Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

I stare down at Squillante’s abdomen. I’m assuming the incision is going to be vertical, since the only times I’ve seen transverse incisions on an abdomen have been in C-sections. I just have no idea how long the incision’s supposed to be, or where it’s supposed to start.

So I wave the pen slowly through the air above Squillante’s midline, like I’m trying to make up my mind, until Friendly finally says, “Right there is fine. Go, already.” Then I draw a line from that spot, which is just below the ribs, to Squillante’s pubic bone. I curve around the navel, since that’s basically impossible to repair if you slice it.

I hand the pen back to the instruments nurse and say “Knife.”

On the day Skinflick and I hit the Farm, I had the grocery kid pick me up at a gas station about ten miles north of there at two thirty in the afternoon. I got there at six in the morning to look for cops. When the kid arrived and stood by the payphone to wait for the call I’d told him was coming, I came up behind him and dropped my left elbow over his chest. Took hold of his chin. He went stiff.

“You’re fine,” I said. “Just relax. But don’t turn around, and don’t look at me. This is going exactly as it was supposed to.”

“Yes sir,” the kid said.

“I’m letting go of you now. Let’s walk to the truck.”

When we got to it, I was still just behind him. I said, “Keep the window down and set the odometer. Let me know when it’s at almost six miles.” Then I swung up into the bed and sat with my back to the glass and my feet against the boxes of groceries. I was wearing a “U MASS” baseball hat, a sweatshirt with the hood up, and a full-length cashmere overcoat. The idea was to look like a frat asshole and be impossible to identify.

When we turned onto a dirt road and the kid called out that we were almost at the six-mile mark, I told him to slow the truck down, and Skinflick came out of the trees ahead of us. Skinflick was dressed like I was, but he didn’t look like a frat asshole. He looked like a Jawa. He had covered up our stolen car pretty well, though, off in the brush by the side of the road.

I gave him a hand up into the truck, and we tucked into the left side of the bed, because we knew the security camera was going to be on the left. The road got progressively rougher. Skinflick’s body next to mine felt like a cashmere-covered duffel bag.

We reached the gate. You could hear the hum of the electrified fence. After a while a man’s voice said, “Yeah, who’s that?” through a loudspeaker. The voice had that nasal George Bush fake-cracker accent that resentful white men all over America now use.

The driver said, “It’s Mike. From Cost-Barn.”

“Lean out so’s I can see you.”

I guess Mike leaned out. An electric motor started, and the gate rolled noisily aside. When we drove through, I could see that the fence had rails of barbed wire, slanted inward .

The truck banged and fishtailed uphill for a while, then stopped. The kid came around and opened the fantail, doing his best not to look at us as he lifted out a box that had a bunch of large cans of food and bottles of detergent in it. He looked nervous, but not so nervous I was worried he would fuck up.

The second he was out of sight I slid out the back of the truck to the ground, and Skinflick came down after me.

The face of the house was done in brown overlapping planks, like it was shingled. Four windows in front, one on either side of the doorway, and another two up top. To our left you could just see the green fiberglass shack at the side of the house that Locano’s plumbers had run the pipes into. The back of the truck was angled toward it to give us another couple feet of cover.

When the driver pushed the doorbell, I ran for the front of the house, putting my back against the wall beneath the corner window. Skinflick landed hard beside me just as the door opened up. I put a finger to my lips in annoyance, and he gave me an apologetic thumbs-up. When the kid disappeared inside, we dashed around the corner.

This was the part we knew would be bad. The side of the house had the same two-up, two-down window setup as the front, though the rear ground-floor window was covered by the shack. The entrance to the shack, meanwhile, faced the back yard. To go around to it we’d have to make ourselves visible from at least two windows and the back yard.

So instead we ran in a crouch along the side of the house. The feeling of being watched was intense, but I’d warned Skinflick not to look up or back. I already knew by then that people can see almost anything and convince themselves they didn’t, but that human faces tend to be undeniable. Half your visual cortex lights up when you see one. So we didn’t raise our faces, and we reached the shack not knowing whether we’d been spotted or not. I held two sheets of the fiberglass back wall apart just long enough for us to slip through.

Inside the shed everything looked green, because the ceiling was the same translucent fiberglass as the walls. The doorway facing the back yard was just a cutout with a blue tarp hung over it from the outside. As promised, the wall shared with the house had a low spigot coming out of it. There was a steel bucket with a hose and a nozzle gun, and a drain in the muddy ground.

I went and looked out through the tarp door. The back yard was about three hundred yards deep before it hit the barbed-wire fence. There were some picnic tables and a cement barbecue pit. I could just see the edge of another fiberglass hut. I wondered if that was the one the dead girl had been found in.

I tried not to wonder whether the dead girl had really existed, or whether she had, just somewhere else. The job was blind. I’d known that coming in, and there was no point to opening my eyes now. The best I could hope for was that some evidence showed up before the killing began.

The fantail of the truck slammed, and as the engine started we could hear a man’s voice speaking to the delivery kid in a tone that was casual enough for us to assume we hadn’t been seen.

That meant the dangerous part was probably over. Now the boring part—the twelve hours of waiting before we went through the hole in the wall and started shooting people—was about to begin. I went and sat down by the spigot, on the tails of my new cashmere coat. [38] Rule One from Never try to spare your clothes.

Skinflick stayed standing, pacing the walls, and after a while I started to feel a bit embarrassed. Like I had some office job that sounded glamorous but really wasn’t, and now my kid had come to visit and I had to show him how Daddy waits all day and night in the mud and then sneaks into people’s houses to shoot them in the head.

Then I started thinking about how it was that my life had turned out like this.

How there’d been a time when I used to read books, and had a pet squirrel.

“Pietro,” Skinflick whispered, jolting me. “I gotta take a piss.”

This was not entirely unexpected on a twelve-hour layover. But we’d only been there for five minutes.

“You couldn’t have pissed in the woods?” I said.

“I did piss in the woods.”

“So go,” I said.

Skinflick went over to the corner and unzipped. When the urine hit it, the fiberglass rattled like a steel drum. Skinflick stopped pissing.

He looked around. Let loose a few experimental drops into the mud just short of the wall. They made a splatting sound, and he stopped again. He started to look desperate.

“Get down low,” I whispered.

Skinflick tried various crouches and kneelings, and ultimately lay on his side in the mud, pissing toward the wall in a fanning motion.