L.A. Rotten (18 page)

“You wanted to use me. To recruit me.”

“No, it was your idea that you'd go to those meetings to get out of going back to jail. I wasn't going to force you…I only ever put it out there as an idea. Like I said, I think the club and you could benefit from one another. I was boasting about you last night. You and me coulda gone there together, we coulda hung out. I trusted you…”

It suddenly dawns on me that this man with his sad little apartment and all his weapons is more than a recruiter for white supremacy. And me, standing here, in his home, pointing his gun at him, I just fucked up his world.

His eyes glance furtively over toward a small bookshelf set precariously up on a card table as his face hardens. I don't need “policeman's intuition” to guess what is behind the single row of pulp detective novels.

“Don't even consider it,” I warn him.

“You're fucked,” Duane assures me. “Even if you're joking, I'm treating this as hard truth.”

“Now, why would you tell me that?” I step cautiously around the furniture and toward the door. “Any way you slice it, I have nothing left to lose. That just makes me more likely to turn this into a murder.”

“You're bluffing.”

“Why would I bluff? I don't like you. I was wondering how I was going to rid myself of you, and then you gave me the answer. In fact, you forced me to take it.” Each statement makes the older man wince.

“This unregistered gun with your prints all over it, consider it evidence now. You brought me over to your little apartment, showed me around, and gave me a gun with the hopes I'd deliver A. Guy. In fact, I've gotten to know him a little better than I've let on. And he seems real keen on us teaming up. So here's what's going to happen: You're going to report to the parole board that I'm a model parolee, and you're going to continue to do so until I am no longer of interest to them. In exchange, I will never deliver this gun to your boss and tell him how I got it. I trust that this will be the last time we see each other. Because while you know where I live and work, A. Guy now knows where you live and work too. That's real. Remember Hank Kelly? These days, I've got a sort of guardian angel who has my best interests at heart. And I can't say that I mind.” I carefully pick up the packet of information from the recliner. “You're not going to be needing this.”

“No one will ever believe you,” he tries.

“I don't need them to. You're smart enough to realize you fucked up, and I'm smart enough to know that I will never go back to jail. So, let's just leave it at that.”

“You stung me bad today, Tommy. I trusted you, but you're fucking dead.”

“Guess I'm not such a nice white kid after all? If I were you, I'd spend a lot of time here in your apartment watching your TV, surrounded safely by your weapons, so you can't get into too much trouble. There's a dangerous man out there who wants to kill you, and I don't want you to give him the reason to do it.”

“Hell is for traitors.”

“You think I'm going to hell? Over this? No, if I'm going to hell, I bought my ticket there ten years ago. It's kind of liberating, actually.” Duane swallows, weighing his options, and for a moment I think he might try to draw on me. “We going to do this, gunslinger? I've never shot a gun before, but it's not exactly rocket science, is it?”

“Just get the fuck out of my life,” Duane resignedly decides.

“Good call.” I leave the apartment edging backwards, finger on the trigger, hoping the gun doesn't go off accidentally. I feel a measure of sadness for the way I'm ending this. Clearly Duane Caruzzi thought more of me than just as a routine parolee. It has to be this way, though. It's better to shut him down hard now than try and do it softly later. I'm winging it, but that seems like my only option now.

Ivy waits outside my apartment building, struggling to grip a box overloaded with kitchen supplies. The contents are not neatly packed, but jammed in so that pan handles and kitchen tools are jutting out at odd angles.

“Hey,” I say soberly, coming up from behind her.

“Just open the door already,” she gripes.

I do so, propping it open with my foot, and, as she passes, I reach out and easily pluck the cardboard box from her tired grasp. “Thank you. Fucking Jesus,” she exclaims, allowing me to take it, and then shakes her tingling arms to generate blood flow. “You never offer to carry anything for me; I was starting to wonder if you were a gentleman. What took you so long?”

