by Andrew Post
“Again,” he said, “I am not a cop. Are you a cop?”
“No,” Amber said. “And neither is she.”
“Nope, not a cop,” Jolene said. “My uncle was a sheriff for a few years though. He said it sucked. Small town. Nothing ever happened. Fished a couple drunks out of the river, but that’s about it.”
Frank nodded. “So none of us are cops. Swell. I’ll go back in my car now.”
“I can’t do this,” Jolene said.
“Keep it together, Jo,” Amber said.
“This is so wrong. He probably has a dead kid out there or something. Fuck, did you kill somebody?” Jolene shouted at him. “Is that what’s happening here right now? Oh, God. Are we destroying evidence for murderers?”
Amber hissed, “Keep your shit together, Jo.” She smiled at Frank. “Sorry. Stressful day.”
“I didn’t kill anybody,” Frank said to Jolene, then looked at Amber. “He was killed, that much is true, but not by me.”
“That isn’t better!” Jolene shouted.
“Maybe I should leave,” Frank said.
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” Jolene screamed. “Take your murder victim and go, murderer!”
Amber grabbed Jolene by the shoulders. “What the fuck is the matter with you? Be cool.”
“Be cool? There’s a murder victim in his car!”
Frank ran out the front door, leaving it open. Amber watched him bounding across the front yard with the maximum velocity his dad bod could hope to achieve and get in his car. She threw the door shut and whipped around to face Jolene, who was running through the house screaming unintelligible noise and tearing at her hair.
“You need to calm the fuck down,” Amber said, following her from room to room. Through the arranged display caskets, the viewing room, the dining hall, then the reception area again before going through the caskets again. “We have neighbors, you know.”
“All our furniture’s gone and we got people bringing dead bodies to the house now? What the fuck even is our life?”
“They’ve always brought dead bodies to this house,” Amber said, still following. “It’s kinda what goes on here, if you haven’t been paying attention.”
“Yeah, but, you know, through the right channels,” Jolene said. “Legally. Not stuffed in the fucking trunk of some middle-aged guy’s car.”
“Okay, so the maiden voyage was a bust. That’s fine. We can work with this. Next time, I’ll manage the drop-off. Hey, where are you going?”
“I’m doing like I said. I’m packing my shit and I’m leaving.”
“Wait, I thought we fixed all that. I said I was sorry.”
Jolene’s dresser had gone with everything else, leaving her clothes in a heap on the floor where the bed used to stand. She pulled a suitcase down from the overhead shelf in the closet and began throwing fistfuls of clothes into it.
Amber stood in the door, watching Jolene try to mash her suitcase so it would zip all the way around. “I need your help.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you agreed to let people drop murder victims on our front step.”
Amber stepped into the room and knelt beside Jolene. “I’ve fucked up. A bunch. This place, without you, would not have survived a year. You’ve worked your ass off. If this place was yours and I had no involvement with it, it’d be doing great now. I know it.”
Jolene kept pressing down on her suitcase. “If you’re expecting me to tell you you’re wrong, I’m not going to.”
“I don’t want you to tell me I’m wrong. I don’t want that and I don’t want you to think you owe me anything, J-Bird. But I’m asking you, as my best friend, the Jay-Z to my Beyoncé, just one more time, to be my ride or die. We have two bodies down in the basement. Their funerals are tomorrow morning and the next day. I can’t do it alone. I’m not asking you to help me cut them up. I’ll do that.”
Jolene gave up on ever getting her suitcase to close. She swept the hair out of her face and finally looked over at Amber kneeling next to her. “With what, exactly?”
“I’ll need to buy a saw. Rhino recommended one.”
“We’re broke.”
“I have one credit card that hasn’t been maxed out yet.”
“This feels so awful.”
“I know. It is awful. And I know this probably isn’t the best time to tell you this, but.…”
“Oh, God. There’s more?”
“The bank’s been calling. We have two weeks to pay what we owe or they’re going to foreclose.”
“Goddamn it, Amber. I’m through with this. So fucking through.”
