Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  “Hank.” Philo patted him on his shoulder, gently squeezed it. “I’ll sit with Grace while you and Patrick get something to eat in the café.” Philo handed Patrick a twenty. “Order some breakfast for yourselves, Patrick. Bring me back an orange juice, please. No hurry.”

  They left the room. Philo leaned in, made direct eye contact with Grace. “As far as fucking off goes, there’ll be none of that, on my part or yours,” he said. He gave Grace a peck on her cheek while he squeezed and held her hand. He still held it while he stood over her bed.

  “Philo,” she said, laboring, “my skin was blue before. Fucking. Blue. Color’s coming back now, and my breathing’s a little better, but for how long?” Her eyes welled. “Be good to my guys, Philo, please. They mean the world to me.”

  “Will do, Grace, but you’re not going anywhere just yet. The prognosis is good for releasing you in a day or two.”

  “Releasing me to what?” she said, her voice weak. “Really, Philo, to what?” A tear rolled down her cheek, onto her pillow. She swallowed; her eyes were pleading. “You bring your gun with you today?”

  He squeezed her hand hard. “What the fuck, Grace, you can cut that shit out right now. If I hear any more drama like that, I’m right the hell outta here. Besides, you still owe me some training, and I’m going to hold you to it.”

  He leaned in and gave her a caring hug. When he straightened up: “I’ve got some news. Just listen, no comments. Think you can do that?”

  Grace nodded, gulped in some air, her breath still short.

  “Good. I’ve been checking with some connections of mine. There’s a strong possibility you’ll get access to a pair of lungs shortly. No guarantees—”

  “But—”

  “Shut it, Grace, you’re listening, remember? No guarantees, but the military’s got some recourse in this area, even has its own lists. I’m waiting for a call back about arranging the location, as in what surgical facility we would take you to for the procedure. We won’t know the date because, you know, that’s a function of when the organs become available. But we’ll get the location ironed out soon.”

  Her lips clamped into a straight line; her eyes narrowed. Her rebuttal was firm but soft, about all she could manage. “I will not,” Grace poked the back of his hand with her finger, “have anyone pull strings to make this happen, or take organs from someone else who’s entitled to them. You hear me? Will. Not. No funny business, Philo. I won’t agree to it.”

  Philo was ready for this as a response. “No pulled strings, Grace. Promise. I have people who owe me.” He wrapped both his hands around her one, smothered it, and he focused on her tired eyes.

  “And now, you’ll be one of them. You’ll pay me off by getting healthy enough to finish our transition contract. After that,” he said, “you can chow down on all that self-righteous BS you feed yourself and check out if you want to. But I hope you don’t. Your guys need you.”

  “Philo—”

  “Look, I’m just being selfish, Grace. I still need your help with the business. Your business. The business you spent your life building with your husband. This guarantees—or is the closest I can get to a guarantee—that I get it.”

  She eyed him, analyzing his pitch. He knew, that she knew, there was more to his plea.

  “I see,” she said.

  He didn’t want her to make him say it, that this sexy old prickly bitch of a woman had somehow wormed her way into his hardened, ooh-rah heart. Didn’t want her to make him say that, like Hank and Patrick, he needed her, too. There’d been little room most of his adult life for caring about people, for caring about parents. He’d screwed up too many times, had disappointed them ad nauseam. Maybe now, here, he could start making up for it.

  Someone had to speak. “I won’t tell Hank or Patrick about this,” he said, “because you don’t need anyone else pressuring you. I won’t say anything until it’s close to happening.”

  Not telling Hank or Patrick about prospective organ availability was a promise he could keep. Everything else was a fabrication. A separate military organ-donors-and-recipients list did exist, but he had no access to it other than if he himself needed a transplant. Him forcing her to earn out this “favor” by still training him, and him needing said training—all bullshit as well. Convincing her everything was on the up-and-up, including arranging an operating room theater and doctors she wouldn’t question, that might prove difficult. But if she learned Philo had scammed her after she received the transplants, it wasn’t like she could give them back.

