Charlie Huston - The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

Back in my room I opened the FedEx envelope and shook out the bills and an assortment of change.

$567.89. And, true to form, no note. Not that I'd asked for one.

Under certain circumstances, the odd amount would mean Mom had sent whatever was lying around, but that wasn't the case here.

Five hundred.

Sixty.

And seven dollars.

Eighty.

And nine cents.

Five six seven eight nine, an ascending numerical sequence. Sent specifically to bring me luck, to raise my spirits, to lift my fortunes.

I'm lucky there wasn't a crystal pyramid in the envelope.

Five hundred sixty-seven and eighty-nine cents. Enough to cover the new phone, buy some groceries and pay off some of the IOUs on the fridge.

I thought about what I'd do the next day. Sleep in. Have some coffee. Pick up around the place, clean the tub. Go do some grocery shopping. Maybe hit the bookstore for a few novels. Get the latest issue of Femmes Fatale. Stop by the shop. Have lunch. Buy a couple DVDs. Come home and have some dinner. Watch a movie. And in bed by seven. Just like pretty much every day this last year. Any day when I had money, that is.

I thought about it. How nice and mellow it would be. A day to myself after having to be around people and be at Po Sin's beck and call and hear all his shit.

Yeah, a me day as a reward for all that hard work.

I picked up the handset from the phone I'd brought into the bedroom.

– Clean Team.

– Hey it's Web.

– Yeah?

– You find anyone for tomorrow?

– Why?

– Nothing.

– Didn't get any money from mommy today?

– No.

– Well, you want to work, all you got to do is say so.

– I want to work.

There was a lot of blood at the Malibu beach house. And it was everywhere. Really everywhere.

Gabe studied the thick maroon blotch at the center of a lighter red eruption splashed over the wall and headboard, all of it studded with gray and yellow and pink gobbets of dangling matter.

He fingered a strip of yellow tape, marked like a yardstick, that ran up the edge of the wall. Near the top it intersected with another piece that ran horizontally just over the highest point of the mess. He looked at that point.

– That wasn't a nine.

The deputy coughed in the doorway.

– Yeah, what we thought. But it was. He did it with a mouth full of water.

Gabe looked again at the dry blood.

– That would do it.

I thought about high school science classes. How shock waves travel through water. I thought about what would happen if you filled a soda can with water and stuck the barrel of a gun in the hole and pulled the trigger. And then the deputy filled in the gaps in my imagination. -The water shredded his cheeks. Crushed his nasal passages and ripped his nose off. Some of it was forced down his throat and it turned his tongue inside out and punched a hole in the bottom of his stomach. Goes without saying it took the whole back of his head off. Everything behind the ears.

He rapped his knuckle on the wall opposite the bed.

– Created so much pressure in his sinuses, his eyes popped out. We found one of them over here.

I looked through the open door that led to the master bath. Blood spackled the white tile and porcelain and bath towels. My reflection in the mirror over the twin sinks was glazed with dried streaks of red. Beyond, through a door at the far end of the bathroom, and let me just say that it was a really big fucking bathroom, I could see more blood spattering the carpet, chair and desk in what looked to be a small den. Small by the standards of this house, that is.

But those rooms were nothing compared with the bedroom. The bedroom looked painted in blood, but not well painted, mind you. Painted, in point of fact, by a collection of one-armed troglodytes employing bundles of reeds rather than brushes and rollers. Painted in dripping and splotchy reds, maroons and purples punctuated by bits and clots of gray and white and black, and the occasional twisted knot of tendon.

– This is unfuckingbelievable.

Gabe and the deputy looked at me.

I held out my arms, bugging my eyes.

– What? Am I wrong? I mean, this is unfuckingreal. This is. Water in the mouth? Water in the mouth gets you this? Myfuckinggod.

The deputy looked at Gabe.

– Where'd you find him?

Gabe picked at something imbedded in the wall, his fingernails rimmed with dry yellow paint.

– Po Sin knows him.

