Stiffed (2 page)

‘I know.’  I
try to wave him into the hall.  There’s no point washing and changing my clothes until we’ve moved the body. 

In the t
en minutes or so I’d been waiting for fat boy to arrive I’d been busy.  I’d performed the world’s longest piss, scooped up my puke, scrubbed the wall, floor and locker, found some duct tape and sheets, rolled Marino on his back, and tugged the base sheet out and had started to wrap it around him as a makeshift body bag. 

‘And you look like shit
.’

‘Not as bad as I feel, believe me. 
Come on, we need to get him out of here.’  I turn away from the door hoping he’ll follow.  This is not a conversation I want to share with the rest of the world.

‘Where’s Psycho-B
itch?’ Jason asks, crossing the threshold and tracking me up the stairs.  ‘You do her as well?’

‘I didn’t do him! 
And she’s not here.  She left after smashing me in the head with a lamp.’

‘She found you in bed with lover boy?’ he asks
, following me into the bedroom.

I don’t answer.  There’s no way I’m confessing to be being found with a hard-on like an iron bar, spooning a dead, blood soaked made-man.

‘Fuck!’ Jason mutters his gaze fixed on the stained sheet covering Marino.  ‘Do you know him?’

‘He works for Pirelli.’

‘Aldo Pirelli?  Jesus, Tadhg.’  He says my name as it’s meant to be pronounced – Tai-g.  Like Tiger without the r.  To those not prepared to try, I’ll also answer to Tad.  My real friends though call me Tadhg.  It means poet or storyteller in Irish.  Its anglicized version is Taig, a derogatory term for Catholics in Northern Ireland and Scotland.  Apparently the prods are not so keen on wordsmiths.  They much prefer murals.  And marching.

‘Are you trying to get us both killed?
’ Jason continues.  ‘Fuck.  Pirelli.’

‘What we’ll do is wrap him in a couple
more sheets, duct tape them in place, and hide him in your garage.’

‘My garage?’
 

‘Jas
e, we don’t have time to argue.  The police could be here any minute.  Here, take this.’  I throw him a sheet.

‘If you didn’t kill him, why not just wait for the cops?’ Jason says, staying where he is.  ‘Moving a body is a federal offence.’

‘Because Aldo Pirelli will put two and two together and get twenty two and then I’ll
be swimming with the fishes in concrete shoes.  We need to move the body out of the house then call the cops.  Anonymously.’

Jason nods his enormous head, thinking through my logic.  I can tell he’s only half buying it.
  He’s naturally suspicious, based on experience, of anything I say.  We share a history of half-truths, one-upmanship, exaggerations and outright fantasies that bond all friends.

‘Even if you call it in anonymously, they’ll think he’s been moved from here.  I mean, if they come here.  Surely they should be here by now
if Psycho-Bitch reported it?’ 

I move to the body
and throw a fresh sheet over Marino.  We don’t have time for a debate. 

‘
Look, Jase, if you don’t want to help me, at least stand on the street and phone me when the cops turn the corner.’

‘She has gone to the cops, right?  I mean, she didn’t kill him, did she?’

‘YES!  I mean, NO!’  I remember her standing at the end of the bed in her underwear, the look of surprise and horror on her face. ‘She discovered the body, panicked and fled.’

I struggle to tuck the sheet under the inert body. 
This is hopeless; I’m a dead man struggling with a dead man.

The mattress sags under the weight of one of Jason’s knees.
  ‘Here, give me that,’ he demands.

Two min
utes later and we have Marino at the top of the stairs.  I have his legs, Jason his shoulders.  He’s wrapped in three sheets, a spiral of duct tape circling him from head to toe.  This might turn out alright after all.

‘I must be mad helping you,’ Jason says.

‘What are friends for?’

‘Good question.’

I start to descend the stairs, holding Marino’s feet.  Four steps down and it occurs to me that I should have turned round and walked down them backwards.  I try to turn, juggling Marino’s limbs, but I get myself tangled in a piece of sheet that has worked its way loose.  The next thing I know I’ve lost my grip and Morelli’s heels clunk onto the stairs.  His shoulders slip from Jason’s grasp and the mobster hurtles down towards the front door, knocking my legs from under me.  I tip over the edge of the banister, my arms flailing, trying to grab hold of something, anything, and drop eight feet or so onto the hall floor, landing heavily on my side.

FUCK
!

That hurt
.  A lot. 

A pair of headlights sweep
s into the short driveway, illuminating the hall.

‘T
adhg!  Hey, Tadhg, man, you okay?  A car just pulled up outside your house,’ Jason says, stating the obvious.

A visitor at this time of the night and in these circumstances is
unlikely to be a positive development.

I
slowly push myself up onto my knees.  Nothing seems broken, thank heavens.  Cautiously I stand and limp towards Jason and the body.  The hall table is on its side, the phone on the floor, a high pitched tone whining from the receiver.  Two potted plants have been upended, dried soil spread everywhere.  It’s a miracle the plants are alive given how infrequently I remember to water them.

