by Joni Rodgers
“Yeah, well, tell her I said to cram it. I don’t want her money.”
“Shut up and take it.”
Bean seized the envelope, tore open the end and pulled out a photocopy of the final Janny’s World comic. He stared at it, flipped it over, looked at the blank backside.
“What the frick is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re the genius,” said Shep. “Figure it out.”
The subject previously identified as Penn Hewitt rolled into Smartie Breedlove’s driveway at 9:42 p.m.. Shep pulled his new Range Rover into the palmy shadows across the street and broke out a pair of night vision binoculars.
Hewitt debarked his vehicle and climbed the porch steps with an armload of chocolate Lab puppy. The front door opened, and there was a minute or so of awkward conversation as Boodle lunged and bayed at the interloper, and Smartie struggled to hold onto Boodle’s collar with her one good wing, and the chocolate Lab yelped and thrashed in Hewitt’s arms.
The door closed.
Hewitt headed back to his truck and wrangled the yowling pup into a kennel crate. Slouching down in the driver’s seat, Shep did his best to be invisible, but Hewitt spied him, strode across the street to the Range Rover and rapped sharply on the window with the back of his hand.
Shep lowered the window an inch. “Evening there, Hewitt.”
“You are an asshole.”
“Yup.”
“Not over, dude.” Hewitt stalked back to his truck and jerked the door open. As he pulled away, he leaned out the window, pointed two fingers at Shep and repeated, “Not over!”
As Shep swung into the driveway, the kitchen door opened, and Boodle emerged, dragging Smartie by a retractable leash. Boodle wasn’t big enough to get his nose above the window ledge, so Shep opened the driver’s door to pet him, good-naturedly allowing the wide swath of buffalo drool on his gray trouser leg.
Smartie leaned on the inside of the open door in her jogging clothes, ready to run, loose corkscrews escaping her ponytail here and there.
“How’s your week?” Shep said.
“Crazy as a granny in the attic. How’s yours?”
“Fine as frog’s hair.”
“Good one,” she nodded.
We’d be friends dependably, lovers if he was lucky.
For now, I was content with the Gunsmoke approach: everybody in their own saddle with an occasional dust devil to keep the saloon door swinging.
“They were such good characters,” Smartie mused.
“Who?”
“Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty.”
Shep knuckled her jawbone and said, “You’re a good character.”
“So are you, Shep.”
“I’d kiss you now, if you still want to see what that’s like.”
Smartie nodded.
He cupped his hand under her chin and brought her mouth over to his. The scent of her hair, the taste of her lip balm, the welcome cross-breeze between their necks, it was all very Houston. Pecan trees and Confederate roses. Palm fronds and chlorine. Distant factories, flowering jasmine, mosquito spray.
Shep regretted having burned the “blink once if you want me to come upstairs” bit. By the time an equally inspired opening line made its way past the pounding in his head, Smartie was jogging down the moonlit boulevard with Boodle ambling at her side.
end
SNEAK PEEK
Something Awful
(a love story)
by bestselling author Joni Rodgers
A crime scene cleaner with a tenuous grasp on reality finds himself involved in a complicated love affair and scrutinized by police as a person of interest in a string of murders. A darkly sensual, wildly imaginative psychological chiller with an emotional edge.
chapter one
accidents waiting to happen
At noon, a song sparrow mourned, and at one, the summer tanager tittered. In between, the Audubon Birdwatcher clock carried on, imperceptibly slow and without a sound, on the wall above the backsplash where the late Mr. Aceveda’s shotgun had left a chalky chip in the tile.
Two o’clock belonged to the cranky purple martin. An American goldfinch sent up its nasal per-chicory at three. By quarter till the common yellowthroat, the air was full of wings. Flies fogged the windows in the breakfast nook and feasted on the viscous red rivers that irrigated the tile floor and clotted the serpentine strands of Mrs. Aceveda’s salt and pepper hair. In a cycle well known to forensics, their progeny hatched, grew fat, flew off and died happy, one generation after another for five busy, buzzy weeks, each day marked in circles by the fluted gurgle of the meadowlark and the checked call of the blackbird.