  He’d had her to himself long enough. A nurse popped in, confirmed he wasn’t the husband, and waited for him to leave. He made his pitch again. “Say yes, Grace. Let’s just do this. You’ve suffered enough. We can make this happen. How about it?”

  Touched and teary-eyed, she disengaged their hands so she could re-cover his with hers.

  “For the business then, and for my guys,” she said. “Okay, yes, let’s do this.” And with her whisper of a smile, she let Philo’s soft-heartedness off the hook.

  Outside her room, Philo fished out a business card. He tapped Wally’s number into his phone and keyed a text, was determined to play through his watering eyes.

  Move the fight up. Tell me how the surgery will work.

  14

  Two Weeks Later

  Chinese food on a Thursday evening, the usual time and place for Kaipo. Her chocolate-covered fortune cookie was on a plate in front of her. Great presentation, on china, and warm, fresh, and so gooey it looked like it had been dipped in a fondue before it had been swirled with its sweet, decadent strawberry sauce. She’d meet this dessert artist someday, to personally commend him or her for creating these masterpieces with such five-star flair, inclusive of their private cryptic messages.

  Why couldn’t that day be today?

  Kaipo did a quick about-face in her chair to see if she could get a glimpse.

  Her Asian waiter disappeared through swinging, salmon-colored doors, the doors more pleasing in appearance than the set of doors beyond them, aluminum-clad and battered, leading to the kitchen. Another waiter entered. In his wake, the ambient lighting revealed a lone male standing in the shadowy no-man’s-land between dining room and kitchen, observing her. Black hair slicked with mousse, white uniform jacket, black pants, and a long, thin, and tanned face. Also Asian, with a hooked nose and a mustache. Dressed here as a cook, he somehow didn’t fit the profile, as interested in getting a glimpse of her as she was of him. The doors continued swinging, but after a few passes he was gone.

  She cut open her chocolate-covered fortune cookie, using a fork to separate the pieces and eat them while reacquainting herself with her surroundings. Two couples at the front window, nearest the street, enjoyed each other’s company, one couple holding hands beneath their table, the other sipping cocktails. Kaipo read her cookie’s fortune. Finally she had a new assignment, a job for next week. She let out the relieved sigh she’d been holding in for days. Ka Hui had forgiven her perceived incompetence, the abandoned dealership job sloppy, unfinished, and necessitating that they relocate their operation.

  She tucked the message into her mouth, and discreetly let its strawberry-flavored consistency charm her taste buds as it dissolved on her tongue. One thought came to mind: Did her dessert artist know the significance of these fortunes?

  A new thought, a disturbing one, from an odd text she’d received this morning while at a client’s home in another Philadelphia high-rise.

  Businessman needs after-hours cleaning services. Name your price.

  A huge red flag. No one outside Ka Hui knew she was a mob cleaner. Here was someone with the poorest of judgment who had to be on the inside of Ka Hui’s supply chain, and who was now making an egregious mistake.

  She’d held off responding until she saw she had a follow-up request from the same texter, suggesting they should meet this evening—

  …for a drink. Non-alcoholic of course. Center City. Non-binding.

  C
asual tone, light, thoughtful, yet also professional. So natural for her to receive an inquiry, maybe even innocent, but any mention of services she might provide outside of personal training and massage was careless and dangerous, more so for the person who had contacted her than for Kaipo herself. She knew what she would do, had to do. And after she did it, she had no control over the outcome. This was someone who knew her background, also knew she was in recovery, which meant someone close to Ka Hui’s management. She texted the only response she could, knowing this was what her current employers would want:

  Where and when?

  His return text:

  Tonight at 9. The Franklin Bar.

  A Rittenhouse Square subterranean speakeasy. She wasted no time in texting her handler, Olivier, to give him the heads-up about this breach. His response:

  Enjoy your Thurs night dinner. Will get back to you.

