by D. K. Greene
Peter pulls himself out of his dad’s embrace. He tips his head to the side in a gesture for his father to get started. “I’m working things out with that plan we talked about a few weeks ago.”
“That’s excellent, Hen. I’d take you out for a drink to celebrate, but I’m afraid Inspector Douglas and little Miss Jones probably won’t let us go to a bar. How about if I tell you a story, instead?” Oliver walks toward the front of the store. Peter follows him, and about fifteen shivering people wander behind them both.
“At the height of my taxidermy, I had a lot of spare parts. Skeletons, mostly. Usually they were complete, so I cleaned, assembled, and sold them to collectors and vet schools. But sometimes I ended up with partial remains and pieces too damaged for display.”
Ollie stops on the sidewalk and takes a seat on the curb. Peter settles next to him, doing his best to ignore the searing cold that jumps through his jeans. Everyone hovers just out of earshot, far enough away to keep Peter’s father talking.
“I held on to those spare bits for a long time. The dump doesn’t take them, and there’s just so many coyotes a man can bury in his own backyard. Then, one night, I’m here talking to the supervisor...” Ollie’s voice fades as he squints beyond the yellow tape blowing in the wind. He points to the current manager who is snuggling with some of his employees under a lap blanket someone must have had in their car. “Not that guy. Back then, this place was run by a man with distinct tastes.”
Peter blinks, hard. The corners of his eyes ache with the effort. “Christ, Dad. You didn’t supply a necrophiliac with love slaves, did you?”
“No. What kind of psycho do you think I am?” Oliver shoves his hands in his pockets. Peter looks at him long and hard. Ollie frowns and lifts his shoulders ambiguously, then turns a sour gaze back on his son. “How many times do I have to tell you that Christ doesn’t approve of you using his name like that?”
“Sorry, Dad.” Peter’s muted apology gets lost in the down of his jacket.
“As I was saying...” Ollie looks up at a volunteer who’s come too close for comfort. When their eyes meet, the cherub-faced woman’s skin blanches. She scurries backward. “The manager had a taste for oddities, and he had a legitimate landscape concern. He wanted to spruce the lot up so the locals would see this place as a high-end establishment. We worked out a deal for him to use my cast-offs as gravel filler.”
Looking around at the landscape, Peter finds thickets of ivy. Even in the bitter cold, the plants are green and thick around the base of a handful of mature trees that have survived the hill’s development. Most places, he can’t see dirt, and it looks as if the ivy shoots straight up out of the pavement. Where there isn’t ivy, there are clumps of evergreen bushes growing six feet high and twelve across.
There isn’t a piece of gravel in sight.
“What bones are you talking about, Dad?”
“Vertebrae, mostly. A few knuckles and kneecaps may have made it in. Depended on what I had on hand. There was a while there where I was processing a lot of deer and moose. Moose vertebrae are something else. Big and bulky. He loved them. They really stood out in the mix.” Oliver spreads his hand out and Peter can tell he’s seeing the image of a giant backbone in his palm.
“How many bones did you sell him?” Peter wants to push his dad to tell him who they’re in a frozen parking lot to find. He knows Ollie will keep talking about his history with the property, though. He can’t blame the man for savoring the opportunity to enjoy some time out in the open air.
“A hundred buckets full, or more. It took several months. Little by little, I’d bring them up here, and he’d pay me twenty bucks a bucket.” Ollie looks at Peter as if he’s just discovered winning numbers on a lotto ticket. “Can you imagine? Twenty bucks a pop for stuff I couldn’t get rid of otherwise.”
Peter suppresses a sarcastic comment. A normal father might tell this same story, but be talking about selling buckets of scrap nails. Or vinyl records. Peter doesn’t think his dad will ever understand it’s not normal to have five-gallon buckets of bones just lying around.
Ollie notices Peter stiffen up. He pulls a hand out of his jacket pocket and pats him on the back. “Anyway, that was years ago. Look around now.” He glares at the current staff. “They’ve let this place go to the dogs.”
