A Sweetheart Deal
by JW Schnarr and John Sunseri
T |
he guy showed up in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t the guy Artie was used to.
Every time before it had been a greaser, a big, muscled guy with slick black hair and a Roman nose, and Artie had imagined he could smell the garlic and olive oil on him, even through the reek of formaldehyde and freshly-turned earth that suffused the undertaker’s offices.
But this guy…this guy looked more like an accountant, with glasses and nice clothes. And he was nervous, too. It was a cool October night, but the guy was sweating and they hadn’t even carried in the body yet.
“Where’s the other guy?” Artie asked, concerned that the deal was getting changed on him.
That’s how life went for him - whenever he got a sniff of something good, a taste of success, they fucked around with the rules and he ended up taking it in the ass. And this was the big one, this deal, this sweetheart deal he had going.
“I’m the one who‘s here,” said the accountant. “Is there a problem?”
“No, no problem,” said Artie, shaking his head. “It’s just, you get used to a guy, and then someone else shows up…”
“Just do your fucking job,” said the guy, “and don’t worry about the personnel. You’re getting paid to keep your mouth shut and do your job, right? So keep your mouth shut...” At this point, the accountant leveled his gaze and gave Artie a look that was meant to remind him of his place in the food chain. “And do your job.”
“I got it,” said Artie, backpedaling. “Really, man - it’s cool. Let’s get the thing out of your trunk, and you can take off.”
“You get it out of my trunk,” said the man. “You’ve got a hand truck, right?”
“But the other guy…” started Artie, then stopped. Yeah, the other guy always helped carry the body in, but he wasn’t going to make a stink.
For five hundred bucks, he’d wrestle the bulky, awkward thing into the lab himself, and the priss could drive back to Portland without getting himself dirty.
As he struggled to get the bundle onto the tines of the hand truck, he kept nervously scanning the grounds of the cemetery.
It was October, after all, and the high school kids would soon be fucking around, tipping over the headstones, drinking stolen whiskey and screwing on the graves. Little bastards.
Artie hoped this wouldn’t be the new pattern.
It’s not as if he liked the other guy, the Italian, but he felt safer when he showed up. He’d been careful never to ask, but he was sure he was dealing with the Mafia, and the little pencilneck sitting in his office right now, drinking the extra-tall fancy coffee he’d brought from Portland, didn’t inspire Artie with a lot of confidence.
If you were gonna deal with the Mob, you wanted real mobsters, you know? You didn’t want the book-and-number guys.
He finally finished. He heaved the thing up onto the embalming table, and the well-dressed guy handed him an envelope. Then he turned around and walked out.
Artie heard the car start up as he opened up his payment, and by the time he had pulled out the cash and counted it twice, the fucker was long gone.
“Three hundred,” he said to himself, the words echoing through the sterile, well-lit room. “Those cocksuckers.”
The lump on the table, wrapped in its two layers of body bags, didn’t respond, but Artie hadn’t expected it to. Three hundred bucks in used twenties and tens, and not five hundred like it had always been before.
Artie felt that old feeling take him in the gut, that feeling that said you’re a loser and always will be a loser, that queasy little twist in his stomach that happened whenever he saw one of his plans crumbling, whenever some stripper turned him down for a date, whenever he realized that the cop who had stopped him for his fucking taillight wasn’t gonna listen to why he hadn’t had time to get it fixed.
They were doing it to him again; people were constantly fucking with him, putting him down, keeping him in the dirt when he should be flying up above it…
He forced himself to think of flying. It always calmed him down.
He looked up at the models hanging on their wires over the sink area, looked at the beautifully-replicated P-51D Mustang, the bulk of the B-29 Superfortress, the Vought F4U Corsair with its bent wings…and then he looked down at the bundle of money in his hand.
Those guys had been real men.
The Americans, the British, the Canadians, all of ‘em who’d flown mission after mission over Germany and France, dodging bullets and the dirty clouds of flak that came up at them like belches of Hell, doing their jobs and taking out the Krauts and the Nips.
And here was Artie, sitting lonely in his mortuary office with a mob kill on his table and a measly three hundred dollars in his hand. It was enough to make you cry.
He looked at the body again, dreading the task ahead of him. He’d have to get the quicklime out, spend two hours carefully packing it into the space between the body bags, and then reseal the whole deal.
