by John Inman
Rattletrap cars were parked along the curbs. Makeshift tents were set up here and there where homeless people huddled. I crossed the Chollas Creek flood channel, its concrete walls lined with graffiti, and parked on the other side of the channel. The moment I stepped from the car, I spotted a coyote slipping away down the sidewalk like it was rushing home after a busy night of scarfing down people’s pets. Urban predator. Just like me. I shook my finger at the sneaky bastard and continued walking.
With the money still in my coat pocket—I sure as hell wasn’t about to leave it in my car in this neighborhood—I strode purposely along, hugging the shadows at the verge of the walk. Dead leaves crunched beneath my tennies. The air smelled of approaching dawn, wood smoke, and rancid lard used to fry too many tortillas. Only one streetlamp was left lit, not shot out by some kid’s BB gun or extinguished by another kid chucking rocks, and that was two blocks away. The only light that lit this part of the city came from the gibbous moon, and it offered little in the way of illumination.
Rather like the sneaky coyote I’d seen only moments before, I slipped through a wall of bougainvillea. It landed me in a backyard filled with broken washing machines, an old pickup truck propped up on blocks, and the remnants of a cast-iron fence that had been dismantled in sections and piled at the edge of the house. Bags of garbage the man had been too lazy to set out for trash pickup littered the grounds. God knows how long they had been there. Most had been torn open long ago by raccoons or stray dogs. The reek of spoiled food brought tears to my eyes.
The house itself was a mess as well. As was the man who resided there. I had been casing the joint—and the man with the cherub tattoos—long enough to know. The bars on the windows were thick with rust. They looked black and muddy in the moonlight. The walls of the house probably hadn’t seen a coat of paint since before I was born. The shingles lay rotted on the roof, baked to charcoal by a million summer suns.
Pulling a veterinarian’s latex shoulder-length rectal glove from my back pocket, I pulled it onto my right arm all the way up to the shoulder, flexing the fingers to make sure it was properly snug. When I was satisfied, I pulled another long glove over my left arm. This would not only prevent me from leaving fingerprints, but the long rectal glove was also my insurance against trace evidence finding its way onto my hands and arms, be it blood spatter or plain old DNA-riddled tears and spit and snot. Tonight there would probably be no blood to worry about. But then one never really knows, does one?
From another pocket, I tugged out my ski mask and once more pulled it down over my bald head. The world was peppered with security cameras these days, and while I knew the resident pervert didn’t have surveillance equipment attached to his shithole of a house, God knows what other cameras might be lurking around the neighborhood. Still, I was off the street now, and I should be safe enough for the next few minutes. Just long enough to do what I came to do, then get the hell out.
Somewhere in the distance, a lowrider with grumbling glasspacks cruised the streets, broadcasting Shakira like some half-assed PSA, tossing out high notes as it passed, like candy being flung from a parade float. The bass on the car stereo was cranked up so high I could feel the vibration of it in my teeth. And then, as quickly as it came, the car veered onto another street and the music was gone. Silence settled in once again. All that remained was the reek of garbage at my feet and the sound of my pulse pumping blood in my ears.
My adrenaline was really ramping up now. Oddly, as I crept up to the rear door that led onto a barred porch, I flashed on a memory from that afternoon. It was a mental snapshot of the young man sitting on the bench by the blind center, his feet in the grass, his white cane with the red tip standing primly upright beside him, his little bow tie crossed neatly at his throat. I remembered how the sun had caught his pale hair. And how, when he smiled, it was sometimes accompanied by either one or two dimples, depending on the magnitude of the smile. I paused momentarily to savor the memory, then studiously went back to work.
With my trusty lockpick gun (available on Amazon for $39.95 and actually legal, believe it or not) I picked the lock on the security door in less time than it takes to tell about it. Click, click, click and the tumblers aligned. While I worked, I listened for footsteps inside, but the house remained as still as death. A rather apt analogy, if I say so myself. Happily, there was no dog to worry about. No cat to meow either. The man lived alone. He didn’t even have a parrot to rat me out. I knew because I had been inside the residence three times already while the tenant was off cruising the grade schools where he fed his highly immoral hunger for tender young flesh. The fucking weasel.
