The Coaster (22 page)

“What kind of man am I?”

“A moral relativist, someone whose values are adaptable depending on the time, place or situation. Or if you prefer, a pragmatist. I don't mean any of these terms to be pejorative. You've earned far more of my respect than I ever thought you would.”

“That's an interesting theory, but since I didn't kill Dave, it doesn't hold up. Why not just get someone else? There have got to be people who would kill for this kind of return.”

“Not everyone is like you, Bob. They're not actually willing to kill to get what they want. But be that as it may, most of the other investors—hell, all of the other investors—I could approach are smarter than you. They would have the same concerns you had about the numbers. No, I'm afraid you're it.”

“Then you're out of luck because I'm not going to do it.”

“Hear me out, Bob. You're looking at this the wrong way. We're the good guys here. We're performing a public service. We're helping people.”

“Oh, please.”

“These poor creatures are going to do meth whether we're involved or not. The only difference is now their product will be made by professionals who aren't meth-heads themselves. Before, they didn't know whether to snort it or put it in the corner to get rid of their rat problem.”

“Any drug dealer could claim the same thing.”

“Think of it like Prohibition. People still drank anyway, but they were forced to drink black-market booze that might blind or kill them. Then the ban got lifted and look where we are today.”

“Yeah, a country full of alcoholics.”

“Sometimes you need a drink and sometimes other people need a little boost to focus and get their work done. We're really like doctors prescribing medicine for an entire nation of people suffering from adult ADD.”

“Somehow I don't think a real doctor would agree with that diagnosis.”

“The point is that even though what we're doing is technically illegal—”

“It's not ‘technically' illegal,” I interrupted. “It's one hundred percent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, banned in every state, illegal.”

“But it's not immoral,” Swanson said. “We will produce a much better and safer product than the hillbilly meth these idiots are making now. And we'll clean up after ourselves. I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to learn that meth labs wreak havoc on the environment. By helping us sanitize these labs, you'll actually be saving the world, Bob.”

“I'm sure I'd receive a humanitarian award from Greenpeace. My meth lab work will overshadow its ‘save the whales' campaign.”

“Even if you don't buy that it's helping, you have to concede that it's not hurting anything. Someone's going to do it. It might as well be you.”

“Things haven't seemed to work out that well for the
Breaking Bad
guy.”

“Again, Bob, that show is not real life,” Swanson replied with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But even if it was, the guy's a rank amateur. He's a fucking high school science teacher, for Christ's sake. We're professional businessmen.”

Swanson went on. “But you don't need to worry, Bob. We're not going to get caught. Our competitors get caught because they're idiots. And Al Capone went to federal prison for tax evasion. But we're going to be paying our taxes, Bob. And if anything ever does go wrong, you'll never be tied to it. You were just an institutional investor. You never had any idea what was going on. You don't even know what's going on in your real business.”

“But it would still be blood money.”

“There's an old saying, Bob. ‘Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime.' Let's go back downstairs.”

Chapter Twenty-six

I followed Swanson down the stairs and over to the other far corner of the warehouse. Random junk was strewn about. A few good-sized rocks, a leather belt, diapers, tennis balls, wood two-by-fours, Kotex and tampons, aluminum and tin cans, steel wool, a cantaloupe, a tennis shoe, a leather shoe, women's pumps, a couple cans of paint, a wet army blanket, that pink fiberglass insulation, a plastic water bottle from the water cooler, and a wood-framed couch.

“What's all this, Swanson? You do some shopping at Casey Anthony's post-acquittal yard sale? Or did you have to foreclose on one of your ‘customers' for nonpayment?”

“You know, Bob, it's hard to believe you're not more successful with that sparkling wit of yours.”

“Unfortunately, there really aren't that many high-paying jobs that call for a guy to stand around making snarky comments. I may just have to start a blog.”

“You're not going to have to worry about money once we get this operation off the ground, Bob. This last little demonstration is the icing on the cake. If this doesn't convince you, nothing will.”

“My money's on ‘nothing.'”

Swanson walked over to an open area in the middle of all the junk. “This little baby,” he said with a malevolent grin that seemed inappropriate when I finally heard the words he was about to speak, “is called a Muffin Monster.”

He was standing next to a small piece of equipment that didn't even come up to his knees. It was a metal rectangle on four legs, painted army-green, no more than a couple feet wide and three feet long with a motor attached to one end. There was a smaller rectangular opening in the top and you could look down into the guts of the thing, which appeared to contain a row of silver metal coils. Maybe you cooked muffins in there somehow. My sister used to bake cakes with a light bulb in her Easy-Bake Oven.

“So part B of your master plan involves selling meth muffins at bake sales all across the Midwest?”

“Oh, no. The Muffin Monster doesn't
make
anything. It destroys things.”