A sigh rolls out in the frozen air. Peter couldn’t hold it back any longer. “It’s a jack-off store, Dad. People don’t come here for the landscape.”
Oliver plugs one nostril and blows a wad of snot out the other. It must be a trick he picked up in prison because Peter’s never seen him do anything so disgusting in his life. The elder man grunts. “Well, it wouldn’t kill them to put some effort into it.”
Inspector Douglas materializes in front of them. He’s so close that the tips of his shoes touch Peter’s. He would pull his back, but he refuses to let the inspector feel superior. Peter pretends to cross his legs and kicks him in the shin. Dougy glares at Peter as Oliver cackles.
“Well?” The inspector places his hands where Peter imagines his hips might be. It’s hard to tell under all his layers, especially since he isn’t gifted in the hip department to begin with.
“Dad sold the manager a bunch of bones left over from taxidermy projects. The guy used them as gravel in the landscape.” Peter watches Dougy scan the imposing bushes and sprawling ivy the same way he had minutes before.
“How many?” Dougy crouches in front of them. His breath smells like rubbing alcohol and sausage.
“He says a hundred buckets full.” Peter looks at his dad. “Right?”
“Maybe more. They weren’t all human, Inspector Douglas. I promise.”
“How many people, Oliver?” The inspector’s face goes red from the effort of squatting. He and Oliver lean together as if they’re old friends. For a minute it seems they might clasp hands and embrace like frat brothers at a forty-year class reunion.
Peter looks over the lot at Special Agent Jones, who watches with a questioning expression. He lifts his hands and mouths, Don’t ask me. She shakes her head and turns to talk to a volunteer.
“It’s hard to say, really. It was toward the end of things. I’d kept a lot of bits and pieces.” Oliver averts his gaze from Peter, as if embarrassed for his son to know this detail. “If I had to take a guess... fifteen to twenty individuals. Mostly male.”
Peter stares at his father in disbelief. Oliver looks over the yellow caution tape and seems to shrink. He’s a man who failed his purpose and will never get a second chance. “You can’t save everyone,” he whispers.
Inspector Douglas looks weary, like all he wants in the world is to go home. His knees pop as he stands. He takes a moment to flex his joints, then turns on his heel and barks out orders. “Everybody grab a shovel from the SAR truck. Fan out and start digging. Pull up every plant, bush or weed. Dig until you find gravel. We’re looking for anything that might be bone. If you aren’t sure it’s human, pull it anyway. We’ll sort through it later.”
Special Agent Jones approaches, shaking her head. “You want them to dig in this weather? What if the ground’s frozen?”
Dougy wags his puffy cheeks. “We’ll tape everything off and come back when the winds change.” As Mac steps away he calls, “And radio for them to bring prisoner transport back around, will you? We don’t need Mister Landscape Artist hanging about now that we know what we’re looking for.”
Peter puts his hand on Oliver’s knee. His father leans against his shoulder with his own. They sit a while as the crews get to work. Snow flutters through the air and Peter looks to the clouds. He blocks out the noise of the people.
For a moment, he’s just a boy. Oliver is merely his dad. And they’re simply together, watching the winter snow.
Twenty-Seven
Peter stands in front of a massive toy store counting gift cards. He’s kept half of them to use as prizes since there’s never a time people don’t want money. He’s bought nearly three thousand dollars’ worth of pre
paid cards. Even planning on giving half away, he’s left with fifteen hundred bucks in plastic burning a hole in his pocket.
He follows throngs of parents into the store, but doesn’t share their tense body language or curt mannerisms. A guy walking beside him lets out a string of profanity as he studies the scribbled writing on the Christmas list in his hands. His genius kid wrote their holiday wishes in pineapple crayon on a canary colored legal pad. Peter’s glad he doesn’t have anyone at home to be disappointed in him if he doesn’t come home with the right animatronic Elmo.
Grabbing one of the few remaining carts, Peter will buy every toy he ever wished for as a kid. He’s surprised when fifty Furbies greet him from a display just inside the entrance. He considers them for a minute, picking out one green and one purple.
