Warren Ellis - Dead Pig Collector

He held her stare, evenly. “No, Amanda. I’m not lying to you.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “What now?”

“Now I tie these bags off and carry them to my van,” he said, and then stopped. “Where’s his car?”

“Whose car?”

“Him,” Mister Sun, said, pointing to a bag of bits. “He doesn’t live nearby, does he? If he does, tell me. If he doesn’t, then he drove here, right? Do you know what he drives?”

Amanda nodded.

“Then could you open the front door for me, so I can carry these bags out to my van? It’ll take a couple of trips. And while I’m doing that, can you look for his car?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, for no reason he could see.

“No, Amanda. I should have thought of it. Events have overtaken me a little, today.” He tied off the bags of limbs and lifted them, one in each hand. “Let’s go.”

It was indeed mid-afternoon outside, and a lovely day. Mister Sun walked back from the van to where Amanda stood on the front step, scanning the street.

“It’s not here,” she said quietly.

“Okay,” Mister Sun said, slipping past her. Inside, he added, “This means that either he took a cab here, or he parked a few streets away and walked, not wishing to be seen parking outside your house. Have you known him to take cabs often?”

“He’d use Uber to get to LAX sometimes. That’s it. He likes his car. It’s horrible.”

“Then we’ll assume the car’s in another street,” he said, lifting the last bag. “I’ll put this in the van, and then collect my toolbox and work bag, and I’m done.”

“What will you do now?”

“That doesn’t matter, does it?” Mister Sun said. “This will all be over, I’ll be out of your way, and you can get on with your life. Has it occurred to you that you now control your company completely, and can steer it in any direction you like?”

“I won’t get to see the end of the process,” Amanda said. Mister Sun believed she might be sulking, in her way. He then stopped to consider that someone with her specific cast of mind might be seriously disturbed by being led through only four-fifths of a process.

He had, obviously, also considered that Amanda was seriously disturbed. But he found he was more bothered by upsetting her than that she was possibly crazy. Perhaps it was that unusual emotional make-up that led to her being the one who escaped her pen. That interested him. He decided to provide her with the closure she so clearly wished for.

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Um,” she said. “I actually really, really do. But I don’t want to… I mean… would that be okay?”

“Let me get the van loaded up. Grab your keys.”

He opened the passenger door of the van for her, warning her to be careful as there was a bag of clothes in the footwell. She had a black canvas shoulder bag shrugged over her arm. He chose not to question it.

Mister Sun drove them north, to where Los Angeles turns into lumps and bumps, canyons and trees. It was, he reflected again, not a real city. In what real city could you drive into solitude tens of miles before leaving it? This was an absurd place. It had taken less than an hour to drive them into a place nobody much looked at.

In fact, the only people who’d recently been here, just past this fork in a meandering road scribbled across steep and scrubby drops, were the people who’d placed the rental car for him by arrangement.

“Here we are,” Mister Sun said.

“What happens now?”

“We dispose of this vehicle, and everything in it, and drive back in the car ahead of us.”

“You planned that?”

“I did. Every job has a method, right? This is mine. No one else has gotten to see it before. It’s been really quite nice, being able to show someone.”

“Could I learn how to do it, do you think?”

He smiled. “I’m positive, Amanda, that you could learn anything, with great speed.”

“My laptop’s in my bag,” she said.

“What?”

“I can work from anywhere. We have an office manager. At the company. I work remotely as it is, from home, a lot of the time. I can work from anywhere in the world. I brought my purse and my passport.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you leave I want to come with you. You haven’t lied to me. Not once. You keep smiling at me. I know I’m talking really fast but everything just seems to be fitting together and I am hoping so hard I’m not wrong about any of this and you want me to come with you.”

Her eyes glittered and sparkled and spun.

“So hard, David,” she said. “I am hoping so hard for this.”

Her hands reached for him tentatively, as if they’d just been untied. Wrists twisting, fingers unfolding.

Mister Sun, whose first name was not David, smiled at her. Amanda smiled back with relief and joy.

He touched her face with a fingertip, and then two. He brought his other hand up, and stroked her cheeks. She closed her eyes and swallowed back something that may have been a sob of reprieve from all the fears and questions in her aching and confused heart. He sighed and snapped her neck.

Mister Sun decided that it was very much time for a cigarette.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. She didn’t, so he fished his cigarettes and lighter out and lit up.

“Here’s what happens now,” he said to her. “I move you into the driver’s seat. Your belt won’t be fastened. I think I’ll probably put the gun in your lap, to amuse any crime scene investigators who peruse the remains. Then what I’ll do is push the van down off the side of the road. I’m hoping I can aim it at a tree, but I’d also like to get it quite deep into the vegetation down there. Once we’re all down there, I’m going to change out of these clothes, throw them in the back with the client and the tools, and start a fire. After that, I will get changed. The keys to my other car will be taped under the wheel well.”

He smoked for sixty seconds, looking around until the silence bothered him.

“Around here, this time of year,” he said to Amanda, “the chances are good that I could start a full-on wildfire. Which would be helpful. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s quite hard to make a car’s petrol tank explode with fire. I mean, think about it: if fire made cars explode that easily, every car manufacturer in the world would have been sued to death decades ago. But being in the middle of a big California wildfire… let’s say I have hopes.”

He stopped himself. No, it was going to be a while before the words hope or hoping were completely comfortable for him.

“Anyway. That’s the end of the process. I drive back to the hotel, eat, shower, and get some sleep, and fly out in the morning. Back home, Amanda, where it’s cold and everyone seems a foot closer to death every day. You wouldn’t have liked it a bit.”

He brushed his fingers through her hair. “And you would have been scared, all the time. Just as soon as you’d worked out the logical progression of things. Disappearing with a strange man the day your business partner went missing, his car parked in front of someone else’s house just a street or two away from your place. Spending the rest of your life feeling like you were trapped in a pen.”

He spent a hundred and twenty seconds or more just looking at that face, ageless and peaceful.

Mister Sun pulled his bag of clothing out of the footwell and got to work.

Mister Sun parked the car in the agreed collection spot, which was the same space the van had occupied earlier. He taped the keys back under the wheel well, adjusted his shades, tucked the screenplay under his arm, and walked back to the Mark.

The same car attendant was outside the hotel. “How’d it go?” he asked Mister Sun.