Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  Philo shrugged. “Sorry, Doctor, but that’s old news. The cops investigated, went searching for the bastard whose blood he was wearing but never found anyone. None of that helped him get ID’d.”

  “Inside his mouth, Mr. Trout. The blood was on his teeth and tongue.”

  Philo’s head tilted. His confused facial expression preceded his question. “What’s your point, Doc?”

  “Hearing about this kidney,” Dr. Andelmo said, “that concerns me. One of the nonsensical things he said during his delirium was, and I quote from the transcribed notes, he said, ‘I ate a pinky.’” He turned toward Patrick. “Have you ever heard of kreatophagia, Patrick?”

  “Um—”

  “Of course you haven’t. It means having a raw meat obsession. And eating raw meat can make a person very sick. Some foolish people think a raw meat diet is a good diet for them, but it isn’t. Tell me something else, Patrick.”

  Patrick turned his attention from the doctor, his look to Philo pleading and confused. Philo patted Patrick’s forearm, gave him a “don’t worry, it’s all good” nod.

  The doctor continued. “Have you experienced any nocturnal wanderings?”

  “Huh?”

  “People with traumatic brain injuries—bad knocks to the head, like you had—occasionally sleepwalk after the trauma, even become violent during these episodes. Have you awakened in places where you didn’t know how you got there?”

  He squirmed in his seat, rubbed his head, glanced at Philo. “No,” he said, sounding unconvincing.

  “There’s no wrong answer here, Patrick. I’m only looking to assess your condition, son. Do you sleepwalk?”

  “No,” he said, more forcefully this time. “No, sir. Nope.”

  “Fine. Do you know what cannibalism is?”

  “Wait, what?” Philo sat up straighter, his fuse lit. “What the fuck, Doctor? Where’d that come from? He made a mistake with the kidney, okay? It’s not like the kid’s got everything sorted out. Christ. Sometimes the simplest shit gives him trouble, and now you’re filling his impressionistic head with this crap?”

  “Please, Mr. Trout—”

  “Fuck you, Doc. C’mon, Patrick, we’re leaving.”

  Good doc and bad doc, just like with cop interrogations. Philo was pissed he hadn’t seen it queuing up that way with these two pompous pricks. Hearing about the kidney, it was like a light went on for Dr. Andelmo, a direct salvo at Patrick. Philo started the truck, let it idle.

  Cannibalism, though. Really? Cannibalism?

  The truck left the parking lot, easing into traffic. “Patrick, I need to know. You eat raw meat?”

  “No. Maybe. Not much. Sometimes.”

  “Which is it? You eat raw meat or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, stop doing it. It’ll make you sick.”

  6

  Kaipo packed up after finishing with her last client, a male TV news anchor living in an art deco high-rise condo in Center City Philadelphia. Bundled for the cold in a warm coat and crocheted dangle hat, she left via the news anchor’s private elevator, pulling her folding table in its cart. At street level she entered the park at Washington Square, on to her next appointment in the same neighborhood.

  Factoid: Hawaii as a state boasted the second lowest percentage of obese adults in the US behind Colorado. Every personal trainer on the Hawaiian Islands hyped this stat, using it to attract transplanted mainlanders to their practices, their clients desperate for transformation from obese ogres to gladiator ninjas ready to flaunt their new bodies in their island paradise. When Kaipo was younger she’d been no different as a trainer, selling her services to much the same population, until she decided to swim upstream to the source, the mainland itself. She had parlayed her Hawaiian brand of training and massage therapy into a small business employing four Hawaiian trainers in addition to herself, and she had set about attracting well-heeled customers to her growing stable of clients.

  “But why Philadelphia?” the philly.com health editor interviewing her had asked. “Why not the glitz and glamor of the West Coast? Why not New York?”

  Kaipo had taken the interview soon after she’d hung out her shingle, conducting it from her apartment home office via Skype. Her long, straight black hair was clipped atop her head, an easy early morning rise-and-shine solution; no one would notice her bedhead. Her pouty features were captivating, with full cheeks and lips and bright, confident eyes. “High demand here,” she’d answered. “Apparently no one else from the Islands wants to set up shop in Philadelphia.”