After tonight, of course, this weasel’s feeding days would be over. He didn’t know it yet, but he had already savored his last meal.
And taken his last innocent life.
I quietly opened the back door and squeezed through into the darkness within. I froze, listening. The only sounds to be heard were the tinny ticking of a clock on the kitchen wall, and farther inside the house, the distant rumble of a human snore. Instantly, a picture popped into my head of a fat walrus snoozing among the rocks, slurping and snorting and slobbering as it dreamed about eating penguins or something. Like that walrus in my imagination, the old fuck at the back of the house kept right on snoring, and I hoped to keep him that way for a while longer. At least until I was in position.
Shooting for silence, I was careful not to crinkle the rectal gloves on my arms. I also made sure my footfalls were soft and carefully placed, especially since there was crap all over the floors, just as there had been in the backyard. I would have been really surprised to find this creep had a Hoover stashed away somewhere. Hell, he probably didn’t even own a broom. Or a dustrag. Or if he did, he hadn’t used them in the last ten or twenty years.
The curtains were closed, leaving the house in utter darkness. That was good. I moved through the rooms by memory, avoiding a table here, a chair there. From up ahead, the gentle rumble of the man’s snoring drew closer.
I stepped through a doorway, and there he was. The fat fuck lay sprawled naked atop a tangle of sheets. Here the curtains had been left open, and the waxing moon outside laid a bar of moonlight across the bed, showing me far more of the man’s naked body than I wanted to see. I somehow wasn’t surprised to see that his hand was snuggled over his crotch, like he had been playing with himself when he conked out. I quickly looked away.
The bedding smelled of mildew—or worse—and the room reeked of dirty feet and bean farts. I was grateful for the ski mask across my nose.
I stepped up close to the side of the bed. Getting right to work, I reached down and wrapped my fingers around his throat.
The snoring stopped. He jerked beneath me like a chicken that’s been snatched up by an ax-wielding farmer prior to having its head chopped off for Sunday dinner. His eyes grew as big as saucers. When he tried to twist free of my grasp, I tightened my grip on his throat, and he immediately froze.
He stared up at me through the shadows, and I could see the confusion on his face. His fat legs thrashed when I applied a wee bit more pressure to his larynx, just to watch him squirm. Now instead of a chicken, he looked more like a big fish flopping at the end of a hook.
“I can’t breathe!” he gasped, and I loosened my hold. But not by much.
Carefully, I climbed on the bed and straddled the man, pinning him to the mattress beneath my weight, clamping him in place with my legs. He lifted a hand as if to fight me, but I casually warned, “Don’t,” and he lowered it again. His breath was coming in startled gasps now. Even through the ski mask, I could smell the fear on his skin. And the filth. I was right. This guy hadn’t taken a bath in weeks.
When I pulled a medium-sized garbage bag from my jacket pocket, his eyes got bigger. His mouth formed a fat O, the aperture black and empty inside like a well. Casting a glance to the left, I saw his false teeth sitting in a glass on the nightstand. The water they rested in was so dirty, it looked like bourbon. My stomach roiled.
His eyes never left the bag in my hand.
“Wh-what are you going to do with that?”
I ignored the question.
“Do you know why I’m here?” I calmly asked, dragging my eyes away from the soaking teeth and back to him.
His head jerked first to the right, then to the left. I had tightened my grip on his throat again, so when he answered it came out as a garbled wheeze. There were tears on his cheeks now. Tears of terror. He was trembling so hard, the bed was shaking. The box springs were squeaking underneath us. He was doing a little tap dance with his heels down at the foot of the bed. If he peed on me, I’d really kill him. Not once did his eyes leave the bag in my hand.
I asked again. “Do you know why I’m here?”
“N-no,” he stammered.
I lifted the bag over the side of the bed and shook it open. He cringed away from the sound of crackling plastic. The tears on his cheeks glistened in the moonlight. A rope of snot dribbled from his nose. That glistened too.
