by Jeff Klima
“No!”
I’m shocked by the reluctance and turn to look at her. “I love snakes,” she begs. “They’re probably my favorite animal.”
“I can’t exactly open the front door and let it crawl out.”
This forces Ivy to consider the options and, finally, she realizes that there is only the one. “Okay, but do it humanely.”
“You suggested I use a chainsaw to kill a human being, but you want me to be gentle with the poisonous reptile?”
“You know I was kidding! But humans can be consciously evil; animals are just working on instinct.”
I flip the mattress back over, much slower and more cautious this time, and the rattler hisses, no longer curled around the hot water bottle, but wrapped into itself like a deadly figure eight with the note tucked beneath its body.
I throw my blanket over the creature, covering it in a thin layer of cotton blend that stretches out flush with the ground. The snake does not like this interference and begins gliding forward, creating a thin, ominous ripple through the cover with every muscular contortion. When it is inches away from the edge of the blanket nearest my foot, I stomp down hard on the triangular curvature at the front of the ripple, directly where the snake’s head is progressing. Through my shoe, I feel the sickening crunch of bone as its mandible goes flat under my construction boot and the beast literally stops dead in its track. The patch of ground around the rattlesnake’s munched skull is colored cantaloupe and cherry, and electrified pulses shoot through the snake, causing the hard skin of its rattle to flick quickly as its body convulses with the shock of death. The note is, strangely, still beneath the expired creature, and on closer inspection, I see a thin black wire looped around its scales, anchoring the paper to its body.
Leaving the snake to its slackening quivers, I rip the note away and take it up to read it. Unlined and handwritten, it suffers from the same poor spelling as his other scribbled message.
Tom,
If you havent lookt under the bed, I sugest you do it now. Ill wait. There. Now we are all on the same page. Last nite, you had me on my weigh out of this motherfucking state. I wuz runing, I admet it. And then I sawe this snake lieing on the side of the hiway, just bassking in the warmthe of the assfalt, and it made me pull over. I thawt, man, that snake is just fearless, the way it dosn’t moove when I aproach it. The snake maid me think of you Tom, and how fucking ballsee you are. I had to shair it with you. So I am bak…thank the snake. Nowing you, it is probablee alredy dead. You seem to hav that efect on most of your relatonships. Again, I don’t understand how it wuz you found me, but in the bitersweet end, it just reenforses for me how nesassery it is that you and I put our stamp on this whorld. I’m sory I sent you on the whiled goose chase out to Ventura this mourning, but I nedded time for this partyqular test. It wuznt easy, partyqularlee deeling with the snake; its caled a Mohavee Green and I am hapee to be rid of it. Now it is your tern.
So get rid of the snake and the dead stinkking drug deeler, avoyd geting pickt up by the cops, and if you still want to be my frend, give me a call when its all over and done with. And I shodn’t have to tell you this by now, but get rid of this note.
Yore frend,
Andy
Ivy’s attention is divided between the two corpses on the floor of my bedroom, and she doesn’t ask for me to read her the note, so I don’t. “We need to get rid of the smell” is all she says.
The body bag is useless now, so I go to the Charger for my milk crate of tricks. It’s still light enough outside that I should be able to get away with use of my Sawzall. The noise will be a concern, but the smell is such that I’m willing to risk it in order to get this done as quickly as possible. Outside even, I can smell the particles of rot that have clung to my clothing, and I avoid the elevator going up. Ivy, to her credit, has forced open any window she can in the apartment and the fresh air is a revelation to the room. I didn’t even know the windows could open. I set the crate on the sink in the bathroom and drag Tony’s body in, along with the snake, on my ruined blanket. Ivy decides to take the path of less evil and begins scrubbing at the floorboards where the mashed imprint of the snake’s shattered skull has been formed amidst the remaining entrails.
