by Jeff Klima
I set my crate down outside and quickly scrubbed the bloodstains out of the two top stairs. I moved down to the bottom platform, where the stained slats of wood had been joined together over a block of concrete. I scrubbed at the stain, which was roughly the size of an average footprint, but it wouldn't go away. I scrubbed again, using more elbow grease, but to no avail.
I realized that it would take more work than I wanted it to, so I moved on, cleaning up the bathroom instead. From there, I worked backward, scrubbing at the stains on the carpeting while Oliver went to tend to the couple's two dogs.
My furniture-stripping brushes were no match for the coarse animal hair that littered the flooring, and as a result, I was scrubbing away at stains that weren't moving. Frustrated, I renewed my attack on them, but it was like burrowing through a coal mine with a dental pick, and the stains wouldn't budge.
Outside, I called Dirk, angry with the reluctant mess, stripping off my black gloves, and splashing my sweat onto the concrete sidewalk. He didn't have any answers for me, and I could detect from his voice that he didn't really give a damn. After all, he wasn't the one doing it.
I turned my attention back to the wooden platform with a renewed sense of determination. If nothing else, at least I would wipe that goddamned stain out.
Twenty furious minutes later, I realized that it wasn't the stain that wouldn't come up, it was the blood, bubbling up through the slats. She hadn't died of a broken neck down there on that wooden platform; she'd died of blood loss, and it was all leaking from beneath that platform like a gigantic pustule.
I pulled back the carpeting from the platform as best I could, what with a large bookshelf overloaded with Time Life readers, seashells, and broken trophies weighing the space down. Sure enough, the blood had leeched from the platform and into the insulation of the carpeting, not bothering to come to the surface and be visible but rather hiding, just waiting to fuck me over.
If I was going to do the job right, I was going to have to move the bookshelf, remove the carpeting, remove the bloodied strip of carpet tacking with its rusty, tetanus-infused sharp nails, scrub the concrete, and soak all the blood out of the flooring.
Maybe Oliver would let me off the hook? I dared to hope. He came in from the backyard, and I explained the situation to him. I could tell, as soon as I did, that the situation wasn't going to go my way.
He fumbled for the nicest way to tell me to "go fuck myself" and, unsurprisingly, found the words. With his help, I set in and unloaded the large bookcase. Its shelving creaked under the sudden absence of weight, yet it couldn't quite find its way back from being bowed and at the verge of collapse for so long.
We moved the crap (in the human sense) on top of the other crap (in the animal sense) and were still only barely able to slide the heavy bookshelf out of the way. It threatened to splinter into a million tiny pieces, which wouldn't have surprised me, given how the day had shaped up.
But as we moved it as far as we dared, I was able to use the safety razor to cut away the carpeting. It was a small basic blade, though, not suited at all for cutting carpet. Dulling all too quickly, the blade forced me to hack my way through the carpeting in a spite-filled performance. All the while, Oliver stared awkwardly at me, his goofy fat face reminding me that I needed to eat more healthily myself.
After I shredded the carpet away from the platform, removed the insulation, and dried the concrete flooring underneath, I borrowed a flat-head screwdriver from the couple's garage to pry up the tack strip, handling the thin wood and bunches of sharpened metal gingerly. I couldn't imagine that some tin-pot housewife from the suburbs and nourishing an animal fetish was riddled with AIDS, but I could believe that feces + rust + blood + dirt = something nearly as bad.
Five hours after I started, I had the rest of the blood soaked up and had made considerable progress on the bloodstains leading to the bathroom. The inside of my suit was filled with sweat, while the outside, formerly a sheer white, was a mixture of browns, yellows, reds, and blacks. It looked like a United Nations meeting.
On the front walk, I stripped off the suit, and there was an audible splash as my abundance of sweat hit the sidewalk. It reminded me of the sound that brainlike gelatin surprise had made on the previous job when it took a swan dive off the dustpan. I was further repulsed to discover that some of the animal hair had found its way inside my protective suit. I picked off what I could and searched in vain for its entry point.
Wiping my soaked and reddened face, I felt I'd give almost anything for a glass of water but, despite my desperation, wouldn't take one from that house.
Oliver was grateful, and paid with cash. He even laid an extra twenty-dollar bill on the top with the caveat that I didn't give it to my boss.
"That one's just for you," he winked.
The money didn't look like much in my hand, and when it came back to me in the form of a paycheck, it felt like even less.
Dirk had decided that since apparently we were going to be busy, it wasn't fair that part of his cut of the business went toward business expenses while I walked away with a clean and clear half of a half. So he decided that since I was more a vice president in the company than an independent contractor, I should get a third instead.
Five long hours of work in the sweltering heat of the near summer, working by myself, and I'd made roughly thirty dollars (not including my sweet tip, of course!) for cleaning up serious biohazard. Migrant workers did better than that. Minimum-wage, pimple-faced whiners pushing a button on a cash register made more than that.
Somehow, some way, I had to do something about that.