Twelve birds.
Twice a day.
Day after day.
Unseasonable heat reduced the potted herbs on the window sill to sticks and bones. Peaches in a wooden bowl sweetened to ripe, ripened to rot, collapsing into themselves like Mrs. Aceveda’s cool cheeks and sagging breasts, relieved of brightness, sugar and life. Maggots came meekly to inherit their loamy earth mother, setting about their task with compulsive stewardship. It was a ministry, really.
Penn Hewitt hated to kill the industrious little buggers.
He counted them as kindred spirits, perhaps the only living things who truly knew why he was compelled to do the things he did. Penn saw a teeming, transformative beauty in their work, but he knew it would be freaky and wrong for him to say anything like that to Madison Mose, the deputy coroner, who crouched beside the stiff, picking skull fragments into a plastic bag.
Standing in his hazmat suit on the welcome mat outside Felice Aceveda’s kitchen door, Penn zoomed his digital camera to a tiny island of stray tissue between the bloodied gun and Mrs. Aceveda’s grapple-hooked fingers. His focus shifted to the cinched strap of Maddie’s respirator, then panned down to the hip pocket of her jumpsuit, the curve of her backside, the jackknifed line of her leg. She looked up, her face unreadable inside her breathing apparatus.
“Hewitt?”
“Hey, Maddie.”
“Did you just take a picture of my butt?”
“Of course not,” said Penn. “Did you want me to?”
She stood and folded her arms. “Long time no see. Last October, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “The Sawzall thing at the crack house.”
“Right, right.” Maddie nodded too. “Where you been keeping yourself?”
“Arizona. I took my mom and dad out. Got them settled,” said Penn.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m good.” Penn ducked his chin uncomfortably. “Pimped my ride.”
“I noticed,” said Maddie.
Out on the curb, Penn’s panel truck was freshly painted caution-tape-yellow, emblazoned with the Hewitt & Son CTS Decon logo and under that, “Houston’s Crime and Trauma Scene Specialists For Over 40 years.” Bursting over the rear wheelwells, toxic green letters shouted, “Yes! We do meth labs!” because Penn’s dad, Kibe Hewitt, wanted folks to know Penn was certified and bonded to do dangerous reclamation work in addition to the standard biohazard, decomp, trauma and gross filth sites, suicides, hoarders, what have you.
“Made sense to get it done while I was gone,” said Penn.
Maddie’s eyes narrowed behind her goggles. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’d like to get moving on this bid. Do you have next of kin?”
“You know I’m not supposed to give it to you until you get clearance.”
“Yeah, but you do a lot of things you’re not supposed to,” he grinned. “One of your best qualities.”
Maddie rolled her eyes and beckoned him into the next room. “She left all the papers on the dining room table. One of those well-considered suicides.”
“So you’re calling it self-inflicted?”
“Easy call,” she shrugged. “No-brainer. Ha!”
She punched his shoulder, and the feel of her fist sparked a fragmented impulse low in Penn’s midsection. Before he could frame it up properly, th
e Carolina wren screeched the top of the hour—tea kettle! tea kettle! CHEER!—throwing him off. He had to focus on the muscles in his hand. Adductor pollicis. Flexor digitorum superficialis. Flexor digitorum profundus.
“There’s a son,” said Maddie. “Kenneth R. Aceveda. When the constable went to track him down for notification, they came up with a warrant out of Galveston County. Drug charges. Apparently, the Widow Aceveda put her house up to get him out on bond, so he’s bye-bye-birdie, and the bail bondsman wins stank house here, for what it’s worth. At the moment, the stiff’s lawyer has power of attorney.”
Maddie scribbled a name and number on a Post-It and stuck it to Penn’s chest.
“You didn’t get that from me.”
“Get what?” Penn grinned. “Do I know you?”
“Not as well as you think you do.” She lifted her respirator briefly and smiled. She had a great smile. “It’s good to see you again, Hewitt.”