The Sawzall cuts through the bloat and bone quickly, sawing through Tony’s limbs in seconds, but it is messier than a handsaw, and I am grateful for my face shield and the shower curtain. The fact that I don’t gag at the smell or sight of the overworked reciprocating blade mangling decaying human flesh should concern me more than it does, but I set about the work with a grim certainty that at any moment, a phalanx of uniformed officers led by Detective Stack could bust through my door and send me straight to the lethal injection chamber. I seriously doubt Stack, or any jury, would be swayed by any notes from Andy. Even without my past, Ivy too is risking much at this point in the game.
Ivy comes in while I am separating Tony’s head from the rest and calmly tells me that the bedroom is “good.” I point to the cans of deodorizer bombs that I have in my kit and tell her to deploy one in the bedroom and the other two in the hallway and then to go buy several gallons of Simple Green concentrate, work gloves, and a long-handled shovel. I tell her to buy the shovel and gloves at a different store than the Simple Green and to pay cash for all of it. She is sharp enough to not question this.
The deodorizers are industrial; the fire department uses them in the aftermath of burnt buildings to give the whole affair a sickly sweet bubble gum smell. The Simple is for the bathtub—it’ll work wonders against the residual blood spotting on the off chance cops ever decide to douse the place with luminol.
I think I hear the door close and I stop sawing momentarily. “Hello?” I question the silence. No answer. “Ivy?”
I get up, praying that it was either my imagination or one of her silly games, because I can’t handle too much else right now. Leaving the Sawzall, I peer out of the bathroom, my face shield splattered with red mess. The hallway is empty. “Ivy?” I try again.
I move out into the living room, but it is just as still as the rest of the house. I stop moving, breathing, and even attempt to slow my heartbeat, so I can listen for the tiniest hint of proof that I am not alone. There is only nothingness and my still-rapid heartbeat. I want to lock the door, but with Ivy out, I cannot chance it. Just go back to work and finish quickly. Now is definitely not the time to lose it, Tom ol’ buddy. I have Tony bagged and tied, along with the snake, my blanket and shower curtain, before Ivy gets back. The smell of the aerosol deodorizers is overpowering now and I retrieve the two from the hallway, click them off, and toss them, with the third, into another bag. My clothes go into yet another bag, as will Ivy’s, and this bag will be incinerated. Tony, on the other hand, will go to the desert.
Ivy strips unabashedly for me and drops her clothing into the trash bag I extend, neither covering her exposed breasts and bare vulva nor breaking from my gaze. I offer her a long black T-shirt and she takes it casually, slinging it over her shoulder as she turns away from me finally, to walk back into the bedroom. I have no other clothing for her, and so she stays as I lug Tony in two trips down to the Charger, nonchalant as I can be under the circumstances. No sooner do I close the trunk, where the brand new shovel lies across the mass of black plastic, than I hear an aggressively male voice behind me. “Mr. Tanner.” Detective Stack steps out of the shadows and close enough that I catch the scent of his aftershave. “Funny finding you out here. What are you up to this evening?”
“The usual,” I say, and manage a thin smile.
He throws a brief glance upward at the rooftop. “You don’t have someone up there with a bucket of paint tonight, do you?”
“No, not tonight.”
He steps closer and I compel my eyes to not look at the trunk. “You’re not a very cautious man, are you?”
“Meaning?”
“Those patrolmen were for your own good. They were a visual reminder that you should be-fucking-have.”
“Have
I not?” I am taking a chance that he hadn’t seen me just load my trunk.
“I think we both know the answer to that.”
“Do you think coming down here to deliver innuendos is going to make me somehow confess to killing Hank Kelly? I’ve got that airtight alibi and I’m sticking to it.”
“The words of a guilty man…but I’m not down here for you just now. The dead landlady—”
“Ms. Park-Hallsley.”
“That’s the one. Her son is back in town, handling her affairs. I missed him the first time, so I’ve come to have a chat with him.”
“Have fun with that.”
“You smell something?” he asks suddenly, suspicious.
“I can only smell your cologne. Brut, isn’t it?”
“Good guess.”
“My dad gave me a bottle. When I was seven.”
“No, the smell I’m talking about is sweeter…like bubble gum.”