  And Olivier did get back to her with a text while she sipped her tea.

  A proxy has been arranged for that meeting. You need not attend.

  Standard protocol was that any further instructions from Olivier regarding her newest assignment were TBD, but after the Franklin Bar attempted-hookup time passed, the instructions she’d receive wouldn’t be much more than time and location, and maybe quantity of victims.

  She left her tip for the waiter, glanced again at the doors that shielded the dining area from the unpleasantness of the kitchen; no one had returned to the no-man’s-land in between. Time to leave so she could go home and catch up on some rest, maybe do some reading while this breach was handled.

  At nine thirty p.m. Kaipo’s Franklin Bar suitor texted her because she was late for their appointment. Ninety minutes after that, she received another text from the same number. This one, she was sure, was not from her suitor.

  It is safe.

  She put the phone away. Her other phone buzzed with another text that included an address.

  We’re ready for you to make it safer.

  Her destination was a residence on Elfreth’s Alley, a tourist attraction in the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia with significant sightseeing notoriety. She was on her way there in her van, a little after eleven thirty p.m.

  As “the nation’s oldest residential street” according to the National Register of Historic Places, Elfreth’s Alley dated back to 1702, its present thirty-plus homes built in the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. She found parking a block away, on a different street.

  Snow fell as she walked, a late-night dusting of the Philadelphia waterfront that was moving inland. Elfreth’s Alley had room for foot and bicycle traffic only, no cars, but occasionally, young crotch-rocket motorcyclists dared the cops on the beat to catch them zooming along its short stretch. Red poles three feet high anchored the sidewalk in front of every house, emphasizing the no-motor-vehicle ordinance. Tonight there was no danger of that type of interference, the surfaces too slippery. Well-appointed brick fronts graced each of the two- and three-story early American homes, most with attic dormers. Kaipo guided two large pieces of wheeled luggage up the street on the slate that separated the brick sidewalk from a wide cobblestone stripe in the center. She wore a skirted business suit accessorized with a shoulder bag, her long black hair braided and away from her face. She caught snowflakes in her mouth, falling snow still a wonder to her even after three years on the mainland.

  The home was a double, two row houses redone as one, and it was for sale. She checked the price online before she entered it, just for grins: reasonable at under $800K for 3,500 square feet in so hallowed a location. After tonight’s activity and her visit, the price would drop.

  “Safe” for this job meant “eliminate connections to us.” She could make things safe from identifying the participants, but recently, in consideration of Ka Hui’s newest venture—organ harvesting—eliminating all traces of these events had become a challenge.

  Her low heels crunched the snow underfoot, squeezing out little white tufts, her rolling luggage leaving sloppy wet tracks behind. A lockbox hung from the doorknob. She punched in the code Olivier gave her and removed the key; she unlocked the door.

  Inside, it was an open-floor plan, with living room, dining room, and kitchen connected by tongue-in-groove “rare red-heart pine flooring” per the real estate listing. The mess wasn’t on the first floor, far as she could tell, was most likely on the floor below street level, accessed by a set of beautiful interior stone steps that wound their way downward.

  Downstairs, the exposed stone foundation walls supported a curved, distressed red brick ceiling above three dramatic spaces: an unfurnished rec room appointed in brick top to bottom, an alcove with a hot tub, and next to it in a small room, a sauna. The lid to the circular hot tub was set aside, exposing gurgling water and something large in it. She peeked inside.

  A floater.

  She moved to the next room. From the doorway she switched on the light. Body number two. The multi-person sauna was a slaughterhouse, the gore overwhelming. She backed out and returned to the hot tub room.

  Here too, the gruesome had ruined the room’s ambience, with bubbling red water buffeting a naked body floating face down. She removed her gun and its holster from under her short sport coat, setting them aside within easy reach.

