John Miller - Upside Down

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Friday / 4:01 A.M.

From ground level, the automobile graveyard looked boundless. The moon was like an open eye that, when it peered through holes in the clouds, was reflected in thousands of bits of chrome and glass. After the four figures passed under a buzzing quartz-halogen lamp set on a pole, long shadows ran out from them, reaching across the oil-stained earth like the fingers of a glove.

The quartet entered a valley where rusting wrecks, stagger-stacked like bricks, formed walls twenty feet tall. One of the three men carried a lantern that squeaked as it swung back and forth.

The woman's tight leather pants showed the precise curve of her buttocks, the rock-hard thighs, and the sharply cut calf muscles. A dark woolen V-neck under her windbreaker kept the chill at a comfortable distance. The visor on her leather ball cap put her face in deeper shadow.

They stopped. When the man fired up his lantern, hard-edged white light illuminated the four as mercilessly as a flashbulb.

Marta Ruiz's hair fell down the center of her back like a horse's tail. In an evening gown she could become an exotic, breathtaking creature that made otherwise staid men stammer like idiots. “How far now?” she asked. Her accent had a slight Latin ring to it.

“Not too far,” Cecil Mahoney said, looking down at the much shorter woman. An extremely large and powerfully built man, Mahoney looked like a crazed Viking. His thick bloodred facial hair so completely covered his mouth that his words might have been supplied by a ventriloquist. He wore a black leather vest over a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, filthy jeans with pregnant knees, and engineer boots. His thick arms carried so many tattoos that it looked like he was wearing a brilliantly colored long-sleeved shirt. Silver rings adorned his fingers, the nails of which were dead ringers for walnut hulls.

The other two men were dull-eyed muscle without conscience or independent thought. Cecil Mahoney was the biggest crystal methamphetamine wholesaler in the South and the leader of the Rolling Thunder Motorcycle Club. Stone-cold killers pissed their pants when a thought of Cecil Mahoney invaded their minds. Few people could muster the kind of rage required to use their bare hands like claws and literally rip people into pieces like Cecil could.

The three men didn't see Marta as a physical threat. How could such a small woman harm them-kick them in the shins, bite and scratch? They had seen that she was unarmed when she stepped out of the car and put on a nylon jacket so lightweight that any one of them could have wadded up the garment, stuffed it into his mouth, and swallowed it like a tissue.

They turned a corner, moved deeper into the yard.

“Over there,” Cecil said.

They stopped at the sharply angled rear of a Cadillac Seville with its front end smashed into a mushroom of rusted steel. Marta's sensitive nose picked up the sickly sweet odor, folded somewhere in the oily stench of petroleum and mildewed fabric, of something else in decay. One of the henchmen lifted the trunk lid while the other held up the lantern so Marta could see inside.

“Careful you don't puke all over yourself, little girl,” Cecil warned.

Marta leaned in, took the corpse's head in her bare hands, and twisted the face up into the light. The way the skin moved under her fingers told her a great deal. There were two bands of duct tape surrounding the head; one covering the mouth and nose and another over the eyes and both ears. It made the features impossible to read, which was now irrelevant. Other than hair color, this corpse was not even close to the woman she had come to identify and to kill.

“Where's the reward?” Cecil grunted.

“The money is in my car's trunk, but whether or not it belongs to you is a question I can't yet answer,” Marta told him.

“That's her, and I'm getting that reward.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not.”

“Okay, gal, you've seen her enough.”

The low position of the lantern made Cecil look even more menacing-his small water-blue eyes glittering. He used a lot of what he sold. From the start he had made it abundantly clear to Marta that dealing with a woman was beneath him. His first words to her had been that he didn't know why anybody would send a “split tail” to do important business. He had referred to her as a “juicy little thang.” If she played this wrong, she would be raped and murdered in some unspeakable manner. She knew the piece of trunk cheese was no more Amber Lee than Cecil Mahoney was the Son of God. The needle marks on the dead woman's arm alone were enough to tell her this girl was some overdosed waif. It followed that the envelope Amber had in her possession would not be there. Marta hoped Arturo was having luck tracking the woman in New Orleans.

“You failed to mention that she was dead. Why is that?”

Cecil's patience was thinning. “Bitch choked on her own vomit. Look, honeypot, a hundred thousand clams was the deal. So stop with the questions. Let's go get my money.”

“It wasn't a dead-or-alive offer, Mr. Mahoney. There were questions that we needed to ask her, and can't now. My boss expects accuracy in the information he receives from me. You said that she was alive. When did she die?”

“It's damn unfortunate. Boomer found her dead yesterday evening choked on puke. Ain't that right, Boomer?”

The man holding the lantern nodded. “I found her dead yesterday. Choked on her puke.”

“I wonder how she gained so much weight in so few days.”

“Well, she's just bloating up 'cause it's hot in a car trunk.”

“Hot in there,” Boomer agreed.

The temperature had not risen above fifty-five degrees in the past two days. “Take it out,” Marta told the men.

“What the hell for?”

“It will be abundantly clear to you, Mr. Mahoney, when they take it out.”

“Get old Amber out, then,” Cecil ordered. Boomer put the lantern on the ground and both he and the third man reached in, wrestled the body from the trunk, and dropped it to the oil-crusted black dirt like a bag of trash. In the lantern light the men looked like depraved giants. As Marta squatted beside the corpse, she pinched her cap's brim as if pulling it down and withdrew from it a wide matte-black double-edged ceramic blade that fit inside the bill. She palmed it, holding the blade flat against her forearm. She knew what was going to happen in the coming few seconds just as surely as if they had all been rehearsing it for days. “You are right, Cecil, it doesn't smell so good. Like it's been dead longer than one day.”

“Bodies,” Cecil said. “Who can account for spoil rates?”

She shrugged. “You have a knife?” She held out her right hand, palm up.

“Knife for what?” he asked.

“A knife, yes or no?”

She didn't know how much longer Cecil would allow this charade to run. Still entertained, he reached into his vest pocket and placed a stag-handled folding knife in her hand. She opened it using her teeth and tested the edge for sharpness with the side of her thumb. Much better than she would have hoped. A man and his tools.

“You could shave your little pussy with it,” Cecil muttered.

Nervous snickers-six fiery, obscene pig eyes.

She reached out suddenly and sliced through the duct tape, laying the corpse's cheek open from the jaw to the teeth twice to form parentheses that crossed at the top and bottom. She jabbed the blade into the flesh and lifted out the plug in the same way one might remove a piece of pumpkin to make a jack-o'-lantern's eye. The dark purple tissue was crawling with what looked like animated kernels of rice.

“Aw, man!” Boomer exclaimed.