While Maddie and her team prepped and palletized the body, Penn got the go-ahead from the attorney, and went about photo-documenting the damages for the insurance claim. The entire kitchen was involved. Mrs. Aceveda’s last moment of free will fanned across the cupboard doors like a cardinal wing. Arterial spray plumed from sink to stovetop, detailing a graceful quarter turn as she spun and fell to the floor, where blood blossomed out of her head and oxidized to a deep red sea pocked with an archipelago of cementish gray matter. Stained grout laid a dark scarlet grid between the white tiles. The ceiling was flecked with crimson stars.
Most costly to repair would be the unseen damage, the result of a vast molecular migration; over the weeks, the stench of decomposition had physically permeated every absorbent surface in the house, haunting every square yard of carpet, every panel of drywall, every mineral fiber ceiling square. The place would have to be stripped to the studs, fumigated, and completely refitted if it was ever to smell like anything other than a tomb. Mrs. Aceveda’s heirs and/or lien-holders would be obligated by law to fully disclose this unfortunate event to potential buyers and provide documentation of remediation measures.
A decomp of this caliber was a license to print money.
Penn closed his eyes and watched the neon green numbers scroll by, horizontally for addition, vertically for multiplication, inverting for subtraction and division. When the equations turned yellow, he opened his eyes and entered the tally into a spreadsheet app on his iPhone. He bid the cleanup for all it was worth, but came in low on the refit. Refit work meant breathing freely for a few weeks, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt instead of the stifling hazmat suit, listening to Radiohead without a respirator, eating lunch in a clean, air-conditioned space that invited the return of the living.
“Hey, Hermione,” Maddie said sharply. “Get your nerdy intern ass over here.”
Hanging back by an open window, the meat wagon driver, Hector Castillo, tightly trudged over to help scoop Mrs. Aceveda’s slight form into the body bag. With only a cheap disposable mask instead of a full respirator, Hector was getting a snootful of decomp. Mucus from his beleaguered nose melded the flimsy mask to his upper lip. Tears leaked down his cheeks.
Before Maddie zipped the bag, she hooked her finger under the shrunken jaw, toggled it up and down and squawked, “Give us a kiss, Hector.”
Hector’s head bobbed forward and back. “The emu,” Kibe Hewitt used to call that.
“You’re okay, dude,” said Penn. “Just talk to your belly, and say you’re okay.”
Hector shook his head, yanked up his mask and vomited on the floor.
“Thirty-nine minutes, forty seconds!” Maddie whooped her long-legged, musical laughter. “Ten bucks, new kid.”
Penn took a deep draw of charcoal-filtered air and pulled off his respirator, placing it over Hector’s face, steering him out the side door and down the steps.
“Easy, dude. You’re okay.”
Sucking noisily at the apparatus, Hector stumbled down the driveway. Penn paused in the breezeway between the house and garage. When he took his first breath of outside air, he caught a distinct whiff. Cat pee and Clorox. He went to the garage window and cupped his hands on the dirty glass, peering into the cluttered dark.
“Hewitt?”
There was a bony prod to the back of Penn’s shoulder, and his heart sank a little when he turned to face Denny McCoy. She hooked her thumbs on her belt, behind her radio on one hip, under the butt of her gun on the other.
“Top o’ the morning, Constable,” Penn said amiably.
“Where are you supposed to be, Hewitt?”
“Here. Bidding this decomp. Is there a problem with that?”
“There’s a problem with you looking in people’s windows. Go sit in your truck until you’re properly authorized to get involved.”
“Somebody’s been cooking meth in that garage,” said Penn. “Take a whiff, Officer McCoy.”
She sniffed, and the stench of putrefaction hanging in the moist heat caught hold of her throat. She doubled over coughing.
“God dang it,” she hacked. “Go—go wait in your truck.”
“You’re welcome,” said Penn. “I’ll add the meth lab to my bid.”
She pointed toward the curb and barked, “I said get over there.”
Whistling an aimless, circular tune, Penn headed down the drive. At the curb, he hoisted the rear door on his panel truck, cracked open a water bottle from a built-in cooler and handed it to Hector, who rinsed and spat and daubed at his swampy eyes.
“Man, that was rank,” said Hector.