  A lie. A big, deadly lie. True, there were no other freelance Native Hawaiian personal trainers in Philly—her business employed the only other four—but this was because an influential group of Hawaiian businesspeople had arrived in the city years back, preceding Kaipo, and had set up their own establishments: restaurants, coin-operated laundries, dry cleaners, corner groceries, and car washes, plus illegal gaming and high-end escort services. This influential group was the transplanted Hawaiian mob. Nicknamed the Enterprise, or Ka Hui, they had been eradicated, reportedly, from their native island soil in the late 1990s. But reports of Ka Hui’s death had been greatly exaggerated. Italian wiseguys, the Russian and Chinese mobs, Mexican cartels, each had storied presences in all the urban environments on the US mainland. Ka Hui instead took advantage of its obscurity, its rumored demise, and the unlikelihood of such an obscure pairing, a Philadelphia–Hawaii connection, to make quiet inroads into the city’s neighborhoods. There was now a network. It had income, it had soldiers, and it had a support staff.

  Which included Kaipo Mawpaw, a striking personal trainer and massage therapist. She’d been recruited while still in the Islands, also while she still had a cocaine and pill problem, something her clandestine employer leveraged to secure her interest. The leverage: We’ll help you kill the addiction monkey. Let us do that for you—or else. Simple intimidation, but a business deal as well. So what was in it for them?

  They liked her extracurricular work, a certain expertise, and she couldn’t perform it when she wasn’t sober. So their help became intensive psychoanalytic therapy with a twist: a therapist on their payroll worked on her head to subdue her cravings while her employers worked on the heads of her drug suppliers, as in—the twist—if you gave Ms. Mawpaw any drugs, you’d be beheaded. She’d relapsed four times, involving four different dealers. After three dealer heads surfaced around the city, the street began going out of its way to not sell to her. The fourth dealer was still at large. Kaipo had at last, after one year, ten months, and twenty-two days—693 days clean in total—fully embraced her new sobriety.

  Ka Hui, “The Enterprise,” flourished. So did Kaipo’s personal trainer business. When other entrepreneurial Hawaiian trainer types relocated here they were soon persuaded to un-relocate. After seeing the gory outcome of these persuadings, plus her personal involvement in a number of other unrelated jobs, Kaipo’s avocation as Ka Hui’s mob cleaner-slash-fixer had been solidified.

  She was not an assassin. As a benevolent businesswoman with scruples, or so she fashioned herself, she’d kill only for self-preservation. Much like last night’s dilemma: the old man at the Chinese restaurant. She’d caught up to him on the street, his gait slow, deliberate, a shuffler. She pulled him into an alley and put a gun under his chin. He didn’t scream.

  “My money is in my jacket pocket. I don’t have much,” he’d said in broken English. His eyes were cloudy, full of cataracts. “I smell your dinner, your perfume, and your rotting tooth, but I will never know your face. Take my money, but please show me mercy.”

  She’d made a mistake, she’d told him, and she let him live.

  Kaipo now retrieved a phone from her right coat pocket, called ahead to make sure her appointment was ready for her. In her left pocket a second phone buzzed, a TracFone disposable.

  She answered it. “Yes?”

  A male voice. “Did you find last week’s fortune cookie satisfactory?”

  “It was
delicious. Thank you.”

  “Good,” came out elongated, the caller giving in to a scratchy hack and sniffle, adding, “your meeting has been moved up.” In the background on the caller’s end, a bone-chilling scream reverberated in their ears. “We’ll be ready for you in two hours.”

  The caller’s hack-sniffle, Kaipo knew, was nasal cancer. For starters, an unusual diagnosis. Even more unusual, it was stage 4. Lymph nodes and elsewhere. Terminal. Dry snuff tobacco wasn’t normally a killer. Which meant that Olivier ʻŌpūnui, the caller, fit into an extremely small percentage of users. His habit had him sniffling into the phone after their call ended, a muffled hot-mike moment suffixed by a spoken “oh, goodness,” that, Kaipo surmised, came after he looked at whatever his nose had expelled into his tissues. Then came the lengthy, familiar sniff-f-f she’d heard and seen him execute a hundred times before. Out with the diseased and bloodied snot, in with the finely ground snuff tobacco, until his nostrils consumed the pinch he’d taken between his thumb and forefinger. A filthy habit, and a chic affectation in the circles Olivier traveled, but Kaipo hadn’t made the mistake of thinking the affliction diminished his allegiances, instincts, or physical capacity for violence. Her handler was a mobster. Healthy or not, he followed orders, or he would die in the attempt.