CHAPTER 6
red riding in the hood
Today I didn't even have to use my AK; I gotta say, it was a good day. —Ice Cube
I've nearly died twice in my life that I can recollect. The first time was my own ignorant fault—I'd gone down to the local beach with my good buddies Matt and Billy, when I was fifteen or sixteen, to shoot guns. You probably couldn't shoot guns off at the local beach, but remember I was only fifteen or sixteen and blissfully unaware of technicalities such as being "tried as an adult for manslaughter."
We weren't shooting the guns at anything in particular, just firing off rounds into the nearby sand dunes to feel tough. Matt had scored the guns, a heavy revolver and a small jumpy pistol, for the day from his boss at work. Why on earth anybody loans guns to children is beyond me. Then again, this was Eureka, where Skoal sales are directly proportional to visiting hours at the batteredwomen's clinic.
I'd taken control of the revolver, not liking the way that the recoil on the smaller semi-automatic was slicing into the webbing between my thumb and index finger. The revolver felt good to me, true Old West style—a real cowboy's choice. My parents were staunchly against guns and had done a fine job of insulating me from the seductive charms of a loaded weapon in my youth but had damned me into a curiosity about them that would prove dangerously innocent when I finally got to interact with one as a teenager.
Having been taught a fear of guns, rather than a respect for them as a tool for making beer cans explode, I'd never learned about such modern contrivances as a "hair trigger." For those as oblivious as I was, a hair trigger can be achieved by cocking the hammer at the back of a gun, thus vastly cutting down on the amount of pressure required to fire said gun.
Of course, naïve me, upon seeing the trigger ratchet back with the cocking of the hammer, I was certain that I'd broken the boss's gun. And so I turned it toward me, scared shitless that I'd done something wrong and could somehow correct the issue by looking down the barrel. I will never forget the blast of warm wind that licked my skull as the bullet whizzed past, racing up into the wild blue yonder.
In the act of turning the gun toward myself, I had tapped my finger on the hair trigger. The gun went off, missing me by closer than my mom would ever want to know about. After that, I put the gun down and stayed away from its kind for a long, long time.
My second brush with death wa
sn't nearly as much my fault, and that made it so much more intense. I was out with Matt again; this time he and his girlfriend and I had rented a patio boat. I was an intelligent man now at eighteen, no longer the foolish lout who played with guns.
I'd called in sick to work that day so the three of us could spend a leisurely day zipping around a large lake a few hours northeast of Eureka. (Ironically, Matt had gotten me a job at the same fast-food restaurant where he worked, and my manager was the one who'd loaned Matt the guns so long ago.)
Matt enjoyed playing captain, and I was more than happy to let him, lackadaisically hanging my feet into the lake water as the powerful engine pushed the medium-size boat through the water. She was raised off the water on the port and starboard sides by twin steel pontoons, pointed like ancient torpedoes that kept the flat-panel boat deck off the water.
I was enjoying my time and as carefree as a boy ought to be in the halcyon days of summer when May winds cede regime to the sun's unwavering stare. In a typical moment of dumbassedness, I decided that it would be hilarious if I attempted to go to the front of the watercraft and spread my arms aloft, à la Titanic.
This whimsical pursuit works far better if you are on an illfated ocean liner and supported by the confident arms of Leonardo DiCaprio and not a 250-pound oaf at the stern of what is essentially a piece of carpeted plywood raised on pontoons that is blasting through the water at twenty-nine knots (roughly thirty-three miles per hour).
Matt, being the intrepid captain manning the wheel, noticed that my large ass was weighing down the front of the patio boat and we were, in fact, starting to take on water. He attempted to slow down, but as our inexperienced collective was quick to learn, there isn't a "slow down" on a patio boat, only a "stop."
The laws of thermodynamics being what they are, I of course continued at the present speed straight off the front of the ship and through the motherfucking air, arms still spread like some messianic jackass. I am a resilient swimmer. (Thankfully, my mother did not hold the same opinion about swim lessons that she held about guns.) So I was able to turn my folly into an efficient dive that, from a viewer's perspective, could almost have been considered graceful.
Now, this is the part that sucks. Left to my own devices, I would have surfaced cleanly, swum back to the boat, had a good laugh about it all, and maybe capped my day off noshing on a delicious peanutbutter sandwich heaped with strawberry jam. Instead, I encountered that wholly unpredictable foil, bad luck.
Matt, you see, was concerned that the now-slack boat might drift over me, and I would hit my head on the bottom and possibly drown. The road to hell is littered with good intentions, and eager to induce some good intent, Matt decided that the smartest course of action would be to drive the boat over me. I had disappeared beneath the surface, and he was hoping that I'd dived deep enough to avoid the undercarriage of the rented patio boat. I hadn't.
I surfaced, eager to share a laugh at my expense with my two friends just as the shadow of darkness that was the patio boat began its pass over me. The whup-whup splashing sounds of the churning propeller blades were omnipresent in the air space afforded me by the sleek gray pontoons lifting the flat-bottom boat off the water.
My screams lost to the roar of the engine, slicing toward me at 29 knots, I flailed in vain at the precision-smooth pontoon metal sides, my arms akimbo again, desperate. This time anything messianic didn't seem the least bit jackassed. I begged at the pontoons to let me crawl forward and escape what I could only register as imminent death.