His mom said Furbies were the devil. She’d insisted they were designed to record people’s conversations and credit card numbers. They’d save the sensitive information until unwitting parents donated them to a thrift store or sold them off at a garage sale. The castoff toys would then find their way into the hands of criminal masterminds unafraid of a few fraud charges, where they’d recite all they knew.
Maybe she’d been right. But if his mother bought him one before she died, maybe he would have had something to talk to all those years without her.
Moving through the aisles, Peter drops superheroes, building blocks, and gaming consoles into his cart. He’s amazed at how quickly it fills up. In less than an hour, the basket overflows with planes, trains, and automobiles. Peter’s mindful of all the masculine toys, so he tosses a few dolls on the heap for good measure. With a slow push, he wheels his haul toward the registers.
Of the dozen check stands, four are open. People gather around them like a swarm of angry bees. A constant chorus of beeps, buzzers and shouts fill the air. He tries to choose a lane, but there are no organized lines. As he steels himself for pushing through the jumbled crowd, someone touches his arm. The sensation makes him jump, and he spins around to look at his assailant.
A short, pudgy teenager throws a smile jammed full of glittering braces and enthusiasm. “I can take care of you at the Customer Service desk.” Peter follows as he waddles around the boom of pissed-off parents trying to fill Santa’s bag too late in the shopping season. The customer service kid unconsciously shakes his right leg every time his slacks ride up his butt crack. Peter ducks behind the pile of toys he’s pushing until he can only see the top of his curly mop of hair to keep from staring.
In contrast to the craziness surrounding the registers, Customer Service is a desolate wasteland. It appears everyone’s buying, and no one is returning. In a few weeks, once all the kiddies have opened their presents and complained Santa brought them the red-haired doll instead of the blonde, the tide will reverse. Peter doubts the pimple-faced kid will be so eager then.
“You’ve got a lot of loot.” His voice doesn’t so much crack as it skitters through the octaves. He grabs a pair of dolls from the top of Peter’s stack and starts scanning barcodes.
“I guess so. I’ve got a lot of kids to shop for.” Peter pats the imprinted rectangle in the pocket where the prepaid cards sit, trying to imagine the people who will take the toys home. They’ll be oblivious to how close to death they are, getting gifts from the son of a man who’s filled as many headlines as he has graveyards.
“Are you one of those Mormons or something?” The kid doesn’t skip a beat in his methodical scanning as he talks.
“I don’t go to church.” Peter wonders what his father would say if they were strangers having this same conversation. Would he have decided Peter had enough faith to go on living? Or, is he the guy Ollie would invite over for a home-cooked meal and a turn filling up a bucket of bones for the porn shop on the hill?
“Just wondering. I’ve been watching documentaries about sister wives. It’d be awesome having that many women lined up every night. But damn, they have a lot of kids.” The teenager’s neck rolls press against one another as he shakes his head.
“I don’t watch that stuff,” Peter admits.
“You should.” The kid looks at Peter seriously as he pushes a bubble blowing lawnmower over the counter. “I’m thinking of converting.”
They’re silent as he dredges through the last dozen toys in the cart's basket. When he’s done, Peter’s total flashes on the register and he hands the clerk the wad of plastic cards for payment. Despite his lapse in keeping track of price tags on the toys as they entered the basket, he’s finished with a fifty-dollar Visa left over. The cashier hands Peter the unused card, a couple dollars in change, and his yardstick of a receipt.
Peter hands the full gift card back to him. “You know what? Keep this one.”
Sweat glistens on the kid’s cheeks. He pants from the effort of the transaction. “For realsies?”
“For realsies. Merry Christmas, kid.”
Twenty-Eight
Peter boots up a laptop he found at a thrift shop. He’s plugged it into a socket at a corner table in one of several coffee shops in Tanasbourne. He bought an obligatory coffee when he first came in and uses it to hold down the scrap of paper with the Wi-Fi password.
When the desktop is live, he enters the information and opens a web browser. Immediately, he’s greeted with auto-loaded social media tabs, a recipe hub, and a music library. All of them signed in.