I walked over for a closer look. It looked like something you might see on the sidewalk outside a hardware store that people buy for lawn care or gardening or cleaning or any of the other home improvement projects I know nothing about. My family has learned that it's easier and cheaper to hire that kind of work out to professionals.

“What does it have to do with muffins?”

“Best I can tell, it's called a Muffin Monster because it's like a fairy-tale monster that can eat anything and still shit out a muffin.”

I tried to give Swanson a look that told him I thought he was out of his mind, but by this point that was my default expression. “So it does make muffins.”

“Not really. They're usually installed in sewer lines to shred anything that gets tossed in there that would clog a pipe. But it will grind anything it gets its teeth on into such small pieces you could form it into a muffin if you wanted to.”

“I've had a few bran muffins that tasted like they might have been made from sewage.”

“You wouldn't want to eat one of these, I assure you. In addition to normal bodily waste, you wouldn't believe what people flush down the toilet or throw in the sewer. That's why they make these things so they can chew up anything.”

“It doesn't look like much just sitting there.”

“Like a woman, you can't get the full impact until you turn it on.”

“Is this being filmed before a live studio audience?”

“You're not the only one who can come up with a clever quip.”

“I'm the only one in this warehouse.”

Swanson walked over and plugged the machine into an orange extension cord. The parallel coils began spinning toward each other, the left one clockwise, the right one counter-clockwise.

“Those spinning cylinders are two rows of sharp, reinforced-steel cutters,” Swanson said. “It's low-speed, to keep objects from bouncing off it before they can be grabbed, and high-torque for tremendous cutting power. The two counter-rotating shafts turn at different speeds and the cutters overlap to pull objects in and shred them with a cutting and grinding action. Each shaft is made up of a stack of individual steel cutters, each with five teeth. I
t can apply over seven thousand pounds of cutting force at peak load.”

“Spare me the sales pitch. I'm not looking to purchase the home model.”
Although it might have come in handy the other night.

“It might have come in handy the other night,” Swanson said. He and I were spending so much time together we were starting to think alike.

“Whatever,” I said, “let's see it eat something.”

Swanson picked up a tennis ball and tossed it into the opening on top of the machine. It briefly rolled along the line between the two spinning cylinders until it caught. It was instantly smashed flat and pulled down into and through the tiny gap, and was gone. Swanson reached underneath and pulled out a metal receptacle like a little wastebasket and dumped the contents on the floor. It was just yellow fuzz and shredded bits of rubber.

“Big deal,” I said. “My dog does that twice a week.”

“Can your dog do this?”

Swanson grabbed a couple of rocks the size of baseballs and dropped them into the Muffin Monster. Then he dumped out the contents of the wastebasket and it was just ashes, as if grandma's urn had gotten knocked over in a lame situation-comedy. Swanson then fed a thick, wet, army blanket through the monster's jaws. The machine never caught or paused, it just kept munching until the blanket was gone, leaving only a pile of fuzz and fiber.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“Each of those cylinders is a bunch of razor-sharp, hardened steel cutters kind of like a Chinese throwing star or a circular-saw blade. The points are angled toward the direction they're spinning so they grab at anything they can get their teeth on and force it down between the spinning cylinders. There's only a few millimeters of space between the two rows of blades, so whatever it's got ahold of just gets chopped and ground until it's small enough to fit through. The result ends up in the wastebasket.”

“So it's kind of a c
ombination industrial shredder, garbage disposal, wood chipper, meat grinder, and trash compactor.”

“Exactly,” Swanson said. “Although not its intended purpose, it's the ultimate eliminator of evidence. It destroys physical objects forever like a paper shredder destroys documents.” Swanson grabbed a glass beaker and placed it on the spinning blades. Instant glass powder, as fine as unmixed Kool-Aid. He fed some copper tubing into the opening and nothing but copper-colored shavings came out the bottom.

“I get it, Swanson. This machine allows you to eradicate any meth lab evidence in a hurry.”

“In conjunction with the Sanitol sanitizer, yes. Once the sanitizer washes all this stuff away, there's no chemical residue or incriminating evidence of any kind left. This thing can even get rid of signs there were ever people there at all.”

Swanson signaled to the linebackers and they lifted the couch and brought it over to the Muffin Monster. They had to break it up a little to fit the pieces into the opening, but when they were finished, no couch. No sign there had ever been a couch.

“If we decide one of our locations is compromised, we can literally erase it from existence in a couple of hours. The DEA will never make a case against us.”

***

Swanson may have been an asshole but he was right about the Muffin Monster. It was freaking awesome. If you walked by one outside your local hardware store, you wouldn't think anything of it. Until it was plugged in and turned on, you'd have no way of knowing you could be dragged into it inch by inch until you were a puddle of goo ready to be hosed down the drain. I didn't even want to be in the same room with the thing. It was like a Stephen King novel, the Muffin Monster just sitting there day after day, patiently waiting and waiting until you or your cat or your child forgot about it and accidentally got too close.