  She retrieved her right-pocket phone and rescheduled her next appointment.

  Kaipo pulled her Chevy van under the Grand Opening Feb. 29 banner hung across the side of the building. Remnants of figure eights from muddy tires had christened the newly tarred parking lot of the car wash. Out of her vehicle, she pushed through a whitewashed door made of thick opaque plastic cut into a two-story garage door of the same composition. She pulled her small cleaning cart through the portal, into the interior.

  This abandoned car wash in Olney had been reclaimed and retrofitted to perform as a six-dollar express wash with free vacuums. Its Quonset hut footprint was ideal, and the new car wash was less than two weeks away from opening for business. Glistening, standing water on an interior floor indicated it had been used already, no doubt today.

  First in line inside the building were heavy fabric rag-strips in faded green, hanging as tightly together as matches in a matchbook, a thousand-legged Cthulhu monster look-alike for swooshing and scrubbing vehicles passing underneath. Behind the rag-strips were side and overhead brushes in Cookie Monster blue and Elmo red. Large painted bands of red, white, and blue barber-poled the aluminum pillars and the overhead scaffolding that housed the hot wax sprayers. Beyond that, industrial strength wide-angle air blowers. Front to back it was a carnival of car love that tunneled through the dinge of the old Quonset hut’s interior, soon to get a steady diet of road dust and dirt and late winter salt.

  Kaipo removed her wool gloves and dangle hat and tucked them all into a pocket. She blew into her fingers; it was chilly in here, could see her breath. And lately, as the old Chinese man had noticed, her breath had a distinctly unclean dragon-mouth edge to it, from a decaying tooth needing a crown. She popped a Tic Tac and continued absorbing the surroundings.

  Twenty yards into the tunnel was her reason for being here. A figure sat slumped in a chair under high-ceilinged spotlighting, unmoving, near the car wash exit. Add this to her toothache, and her contact’s handle, Olivier, and the images echoed Laurence Olivier’s movie-dentist’s venue, plus his question to Dustin Hoffman’s tortured Marathon Man: “Is it safe?” From an intimidation, torture, and murder perspective, the people who paid her and Olivier were in a similar business. She was here to remove the evidence, and the aftermath, of their obscene use of this place.

  Her first time here, she could see the attraction, knew they’d use this location again, and maybe other car washes, for this kind of work. High-pressure hoses and sprayers, scalding water, a covered drain trench, and a waterproofed, stain-resistant cement floor. Kaipo wheeled her chemistry cart along the tire guide rails that ran the length of the building, stooped to move past the Elmo brushes overhead. On the other side of the brushes, her eyes concentrated on her object of interest, seated under the liquid hot wax sprayer. The chair with the slumped body was adjacent to the drain. She stepped closer, her cart behind her.

  Some of his sepia-brown skin was gone, boiled off to expose his musculature in spots, his skeleton in others. There could be little question about the efficacy of the car wash’s hot wax nozzles; a blend of wax and skin formed a mound on the floor that reached above the man’s ankles. Alongside him now, she still couldn’t smell the body, the stink masked by the thick, sweet odor of the wax. She dipped her finger in it; still hot. She eyed the drain trench, which cut a wide channel inside the tire guiderails, its silver-black grating flush with the floor. Straining, she gripped and tilted a section of the metal grate covering the trench to gauge its weight, then she lifted a four-foot piece of it off the channel and set it aside.

  The trench was a foot deep. In it, preserved in wax below her, was more melted human being. She tucked her hair inside her stretchy biohazard cap, spread some Tiger Balm on her upper lip, put on a mask, and stuck her head and a flashlight inside the trench to see down its length. The channel ran forward, toward the car wash exit, and was mostly clear except for what looked like wax and body effluence that had gathered near its end. Farther down, she removed the grate to see where the channel connected with piping destined for the public sewers. A high-pressure hot water rinse from a maintenance hose would clean up the trench and the drain nicely, and push along whatever mess that had already accumulated, plus the additional mess she was about to create.