“I know you are. I know. But I don’t have anywhere else to go. Dad left this place to me and took off. He won’t return my calls. I think he changed his phone number. He doesn’t care. And your parents, well, we tapped that vein too many times. This is on us. We need to be grown-ass adults and this is the only way I can see us getting out of this, in the time required to do it in. I need your help to keep the funerals going while I tend to the side stuff. I’m trying to make up for all my years fucking around. We can do this. Please.”
The doorbell rang.
Jolene violently flinched. “What did I do in a previous life?”
“Come on, let’s go see what that is. Together.”
They returned to the reception area again and went behind the desk. The CCTV showed no one on the front porch. But the second screen, giving a downward angle of the driveway, right in front of the garage door, showed a lump lying pressed near the house. The camera’s quality wasn’t great and to them it looked like an impossibly large black cocoon.
Amber rushed to the front door. She saw a silver Lexus tear out of her driveway, barking tires as it flew around the corner, and speed away. Across the street, she saw the neighbor’s upstairs lights come on. She ran outside around the house, across the side yard, hopped through the overgrown flower bed, and slapped on bare feet down the driveway. The motion light clicked on, and as if on stage under a spotlight, there lay a body wrapped in a rug, just like in the movies.
The garage door shuddered open, Jolene standing inside as it rose. Amber watched her stare at the body from behind her smudged glasses, hike her shoulders and sigh. She dragged her eyes up to Amber’s, standing on the other side of the body. “Get the shoulders, I’ll get the feet.”
Chapter Four
“Thank you.” Amber tried leaning over the body toward Jolene. “Seriously, thank you. Hug me.”
Jolene batted her away. “Get the shoulders. The sun will be up soon.”
As they hoisted the body off the ground, it peeled away from the cement with a wet sound. Tottering backward, Amber maneuvered the corpse alongside the hearse, pressed the button to drop the garage door, and they waddled it into the workroom, counted to three, then swung it up onto the stainless-steel slab. Upon impact, a puff of white shot out the end of the rolled carpet, each feather seesawing through the air to land on the bleached, tiled floor.
“Think it was a pillow fight turned fatal?” Amber said. “What? Don’t tell me we’re not in the exact kind of situation that all but demands some comic relief.”
“I’m really afraid to see what’s inside this thing.”
“Whoever they are, they don’t smell,” Amber said, lifting a corner of the rug wrapping the body. “Which is good, because Rhino said we can’t bring him anything that’s been harvested from someone who’s been dead longer than a day. Oh, and none of it can have been embalmed. We have to take everything out of them first. He suggests packing peanuts, to bulk that back up. And when we get the saw, we need to get those coolers that can hold a six-pack, some plastic wrap, and dry ice. He won’t accept deliveries in anything else. We need to get their approximate age, gender, and blood type if we can. He really stressed the blood-type thing. He also said—”
“Let’s just see wh
at we’re working with,” Jolene said. “And start there.”
“Do you want your radio on?” Amber asked.
“Sure.”
Once they found some light classic rock station to help bring some levity to the room, they snapped on latex gloves, donned plastic face-shields, and opened the rug.
Inside was a man, probably somewhere around their age, maybe a little younger, close-shorn hair, skinny, and naked. His bloodied face had feathers stuck all over it. He had two bullet wounds in him – one between his pale blue eyes and another in his crotch. The latter wound seemed older, the crust black around the wound, and his legs from groin to his socks, the only clothing he was wearing, were brown with dry blood. Amber couldn’t help staring at his massacred scrotum; she didn’t have testicles, but still winced sympathetically seeing the disaster that’d been made of his.
“What’s the story here you think?” Amber said. “They blew up his junk.”
Jolene’s mouth was a thin, bloodless line as she surveyed the corpse, hands on her hips, shaking her head. “Some kind of mafia thing maybe.”
With her gloved hand, Amber lifted the guy’s arm by the wrist. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in. He’s still kind of warm too.”
On the inside of his left arm there was a small puncture wound. Since it was the only one, he either was a first-time user of intravenous drugs or he’d had an IV put in. On his bicep was a tattoo that looked relatively new; it was still peeling. Russian characters, a string of ten in all.
