Warren Ellis - Dead Pig Collector

Mister Sun sipped his espresso, quietly calculating space and seconds. He didn’t require a weapon for his job. His intent had been to steal into the room, silently approach her, stamp a foot into the back of her knee, and cleanly snap her neck as she collapsed.

He could still perform a similar operation from this position.

“You are a very intelligent woman,” he said.

“I’m good with problems. Breaking things down. Step by step. It’s how code works. Logical procession.”

He gave her a smile whose warmth was not entirely false. “Would you like to finish learning how to break down a dead body?”

Amanda’s head cocked to that querent angle again. “There’s more?”

“Amanda, we haven’t even gotten him out of your house yet. Shall we follow the process all the way to the end, before we go our separate ways?”

“I don’t like that.”

“Don’t like what?”

“The way you said that last part. Like we’d never see each other again.”

“We won’t.”

“I don’t like that.”

Mister Sun’s phone vibrated in his pocket, just once. He realized that that would be his girlfriend, responding to last night’s text. He elected to ignore it, and smiled at Amanda again. She smiled back. He liked her smile immensely.

In the bath was a white body and a couple of gallons of pink muck. Mister Sun reached under the sheet and tugged the plug out. The bath began to drain, sounding like an extended and ugly strangulation the whole time. He gave the cold faucet a half-turn and suggested to Amanda that a couple more blasts of the robot-perfume air freshener might be in order.

“So why have we drained all the blood out of the bastard?” Amanda asked.

Mister Sun had torn one of his heavy sacks off the roll and was shaking it open. “Because it’s going to make it much easier and cleaner to joint him.”

Amanda just looked at him. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”

“Well, we need to make him simpler and more discreet to transport. Also, every step has the intent of making him harder to identify in case of an interruption. You know what you might also find interesting? It may seem that I brought a lot of gear in here, but it’s all very inexpensive. If you shopped around, you could probably dispose of a body for under a hundred dollars.”

He pulled the sheet off the bath. Amanda was moved to give another long spray from the can. Mister Sun folded the sheet as best he could, and stuffed it into the open sack. He tied the sack off and put it to one side, and then pulled another one off the roll.

“Right, then,” he said. “Head first.”

There was always a little extra blood during this part, which is why he left the water running as he put the KA-BAR clone to his client’s throat and began to slice through meat and ligament, all the way around the neck until he met his first cut. Putting the knife down, he grabbed the head under the jaw and began to twist. He was rewarded by a little crepitation. With a tight smile he twisted the head the other way, working it, and then pulled. The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.

This time, Amanda did actually clap her hands, as if she’d been shown a mysterious and spectacular magic trick.

“Did you want your knife back?” he grinned, cradling the head and its thin run-off over the bath.

“Please say we can stay friends, David,” Amanda said.

Amanda’s dishwasher thrummed away in the background. The Chinese chef’s knife was terrific, and had gone through the client’s head without a notch, nick, or scratch. It would continue to perform admirably for years to come, and throwing it away had seemed to Mister Sun like a terrible waste.

The stupid gun was in there, too.

The head was in a sack, liberally sprayed with a cheap aerosol oven cleaner whose active ingredient was lye, and Mister Sun was working with the KA-BAR knife and a hammer on a shoulder joint. He was making short, careful strikes, as he didn’t want to spatter the place with bone chips.

Amanda was talking about her business. It appeared to be the sort of classic mismatch that kept Mister Sun self-employed. The business didn’t exist without her skills and perceptions, but it didn’t move without his client’s money. This tension torqued until it became clear that the whole machine of the company had locked fast and was beginning to smolder.

“He’d threatened me with everything he could think of, I suppose,” Amanda mused. “But if I left the company, money and intellectual property came with me. He couldn’t force me out, and he couldn’t scare me out. I guess having me killed seemed like the best option.”

“What I don’t get,” said Mister Sun, “is this: He was just the money, right? You were the brains. Why would he want you out?”

“Monetizing software, especially software with a social purpose, is disgusting. Licensing it, I can accept. We did fine from government licenses for some of the things I built. But sticking ads on everything? Making it so you had to look at ads just to open your phone?”

The client’s right arm came off, a little more wetly than Mister Sun would have liked. “You were selling services, though.”

“We were providing services. We rented tools to the government in order to provide services to people. Do you know how much easier it is for me to interact with people through devices? How could anyone monetize the easing of human contact?”

“He wanted to cover everything with ads? That is kind of repellent,” Mister Sun said, making a start at sawing off the dead body’s left arm.

“It occurs to me now that his life would have been simpler and richer with me dead and a bunch of new hires implementing his wishes.”

“One of my uncles once told me you have to spend money to make money,” Mister Sun said.

“Did he pay you a lot of money?” asked Amanda, who did not smile.

“I charge a fair price,” said Mister Sun, hacking through some intransigent muscle, “but I don’t advertise. Word of mouth only. Human contact.”

“But there’s no human contact with you, is there?”

“An aunt of mine would say that I am currently engaged in the most intimate human contact of all.” He tore through the meat, and began to attack a socket with knife and hammer.

Amanda watched him with glittering eyes, impassive. Mister Sun placed his concentration back on his work, feeling as if he’d impulsively broached something badly.

After an industrious couple of hundred seconds, the left arm came away. The only sound in the room seemed to be Amanda’s breathing.

A head and two arms in one sack, two legs in a second sack, and a torso in a third, all coated in oven cleaner. The gun was out of the dishwasher and temporarily stored in his toolbox, the knife back in its block. Mister Sun very much wanted a cigarette, for a few reasons, but this was part of the discipline of the job, even though the craving was exacerbated by today’s particular working conditions. The bath was sluiced out and wiped over with several alcohol-impregnated wet napkins that were now piled in the torso bag. He figured it for mid-afternoon. Not bad.

The phone in his pocket vibrated again. This time, Amanda heard it buzz. “Who’s that?” she said, quickly.

“Not important,” Mister Sun said. “Someone just waking up in a different time zone. Nothing to be concerned about.”

Her eyes flickered. “Your girlfriend?”

“No,” he smiled. “I don’t have a girlfriend. Just a friend.”

Her eyes jumped around his face before settling on his. “David, I have a hard time telling when people are lying to me. Sometimes I just naturally assume they are. This gets me into fights, now and then. So I’m just going to ask. Are you lying to me?”