The laptop’s prior owner, Miranda Wood, has a music station dedicated to the song Fergalicious. Her ten thousand followers are engaged in a photo of the new luggage she purchased for a trip to Miami. She’s pinned the same casserole recipe that Jeanne’s receptionist posted online earlier in the week.
“Birds of a feather,” Peter mumbles.
Minimizing the trappings of Miranda’s inane life, he decides not to bother logging any of it out. She’s lucky he’s not the type of person who’d steal her identity. Especially if her bank accounts automatically sign in as well, and Peter suspects they will. Instead, he opens a new browser and hunts around until he finds a free template that matches the blank labels sitting in his backpack. He experiments with the twelve available fonts and some wording until he’s satisfied.
Congratulations. You may have won!
$1,000,000 in cash and prizes.
Call now!
He’s not sure if he should say he has a million dollars in prizes, but decides in this potentially fake murder scheme, he has bigger things to worry about than false advertising claims. He finishes the label with the number from the disposable phone.
“Can I get you anything else?” The coffee shop is slow. The baristas have migrated from the espresso machines and pastry displays to clean up after an earlier swarm of caffeine addicts. The one talking to Peter is a lanky blonde who looks like she’d be more at home on a yacht than in a green apron wiping down tables.
“Do you have a printer I can use?” He smiles, looking as non-threatening as possible.
She pushes her ponytail over her shoulder. “We don’t let customers use it.”
Reaching across the aisle between them, he places his hand over hers. The damp towel makes her skin cool. “I promise to buy a dozen more coffees and give you a twenty-dollar tip.”
Her ponytail drops in front of her shoulder again when she leans over. She smiles. “Make it a twenty-five-dollar tip so I can afford a pedicure, and you’ve got a deal.”
Peter follows her to the back room and wrestles the odd-sized sticker sheets into the printer. Peter finds the device on his laptop and the machine sets to work. The barista introduces herself as Sammi before heading back out front to brew Peter’s tower of coffee, leaving him alone in the manager’s office. He glances at the safe under the desk and wonders at how much she trusts him. The first page of stickers plops into the printer’s tray. The page printed crooked. He adjusts the feed and waits.
A half-hour later, Peter holds two hundred gold labels. He’s cleared the sticker template from the laptop’s web history and re-donated it to the thrift store he
’d purchased it from. He drives slowly toward home with three cup carriers of black coffee lining the floorboards. He pulls into a Park and Ride lot near his apartment and stops in a space near the platform.
“Free coffee!” he shouts as he gets out of the car. The people closest to him look over with suspicion until they notice him unloading cups with the familiar green and white logo printed on the side. In minutes, he’s given away the lot, randomly wishing strangers a Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah as they collect the impromptu gift.
Peter settles into the driver’s seat and pulls his phone from his pocket. He scrolls through his history until he sees Valorie’s number. He hits the talk button and listens for the sound of her picking up the phone.
“Hey, It’s Peter. You want to meet up after work?”
“I’m off in an hour.” Her voice is clipped and professional. She’s a hard-ass who strictly enforces the policy of no personal calls at work. She pretends he’s some employee from another branch. “Can you get me the docs before then?”
“Sure,” Peter says, “I’ll make a dozen photocopies of my butt and have them ready when you show up.”
Valorie stifles a chuckle, and the line goes dead. Peter leans against his headrest and smiles. Today has been a pleasant day. Now that he will give Valorie another tumble on a bed covered in cash, it’s about to get even better.
Twenty-Nine
To make Peter’s scheme appear legitimate, he decides he needs a badge declaring he’s an official representative of Alphabet Apes cereal. He drives to a ship and print center as far across his GPS map as he’s willing to drive. Banners hung in the windows advertise holiday cards, party invitations and decorative backdrops.
They’ve split the store in two sections. One side for printing, the other for shipping. The package area is bombarded with people frantically seeking assurance their parcels will reach their destinations before Christmas. In stark contrast, the print side is vacant aside from a bored woman behind the counter. She cuts split ends from the length of her hair with scissors beefy enough for industrial cardboard.