“You suppose anybody’s looking for this guy?” Jolene said.
“Maybe. Better to get this over with soon.”
“He’s so young,” Jolene said. “It’s kinda sad.”
“We should get to the store. Let’s get him in a drawer and go before rush hour starts.” Amber tore off her gloves.
Pinching them by the toes, Jolene peeled off the dead guy’s socks and stood at the corpse’s pale feet, her face a matching bloodless shade.
“What’s wrong?” Amber said, turning off the radio.
“I want to stick around.”
“Okay, honey. I was never gonna kick you out. Did you think that?”
“No. I didn’t think that. But I wanna stay. We can make this work, I think.” She looked down at the corpse again. “This isn’t what we talked about doing in college. But it’s still working for ourselves.” She lifted her eyes to meet Amber’s again. “Do you feel good about this?”
“I will, once we get paid. It’s not like we’re selling crack on the street corner. This guy won’t miss any of this.”
Jolene nodded, small. “Hey, I’m really sorry I said what I said before.”
“I’m sorry too. We’re cool, you know that, right?”
“Yeah. I do. Okay, let’s go get a saw.”
* * *
Maybe it was muscle memory, but Frank spun the wheel of his Lexus onto 146th and cruised down the empty, dark street. It was tree-lined as it had been before, all the familiar houses. Nothing much looked different. He slowed to a crawl when he came to house 121. The shades were drawn, curtains closed, and he was sure the keys on his keychain wouldn’t work in the locks anymore. Not that he would do that. Though they’d said some terrible shit to each other in therapy, then in court when therapy wasn’t getting them anywhere, Frank wouldn’t become one of those crazy ex-husbands. He still thought about Rachel all the time. The day they met in school. The first time they kissed, in her parents’ basement listening to Bob Dylan after feeding the koi fish they kept in a kiddie pool down there so they wouldn’t freeze in the little pond out behind the house. The first time they had sex, just a few feet from where they first kissed; the washer and dryer rumbling away helped mask any sound they made from her parents right upstairs. The little gasp she made the third time they had sex, when it worked the way it should’ve. Then the thousands of times after, and how about year four of marriage it started to taper off and taper off. Hours at the clinic, a million bloody faces. And the faces he wanted to see, those of his wife and daughter, in his memory of those years, were so few and far between until soon, it was waking up at the hospital, working all day, then spending the night there again. Coming home to argue, happy to have his pager go off, giving his daughter a kiss on the forehead as she stared into a computer screen moving little monsters around and her saying ‘I love you’ like she had no tongue because she was so distracted and probably, now, had a hard time remembering his face because he was never there. A smear of color in her life, the occasional word or two. Or maybe those were just dads she saw on TV.
The lights were on in the house. He could tell by the way the curtains glowed. Only the downstairs ones, though. The upper right window on the second floor was Jessica’s room. It was dark. Maybe she was at work or with friends. She sent him a friend request on some social media thing but Frank couldn’t ever get his brain wrapped around how it worked so only occasionally checked it. Jessica didn’t have Frank in one of her ‘inner circles’ so he didn’t see a lot of what she wrote, only pictures of meals she’d had and the occasional video clip of some singer she liked – Michele something-or-other, some French guy.
Frank pressed the accelerator and left the neighborhood. Back on the highway, having it mostly to himself, he floored it. Away from the funeral home, away from that corpse he didn’t make but still had to deal with, away from his old house where he probably wasn’t even remembered as having set foot in – he could barely remember living there himself.
* * *
It was only an hour’s drive home but Frank smoked an entire pack of cigarettes in that time, leaving a trail of orange filters across Minneapolis and into St. Paul. The sun was coming up and his car told him the outside temp was already seventy-one degrees. He felt none of it. He kept the air conditioner cranked, only feeling the humidity coming down like a blanket over the city when he tossed out another cigarette butt. The car was full of fog by the time he pulled into his driveway. Missus Shulman, who lived next door, was standing on her side of the hedge with her gardening gloves on, even at this hour, looking at his driveway. She didn’t acknowledge him having pulled into the garage until he said, “Good morning, Missus Shulman.”
