stepped on Li’s other ankle, and repeated the same powerful blow, severing the dead man’s other leg.
“This is where it gets gruesome,” Sid said. “So if you thought that was bad, you might want to turn around.”
“I’m fine,” Wenzao said, surprised at his own lack of queasiness, considering the situation.
Sid nodded once, and then repositioned himself to get a better angle. He took a couple of measured practice swings, and Wenzao knew what would follow. He watched Sid lift the ax above his head and bring it down on Li’s groin, tearing through the flesh, but not severing the leg.
“Fuck it all,” Sid shouted. “Out of practice too long. You miss by a couple of inches and this is what happens.”
The gruesome display after such a clean break on the lower leg caught Wenzao off guard. He saw Li’s muscles torn apart, and the meat of his leg separated, pulled from the bone, which appeared still in tact.
“Not enough power behind that one. Couldn’t get all the way through the hip. That’s why you’ve got to do this just right.”
Sid stepped over Li, held his leg with one hand, and used the other to take another swing at the joint. With the awkward angle and use of only one hand, Sid couldn’t get much power behind the swing. He hit it at a perfect angle though, and then bent the leg backward, popping the joint out, just like a turkey drumstick. One last swing cut through the rest of the flesh, and the leg came loose.
“That’s the worst,” Sid said. “So much flesh it’s impossible to get through in one swing.”
Sid straddled above the other leg. This time, without taking a practice swing, he slammed the head of the ax into Li’s groin and the blade tore through the skin and muscle of his leg, and separated the bone’s ball from the socket before coming to rest.
“Ah-ha! I got that one,” Sid cried, as if he’d just hit a hole-in-one rather than cut off a dead man’s leg. “A quick swing,” he said, as he lifted the ax again and cut through the rest of the meat. He threw the leg to the side lifted his right hand above his head in a triumphant fist.
“Do you want to try one?” Sid asked, holding the ax up for Wenzao to get a better look. “The arms are the easiest. Even if you don’t hit them just right they’re so thin that this bad boy will go right through them.”
“No, you’re doing just fine,” Wenzao said, looking away from the bloodied ax. “How much more are you going to do?”
“Well, we’re almost out of parts,” Sid said with a chuckle. “We can’t do too much more.”
He straightened Li’s arm perpendicular from his body. This time, as he crashed the ax down upon his arm he let out a growl as if the volume of his yelling corresponded to the force upon the ax. The arm split off just below the shoulder, leaving no trace attached to the body.
“That’s more like it,” Sid said.
He did the same with the opposite arm before putting down the ax and looking at Wenzao. Neither man spoke, and not until Wenzao looked down at Li and his severed limbs did Sid said anything. “Well?”
“Well what?” Wenzao asked.
“Are we done?”
“What do you mean, are we done? You’re the expert here. You tell me if we’re done. I’ve never done this before.”
“No, what I mean is, do you want me to keep going?”
Wenzao finally realized what Sid meant. “The head?” he asked. Sid nodded. Wenzao covered his face, threw his hands in the air and looked out the window. “I don’t know. What do you suggest? Would you normally do it?”
“Most of the time we only do the head when we’re scattering the body. It can be hard to identify a body from only a torso, or a leg, or whatever. But if we’re just dumping it all in one place, then it’s not like they’re going to have to search very far to find the head if they come across the torso first. I don’t know what we gain.”
“That’s a horrific thought,” Wenzao said.
Sid threw his hands up in the air as if to say, “Don’t blame me.”
“Do it,” Wenzao said. “Let’s not take any chances.” Although Wenzao wanted it done, he didn’t want to watch it. He turned away from Sid and left the conference room. He didn’t veer too far though because he didn’t want to risk tracking Li’s blood throughout the floor.
After two more growls punctuated with the sound of cracking bone, Wenzao heard the rustle of plastic bags, and then Sid called, “It’s done.”
Wenzao went back inside and saw only Li’s torso on the floor. Blood soaked at least one-third of the carpet.
“Let’s cut this now,” Wenzao said.
He and Sid fell to the floor and began cutting the carpet into four-foot long strips. After cutting the last row of strips Sid spread Li’s body along the far wall, placing part of it on each strip. The torso here. The upper leg and arm there. The head and a lower leg in another section. They then rolled up each strip, encasing the body part inside the thick cylinder of carpet.