“I don't know how good you are at making the product, Swanson, but you seem to have a knack for destroying things.”

“That's not all, Bob. We can also use the Muffin Monster to safely dispose of other ‘problems.'” Swanson's one of those people who can make air quotes with the inflection in his voice.

“What problems would those be?”

“Observe.” He walked over to the junk pile and rummaged around for a minute. He came back with a man's leather belt. I can't really tell one belt from another, but it looked suspiciously like one of mine, a Christmas present from Sarah that I would never have bought for myself because it cost way too much and a belt is a belt. He fed it smoothly through the machine. “The Muffin Monster is very effective at getting rid of articles of clothing we wouldn't want found.”

“I'm sure it is, but it's actually kind of an anticlimax after the couch. I wouldn't close with it.”

“Oh, I'm not finished.” Swanson dug around in the junk some more and came back with a pair of black women's pumps, again naggingly familiar. I don't really know one women's shoe from the next, but I remembered Sarah had bought a pair just like this one. It stuck in my mind because these shoes cost four times as much as the already outrageous normal price of women's shoes because they had bright red soles. “You're paying a premium for the bottom of the shoe?” I asked her. “That's like paying extra because you like the underside of a rug.”

In the shoes went. The Muffin Monster gobbled them up like candy. The next item Swanson selected was a red, white, and blue basketball, the old ABA style popularized by Dr. J and his giant seventies afro. Nick's favorite ball looked just like it. Obviously, I was beginning to sense a pattern here, but all of these things were fairly generic items. They were similar without question to my family's belongings, but not necessarily the prized possessions themselves. I also have to admit it was pretty cool the way the monster grabbed that basketball, completely flattened it and sucked it down into its belly in about two seconds.

But the next thing Swanson brought back from the pile, there was no doubt. It was not kind of the same or similar to or the same brand as Emily's favorite stuffed animal. It
was
Emily's favorite stuffed animal. I know because I've tucked her into bed with it every night for the last year. It was a stuffed beaver her brother, Nick, gave her for her eighth birthday. Nick dressed it in a flat-billed baseball cap like rappers and suburban white kids wear for street cred and named it Justin Beaver. So, naturally, Emily loves it and she can't go to sleep without it. Max is also fond of him and as a result Justin has a mangled beaver tail and a missing right eye. Just like the beaver Swanson was now holding above the gaping jaws of the Muffin Monster.

“All right, Swanson!” I yelled. “You've made your point.”

Swanson looked at me, fake-puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

“It's one thing for you to destroy some of my family's impersonal belongings, although I may be underestimating Sarah's intimate feelings for those shoes. It's another thing to destroy my daughter's favorite stuffed animal. She loves that thing like a real pet.”

“How do you know it's hers?”

I walked over to Swanson, reached out and squeezed the furry creature's left paw. Nick's voice echoed in the warehouse. “Happy Birthday, Emily. This is Justin Beaver. Like, baby, baby, baby, oh. Like baby, baby, baby, no!” That's right. He even sang that last part.

“My son got this for my daughter at Build-a-Bear. They put a voice chip in the paw with a personal message. I get the message, Swanson. You're threatening my family.”

Swanson looked offended. “I haven't threatened anyone.”

“Whatever. Call it what you want. It doesn't matter. But you or one of your henchmen have obviously been in my house.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Swanson replied innocently.

“I'd like to leave now.”

“Of course. You can leave whenever you want, Bob. No one is holding you against your will.”

“It's kind of a long walk from here, Swanson.”

“Oh. You're looking for a ride.”

“Well, considering you had the Aryan Linebacking Brotherhood bring me here in the first place…”

“Fine. But before you go I want to make sure you truly understand what our operation is capable of here. Come over here where you can really appreciate the power of this machine.”

I walked over and stood next to him, but a couple of steps back from the Muffin Monster. I still felt like it was something I might trip and fall into. I treated it like a cliff overlooking an abyss. I didn't want to get too close to the edge.

“Just look at those spinning steel blades,” Swanson said. “Can you imagine what that would do to flesh and bone?”

“I've been imagining it for the last fifteen minutes. If you're trying to convince me this machine is an instrument of horror, you've succeeded.”

I noticed the linebackers were suddenly standing right behind me. They each grabbed one of my arms and held it.

“Sometimes the reality,” Swanson said, “is far worse than the human mind will allow itself to imagine.”

“Not for me.” I struggled futilely. One of them could have easily held me. Two was overkill. “You wouldn't believe what I can imagine.”

“I can believe that,” Swanson said, “having gotten to know you over the last few weeks. But you still need a demonstration.”

I closed my eyes and waited for one of my hands to be forced down toward the jagged teeth. Nothing happened. I opened my eyes. Jim in the blue coveralls was walking toward us wearing rubber gloves and holding a large brown rat by the tail. The rat was very much alive, stretching to bite and scratch him, but it couldn't penetrate the gloves.