He can search me or my car anytime he likes, but I think he’s just fucking with me. “Usually the streets around here smell like sewer. Maybe we’re moving up in the world?”
Stack moves again, past me this time. “Just because I stopped giving you a babysitter doesn’t mean you can stay out late. Don’t go getting into any trouble tonight—I don’t want someone else to have the pleasure of arresting you.”
The smug part of me has a comeback ready, but the smart part of me silently gets in my car and goes; I can see the detective standing still on the sidewalk, watching my taillights fade into the distance. There is something to be said for good timing, I guess.
Chapter 23
City lights drift into the distance as I drive the 10 east toward Joshua Tree. I need a good patch of rocky desert landscape, a place that by and large looks unsuitable for any sort of commercial development in the near future. A place where during a day hike, no one’s dog will accidentally unearth a corpse…somewhere where two hippies high on peyote don’t drive a tent stake into a mound of Tony’s withered thigh flesh.
Out past Palm Springs, I’m betting there are a lot of places that fit just such a purpose. Supposedly, Gram Parsons’s body got burned out here. I think Tony would appreciate that. Not that he has a choice.
Illuminated in the twin headlamps of the Charger, my shovel dips into the rough dirt behind a span of boulders that seem to form a fist pointed toward the open night. There are a myriad of visible stars, dotting the sky like drops of semen under a black light. I’ve been digging for over an hour now, and there is still a long way to go. Anything under three feet, and the coyotes will sniff him out; then it’s just a matter of a low-flying private plane, out joyriding, making several passes over the smooth white curve of a human skull licked clean. Granted, it’s unlikely, but it’s not ridiculous to be so cautious—I can’t imagine there being any tangible link between Tony and me, other than my number in his phone (which I will also deal with soon), but that is in and of itself a problem: I did a lot of years with a lot of people who indirectly admitted that they had been “so careful,” and yet, there they were—in jail. The reality is, I have no idea how many people had taken notice of my going to and from Tony’s apartment, how many neighbors I had rankled by parking in his parking space or doing some peculiar little thing of which I was completely unaware. Because I hadn’t taken the time to consider these extravagances beforehand, I have to overcompensate for the possibility of them now, meaning I can’t just toss Tony’s corpse in the dumpster behind the Hollywood Wax Museum, I have to drive out to the middle of nowhere, off the road in the dead of night, and dig this deep grave so that no one can come to me with the photos of an excavated Tony Brahma and ask me where I was on this hot August night. Several hours past the darkest part of night and I’ve managed a serious hole in the desert terrain that will do just fine for a makeshift plot. I haul each of the bags containing Tony out of the Charger’s trunk, and drop them, one by one, beside the cavity. They are light now—mostly bone and sinew were left by the time I’d finished cutting. Taking up a disposable razor from my work crate, I hack off the knotted tops of the bags. The decomp-and-bubble-gum stink assaults my nasal passages, and I grip each bag by its base, lifting it to dump the contents down into the sandy soil. This way, the pieces of Tony will wither into the surrounding earth without waiting the hundred years or so for the plastic to break down. It’s sort of the gravedigger’s version of replacing the divots. The air is still tonight. Out here in the desert, sound carries for miles, and yet, I hear nothing. This is exactly what I’d hoped to hear.
Not wasting the nightfall I’ve got left, I begin shoveling heaping mounds of dirt onto the fragmented body below, stopping only briefly to finally kick the trash bags in as well.
Sweat coats my upper body and has made me slick. I search for the T-shirt I shucked off hours ago, towel myself down, and put it with my pants and shoes in the bag for incineration. Soil samples can be pulled from them that might clue the po-pos in to this spot; murderers have been found with less. I slip into my third pair of clothes tonight, fresh ones from the backseat, and give one glance back to assess my work. I’m impressed, I have to admit—I did good work. The desert looks even and smooth, plenty capable of keeping Tony hidden for a long, long time.
