Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

I opened the gate. The hinges creaked and the gate sagged, its wooden slats scraping against the concrete sidewalk. Bobby winced and looked over his shoulder like it was an alarm or something, but I knew it didn’t matter. All the houses around here have tall wooden backyard fences. Everybody wants privacy, and everybody else gives it to them. It’s rude to peek through the cracks in the fence to see what’s going on in your neighbor’s backyard. Once we got behind the fence, we could do almost anything and no one would know.

Bobby walked through the gate and I closed it behind us like we belonged there. No sweat.

Most of the backyard was just dirt, but some of it had been lawn before the workmen trampled it down. Their big, ugly boot prints were all over the place. Scraps of lumber and little bits of chalky walling and rusty nails were ground into the dirt right along with more cigarette butts. In the back corner a couple of piles of dog shit drew flies. I wrinkled my nose against the smell. Debris from inside the house — big pieces of walling and insulation and scraps of wood and little bits of wire — was piled against the inside of the fence, and more stuff was jammed in a battered metal trash can next to the back gate.

The guys who worked here were slobs. Good thing. Hidden underneath all that debris was the little red Sold sign I pulled off the top of the Realty Masters sign the day before. If they’d cleaned up their mess they would have found it. Some people make it so easy to play the game. They deserve what they get.

The sliding-glass patio door was unlocked, just like it was yesterday.

“Easy,” I said. “Told you.”

I slid the door open and grinned at Bobby. It wasn’t my sweet, innocent grin, more like a shared-secret kind of grin. My playing-the-game grin. The best grin of all.

The door opened into a room I guessed was supposed to be the dining room. A paint-splattered plastic sheet covered dirty carpet. The room was empty except for three doors propped up against the walls. Yesterday the white paint on the doors had still been wet. Now the doors were dry, but the house still stank as bad as it had the day before, maybe even worse because it was so hot inside.

I looked at the white door closest to the patio door. The scratches I’d made the day before with a nail in the new paint at the bottom of the lowest panel were still there. Not quite my initials — I’m not stupid — but enough of a mark that if anybody looked close, they’d know somebody did it on purpose. I wondered if anybody would notice before they put the door back where it belonged.

“You do that?” Bobby asked, leaning in to look at the door.

“Yeah.” I laughed. “Cool, huh?”

“You’re a freak, you know that?”

If anybody else had said that, I would have slugged them. But Bobby knows he can call me that and I won’t get mad.

“And you’re the freak’s friend, so what does that make you?”

“Freak Man!”

Burger Man. Rebound Man. Now Freak Man. That was just too much. Bobby could always make me laugh. We stood there on that paint-splattered piece of plastic, busting up in the middle of a hot, stinky dining room over something that was only funny because I was in the game.

We were both freaks, and that was fine by me.

Things started to go bad when I showed Bobby the dead hamster.

I didn’t think it through, I guess. Animals are just animals to me, nothing special. But Bobby, he used to have a dog before his old man found a mess it made and beat the crap out of it. That’s the only time Bobby ever stood up to his old man, and that piece of shit turned his belt on Bobby. He ended up with a bruise on his arm the shape of a belt buckle, and probably more on his back that he wouldn’t show me. I wanted to wrap that belt around his old man’s neck and squeeze, pull it tight until his face turned as purple as Bobby’s arm. I didn’t do it, though. Part of the game is to pick the right time. One of these days it will be the right time for Bobby’s old man.

“C’mon,” I said after we finally quit laughing. “I gotta show you the weirdest thing.”

The dead hamster was inside what was left of a wall in an upstairs bedroom. I found it the day before, just a piece of stiff, dried-up fur with sunken holes where the eyes used to be. The guys working on the house had punched out a hole in the wall between two of the bedrooms, and the hamster was wedged in tight next to a beam in the empty space between the two sides of the wall. I figured maybe it got inside somehow and couldn’t get back out again. Stupid thing probably starved to death.

I thought the hamster was cool. Bobby wanted to give it a funeral.

“A real funeral, you know, like a Viking or something. You wanted to burn something anyway. We could make a funeral pyre.”

All that Bobby knew about funeral pyres came from reading comics. That heroic, send-your-dead-warrior-off-in-a-burning-boat crap. I could have cared less about the funeral, but the idea of a pyre was kinda cool, I had to admit. Barbecued hamster. Better than burgers.

“Well, I’m not touching it,” I told him. “You want to set it on fire—”

“Give it a funeral.”

“Whatever. You’re picking it up.”

It took Bobby a good five minutes to get that hamster out of the wall. The thing must have been jammed in there real tight. Me, I wouldn’t have had the patience, but Bobby wiggled it back and forth real slow. Like he didn’t want to leave even the smallest piece of it behind.

Bobby carried the hamster back downstairs like it was still alive, cradled it in his hands right up next to his shirt.

“That thing probably has bugs in it,” I said. “Worms. They’re gonna come crawling out all over you.”

“Shut up.”

“Slither right up your arm—”

“Shut up.”

“—crawl in your nose—”

“Shut up!”

“—and eat out your brain.”

“Shut up, shut up! You don’t know anything about it!”

Bobby never yelled at me. Never got so mad at me that spit flew out of his mouth and his face got all blotchy red.

I stopped on the stairs and just stared at him. For the first time, Bobby looked ugly to me. Just for a second I saw some of Bobby’s old man in his face, saw other kids with black hair and permanent tans and mean eyes who hid guns and knives in their baggy pants, and I knew that was what other people saw when they looked at Bobby.

He turned away from me and started down the stairs again. Me, he yelled at, but he talked baby talk to the dead hamster, walking down the stairs real slow and deliberate like he was at a real funeral.

“So, where are we going to do this?” I asked him just for something to say.

Bobby didn’t answer me, so I followed him downstairs and through the house as he walked from room to room. He was looking for a place to do it. I thought he’d pick the fireplace just because that’s where somebody like Bobby would start a fire. No imagination. No great ideas. But he surprised me. He took that thing to the kitchen and stopped in front of the sink.

“Here,” Bobby said. “This is a good place.”

He looked at me like he expected me to argue. I didn’t. I was too jazzed. Finally, we were going to do what we came here for. I’d make him pay for yelling at me later.

The kitchen sink was full of gunked-up paintbrushes and dirty rags, and a couple of old cans with some kind of dirty, muddy-looking liquid in them. Something to clean the brushes, I guessed. Not water, because it stank to high heaven. I moved the junk out of the sink, piled all of it on the countertop next to the stove.

“What are we going to use for the pyre?” I asked.

“Wood,” Bobby said, like I was the stupidest person in the world. “Funeral pyres are always made out of wood.”