On our slow, jerking elevator ride up to my floor, I fill her in on all the day's events, finishing with Duane, whose gun is now tucked beneath the front seat of my car.

“It's probably all for the best, yeah?”

“Probably.” It scares me how easily she just accepts these terrible things about me.

“Did you learn anything new about Andy Sample?” she asks as the elevator gives a final jolt, denoting its arrival on the fifth floor.

“From the hotel room this morning, I get the feeling that he's up to something, but I don't know what.”

The elevator doors slide open, and where there is normally flat, stale air hanging in the hallway, tinged with the stink of mildew, there is something pungent and new in the air, something much, much worse.

“God, something stinks up here. I don't remember it smelling this bad before.”

“It's decomp,” I assure her, moving cautiously out into the hallway, still toting the large box. “Either another cat has died in the walls, or…” I don't bother finishing, noting the increasing foulness of the odor as we approach my apartment.

“I'm surprised no one has called the police yet…it even smells like you'd think a rotting body would.”

“Breathe through your mouth,” I say, and steady the box against the wall to pull out my keys. “It's going to get a whole lot worse.”

The swamp scent of putrefying gas spills into the hallway like a tidal surge, overwhelming Ivy, who puts her hands over her mouth and nose to stymie the bile invading her throat. “Yeah, that's the stuff,” I say, but don't grin.

Setting the box beside the door, I glance around the barren room, taking short shallow inhales through my nostrils to gauge the source of the stench. Making my way slowly through the living room and into the kitchen, I find the smell is less concentrated and backtrack out toward the bathroom. The shower curtain is stretched across the expanse of what passes for a bathtub in this building, concealing the minty green tile interior. In this part of the apartment, the air is so dense with the perfume of rot I can't pinpoint its origin. Ivy is right behind me, staying close out of bravery or fear, hands still masking the lower half of her face.

I yank the shower curtain back, all at once, quickly revealing the same empty space I'd left upon last using it, my water-thinned bar of soap dry in its ceramic cubby, the store-brand generic shampoo bottle teetering in its familiar place on the lip of the tub. “The bedroom,” I say, and Ivy flattens herself against the wall, allowing me to pass in her determination to not go first.

Flies have sprung from a seeming nothingness to populate the sparse drapery of my modest bedroom. Ivy sounds her displeasure behind me as I march to the closet and noisily slide open the double door on its chintzy little track. Aside from the collective of dark shirts hanging from dark hangers, my closet is as barren as my shower. For some reason, I'm embarrassed that Ivy can see the sparseness of my closet, and I shut the door, the little wheel whining as it makes its way back across the metal.
The bed
. The covers are definitely raised in the middle; a swell in the blanket gives the indication that it is hiding something. I yank it away from the mattress, expecting a human head.

Ivy's yelp outpaces the dry, hollow rattle as a banded snake, coiled in the center of my bed, rears up its head and tail simultaneously. A black, forked tongue flicks out from the front of its shoveled snout, testing the scent of the intruders.

“Stand back,” I warn Ivy, and step back as well, but the snake is adamant about staying put, continually shaking its rattle in fair warning. Keeping my eyes locked on the greenish-hued snake, I can see that there is something in the center of it, something surrounded by the thick body of the rattler. It's a hot water bottle, I realize, put there to keep the snake attracted to the warmth. There's something else too, though…a note.

“Is this how rattlesnakes smell?” Ivy asks through her hand, and, impressively, she does not seem scared by the reptile's presence, though she keeps her distance.

“No, it isn't,” I admit, too concerned about everything to mock her. I move slowly around to the side of the mattress, and the rattlesnake keeps pace, the twin pits by its mouth shifting around, following my heat signature.

“What are you doing?” Ivy whispers as if the snake is sensitive to noise. I step closer to the bed and it lunges, its hinged fangs seeking my hand. I pull back once, but then reach quickly down and flip the entirety of the bed over, box spring and all. “Aggh!” Ivy shrieks, caving, and runs out of the room as the snake tumbles with the mattress onto the floor and out of sight against the far wall. I, however, am now more concerned about the occupied black body bag lying on my floor, and the fact that it is leaking.

