Edward Lee - Grimoire Diabolique

She lay perfectly still on the cheap coffee table.

Nick and Frankie gaped down, bug-eyed. They knew at a glance. Spooky’s head hung over the table edge, her eyes crossed and wide open, her tongue hanging out. The silence was absolute.

“Man. Oh, man,” Nick whispered. Beads of sweat wrung out of his pores. “Frankie, you better pray she ain’t…” He couldn’t even say the rest.

He knelt down, put an ear to her chest.

And gulped.

He felt around her neck for a pulse.

Gulped again.

Then he raged up at Frankie: “You big dumb cement-head motherfucker! You killed her!”

“I-I-I—” Frankie gaped. “No, she—”

“Fuckbrain! You broke her neck against the edge of the table!”

“No, I-I-I…” Frankie was remiss for locution. “No. She fell, and her neck… It got broke.”

“You KILLED THE BITCH! And now Vinchetti’s gonna have one of his crew KILL US! They’ll hang us upside down by meat hooks through our assholes and blowtorch us! He’ll have that crazy-ass doctor cut all our skin off!”

Frankie started to blubber he was so shit-scared. Nick sat dejected on the floor, head bowed.

“Let’s-let’s-let’s just… leave town!” Frankie suggested. “Go somewhere. Hide.”

“We could go to Mars and it wouldn’t matter—Vinchetti would find us. We could go to fuckin’ Egypt and bury ourselves a thousand feet under one of the pyramids and he would find us. We killed his best scat girl—Vinchetti loves scat. He’ll be more pissed off about this than when the Yankees lost the series to Arizona.”

“We’re dead,” Frankie blubbered.

Nick just nodded.

“Let’s just-let’s just-let’s just—leave her here,” came Frankie’s next brilliant idea. “Just say she croaked, say she OD’d or somethin’. Yeah. Leave her here.”

“It’s a fuckin’ Howard Johnsons! We can’t leave a dead meth-head whore with no arms in a Howard Johnsons! You murdered her! Our prints are all over the room! The clerk saw us come in. This is a homicide scene, Einstein.”

Frankie maintained his frantic blubbering. “Well-well-well—let’s dump her body. Dump her body in the canal. Then we can say some of Peroni’s boys muscled her away from us. Peroni’s been trying to horn in on Vinch’s scat and nek market for years, and he’s dumped a lot of bodies in the canal. The cops’d think it was Peroni.”

Nick opened his mouth to voice further objection but—

“Hmm,” he said.

“Vinch might believe it, Nick.”

“He might. He just might.” Nick glanced around, brain ticking. It was a bad plan but it was all they had. “Frankie, put your clothes back on. Then take the camera, lights, and tripods back out to the Caddy and put it all in the trunk.” Now he was looking at the long suitcase they’d carried the equipment in. “We’ll carry Spooky out in that.”

“In what?” Frankie was stepping into his slacks. “You mean the suitcase?”

“Yeah. The suitcase.”

Frankie scratched his chin. “Oh, Nick, I don’t know. I don’t think she’ll fit.”

Nick got up and grabbed his eight-inch Gerber Mk IV sheath knife off the dresser. “She’ll fit just fine, Frankie. After I cut her legs off.”

One time-saver was the plastic drop cloth they’d already spread out under the coffee table. This was, after all, a scat film scene. Never Leave A Mess was the rule. The trashed bathroom presented a bit of a problem, though, until Nick put the brain God gave him to work. The bathroom was padlocked shut—hence, no bath tub to cut her legs off in and, doubly hence, no place for all the blood to drain. Nick deftly cut four yard-long lengths of extension cord and began to apply the tourniquets just as they’d taught him in the Army. He cranked the first two on at the top of each thigh as close as possible to the hip joint, then two more a half-inch below the first two. He cranked them all down tight and tied them off. Next, with the Gerber, he began to cut. He cut all the way around each thigh, straight to the bone. Sharp as the Gerber was, the task proved much, much, much, much, much, much, much more difficult than one would think. Very little blood leaked out, however, due to the dual ligatures on each leg. A hammer and chisel from the Caddy’s tool box neatly cracked each thigh bone—

And off the legs came.

“Nice job, Nick,” Frankie complimented.

“Thanks.”

Spooky’s torso fit perfectly into the suitcase, and the legs went right on top. They zipped the suitcase up, slid it into the Caddy’s back seat, discarded the drop cloth into the motel dumpster, and drove away.

Nick turned on the radio and smiled. What better harbinger could he ask for? The Yankees were beating Baltimore 11-1.

And it was only the fifth inning.

“I don’t know about the canal, Frankie.” Nick appraised the long stripe of black water from the road, trying to drive normally. “I saw two cops on the other side.”

“They were just roosting,” Frankie felt confident. “Eatin’ donuts and reading the funny papers. They’ll go back on patrol soon. Let’s just kill some time, drive around a while.”

“Frankie, we got a fuckin’ torso in a suitcase in the back seat. I’d kind of like to get rid of it as soon as fuckin’ possible, know what I mean?”

Frankie nodded, seeing the logic. “Fuck, you got any Demerol, Nick? I’m all out and I need a bang.”

“Wait till we get back to the compound. And you better pray that Vinch believes our story ’cos if he don’t you’re gonna need a shitload of Demerol for when that kooky doctor starts doing the job on you.”

“Fuck. I definitely need a hit.”

Nick pulled a u-turn, a sudden endeavor occurring to him.

“Where we going now? Those cops ain’t left the canal yet.”

“The Kwik-Mart,” Nick answered. “For Wet-Naps.”

“Wet-Naps? We goin’ for ribs?”

Nick frowned. “No, we ain’t goin’ for ribs. We—or, I mean you —gotta wipe down everything we touched.” Nick pointed to his head. “Think, Frankie. That suitcase has our prints all over it, and so does Spooky.”

“Fuck.” Frankie seemed disgruntled. “I don’t wanna wipe fingerprints off her fuckin’ corpse with Wet-Naps.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you don’t want. You got us into this mess, so you’re gonna do the job. I ain’t spendin’ the rest of my life on Riker’s with some guy named Luther usin’ my asshole for a place to party. I can’t believe how bad you fucked this up.”

“It wasn’t my fault, Nick.” Frankie was pouting now. “She asked for it. She shouldn’t oughta have said those things to me.”

Nick pulled a Demerol tab from his pocket, showed it to his cohort. “You wipe down the bitch’s body and then you can take your bang.”

“Hey, thanks!”

The front of the Kwik-Mart shimmered in neon. There were only a few vehicles in the parking lot: a mint-condition ’68 350 small-block Camaro that had been oddly spray-painted black, an old red pickup truck, and a gold Dodge Colt with a P.I.L. sticker in the back window. Nick and Frankie loped inside, Frankie beginning to sweat out some early withdrawal. “Shit, yeah!” Nick bellowed in the store. The man behind the counter, who wore a turban and bore a suspicious resemblance to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, jumped an inch off the floor at Nick’s celebratory outburst. What was Nick celebrating? There was a little television behind the counter, the Yankees game on, and somebody named Giambi just hit a grand slam. The score was now 15 to 1.

And it was only the sixth inning.

“I knew that big boat anchor was good for somethin’!” Nick railed happily. Frankie shrugged, wishing for a mainline. They bought Wet-Naps and big coffees, and as they headed back toward the Caddy, Nick said, “You know, Frankie, I’ve got a really good vibe about tonight, even after all the shit that happened with Spooky.” He shook his head hopefully. “When the Yankees beat the shit out of Baltimore, great things happen.”