His terrified eyes followed my movements as I brought the bag closer to his head. When he tried to twist away, I tightened my grip on his throat yet again. He tensed, motionless, as I slipped the bag over the top of his head, still leaving his fat face exposed.
“Does that tickle?” I asked.
He was afraid to nod, afraid of what I might do if he did. So he sobbed instead. And even that he tried to do without moving his head. “Please don’t,” he began. Then he asked the question I was hoping he would ask. “Who sent you here?”
At that, I offered the man beneath me a smile. Hidden by the ski mask, it was a smile he would never know was there, but I didn’t care. I offered it to him anyway. For no other reason than I thought that was how it should be.
“Shelley Ann Ridgeway sent me,” I said.
Confusion dimmed his eyes. It was a look that infuriated me. I leaned in close. Threatening. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember Shelley Ann Ridgeway.”
He shrank from my anger. His entire body trembled beneath me. “Who did you say? Who?”
But I was through playing games. Tightly wrapping my fingers around his neck and leaning down to press the palm of my hand into his throat, using all the weight in my body to hold it in place, I yanked the garbage bag down over his face and pulled the drawstring tight around his throat. Immediately the bag began expanding and deflating as he fought for air. I covered the bag with a pillow from the bed and held it over his face to seal out any wisps of oxygen that might be leaking in.
I rode him like a wild bronco while he heaved and shook and tried to throw me off, all the while screaming out muffled cries, begging for a decent breath.
A breath that never came.
As he weakened, as the last dregs of oxygen were drained from his lungs and brain, the man slowly grew still. The tap dancing stopped. His fat belly ceased heaving.
At the moment when his evil life slipped away for good, his muscles went slack. Every single one of them. He lay beneath me like a sack of potatoes. Death had snatched him away before he could utter another sound.
Satisfied my work was complete, I rearranged the pillow under his head, then plucked the plastic bag off his noggin and stuffed it in my pocket. Cocking my head to the side, I sat there on his fat stomach like I was riding a horse, listening. Across town in a concrete-lined grave, where California poppies blossomed above and grass dipped in the wind, I imagined a young girl expelling a sigh of relief. Turning slightly in her satin cocoon, she reached out with cool fingers across the expanse of an entire city and touched my cheek. I imagined her fingertips on my skin as I sat humped over this filthy bed, straddling this fat dead fuck who smelled like a bag of rats and lamenting the fact that his acquaintance with soap was transcendental at best.
Still in my imagination, the girl whispered something to me, which I didn’t quite catch. I said, “You’re welcome,” anyway. And then she was gone. Later, driving home, I almost smiled, remembering.
It was a funny thing, but as I lay alone in my bed that night, I did the same thing I always do after completing a job. I cried. Not big nelly sobs, mind you, only a few manly, restrained sniffles. With a couple of hiccups thrown in for good measure. If I’ve learned anything in the six years I’ve been in this line of work, it’s this. Killing a human—even a cruel, terrible human—is never easy. It leaves a mark. Not a guilt mark, because I felt no guilt about what I did. Just a lessening of humanity mark.
The trick, of course, is not becoming as evil as the thing you are fighting against.
Chapter Three
MY MOTHER’S house sat at the deep end of a cul-de-sac, nestled among a stand of Torrey pines, 300 feet above San Diego’s Black’s Beach, where it is legal to swim naked, as long as you don’t waggle your body parts in anyone’s face or masturbate on the sand, although even those rules aren’t strictly enforced.
There are three access points to Black’s Beach. One is a three-mile hike south along the shoreline and another is a two-mile hike north along the same shoreline. Both paths are inundated at high tide, and more than one hiker is swept out to sea annually, never to be seen again. The third way down is along a heart-stoppingly steep cliff where errant nudists, or those aspiring to be, are regularly plucked to safety by rescue helicopters because they froze in fear either halfway up or halfway down.
Secretly, although I would never tell her this, I felt great relief knowing my seventy-year-old mother was not physically capable of making either the hike or the climb. Otherwise I didn’t doubt for a minute that she would be down there with all the other naked people, flaunting her wrinkles and frolicking in the surf with some old geezer on vacation from French Lick, Indiana.