“Why would you do that?” Ivy yells from the living room.

“So this is what you were up to,” I murmur, though it is no kind of answer.

“What is it?”

I squat, zipping open the bag to look, and more putrescent brown slime leaches from one of several long incisions intentionally slashed down the length of the bag. I grimace—it's a smell you get used to, but never enjoy.

The body within is in a state of extreme decomposition; a few weeks' worth of bacterial buildup are breaking down the tissue and consuming their host from the inside out. It's a male, adult, and though its face has become blistered and black, and one of the cheeks has rotted in, I recognize the general facial form of Tony Brahma.

“I wondered what happened to you,” I confess to the waxy corpse that, in a sense, has suffered from a lack of insect infestation. The bloating from his bile ducts and stomach has torn the skin apart in patches, and a tightening of the derma from the departure of moisture has given his corpse a badly mummified appearance. Had he been exposed to the presence of blowfly maggots and the summer heat, he would otherwise mostly be a skeleton by now. He's instead spent his days in the black plastic sack, festering and swelling, the gases threatening to rupture the sides of the bag until Andy had released the pressure with the serrated edge of a long knife.

“Where the fuck is the snake?” Ivy asks, making her way into the bedroom and momentarily uninterested in the presence of a rotting body.

“It's not going to bother you,” I snap, and then realize I am going to need her help. “Sorry—it isn't interested in us, it's over beneath the mattress. It'll wanna stay over there in the dark.”

“Who is that?”

“It's my old drug dealer.”

“What are we going to do about him?”

“I don't know yet.”

“Is that your next test?”

It reminds me that over by the snake there is a note. “I'm gonna have to kill the snake.”

“No!”

I'm shocked by the reluctance and turn to look at her. “I love snakes,” she begs. “They're probably my favorite animal.”

“I can't exactly open the front door and let it crawl out.”

This forces Ivy to consider the options and, finally, she realizes that there is only the one. “Okay, but do it humanely.”

“You suggested I use a chainsaw to kill a human being, but you want me to be gentle with the poisonous reptile?”

“You know I was kidding! But humans can be consciously evil; animals are just working on instinct.”

I flip the mattress back over, much slower and more cautious this time, and the rattler hisses, no longer curled around the hot water bottle, but wrapped into itself like a deadly figure eight with the note tucked beneath its body.

I throw my blanket over the creature, covering it in a thin layer of cotton blend that stretches out flush with the ground. The snake does not like this interference and begins gliding forward, creating a thin, ominous ripple through the cover with every muscular contortion. When it is inches away from the edge of the blanket nearest my foot, I stomp down hard on the triangular curvature at the front of the ripple, directly where the snake's head is progressing. Through my shoe, I feel the sickening crunch of bone as its mandible goes flat under my construction boot and the beast literally stops dead in its track. The patch of ground around the rattlesnake's munched skull is colored cantaloupe and cherry, and electrified pulses shoot through the snake, causing the hard skin of its rattle to flick quickly as its body convulses with the shock of death. The note is, strangely, still beneath the expired creature, and on closer inspection, I see a thin black wire looped around its scales, anchoring the paper to its body.

Leaving the snake to its slackening quivers, I rip the note away and take it up to read it. Unlined and handwritten, it suffers from the same poor spelling as his other scribbled message.

Tom,

If you havent lookt under the bed, I sugest you do it now. Ill wait. There. Now we are all on the same page. Last nite, you had me on my weigh out of this motherfucking state. I wuz runing, I admet it. And then I sawe this snake lieing on the side of the hiway, just bassking in the warmthe of the assfalt, and it made me pull over. I thawt, man, that snake is just fearless, the way it dosn't moove when I aproach it. The snake maid me think of you Tom, and how fucking ballsee you are. I had to shair it with you. So I am bak…thank the snake. Nowing you, it is probablee alredy dead. You seem to hav that efect on most of your relatonships. Again, I don't understand how it wuz you found me, but in the bitersweet end, it just reenforses for me how nesassery it is that you and I put our stamp on this whorld. I'm sory I sent you on the whiled goose chase out to Ventura this mourning, but I nedded time for this partyqular test. It wuznt easy, partyqularlee deeling with the snake; its caled a Mohavee Green and I am hapee to be rid of it. Now it is your tern.