The propeller, part in the water, part out, was spinning too fast for me to make out the individual blades powering the craft that was encapsulating me and was now too close to write off as an escapable nightmare. I would be shredded and emerge as one of those comically red stains in the otherwise serene, blue lake water.
With the same adrenaline coursing through my veins that allows mothers to lift cars off their endangered children, I pushed off from the bottom of the boat, praying to a God I didn't believe in that the effort would be enough to keep me submerged deep enough and long enough so that wicked steel propeller would pass over me and allow me to glimpse daylight again. It wasn't.
My head resurfaced, popping up corklike directly to the left of the passing blades, their razor edges fanning at the tip of my nose with unholy menace. My arms followed my head to the surface, and in a moment too instantaneous to process, my left arm was swept into the twisting thrust of the propeller.
A violent yank wrapped the length of my appendage around the propeller head and swept my beautiful arm up into the mechanical process. A second later, it spat me back out and left me in the boat's swirling wake. I was incredulous to be alive, but certain I was missing my left arm from the elbow down.
And yet when my shoulder extended from the water, there was my arm, intact and aloft. Matt, of course, took my raised hand to be a gesture of thanks for quick thinking on his part and gamely waved back.
A nice long slice ran the length of my arm, not deep enough to warrant immediate medical care but enough to cause me an awkward explanation when I returned to work the next day, bandage wrapped on my forearm and back from being "home sick."
The scar has since faded and is now mostly lost behind hirsute sprigs of dark hair that betray my Eastern European heritage, but the point was not lost on me. Even though we humans control the actions that lead us on our life paths, sometimes an outside influence smashes in and makes the decisions for us.
* * *
Dirk called me up a couple of weeks after my gig at the Animal House to let me know that once again we had business. But he wanted me to come down to Santa Ana, where he worked, to talk about it.
I had never been to the sheriff's department, or any police station, for that matter. So, as a kid from a small town with no inner-circle access or political connections, I was pretty hyped about my visit. I had visions of walking down a concrete row with prisoners eyeballing me, catcalling, and maybe even spitting on me.
But I'd be grim, resolved, and wouldn't let 'em see they got to me. I've got my freedom, and they don't, I'd think. Then, as we were leaving, I would grab my balls and flip them all the bird, letting them know that the whole time, they were the ones getting punked.
What a disappointment when Dirk asked me to meet him in the alley.
Our latest was a special case, a murder. A sixteen-year-old gang member had been riding in the passenger seat of his parents' car, driven by one of his cousins. A rival gang rolled up on them and opened fire. It was an assault from the front and side; the driver was wounded, and the kid in the passenger seat was blasted apart. Bad luck is a son of a bitch.
The car had been through all the steps: it was towed from the scene, forensics did their kit, the car was impounded, and then finally it was released to the parents. Now it was sitting in their driveway, bloodied, riddled with bullet holes, and in serious need of a cleanup. The parents were hoping to salvage it, since it was their sole means of transportation. There was just one problem—communicating this to me. They didn't speak a word of English, and I only knew cuss words in Spanish. I would need a translator.
When I was in high school in my twenty-seven-thousand-person town, there was a requirement that in order to graduate you had to take two years of a foreign language. The choices were French, German, and Spanish. The smart kids, recognizing the direction the world was heading, all took Spanish. The second smartest group of kids, wisely identifying that two business languages of international trade were English and French, chose French. The dumbasses all took German. Guess which one I took? Ja, und ich sprechen sie Deutch nicht so gut, senf. (Loose translation: Yes, and I don't speak German very good now, mustard.)
To help me with the language barrier, Dirk called in a favor from a coworker named Leslie, who would help translate the negotiations between me and the parents of the victim. She was a few years older than my twenty-six and only vaguely Latina-looking. But as long as she spoke Spanish, she could have been from the un
-planet Pluto for all I cared.
I took Dirk's truck for the gig; the fear was that there would be a lot of stuff to get rid of from the scene and my little red Chevy Cavalier, with its broken trunk that hadn't been opened in three years, wouldn't quite cut it. My Cavalier was an embarrassing vehicle to roll up to a crime scene in anyway. I had long been teased for having a "girl's car" and had compensated for that by never washing it, so that it would at least appear masculine and grungy.
Of course, when you are a cleaner by trade and you arrive in a filthy vehicle, your clients tend to cast a wary eye at you. I relished the opportunity to take the truck when I could. Besides, the truck meant my not losing out on gas money that I otherwise wouldn't be compensated for.
Leslie drove a little hatchback. Though she was officially a police officer, she wore civilian clothes and did office work, like Dirk. While I was en route to Dirk's office, he had briefed her on the address and location. She knew the area well. I tagged along behind her, having to race to make lights that she blazed through on yellow.
I hoped she wasn't attempting to set me up for a traffic ticket as part of some scummy police sting. The sheriff's coroner for Orange County had just been charged with money laundering and bribery offenses, so it wasn't completely out of the realm of possibility. As she raced along, her car blended in with the weathered vehicles of Santa Ana—plain, simple cars that didn't have a lot of cash invested in them for extras like rust proofing.