I drive out, continuing forward, narrowly missing the freshly packed grave as I turn my wheel to cruise around it. I must drive forward, blazing a new trail in the unpaved dirt, to keep my tire tracks from looking more suspicious than they already appear. If suddenly two thick tire tracks were to go veering sharply off the road out into the unpaved desert land for a ways, stop abruptly, and then come back out onto the main road again, back the way they came, even the most unmotivated of park rangers would doubtless take notice. The drive back to Los Angeles is a long one, and my arms feel rubbery, like lengths of worn hose. I pull over in Palm Springs and leave the shovel, wiped free of my prints, leaning against a telephone pole. The first day laborer along in the morning will be happy, I figure.
The bag containing the clothes, while smelly and dirty, is innocent enough, and I doubt too many cops would give me much hassle about it. Still, I take it down to work, seal it in a biohazard drum, and set it with others to be incinerated. Next I hit the car wash, where I scrub the Charger inside and out, ridding it of its dust and desert stink. Now it’s a matter of getting rid of a certain cell phone, and that will be all she wrote concerning ol’ Tony Brahma and me.
—
Ivy is asleep on my stripped-down bed when I get home, wearing my T-shirt like a nightgown. I detect lingering whiffs of both decomp and deodorizer in the hallway and bedroom, but both smells have dissipated to the point where it’s safe to close the windows and try for some shuteye. My phone rings. It’s after four in the morning. This means it’s either a crime scene or Andy, but then, these days, it’s only ever a crime scene or Andy.
“Tom,” I answer, not sure which I want it to be.
“Hiya, slugger,” Andy responds, full of energy. “Had a long, full night, did ya?”
“Yeah, so how ’bout letting me get some sleep?”
“I can’t sleep, Tom, I’m excited.”
“What for?”
“For you, buddy. You’re comin’ along nicely. Going up like a sunflower.”
“I’m glad, I guess.”
“Well, yeah,” he says, jumping on my words manically. “You’re on the cusp of change, brother, change larger than life. You should be ecstatic.”
“It’s late.”
“It’s early.”
“What do you want, Andy?”
“You need to kill her, Tom.”
“What?”
Ivy softly moans from her spot on the bed, deep in a dream.
“No attachments, Tom. You need to kill her. I thought about maybe you could just break up with her, but then I realized: this is your final test.”
“I’m not going to kill her, Andy.”
“Why not? She’s just a person, a stupid, vapid waste of resources. Fuck her. Kill her.”
“No.”
“Tom, she’s a liability. She’s got that sick-puppy-dog thing where she just wants to follow you around with her nose in your ass. You need to drown her in the river. C’mon, man, think of the team.”
“Andy, I’m fucking exhausted. Let’s deal with this tomorrow.”
“You’re not going to try to sell me on the notion that you like this broad, are you? Jesus Christ, Tom, call it what it is.”
“What is it?”
“Really? Okay. It’s your fucking guilt manifested, okay? Blonde hair, about twenty-one years old, pretty girl, kinda trashy—she’s Holly Kelly, all grown up.”
A sharp, eerie tingle arcs up the back of my spine and into my brainstem. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Tom, I’ve been on your ass like a pimple these last couple months. I’ve walked right by you on the street; I’ve been in your apartment—hell, I was there tonight, watching your girlfriend sleep. You don’t eat, you don’t drink booze, you’re a junkie, or at least you used to be…no friends, no hobbies, and you clean up crime scenes for a living when you could be doing any measure of other jobs. You’re living with guilt, brother. But once you accept it, you and I can get down to brass tacks. You don’t need her; you don’t need anyone—just like me. Fuck everybody. Let’s make the most of it together. So kill her, bury your guilt, and let’s set the fucking world on fire.”
“I’ll call you,” I say finally, unable to take my eyes from Ivy’s slumbering form, and click the phone off.
—
Ivy wakes slowly, blinking off the sleep to find me staring at her, as I’ve been doing now for the last several hours. “Morning,” she says, smiling, demure. Andy, as much as I fucking hate to admit it, is right.
“We gotta talk.”
She knows me enough to know that talking isn’t good. “What’s wrong?”
“This isn’t going to work.”
“What’s not going to work?”
“Us. This…whatever this is.”