“What’s all that there?” she said, pointing with her little hand-rake at the black dots and dark smears on his driveway – a blood trail leading to the side door of his house.
More blood on the doorknob, on the jamb.
It didn’t look so bad in the dark when he’d left.
“I barbecued steaks last night,” Frank said, blurting it. “Accidentally dropped a few.” Before she could look behind him, into the garage, where his grill sat under a coat of dust, he tapped the garage door button to close it.
“Harold and I like to grill out,” Missus Shulman said. “Why didn’t you invite us over? We were home. Watching TV. Not doing anything. You could’ve had us over. We would’ve come.”
“It was friends from work. Trying to impress the new boss.”
“I thought you were a bag boy at that hippie grocery store.”
Frank shrugged, tried smiling amiably. “I’m chasing after a promotion and the best way to a man’s heart, I’ve always heard, is through his stomach.”
“Are you trying to impress him or fuck him?”
“Is there anything else I can help you with, Missus Shulman?”
“No. You should clean that up before it attracts flies. If you use dish soap and—”
Frank closed his blood-spattered door behind him and stopped in his kitchen. In the cold light of day coming in through the back window, the blood almost seemed to glow. It had darkened and dried and cracked in places, but in others it still sat pooled bright red and shiny-wet. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. Frank tried not to step in any of it as he moved into the living room and turned to look into the O.R. where the plastic curtain remained pinned back. As Missus Shulman warned, there were f
lies. More blood. All over his operating table, smeared on every handle of his supply cabinet, all over the sink, the mirror. And the exclamation point, Vasily’s artery had come loose and sprayed up the wall and arced across the ceiling.
Frank got out the bleach and the kitchen gloves and got to work on hands and knees. He scraped the most indictable thing, all the bloody feathers everywhere, into small piles and flicked them off the glove fingers into the trash bag. He scrubbed and mopped and sprayed and wiped. He needed some of it left behind, though, because having it too clean would tip the Petroskys off. Frank considered how much blood a man shot in the nuts would produce, trying to remember what the O.R. looked like before Simone had shot Vasily. He left some, enough, and took the bag of bloody feathers out to the garage and flung it in the garbage can. He came back inside, set up an oscillating fan to kick some of the stink out of the house, and checked the time on his phone.
It was nearly nine.
He hadn’t eaten since breakfast at Ted’s the day before and hadn’t slept in longer. He had a headache that’d settled across the top of his skull sometime yesterday and had remained bolted there, crushing his brain. He washed his hands to the elbow twice, had a glass of water, started the coffee, scraped the green off two pieces of bread and put them in the toaster.
He was due for the afternoon shift at the grocery store but he was considering calling in sick. He didn’t know what time Bryce would be by looking for Vasily and how long it’d take to explain what supposedly had happened. As Frank watched the coils inside the toaster begin to glow orange, he ran through everything he’d need to say to keep himself alive.
“I woke up and he was gone. I didn’t hear him leave. I checked on him before I lay down and he was stabilized for the time being. No. I woke up and he was just…gone. I remember I set an alarm for three a.m. and when it went off, I got up and he was just…gone. I thought about calling you guys but I didn’t have a number.”
He nodded to himself, liking how it sounded. Maybe make it a little more frantic and apologetic, stammer some. Like Simone said, they wouldn’t suspect him of killing Vasily after he’d proven himself working so hard to keep him alive. He had that much at least. Frank watched the two slices of wheat bread in the toaster begin to darken, the crusts shriveling away from the heat. He didn’t like the idea of trusting total strangers to do whatever they would do with Vasily to purge him from the face of the earth. Frank always liked doing things himself, seeing a job through on his own to know it was done right. He had removed everything he’d put on Vasily, every bandage and piece of tape he’d used. He didn’t touch him at any point without gloves on so there was no chance of fingerprints, which Frank had heard were always difficult to lift, accurately, from skin anyway. So other than maybe the odd hair or eyelash, there was nothing on Vasily that could possibly link Frank to him – oh, fuck.