  Kaipo returned to the front of the car wash track and poked her head out the door to confirm there was no audience. Back inside, with the press of a button, the car wash garage door lifted. She backed her van up to it, opened its rear doors. Inside, on casters, was her pressure cooker. She slid a short ramp from the van’s undercarriage and unloaded the cooker from the van bed, onto the car wash floor.

  Commercial quality, with a stainless-steel tub and a 150-quart capacity, size-wise the cooker’s exterior mimicked a car wash industrial vacuum on steroids, and was a hand-me-down from her employers by way of one of their restaurants. A small metal plate stamped onto its curved exterior wall listed its specs in both Chinese and English. She hit the garage door button again. The door slid back down to the floor, Kaipo and the pressure cooker inside.

  In her biohazard suit now, she squeezed on medical-grade nitrile gloves. Kaipo rolled the cooker the length of the car wash and set it up over the drain, next to the body.

  Sodium hydroxide, or lye, heated to 300 degrees with sixty pounds of pressure per square inch, would liquefy a body in a few hours and leave behind a flushable residue the consistency of maple syrup. Her head covering in place à la a 1950s spaceman, she peered down her nose at the victim. He was wrapped tightly in the chair by multiple bungee cords. When she unwrapped the cords, the unsupported body leaned forward then toppled to the floor.

  There were cavities where organs should have been. No heart, no lungs. She poked at the body with a broom handle, separating the husk from other internal organs. No kidneys or liver either. No eyes.

  An execution with feeling. A torture in retribution for some heinous act, but the organ harvesting was new territory for her employers. They were recycling the trash for money, every reusable organ exploited.

  They paid her to dispose partial bodies the same as for disposing the whole ones, but the organ-harvesting thing was over the top. A new, obscene direction for Ka Hui.

  No time to process this now. She needed to get to work.

  Kaipo unrolled a plastic tarp, gripped the severed upper torso under the shoulders and dragged it on top. Something pink on the side of the black man’s skull got her attention: a Post-it note attached—stapled—to an earlobe. She jerked it off with one quick rip, the way she’d remove a Band-Aid.

  Handwritten on the note in ʻŌlelo Hawai‘i: E waiho ke poʻo ma ke pākeke polū. The translation, Leave the head in the blue bucket. Below
that, also in Hawaiian, You’re welcome.

  The You’re welcome presupposed her thank-you, but for what, she didn’t know. Kaipo looked more closely at the skinned heap that was the upper body of the victim.

  God no.

  She pushed the broom handle through what was left of his wax-covered lips, levering jaw muscles hardening from rigor mortis; his mouth opened. There she found what she hadn’t wanted to: two silver front teeth.

  Monte, the last of her drug dealers.

  Threats by Ka Hui had long lives. This one had lasted one year, ten months, and twenty-two days—693 days in total—coincident with her sobriety date. This was dealer number four, the one attached to her last relapse.

  “So sorry, Monte. You didn’t deserve this.”

  Resigned, she found her machete in the van, returned to the body. “Or this, either.” Whap. His head separated from his torso with one coconut-splitting swing.

  The pressure cooker powered up. She strained while she hefted Monte, minus his head, into the cooker, then seasoned the stew with the lye. The head she deposited into a biohazard bag, would leave it as directed in the blue bucket next to the office. Ka Hui’s machismo bullshit, with its messages for the street, had always been so overly dramatic.

  While the pressure cooker hummed and popped and gurgled, it was time for a little break. Kaipo patted down her sweaty face and retouched her makeup, then settled in with some reading on her e-reader in her van for the next few hours while the lye did its work. After, she would wash out the cooker and use a hose to rinse all the sludge the length of the trench to the drain, turning what little was left of the victim into sewer meat. By then it would be dinnertime. She’d grab some local Mexican takeout and eat in her van.

  After dinner she keyed a text into her left-pocket phone, to Olivier, staying cryptic: It’s safe. It’s very safe.