William Brown - The Undertaker

“You can't be serious.”

“Can't I?” he answered, smiling at me as he buttoned the smock. Even now, I think that was the coldest and most malevolent smile I had ever seen, before or after. “I'm as serious as lung cancer, boy. In fact, you've never met anyone in your miserable, little life who is halfway as serious as me. You see, when you showed up yesterday, you caused a great deal of consternation, not with me, because I know what I'm doing. I believe in our mission and I know it's right, but you really spooked the others. I'm sure that was exactly what you had in mind, but now it is my turn. Simply put, I want to know why you are here, why you're bothering us, Mr. Whomever-you-are. I want to know what you know, everything you know, and who you're working for.”

“Who I'm working for?”

“Is it Jimmy Santorini's people or Rico Patillo's? If it isn't one of them, maybe it's someone at Justice or the FBI who suddenly developed a queasy stomach over our little operation. Is that it? Or, are you really working for the local snoops downtown, as you said you were? Which is it?”

“You can't get away with this.”

“Peter, Peter,” he looked down at me, amused and disappointed. “Do you have any idea how many times I've gotten away with ‘this’? No, you couldn't, could you? Well let me assure you that the handful of graves you found up in Oak Hill with those grease balls from the Santorini mob in New Jersey, they are only the very small and most recent tip of a very large iceberg.”

“I'm going to be missed, Ralph.”

“By whom? We've tracked back on all your cell phone calls, the ones you made and the ones you received. And we've analyzed every piece of plastic in your wallet, your bank records, and every credit card charge you've made for the past year.”

“My phone calls? My credit cards? What…”

“Every dime you've spent and everything there is to know about your pathetic little life — where you've been staying, what you had for breakfast, your shoe size, where you had your car fixed, everything you've bought, every bill you paid, everything.”

I was stunned. And I'd never felt more alone in my life.

“As a fellow professional, I must admit that the legend they wove for you — all the background and documents — they are first class, as good as I've ever seen. Someone went to an amazing amount of trouble to put you in place. Unless of course you really are who you say you are.”

“That's what I've been trying to tell you.”

“Ah, but that's the problem, isn't it? We need to find out which is true.”

“People know I'm here.”

“Who? Your friend Doug in Boston? If that's who he really is, then that's one more loose end we'll have to take care of, all in due time of course, but it will be taken care of. A little “collateral damage,” I think they call it.”

I pulled hard again on the straps holding me down, desperate to find some wiggle room, but there was none.

“Please understand, I will get the whole story out of you before this evening is over, in about twenty minutes, I suspect. As “Old Blue Eyes” sang, “Set 'em up Joe, there's no one in the place, except you and me.” Nooo-body, Pete, nobody except you and me.”

He circled the table again, staring down at me with that same thin, sadistic smile. “You know what the men in our little detachment down in El Salvador and Nicaragua called me? They called me the undertaker. Funny, isn't it? Here we are in Larry Greene's funeral home and I'm the one they call the undertaker,” Tinkerton chuckled. “It started as a little joke Sergeant Dannmeyer came up with. We were part of an ecumenical little group that was tasked to liaison with the local counter-insurgency people. Liaison, my ass. Our job was to eliminate the communist infrastructure in the villages. Eliminate, disappear, call it what you like, it was a polite way of saying we killed people. We needed information and we made people talk to get it. That is what I do. I pry the truth out of people and I'm quite good at it. Yes, before the end comes tonight, as you feel yourself slipping away into that dark forever, you'll start to talk, all right. You'll talk, and you'll talk, and you'll talk, until you can't talk anymore.”

“Look, Ralph…”

He dismissed the protest with a wave of his hand. “All in good time. All in good time. I just wanted you to appreciate where we are headed, that's all. Like a good vintage wine, a little terror helps one focus the mind.”

He opened the door of one of the glass cabinets and examined the knives. “What marvelous toys. When I was in counter- intelligence, we never had nifty tools like this. Just coat hangers, penknives, electric cords, pliers, and our boundless imaginations, of course. But this stuff of Larry's is great.”

He picked up a scalpel and let the light flash off the razor-sharp blade. “I watched Larry do a couple of them down here. Professional interest, of course. First, he opens a vein or two and lets the blood drain out. Not much to it really, and it doesn't take very long. A small incision in a major vein in one of the lower extremities, a couple of shunts, and gravity does the rest. Personally, the system is a bit messy for my taste, but that's why the table is sloped and what the gutters along the sides are for.”

“Look, Ralph, you've got this thing all wrong.”

He completely ignored me. “Then he opens an artery or two up top and pumps in the formaldehyde to flush everything out. Nothing tricky about that either. After he's finished, a couple of clamps, a half dozen stitches, a bit of Crazy Glue, and voila! Finished, except for the makeup and the cosmetic repairs.” Tinkerton looked down and smiled. “Sorry, but we won't be worrying about the artsy stuff tonight.“

Tinkerton reached his hand out and I felt a cold finger touch me at the base of the neck above the collarbone. I jumped as if I had been touched by a high power line. “That's where the carotid artery and the jugular vein are located,” he chuckled softly. “Larry likes using them. Simple and easy to get at, you see.”

His hand moved down and he grabbed my upper arm. I fought him, but with my wrist strapped down it wasn't hard for him to turn it outward. “Now, some embalmers prefer to use the ones here, inside the bicep, but they're a bit harder to get at.”

I strained against the straps, trying to pull my arm away, but it was hopeless.

“Me? Perhaps I'm old fashioned. If I had to choose, I'd pick the femoral artery and vein right here in the hip and groin.” I never saw his hand move, but suddenly his fingers passed lightly across my abdomen and hip and I felt myself shiver. “That's the iliac. It's less obvious, you know, out of sight and out of mind.”

He chuckled as he turned away; tapping the tall metal cylinders and picking up the rubber tube with the big bore steel tube at its end. “Put this baby in an artery and turn on that pump. With twenty pounds of pressure, it doesn't take very long. Everything simple and very painless,” he said with that cold, hard smile again. “Of course, that assumes the subject is dead.” He picked up a can of talcum powder and dusted his hands. He pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves one at a time, letting the wrist bands snap. “I have been forewarned that when one is working on Californians, one cannot be too careful regarding the transmission of certain diseases, you know.”

When he turned back toward me, he was holding a scalpel, looking down at my body with a cold, almost scientific indifference. I stared up at him, wide-eyed, my eyes following him around the table. I felt his hand on my thigh and I almost took the table with me through the ceiling.

“My, my, but we are touchy tonight, aren't we?” He laughed.