  Kaipo pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves, reached in, and nudged the body’s shoulder, slowly rotating the floater to expose an ear-to-ear throat cut, the blood still leaking from the slice and circling the body’s upper torso in the water. The woman’s face was distorted but her ethnicity was discernible: reddish-brown skin probably from south of the US border, anywhere from thirty to fifty years old. Kaipo rotated the body to get a better look at the damage. Holes throughout, many organs missing. Hopefully the throat cut ended the drama quickly for her, before the organ removal. An intended victim, or collateral damage? Kaipo guessed the latter. Someone unlucky enough to be on site as a potential witness when the chickens had come home to roost for the victim in the sauna; maybe a housekeeper. Regardless, after the maid’s new Colombian necktie, the organ-harvesting vultures had swooped in.

  Kaipo returned to the sauna, another striking room. A long cedar bench extended wall to wall. At the end of the bench was the sauna’s heat source, stones that were still warm, in a box raised off the floor, the box level with the bench. Draped across the bench, with a face buried in the stones, the second body also had chunks missing, but the parts had been hacked out at haphazard angles, different than the maid’s.

  She assessed the sauna mess; this one would be less work for her. When she’d heard the address—Elfreth’s Alley—she knew not to expect a simple lift and drop into the cooker. The narrow street and the home’s internal configuration wouldn’t permit it, the cooker not a consideration inside the house. No, these bodies would require transport, which meant dismemberment, and with this one, here in the sauna, the process had already been partially completed, evidenced by what was strewn around the cedar bench and floor: many of the body’s internal organs, tenderized nicely in the sauna heat. They hadn’t been surgically removed, were instead savagely torn from their cavities, or so it appeared. This was not an organ harvest; it was more like a wild animal feeding frenzy that had been interrupted.

  Her phone vibrated.

  Olivier.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you on site?” Olivier said. A gravelly hack, with no apology, then he blew his nose.

  “Yes.”

  “You are wondering what happened.”

  “Yes.”

  “We needed pictures.”

  “For marketing?” she asked, a vague question, as in was this expected to deliver a message to a mob competitor?

  “In part,” Olivier said. “And partly because one of our contractors requested it. Your instruction is to remove the floater only. Everything in the sauna must stay as is, to be discovered by the (cough) authorities. Let me know when it is safe.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I have a question.”

&
nbsp; She needed to choose her words carefully, to speak so only Olivier could understand her. Phone conversations traveled the airwaves; the airwaves attracted prying ears. Plus, she needed to be respectful. “This new program. Its donors sometimes experience unexpected outcomes. Are the company’s other businesses not performing well enough? Why this new venture?”

  The phone was silent for five, six, seven seconds, then a guttural snicker. The snicker turned giddy, almost feminine.

  “Your question reminds me of Michael and Kay. You know, Pacino and Keaton? Like Michael Corleone said, ‘Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.’ I can still see him slapping his hand on the desk in that scene, yelling at her, ‘Enough!’ Ha! (cough) You should assume that just happened on my end, but without the trite yell.

  “This one time I’ll answer your question about the business, then we close out this discussion. The other businesses are performing quite well. But cheap raw materials and leveraged outsourced support generate high margins, and high margins always interest us. That’s all you need to know.” The call ended.

  A rebuke, somewhat lighthearted, but mostly not. Below the surface: Don’t screw with us, Kaipo. You know what we’re capable of.

  Netting it out, and ignoring her discomfort, this would be a reprieve in her workload. The ghoulish male body parts mess in the sauna, per Olivier, needed to stay where it was. Only the female needed remediation. A throwaway domestic, probably an undocumented immigrant. A cheap raw material, per Olivier.

  She opened one of her luggage pieces, removed her circular saw, a one-piece hooded Tyvek suit, footies and goggles, some chemicals and rags, and a roll of heavy plastic sheathing. She got to work, measuring each cut to maximize the space in the second suitcase, then adjusting the pieces with further cuts as needed to make them all fit.