Warren Ellis: Dead Pig Collector

In his room, kneeling at the single low table, he pulled away the shrink-wrap. After the first five pages, the screenplay had been cut away to create a boxy space in the middle, which had a pair of car keys affixed there, bound securely in tape. Mister Sun already knew which vehicle to look for, having memorized a photo sent by the client through the self-destruct app. The vehicle would have been parked yesterday, when the client put this envelope into the mail. It was time to begin preparation.

The rollaboard case was half-filled with fat, transparent plastic worms: clothes bags that bore a black fitting for a vacuum cleaner tube to suck them into a compressed log. The vacuum bags generally allowed him to pack twice what he needed into a quarter of the space.

Not long after, Mister Sun left the hotel, wearing clothes under his shirt and suit. Out front, he put on his shades, smilingly confirmed with the attendants that the Chateau Marmont was indeed a left turn down the road because good God he had so many annoying meetings to sit through there today, and left with the screenplay tucked under his arm.

A gentle three-hundred-and-sixty-second stroll brought him to a parking lot in the lee of a dying strip club, where he found a short white van of nondescript age. The keys opened the back of the van easily, and he quickly appraised the contents. Everything on his shopping list seemed to be in there, right down to the old blue baseball cap and the battered sneakers stuffed in a disposable grocery sack, which he took. The keys were a little more argumentative about opening the driver-side door, but he convinced it, hoping this was no more than a sticky fluke. Inside, he put the grocery sack at his feet and pulled from his suit pocket a folded vacuum bag. He wrestled off his jacket, shoes, and, most awkwardly, his pants and shirt, and serially pushed them into the vacuum bag. Under the shirt and pants he was wearing a plain T-shirt and thin two-piece mechanic’s coveralls, in blue. The bag went into the passenger-side footwell, and he carefully got the sneakers on his feet.

The van didn’t want to start. Mister Sun bit back his fury. How was he supposed to go and kill someone in a vehicle that didn’t work? How much longer was he going to draw attention to himself by making the damn thing grind and groan in front of a fucking strip club of all places? “You’re a dick,” Mister Sun hissed at the dashboard, and strongly considered killing his client after the job was done. He’d been paid in advance, after all.

The damned thing eventually caught, but it didn’t sound happy about having to move. It may as well have been a sick horse, coughing and stuttering all the way out of the lot.

An estimated six-hundred-second run to the job took him almost a thousand seconds, and so Mister Sun was almost vibrating with hate by the time he parked up in front of the scene of the job. He threw himself out of the van, slammed the door shut with murderous force, tore open the back of the van, pulled on the disposable latex gloves, picked up the toolbox and the messenger bag, took what he needed from them before hefting them, and stomped up to the front door of the property so deeply angry that he knew he wouldn’t even enjoy the day’s work.

He had learned the layout of the low, detached house by heart, and had memorized the daily schedule of the occupant as provided to him by the client. He mimed pressing the doorbell with one hand while he worked on the lock with the tool in the palm of the other. The door popped. He silently pantomimed being greeted by an occupant, just for the look of it, and slipped inside.

He took five seconds to close the door its last inch, to ensure the seal was soundless. In those five seconds, he listened. No TV or radio, which was a shame. The occupant rose late and habitually fashioned a brunch before leaving home in the early afternoon. Mister Sun found a smile as he picked up some shuffling from the kitchen in the back of the structure. Excellent. Kitchens were both easy to clean and festooned with confusing evidence traces. He set the toolbox and messenger bag down, without sound, and moved with great craft down the hallway to the kitchen.

Standing in the kitchen, facing Mister Sun, was a tall woman with very wide eyes.

Lying in the kitchen, also facing Mister Sun, was his client, also with very wide eyes, and in addition sporting a superb Chinese chef’s knife in his head.

The woman was shuffling, one foot forward, one foot back, head bobbing, not blinking at all. His client wasn’t blinking either. It was, Mister Sun thought, just as well he was dead, because the position he was lying in didn’t look a bit comfortable. A gun—a ridiculous off-brand long-barreled .357—lay by his awkwardly splayed right hand. Mister Sun suspected he recognized it as an overpriced Argentine weapon of distant experience, a thing with a shit trigger that was prone to jamming and, as his client may have found, was not the easiest shooter in the world to draw quickly.

The eight-inch knife in his head, however, was marvelous, having cleaved his skull and brain so sharply that no blood had yet leaked out. The only thing in the room that had spilled, in fact, was the plate of carrot sticks the woman had obviously been chopping when his client had let himself into the house and taken her by surprise. It seemed very likely that she’d been so surprised that she’d turned around and brought the knife down on his head while he was still trying to wrestle that stupid gun out of his pocket.

The woman, Mister Sun’s target for the day, found him in her field of vision. He saw her eyes clutch at him.

“Help,” she simply said.

Mister Sun released the breath he’d been holding and looked down at his dead client. “Getting it done!” had, apparently, meant that he couldn’t wait another minute and had driven across town to kill the woman himself, leaving Mister Sun to take care of the disposal. His client was, in fact, a colossal dick. So much of a dick that he’d died of it.

“He died of being a dick,” Mister Sun said to the woman. She seemed to have no response to that beyond taking a long, shuddering breath, so he studied the dick for twenty seconds longer. Mister Sun had been paid. All the correct protocols had been observed. There was no knowledge of the contract outside this room, no trail or trace. When one considered it rationally, Mister Sun thought, this would indeed fulfill the contract. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, paid for the murder. Any idiot could kill someone. He was paid for the disposal.

“Yes,” Mister Sun decided, looking up at the woman again. “I will help you. Do you have a bath?”

The woman, whose name was Amanda, did own a bath: a high-backed claw-foot tub that Mister Sun would not have been surprised to see in an old Western TV show. She was not much help with transporting the client to the bathroom, and was much more interested in talking, very fast, about the client—whose name was evidently Bastard Dogfucker—the successful business they’d shared in, and the apparently spectacularly unsuccessful sexual experience she had regrettably subjected herself to. His client’s decision to take action in her respect therefore appeared to be a direct result of both her intent to move on from him professionally and her refusal to repeat an amorous conjunction she likened to being mounted by one of those big slobbery animals that take brandy barrels to dying climbers in the Alps.

Mister Sun preferred never to learn the reasons for his being hired, and tolerated her shock-powered ranting insofar as it occupied her enough to prevent her actively hampering his work. She was an attractive woman, in that sinewy, rangy American way that spoke to him of cheerleaders and swimmers. Great candyfloss tumbles of blond hair, and immense green cat-eyes, with features so pale and crystal that make-up would ruin, render overt and crass. He found himself wondering what she’d look like in ten years. Perhaps features like Amanda’s wouldn’t age, not obviously. His own girlfriend, in eighteen months, had visibly aged. He did not enjoy watching people die slowly.