Tomorrow he’d have to dig the grave for Curt Ripley and make it three feet deeper than normal so there’d be room for the extra body underneath the coffin. For five hundred bucks, it was an annoyance. For three hundred, it was insulting.
Fuck this, he thought.
He’d do it all in the morning. He was almost out of lime, anyway. That meant another trip down to Johnson’s Tack and Saddle, where, with any luck, Michelle would be working.
This thought, unlike the thoughts of the WWII airmen, managed to lift his spirits a little, so that when he clicked off the light and moved back through the building to his apartment, he felt a little better.
And when he stuffed the new cash into his light plane envelope (almost five thousand in there, now, less a couple hundred for trips up to Portland and the strip clubs), he was even whistling a little bit. Tonight he would prime a Spitfire Supermarine and see if he couldn’t trace out the blue-green camouflage pattern on it, the one that had made it practically invisible over the North Atlantic waves.
Tomorrow, he would see Michelle.
The next day was Saturday, and he spent the morning working on Curt Ripley.
There wasn’t much more to do. He’d already set old Curt’s neck so that it was straight again, and pinned a black suit to him. All that was left, really, was the knee, and Artie had saved it for last because it made his stomach turn. The thing looked like it had gone through a sausage press.
Curt had been hit - well, not hit, really, but pulverized - by one of those new Dodge trucks, the ones with the huge engines and big grills. Crushed his ribcage and broke his neck. His ribs had splintered inside him and sliced up his internal organs. A bunch of them had actually ended up in his underwear.
And it looked worse than it sounded - Artie’d had to snip the things out of Curt’s ass and drop ‘em back into his chest cavity.
His knee, though, was the worst. It had gone under the truck and gotten pinned by the tires. When the guy had slammed on the brakes, Curt’s leg had turned into soup.
Artie straightened it and did some stitching just to try to give the leg a bit of form again. When he was done it looked like shit - but it had looked like warm puke when the stiff had first come in, and at least this way it would kind of look like a knee again.
Curt’s family had gone all-out for the funeral. They couldn’t have an open viewing period, because Curt had left half his face on the Dodge’s fancy grill, so they had opted for the posh Excelsior casket and a large photograph of old Curtis instead.
Real nice. Lots of brass and oak. Weighed about 400 pounds, even without a passenger.
After lunch, Artie dropped Curtis into his new - and last - home. He filled out the final bit of paperwork and wrote a little note that said simply ‘DNV’. Do Not View.
Just in case.
Artie looked finally at the double-wrapped bag on the table. Just looking at it pissed him off.
He still had a little time before Michelle’s shift at the Tack and Saddle (at least, he thought he did. She worked afternoons on Saturdays, usually), so he shook his head and decided to get a little work done on the thing.
He unzipped the outer bag and saw right away that someone had forgotten to lock the inner one.
Interesting.
The zippers on the bags came with a double clip so that they could be locked up. Saved the body from slipping out of the bag in transit, and also kept thieves from robbing the corpses before they could be properly processed.
This one was missing the little brass lock.
Someone had been in a hurry to get it here, and had gotten sloppy. Either that, or…
A test? It was the Mob, after all (at least, he was pretty sure it was the Mob). Would they do that to him, give him some bullshit loyalty test?
It would make sense if he’d ever given them a reason to worry, but he’d been doing the job perfectly since Day One. Maybe they were just paranoid.
Or maybe they wanted to rile him up and see if he’d shake, so they intentionally short-changed him, then stood back to see if he’d take the bait, open the bag, and then they’d burst in and give him the old double-tap salute to the back of his head.
Naw - he was pushing it, now.
This was stupid. These little paranoid fantasies made sense in Artie’s head, but not in the real world. He grimaced.
To hell with it. Piss on those Guinea fucks. A deal’s a deal, and three hundred bucks ain’t five hundred. He deserved something for the missing two C’s.
He deserved a look.
He peeled back the outer bag, then unzipped the inner one. He pulled it back and then stared at the thing before him, unsure of what to do next.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a corpse.
It looked like a lump of wax.
It was a soft margarine-yellow color, and vaguely human in shape, but that was it. It had no discernable features.
Artie reached down and pushed on it with his finger.
It was soft, like feta, and had a greasy sheen on it that stuck to Artie’s skin when he pulled back his hand.