– You tell him about the pipe bomb?

Gabe took a Leatherman from the nylon case on his belt and unfolded it into pliers.

– Be my guest.

The deputy put his hands on his hips.

– Guy was ex-military

He looked at Gabe.

– Right?

Gabe closed the tips of the pliers over whatever was in the wall.

– I think so, yeah.

The deputy looked back at me.

– OK, ex-military guy wanted to off himself. So he made a pipe bomb.

I put my hand to my forehead.

– No.

– Yeah. And to do it, what he did was, he sat on it. And I don't mean sat on it, I mean he sat on it. Full insertion.

I put my other hand on my forehead.

– Oh no.

He nodded.

– Yeah. Pipe bomb in the ass. And, here we go, he does this while seated on his water bed.

– Oh shit.

– You'd think. But here's what happened. The, what, the internal dynamics of a bomb in the rectal passage were such that the force of the explosion went straight up. Not only did the bed not burst, but by giving slightly while still offering resistance, it helped to focus the blast upward. Thing went off, it scoured his viscera, guts, lungs, everything, shot them up through his head and out the top of his skull. Like a fountain. The whole room got sprayed, but other than looking a little bloated, and, you know, his head being gone from the eyebrows up, he was intact. And the bed was peachy.

He made pistol fingers and pointed at me.

– That was a fucking mess.

Gabe twisted the pliers and pulled something free of the wall and inspected it.

– Yeah. It was a big job.

He dropped the object in his palm and walked to the deputy, folding the Leatherman away.

– You need this for anything?

I walked over and looked at the large silver-filled molar he was showing the deputy.

The deputy shook his head.

– No. We finished in here. No way to fake a scene like this. Don't need teeth in the wall to tell us what happened. He made it easy. Note. All that.

I walked to the door and looked down the hall. I could see Po Sin on the couch next to the girl who'd let us in. The two of them going over papers on a clipboard, the girl signing her name. Po Sin taking a travel pack of Kleenex from his breast pocket and handing it to her as she set the clipboard aside and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

I looked back in the room.

– So why'd he do it?

The deputy looked at me.

– Brain tumor.

He pointed at what had been a head, now gored all over the wall.

– Guess he showed it who was boss.

In the driveway Gabe and I put on our Tyveks and I watched Po Sin palm the deputy a fifty.

– Thanks for the referral, Mercer. Hope we can do some more business over here.

Mercer pocketed the cash.

– No problem.

He opened the door of his patrol car.

– Far as I'm concerned, Aftershock's off the referral list. Last job I put them onto, a teenager did her wrists in the bathtub, right. Found out she was pregnant or something. Anyway, door closed. Hardly any splatter at all. Plastic shower curtain. Couple towels. Easy as hell. A month after they were in there, the girl's brother uses the tub for the first time, to wash the family dog, right. Has Fido in there, running the water to get it warm how his best little friend likes it. What happens is, the water starts backing up, starts filling the tub, and it's fucking red. Drain was choked with dry blood and feces from the girl. Those Aftershock rocket scientists, they poured some Drano in there and called it a day. Little boy is already traumatized from his sister having to take a real long nap, and now bloody water's gushing up from the drain and his dog is spazzing out. Family calls Aftershock, pretty justifiably upset, and Morton tells them it's not his problem. Tells them he did his job and they signed off on the work. He'll be happy to send someone over, but he'll have to draw up a new invoice. Fucking prick. And guess who gets the next call? They have my fucking card ‘cause I was first on the scene. Want to know why the people I suggested to them to clean up after their tragedy won't take care of their responsibilities? Want to know what I can do about it, right? Well, last thing I need is these people getting upset with me and putting in a call to the Civil Litigation Unit and end up with those fuckers asking me what the hell I'm doing giving referrals for private contractors. So I call fucking Morton and tell him to get his ass over there and take care of it before I call a friend in Parking Enforcement and see that his fucking van has a ticket on it every time it's on the street.