The Professional Corpse (The Departed Book 1)

by Sean Arthur Cox

  “Sure,” she said.

  She took my arm and placed a steadying hand on my back. The warmth of her touch stirred thoughts within me that Bill would have been more practiced containing. I tried to keep my breath from quickening, but with little success. Together we took two steps down, splashing in the pooled coffee as we went. Then I felt her lean in close and whisper in my ear, “We’ll get you all the way down in no time.”

  There was a hard shove, and I went falling, flailing, and slamming hard into landing after landing of cold, unforgiving concrete steps. I felt my ribs shatter, my legs twist in agonizing angles, and my skull crack hard into the cinder block wall. Excruciating pain tore at my body like wolves devouring their prey. Not an exaggeration. I’ve been eaten by wolves before.

  And then there was blackness, and I felt nothing.

  Chapter 7

  OLIVIA

  I’M AT ODDS WITH DESTINY

  After following the old man all the way down to the bottom, carefully avoiding stepping in any blood so as not to leave incriminating tracks, I slip on some latex gloves to check his pulse. It’s present, but weak. One could barely call the movement in his chest breathing. Blood pools all around him. I feel a little sick, seeing him lie there in such grotesque, misshapen angles, but I remind myself what a bastard he was, and that eases my discomfort. He’s not dead yet, but he will be so soon the difference is academic. I want to finish the job properly myself, but don’t dare touch the body in case I accidentally leave some trace of evidence behind, subtle things like strangulation marks or bloody shoe prints all over his face and neck. You know. Things that might make someone suspect foul play.

  I’m just thankful that whoever installed the security system never thought to put eyes in the fire stairs. I had re-enabled the executive elevator shortly after he entered the stairwell, so I figure no one will find him in the fleeting moments leading up to his death. I’ll have to make do with good enough.

  Taking a moment to compose myself, I wipe a few beads of sweat from my brow and double check my make-up. I’ve never been much into “girly” things, but YouTube has tutorials for everything, and with just a little practice, I’m able to freshen myself up the way people expect young overwhelmed interns to be. The last thing I want is for someone to catch me looking like I just walked down forty flights of stairs and then start investigating why. When I feel I’ve put myself together well enough to attract no attention, I walk out of the stairwell, through the lobby, and onto the sidewalk where a cab waits.

  Climbing into the back, I pull out my phone, dialing as the taxi slips into the Omaha streets. The phone rings several times, and I grow anxious. Why isn’t Houston answering? I can’t exactly leave any sort of voicemail for someone else to find. I haven’t secured his line yet from possible eavesdroppers.

  Right as I move to hit the end button, I hear his voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey,” I say, once I know it’s him. I don’t dare use his name, just in case.

  “Finished with work already?” he asks. “It’s only eleven fifty-three.”

  I consider how to answer without saying anything that might expose me. What might work for an office environment? “Just about. It’s sent to the printer. Just waiting for it to come out.”

  “So not finished yet?”

  “Like ninety-nine percent. Or even ninety-nine point nine nine,” I say, and fumble for how next to disguise murder talk with Office Space dialog. “For all I know, it’s probably done already, sitting on the print tray waiting to be collected.”

  “Remember the job requirements,” he says. “It needs to be submitted for public review by mid business day. It may be done, and it may not be, but if it isn’t up for public review on time, the boss is going to cry foul and may even dock your pay.”

  He is so much better at talking in code than I am.

  “It will be,” I say. “Care to have a celebratory drink tonight?”

  “Can’t,” he says. I can just make out the sounds of gunfire in the background. “They’ve got me in Taiwan tonight working on a hostile takeover. But keep me posted on your project.”

  “I will. Be safe.”

  “Be careful and avoid any typos,” he says back.

  “I will.”