So get rid of the snake and the dead stinkking drug deeler, avoyd geting pickt up by the cops, and if you still want to be my frend, give me a call when its all over and done with. And I shodn't have to tell you this by now, but get rid of this note.

Yore frend,

Andy

Ivy's attention is divided between the two corpses on the floor of my bedroom, and she doesn't ask for me to read her the note, so I don't. “We need to get rid of the smell” is all she says.

The body bag is useless now, so I go to the Charger for my milk crate of tricks. It's still light enough outside that I should be able to get away with use of my Sawzall. The noise will be a concern, but the smell is such that I'm willing to risk it in order to get this done as quickly as possible. Outside even, I can smell the particles of rot that have clung to my clothing, and I avoid the elevator going up. Ivy, to her credit, has forced open any window she can in the apartment and the fresh air is a revelation to the room. I didn't even know the windows could open. I set the crate on the sink in the bathroom and drag Tony's body in, along with the snake, on my ruined blanket. Ivy decides to take the path of less evil and begins scrubbing at the floorboards where the mashed imprint of the snake's shattered skull has been formed amidst the remaining entrails.

The Sawzall cuts through the bloat and bone quickly, sawing through Tony's limbs in seconds, but it is messier than a handsaw, and I am grateful for my face shield and the shower curtain. The fact that I don't gag at the smell or sight of the overworked reciprocating blade mangling decaying human flesh should concern me more than it does, but I set about the work with a grim certainty that at any moment, a phalanx of uniformed officers led by Detective Stack could bust through my door and send me straight to the lethal injection chamber. I seriously doubt Stack, or any jury, would be swayed by any notes from Andy. Even without my past, Ivy too is risking much at this point in the game.

Ivy comes in while I am separating Tony's head from the rest and calmly tells me that the bedroom is “good.” I point to the cans of deodorizer bombs that I have in my kit and tell her to deploy one in the bedroom and the other two in the hallway and then to go buy several gallons of Simple Green concentrate, work gloves, and a long-handled shovel. I tell her to buy the shovel and gloves at a different store than the Simple Green and to pay cash for all of it. She is sharp enough to not question this.

The deodorizers are industrial; the fire department uses them in the aftermath of burnt buildings to give the whole affair a sickly sweet bubble gum smell. The Simple is for the bathtub—it'll work wonders against the residual blood spotting on the off chance cops ever decide to douse the place with luminol.

I think I hear the door close and I stop sawing momentarily. “Hello?” I question the silence. No answer. “Ivy?”

I get up, praying that it was either my imagination or one of her silly games, because I can't handle too much else right now. Leaving the Sawzall, I peer out of the bathroom, my face shield splattered with red mess. The hallway is empty. “Ivy?” I try again.

I move out into the living room, but it is just as still as the rest of the house. I stop moving, breathing, and even attempt to slow my heartbeat, so I can listen for the tiniest hint of proof that I am not alone. There is only nothingness and my still-rapid heartbeat. I want to lock the door, but with Ivy out, I cannot chance it.
Just go back to work and finish quickly. Now is definitely not the time to lose it, Tom ol' buddy.
I have Tony bagged and tied, along with the snake, my blanket and shower curtain, before Ivy gets back. The smell of the aerosol deodorizers is overpowering now and I retrieve the two from the hallway, click them off, and toss them, with the third, into another bag. My clothes go into yet another bag, as will Ivy's, and this bag will be incinerated. Tony, on the other hand, will go to the desert.