He rubbed it between his fingers and smelled it. Some kind of oil. The places where it touched his skin began to stain.
A moment later, they began to sting. Artie watched as two black bruises formed on his fingertips like blood blisters. Then tiny droplets of blood began to form on the skin.
“What the hell?” he whispered, staring aghast as the blood welled up and formed a perfect drop. It fell from his hand and splashed on the floor.
He looked at the waxen figure before him and his face furrowed. He had made a line in the stuff when he’d touched it with his finger. An indent in the formless mass.
His fingertips felt swollen.
Whatever this shit was, he wasn’t getting paid to piss around with it. Of course, if his paranoid fantasy was true, and they were testing him, he’d just fucked up big time. They’d look at the streak in the thing, and know that he’d been messing with it.
So stupid, he thought.
He’d leave for a while. Just to be sure. You never knew, right? He’d leave the office and if shit looked like it was beginning to go down when he got back he’d just drive on by, maybe take an impromptu trip up to Canada to visit his brother.
Just to be safe, he’d drop the wax shit into the coffin with old Curt. Lock it up. If the Mob came, they’d have to take a fire ax to the Excelsior to get inside it. Solid fucking oak. It would take hours.
He wheeled the casket over to the table, wincing as his bruised fingers came into contact with the handle, and again when he struggled to dump the thing into the box on top of Curt Ripley. With this minor handicap, he fumbled a bit as he heaved it over the edge, and the bag started to slip, but he wasn’t going to fuck with the thing any more right now. He left it, locked the casket, set the alarm on the prep room, double-checked everything.
Triple-checked.
And then left. No sense being careless.
When he was almost downtown, Artie’s fingers began to hurt so badly that he had to pull up in front of the Grange building and stop the car. They’d been aching since he’d left the Veteran’s Cemetery, but now they felt like someone was squeezing them in a vise - someone strong and pissed-off.
He looked at them, his fore and middle fingers, and though they had stopped bleeding they were swollen and puffy, and he could actually see them throbbing with his pulse.
He was truly scared, now.
Maybe it’s not the Mob, he thought. Maybe it’s some weird scientific thing, some X-files type of thing, and what I’ve been burying all this time is toxic, like failed biotech experiments…
He raised his fingers to his face so that he could see them better, and for a span of five seconds he stopped breathing. There was something going on under the skin of his fingers.
Something moving.
What he’d thought was his pulse wasn’t. It was like worms were in there - something alive, inside his fingers, moving blindly around in the meat and the juice.
He yelped and grabbed his fingers with his left hand, feeling them, feeling the motion of something alien inside him, and with his brain a maelstrom he squeezed as hard as he could, like he was trying to get the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.
Yellow-white stuff, looked like feta, started to ooze out of his fingers.
Blood came too, a thin watery stream of red, like he was popping a pimple too hard, but it was mostly the wax, coming out of his pores as he forced it, tightening the pressure as his heart pounded in his chest.
It was moving down, he gibbered in his mind. It was moving down the fingers toward the hand, and then it would have gone up my arm, and toward my heart.
He squeezed and squeezed until nothing but blood came out, and shook his hand frantically to rid himself of the alien wax, spattering blood and the cheese-stuff onto the passenger seat of his pickup, onto the dash, onto the Dairy Queen wrappers on the floorboard, shaking his hand like a priest shaking his thurible.
Finally he stopped. His hand felt better. The blood was slowing, though the tips of his fingers still had red pricks all over them, like little measles.
He thought he’d gotten all of it. He couldn’t be a hundred percent, but he thought it was all out, and he looked carefully at the stuff on the seat next to him, waiting for motion from the little splatters of pus he‘d flung there.
Nothing.
He looked around, but the Grange was deserted on a Saturday. Over the front door, a hand-painted banner advertised tomorrow’s pancake feed and pumpkin-carving contest, but today all the farmers were out in their fields or spending time with their families. No one had seen him doing his panic dance in his truck.
After another minute, he wrestled the old Ford to life and put it into gear. He was still scared as hell, still panicky and breathless, but he couldn’t just go home and stare at his fingers for the next two or three hours, like he wanted to.
He needed lime, and a lot of it. He was damned if that shit back in old Curt’s coffin was gonna stay there much longer.
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