  I hang up the phone and ride in silence, thinking about what I’ve done. I killed a man. For years, I’ve trained for it. I’ve even given Houston an assist on a few jobs, but this one, this death is all mine. It feels strange. I thought I might feel a sense of pride at a job well done or satisfaction at removing a scumbag from history. I thought I might feel terrified that I would be caught. I thought I would be looking over my shoulder constantly, worrying about fingerprints and security footage and witnesses. I thought there might be the slightest possibility I would feel regret. After all, with a simple push, I ended a human life. Poof. Gone, never again to rise. To a degree, I do feel all of this, brief bursts of giddiness or fear, fleeting pangs of sadness. On the whole, however, I don’t feel much of anything. It occurs to me how much it feels like the conversation I just had with Houston, with all the emotional impact of paperwork. The only lasting sensation is one of relief at it finally being over. For a moment, I worry over what that says about me, that I rank killing a person with filing a report, but then I decide it says I am a professional and take it in stride.

  The cab driver lets me off at a predetermined location. I wait until he disappears completely out of sight before boarding the next bus to come by, which I ride for several stops. Then I hop off, walk several blocks in a random direction, board another bus, ride at random, walk more, then another bus, taking a long, winding trip back to the crash pad Houston had me set up for the job.

  It’s a Howard Johnson’s booked under an assumed name. We made sure to get into a busy hotel that got a lot of convention overflow. Things get hectic at certain specific hours, making inconspicuously checking in and checking out a breeze. After all, when two hundred dentists all need to leave at the same time, who is going to notice one more professionally dressed woman in the mix? However, because most of the guests are conventioneers, when it isn’t check out time, the halls are as devoid of life as the moon.

  I slide my keycard into the lock and duck into my room, certain that no one has followed me back to the hotel. The cleaning lady left my room alone. A “Do Not Disturb” sign and background porn left playing on a loop keeps housekeeping away better than anything else I can think of. The paranoia Houston has trained into me presses me to check the room anyway, just to be safe. I do a quick sweep for bugs, compare my things against photographs to make sure they haven’t been moved. Everything turns up out clean. Even the cotton swab I left leaning up against the inside of the deliberately messy bathroom door is still standing. A good search team will take their own photos and put stuff back as precisely as they can. If they don’t realize they’ve moved something, however, by say, accidentally knocking over the cotton swab when they opened the bathroom door, and seeing the rest of the clutter, assume the swab had always been lying there, they tend to overlook putting it back.

  My three bags lie by the far window right where I left them. One contains personal effects, clothes toiletries, a small assortment of tools, a few vials of assorted poisons, etc. The locked suitcase contains Prince Charlie. I know I don’t need him for the job, but I brought him along anyway in case I find a free moment to go practice. The third contains an emergency fire escape rope ladder should I need to make a quick getaway. As a rule, I never take a room higher than the second floor, so if worse comes to worst, I can always jump out and have a reasonable chance to survive with only minor injuries. Even so, I prefer the ladder. It’s hard to run with a twisted ankle or heaven forbid, a broken leg. That’s how they caught John Wilkes Booth. Not that I admire his work or his tradecraft, but it’s good to know the cautionary tales just the same. I glance down at my rental car. It’s right where I left it, parked directly beneath my window. I hope I won’t need to utilize my escape pl
an, but it’s a comfort to know I have it.

  After a quick shower to wash off all the coffee I spilled on myself today, I kill the porn on my laptop to see what the news has to say about our poor departed friend Bill Thompson. Typically, if a story is big enough, you don’t need to break out your good Google-fu to get info to come up. I hope that will be the case. I don’t want to do something foolish like plug in “Bill Thompson dead” or “Bill Thompson fall” if his body hasn’t been discovered yet. It’s been at least an hour since I left Thompson’s corporate offices. Surely someone has discovered him by now. I type in his name only, just to be safe.

  After scrolling past his personal web page, the Thompson’s home page, and Bill Thompson’s Wikipedia entry, I come to the Recent News tab. There are headlines about his unfortunate accident, but they’ve been truncated. I click a link at random to see what the word is, and my jaw about drops to the desk.

  “Dumb fucking luck.”