“When I first started, my dad told me to do like this.” Penn tucked his bottom lip behind his front teeth, pushed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and inhaled with a fffffft. “Eventually your brain basically decides not to process it as reality. Puts a lid on that part of your olfactory senses.”
“Really?” Hector inhaled with a skeptical ffffffft.
“The mind is equipped with powerful coping mechanisms.” Penn sagely tapped his temple. “I haven’t yarked at a job site in thirteen years,” said Penn, “and I’ve seen some messed up stuff. Decomps are fairly rare. More homicides in the summer. Holidays are good for suicides, of course. Doing a lot of meth labs the last couple years.”
“That’s a hard way to make a living.”
“Gotta disable the electric, so you got no AC. Fumes are explosive and toxic as heck, so you have to stay completely geared up.”
“I hear the money’s good, though.”
“Oh, heck yeah,” said Penn. “Ridonkulous.”
Maddie came down the driveway and handed Penn a spare set of keys from Mrs. Aceveda’s purse. She pulled the paper cover off her head, and her hair fell around her face in a kicky, bright blue razor cut. She brought the back of her hand to her nose and said, “Dang. This does not bode well for the weekend.”
“What…” Hector said warily.
“The smell penetrates your pores on a molecular level,” said Penn. “Difficult to get laid for a few days after a decomp. Get on my website and click ‘Tricks of the Trade’. There’s a recipe for a peroxide scrub.”
“Too abrasive,” said Maddie. “I rub myself with a lemon.”
“Lucky lemon,” said Penn.
“Ah, Hewitt.” Maddie gave him an up-down appraisal thinly disguised as a slow blink. “The body of a Spartan awkwardly piloted by the brain of Bart Simpson.”
This was the kind of thing Maddie always said. Ah, Hewitt, what you lack in politesse, you make up for in girth. Ah, Hewitt, the conscience of Wally Cleaver shackled to the humping compulsion of an otterhound. Penn knew he was being insulted, but it always left him baffled and strangely warm.
Maddie punched Hector’s arm and said, “Let’s go, sweet cheeks.”
As the meat wagon pulled away, lights mutely turning in a rack on the roof, Penn fished his cell phone from his pocket.
“Whadjuhneed?” It always came out like one word when Kibe Hewitt answered, a single hasp-stroke of whiskey dregs and cigarette abuse.
> “Dad. Word of advice. I’m thinking about hiring some part-time help.”
“What for? So you can sit on your dead lazy ass?”
“So I can sleep once in a while,” said Penn. “I’ve been putting in almost a hundred hours a week since I got back. It sucks doing this by myself.”
“Hundred hours a week,” Kibe scoffed. “What’s that average per day?”
Penn closed his eyes. “14.285714.”
“Which leaves how many hours a day to sit on your dead lazy ass?”
“9.714286.”
“Well, hell! What do you want? You want to float around on a swimming pool all day? Why don’t you just do that, assbone? Invite a couple hookers over for a barbecue.”
“Dad, there was a guy at this decomp today. A CSI intern, so he’s cool with blood-born pathogen protocol, OSHA regs, all that.”
“Well, I’m out of it. It’s your business now. Do what you want.”
“I saw that girl,” said Penn. “From the coroner’s office.”
“Nail her.”
“Dad. Geezes.”
“What, you need a map? Turn left at the right kneecap and head north.”
“Why do I even try to talk to you about this stuff?”
“Because you’re a dumbass.”
“What’s Mom up to?”
“Bunko night.”
“Tell her I love her.” Penn pushed the heel of his hand against his eye. “I miss you, Dad. Geez, this is hard.”
“I know, Penn. You just pay attention to where you’re supposed to be,” said Kibe. “Keep your nose clean, and remember that Mom and me love you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get back to work.”
Penn pocketed the cell, whistling again, taking in the blue sky and songbirds.
Elsewhere in the world, it was still winter, but in the separate reality of the high-dollar Houston suburbs, the morning had warmed to eighty-eight heavily perfumed degrees. Away from the tainted house, the air smelled like cut grass with a sticky dressing of fermenting flowers and flowering fruit. The magnolia trees were beaded with decadent sweat. Sego palms and yuccas fanned, live and spiky, beside the verdant bromeliads.