Chengcheng and two of his men arrived just as Sid finished rolling the last strip. While Wenzao watched, the four men wrapped each strip of carpet in plastic wrap, and then threw a strip over their shoulder and carried it onto the elevator. They took the elevator down to the parking garage beneath the building, and threw the strips into the van. Onlookers would only see men removing carpet. They’d have no idea of the carnage within.
When the men returned they each carried one end of two rolls of carpet, twelve feet in width. As Sid carried the last remaining roll of old carpet down to the van, the other men cleaned the glass walls and swept up the debris left behind by the old carpet. By the time Sid returned the new carpet had been unrolled, ready to install.
The men worked through the night, installing the carpet, washing it with special cleaner to remove the new carpet smell, reassembling the table, returning the chairs, disrupting the carpet fiber patterns in the hallway that showed where the chairs rolled.
Just after sunrise Buster returned to the office to find it almost exactly as it had looked the previous morning, with the exception of the missing bar cart. Employees would miss the cart, no doubt, but Buster would claim it stolen, and launch a faux investigation. Someone might even get fired for it.
But no one would notice the new carpeting, or that the conference table sat four inches closer to the window than it had the day before. And since the police wouldn’t arrive to dust for prints, no one would know that not a single fingerprint existed on any surface in the room.
So, for Buster, only one question remained: Would anyone miss Yuzhan Li?
10
Chapter 10
Randy smelled the smoke first. In his half-conscious state, he couldn’t place the smell right away. It seemed familiar, but didn’t spur him into action, or even wake him up. Instead his just rolled over from one side to another, hitting Mia in the face with his hand as he did so.
The slap to her face woke Mia, and as she tried to clear her eyes she recognized the smell and sat up. She instantly understood the gravity of the situation.
Near the stern of the boat a wall of flame shot into the air at least ten feet high. It roared from starboard almost all the way over to portside, and had already consumed the area surrounding the stairs that led below deck. She gasped as she saw the corpse of one of the intruders half-consumed by flames.
“Randy, get up,” she said, as she hit Randy in the arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. Get up.”
Randy moaned, but didn’t say anything. Mia hit him again, this time slugging him in the arm so hard that it felt like her hand would bruise. Randy sat up, still leaning back on his arms, his eyes still closed.
“The boat’s on fire,” Mia said.
“What?” Randy asked in disbelief as he opened his eyes. He stood up and backpedaled away from flames.
“It’s too big to fight,” Mia said, as if to reassure herself that they shouldn’t try. “Is there a life boat?”
“There’s an inflatable below deck. I don’t think that helps us right
now though.”
Mia remembered the intruders’ boat, and as she turned around she yelled, “The trawler.”
However, as soon as the words left her mouth she noticed the boat was no longer there. Her open-mouth gaze made Randy turned around. “What the fuck happened to it?”
Mia spun around, and as she cowered away from the flames, an object in the portside of the boat caught her eye. She ran across the deck to get a better look, and called back to Randy “It’s over there,”
About three hundred yards away the trawler bobbed up and down with the waves, its dock lines floating on the surface.
Randy, still sore from the beating delivered by the intruders, hobbled over to Mia. “I don’t know how it got loose. Looks like the ropes just broke free.”
“Do you think we can make it over there?” Mia said.
“You tell me, you’re the one who survived floating on top of a ball of plastic wrap.”
“Not by design,” Mia said. “I thought you were a fisherman. Shouldn’t you know these things? Aren’t you some seafaring veteran? Golly fuck, do I know more about this than you?”
Randy shot Mia a disapproving look and then said, “We can’t swim out there. The cross-currents will take us away before we get halfway there. The chances of swimming through them are practically zero.”
“What’s the alternative?” Mia asked. “Stay here and die? Get burnt to a crisp or suffocate? Neither sound very enticing.”
“Are you proposing we go into the water?” Randy asked.
“Unless you have another option. And if you do, I’d love to hear it.”
Randy looked toward the wall of flames, and then toward the trawler. “If this thing keeps burning we’ll start sinking any minute.”
“It’s going to keep burning,” Mia said. “We can’t put it out. We’ve got to abandon ship.”
Randy said nothing, but he knew Mia was right. They had no choice. “We can’t swim out to that boat. We’ll never make it.”