  Bill Thompson is at Nebraska Medical Center in critical, but stable condition. After that absurdly long fall, after all that blood, he is alive. Battered to Hell and back, not going anywhere any time soon, but alive. “What sort of multi-vitamins do you take in the morning?” I mutter to myself under my breath.

  My phone rings.

  I don’t bother checking the caller ID. Only one person knows this number. “Hello?”

  “Seems there was a paper jam at the printer,” Houston says as gunfire pops in the background. “You’re going to diagnose the problem and resend.”

  “Yeah, so I noticed.” I toy with saying something about the printer being old, but stop myself. It will only confuse the metaphor because Bill’s advanced age should have worked in my favor, but didn’t.

  “Well, hop to. Don’t forget that two o’clock deadline.”

  “Can do.”

  I hang up. He seems too busy to chat what with the shooting and killing, and I have too much to do anyway. I don’t have time to bus hop. I need a straight shot to the hospital if I want to avoid any complaints from our Mister Johnson, who might decide he won’t pay if the news hits even a second after two. I fish around in my bag for a couple of poison vials and some of latex gloves. Tucking them into my pocket, I turn the porn back up, put the privacy sign back on the door, and slip out of the room. Down in the car, I fish a set of nursing scrubs from the trunk and change in the parking lot. A dentist back early from the convention gets a quick show, but I don’t have time to worry about him. He’s a dentist. Let him have one good thing happen to him in his life. I climb into the driver’s seat and pull out onto the road, speeding as cautiously as I can for the hospital.

  I arrive without incident, and I slip behind the first unoccupied nurse’s station I find to pull up Thompson’s room number. While I’m there, I grab a sterile face mask for anonymity and quickly pull up the user’s manual for whatever vitals monitoring systems they keep on hand. Finding a secluded corner of the hospital, I skim to the troubleshooting guide and figure out how to reverse engineer a malfunction that will slow the nurses finding out our poor friend Bill Thompson has died, hopefully stalling them just long enough to keep any hero doctors from bringing him back.

  As I make my way to his room, I notice a small crowd has begun to form around his door. Throngs of well-wishers and looky-loos and press types circle about in numbers great enough that hospital security has to be stationed at his door. Damn. I hope my scrubs will save me. I force my way through the mob of onlookers to the door where a security guard stops me.

  “Badge?” he asks.

  Man. Questions? Talking? I take a breath and channel my best Edie Falco/Nurse Jackie. She wouldn’t take this guard’s shit. Reaching down to my waist, I pull up nothing, look at the hem of my top, get frustrated, groan, cast accusing glances back toward the crowd. “I think I lost it,” I say. “It must have slipped off while I was squeezing through. If one of you could look for it?”

  Naturally, they pay me no mind. I’m just a nurse. I repeat myself, knowing I’ll get the same result, then return a pleading gaze back to the security guard.

  “Look, I just have to go in and out. You can even go in with me. No big deal.”

  “Why the gloves and mask?” he asks. “You look like you’re prepped for surgery, and usually, that’s the sort of stuff you don’t put on until you get in the room anyway. Keeps things cleaner.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “But it’s not for his benefit. I have bedpan duty, and there weren’t any gloves in the last room. I’m not wiping another shit-covered ass unless I know I don’t have to touch it or smell it.”

  He eyes me suspiciously.

  “Come on, man. Look at me. I’m not a journo. No camera, no notepad. I don’t even have a pen on me. You can watch me work. Seriously. This is my last pan before I can clock out.”

  He weighs my words and after a few seconds decides they are good enough for him. He follows me in, which I didn’t think he would. No problem. There are ways to chase away a snooping eye.

  I survey the room and see Bill Thompson looking like he has been on the receiving end of the worst kind of mugging. Bandages cover most of his body, and bruises peek out from what little skin can be seen. Two people hover over him, a young woman and a man I recognize as Tyler Hanson. The air feels tense, as though someone has hit the pause button on a big battle, and they turn to eye me, the interloper who no doubt stopped them in the middle of some last goodbyes or words of encouragement. More witnesses.