Back in the last century, my mother lived the life of a hippie, flashing peace signs, sporting tie-dye peasant skirts, and passing flowers out at airports. I admired her for that. I even admired her for the spirit that would have sent her scrambling down that cliff to Black’s Beach if what little common sense she had left hadn’t warned her not to.
I loved my mother. But I loved her best in one piece. Gladys Bootchinski’s little Craftsman shotgun cottage overlooked the sea, and when the wind was right, you could hear the gulls and smell the brine blowing through her kitchen window. Her tiny house boasted a mere 612 square feet, and the yard was smaller than a flatbed truck. It had recently been appraised at $1,300,000. Next year it would probably top a million and a half. Is California real estate a hoot or what?
I didn’t knock because my mother refuses to lock her doors. At heart, I guess she’s still a hippie. I found her, feet up, sprawled practically flat, smoking a pipe in her favorite recliner. The pipe wasn’t filled with Prince Albert, if you know what I mean. Two whiffs of the cannabis-clogged air and I had a sudden craving for Cheetos, my munchies of choice.
“Jesus, Mom!” I wailed. “It’s nine o’clock in the morning!”
She squinted through the haze at the old-school clock hanging above the mantel. “Not yet it isn’t,” she said. I could barely see her through the blue cloud of happy smoke billowing around her head.
“Do you have any doughnuts?” she asked. “Oreos? Cheez-Its?” There was a desperate light in her eyes.
“Mom, at your age you should be eating fiber!”
“Fine!” she snapped. “How about miniature Tootsie Rolls! Got any of those? I’ll dip them in Metamucil!”
When I said I didn’t have any of those things, and even if I did, I wouldn’t give her any, her desperation dissolved into wounded sadness.
At that moment, the school clock began to chime. She hoisted a finger in the air and froze in place, listening. I could see her lips moving around the pipe stem as she counted silently along with the bongs. On the ninth and final chime, she grandly announced, “Okay, now it’s nine o’clock!” Then she giggled.
As much as I hate to admit it, I found myself wishing I felt as happy as she looked. I noticed she had removed her false teeth to allow room for the pipe in her mouth. When she drew on th
e smoke, she went puh, puh, puh, sort of like a goldfish kissing the side of its bowl. Her teeth were lying next to a baggie of weed on the end table. A disconcerting tableau if there ever was one.
“Why are you smoking a pipe?” I asked.
“Ran out of papers.”
“Oh.”
“Are you sure you don’t have any doughnuts, Lawrence?”
I slapped at my pockets to prove the point. “It’s Larry, and nope. Sorry. Nary a one.”
She gave me a long hard look through tendrils of pot smoke dribbling from her nostrils. “You need to find a boyfriend. You’re starting to look… pinched.”
I snorted back a laugh. “Pinched?”
“Yeah. Pinched. Like people who haven’t been laid in a month of Sundays.”
“You haven’t been laid in a month of Sundays.”
She eyeballed me askance. Puh, puh, puh. “What makes you think that?”
I swallowed any further discussion on that particular topic. If my mother had been poking some old guy with hair in his ears and corn pads on his feet, I really didn’t want to know. I scrambled around, tossing stuff left and right from the drawers inside my head, trying to unearth a more suitable subject for conversation.
“How’s your pussy?”
She blinked and almost dropped her pipe. Then she got ahold of herself. “Oh, you mean the cat. The cat is fine, I guess. I haven’t seen him in three days. He probably gets laid more than you.”
“Thanks.”
“And stop calling him my pussy. You know darn well his name is Frank. Did I mention he gets laid more than you?”
I took a stab at shooting darts through my eyes. “Yes. More than once.”
“Oh, good. Then I guess you’ll be doing something about it.”
“We’ll see.”
She took another hit off her pipe, and her expression immediately softened. Either she was sorry to be nagging me about my sex life, or she was getting so stoned she couldn’t control the muscles in her face.