  “Sorry, friends,” I say. “Time to change the bedpan and check the catheter. You don’t want to see this, and it’s the hospital’s privacy policy not to let you anyway. I’m going to need you to step out for a bit.”

  They look at each other, then Bill. “We’ll talk later,” Hanson says, and turns to leave. The girl says nothing aloud, but the sadness in her eyes speaks volumes. Still, they leave without any objection.

  I walk confidently to Bill, whose eyes seemed glazed over from the morphine drip by his bed, and prepare to scare off Big Brother. For all their talk and bravado, security guards can be pretty squeamish. Hoping my friend here is just such a guard, I take Bill and gently move him onto his side, revealing a large adhesive hospital pad. I give it a prod and nod, then let the old man rest back flat while I fetch a replacement. Rolling him over again, I peel off the pad and make sure the guard can see the smears of feces all over it. By no means coincidentally, the front of the hospital gown falls aside as I work to wipe away the shit, exposing the old man’s wrinkled, gray-haired scrotum and penis with an uncomfortable tube running down its urethra. While I clean, a decent bit of feces rubs onto my gloves, and the old adhesive pad fares only slightly better. I gesture to the hospital pad.

  “While you’re in here, can you give me a hand and toss this while I keep cleaning?”

  The guard looks revolted, and I can practically see his lunch fighting its way up.

  “I actually think I hear a commotion out in the hall,” he says. “I should probably go look into it. You… finish up in here and hurry out.”

  I nod and resume my work. Once he leaves, I replace the hospital pad—someone might ask questions if I don’t—and set to work disabling the monitors. Once I have that done, I check his chart for injuries and decide that with his punctured lung, respiratory failure seems as likely as anything. Unscrewing his IV, I begin to pump a vial of succinylcholine into his veins. It’s a powerful muscle relaxer, one that doesn’t get checked for in most tox screens, and in high enough doses causes lungs to simply stop working, completely normal for someone in his condition. They won’t check for poison and probably won’t even do a thorough autopsy.

  Bill Thompson eyes me the whole time, and soon he begins to flail, almost causing me to spill my poison. He speaks in a weak little mousy voice. Most everything he says is garbled by injury or morphine, but a few words come through.

  “You…” he says. “…coffee… killer…”

  I shrug and reconnected the IV. I don’t want things looking strange
should someone come in before he dies. “You got me, Bill. But look on the bright side. You were supposed to be dead yesterday at the golf course, so take a moment to appreciate the extra time you got to enjoy, you bastard.”

  He begins to mash his call button as frantically as a man in his condition can.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to work,” I say. “I disabled it just a second ago. All of it. But if it makes you feel better, press away.”

  “…don’t…”

  “Sorry, but you pissed off some rich people. Instead of begging me not to kill you, maybe the thing to do would be to re-evaluate those life choices that made someone hate you enough to want you dead.”

  “…who…?”

  “No idea. It’s all fake names and shell e-mails, but good try.”

  I finish my work and tidy up the room a little, making sure I leave no DNA anywhere. As I clean up, I see his eyes go wide in panic. The poison no doubt has begun to take hold, and his lungs have begun to seize. As he flails desperately trying to grab air, he pulls his heart monitors loose. Perhaps it’s deliberate, an effort to call in the nurses. It doesn’t matter. The steady beep of a heartbeat continues to fill the room. Someone wasn’t paying attention when I told him I had disabled everything. Still, one has to admire a fighter, even if he is a lying, cheating bastard. I wait until he exhausts himself, and hook the monitors back up to him. The fewer questions they ask later, the better.

  “Have a nice life,” I say as I leave the room. Bill replies with an unintelligible groan.

  I shut the door tightly behind me and give the guard a nod. “Thanks for the hand in there, champ.”

  He looks away uncomfortably. It may be childish of me, but I have always loved to watch authority figures squirm. As I turn from him, I see Hanson and the young girl waiting anxiously at the front of the crowd. I give them a solemn nod. “He’s sleeping now, but you can come back in a bit.”