‘Who is it?’ I whisper.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come
on, let’s get him out the back door.’

Jason nudges me out the
way, drags Marino back up onto his feet then flips him up onto his shoulder, letting out a grunt with the effort.

We head through the kitchen to the back door and I let Jason out.

‘You go,’ I say, ‘I’ll follow you in a minute.’

‘Tadhg.’

‘I need to tidy up a little.’

‘Tadhg!
’ 

I sneak back in and
dash up the stairs.  I want to flip the mattress in a vague effort to hide the blood stain and throw on a fresh sheet and bed clothes.  As I reach the landing a heavy hand raps on the door.

Damn
.

I grab hold of one side and yank the mattress up, dragging it across and letting it drop back into place.  I throw a fresh shee
t over the bed and quickly start to tuck it in.

The knocking is repeated.

This is hopeless.  I glance round the room.  It’s a mess.  There’s the residue of puke on the closet door, there are flecks of blood I’ve missed on the wall and floor, the crap that was on the bedside locker is jumbled on the floor, and the blood stained duvet cover is in full view.

I kick the duct tape under the bed and stuff the duvet into the closet.
  It’ll have to do.  I can explain.  Kind of. 

Except I no longer have the body.

I should have fled with Jason. 

Fuck
, Jason!  He’s now on the run with a dead made-man.  I wonder who he’ll ring to help him out if I’m indefinitely delayed?

I head for the top of the stairs. 
Time to face the music.  I scratch at my arm and stop.  It’s still covered in blood.  Marino’s blood.

Oh
God.

There’s a tinkle of glass in the hallway and a black hand sneaks in through the shattered pane, reaching for the lock.

I shuffle backwards and head for my old bedroom at the rear of the house.  It’s still full of the crap I accumulated in my youth - books, comics, games consoles, fantasy figurines and model aircraft - though now neatly rearranged by the hands of my late mother.  I open the window and step out onto the pitched roof of the back porch.  I’ve years of practice sneaking out this way.  During my teenage years it was Route 1.

The front door is now open and I can hear the voices of two men as they enter. 

‘Are you sure this is the right house?’  The man sounds like Barry White with the flu.  Deep and guttural.

‘Of course I’m fucking sure!’

‘Someone’s been here before us.  The place is a fucking mess.  You take upstairs, I’ll look round down here.’

‘I ain’t your fucking
flunkey.  You take upstairs.’

‘Just fucking
do it, Junior.’

‘And st
op calling me Junior!  I ain’t junior to no-one.’

‘If I have to tell you again,
Junior
, it’ll be for the last fucking time.  Do you understand what I’m saying?  I’ve had just about all the shit I can take for one evening.  Fucking rednecks.’

‘Fuck you, man.  Fuck you
and fuck your crazy shit.  I got better things to be doing than getting into gun fights and chasing a crazy white bitch.  I should have listened to Denise.  She said this trip would be fucked up.  That you’d gone color blind.  I could be at home with her right now, doing the nasty, instead of fucking about here with you ... what the …’

There was a
kind of hiss, then a thunk, followed by another.

‘Fuck.’  Barry White didn’t sound happy.
  ‘Fucking Denise.’

If these were cops, then it sounded like one of them
had just knocked out his partner. 

Which probably meant they weren’t cops.

Oh shit.

The stairs creak
as Barry White ascends.  As he reaches the landing I chance a quick peek through the window.  He’s tall, broad and bald, with skin that seems blacker than the shirt he’s wearing.  Pure ebony.  He enters each room then heads back downstairs.

I climb down off the porch and sneak
round the side of the house.  A minute later Barry White emerges alone, his face a fierce scowl.  He isn’t someone you’d want to bring home to your folks – unless you wanted to scare them half to death.

‘Fuck,’ he mutters and heads
for his car, a black Lexus, leaving the front door wide open.

He reverses out and
glides away slowly.

I wait
a minute or so then cautiously step back across the threshold, my heart in my mouth.

Junior i
s slumped at the bottom of the stairs.  He is, I mean was, a small black man dressed in jeans and a grey hooded top, RED SOX printed across the front.  There’s a neat hole in his forehead, his brains sprayed all over the hall wall and a photograph of my parent’s wedding.

Fuck. 

Fuckity fuck.

I turn away and dry heave. 

* * *

I tap lightly on the door leading into the basement.  A few moments later
Jason pushes it open.  The basement is his domain.  He shares the middle floor with his parents.  They occupy the top floor.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’
he whispers waspishly and not unreasonably.  It’s nearly an hour since he left my house carrying a heavy corpse with attached liabilities.

‘Tidying up.’
 

I hand him a sports bag that contains
some spare clothes.  Every part of me aches like a mouthful of rotten teeth.  The fall over the banister seems to have jarred every bone in my body.  Sweat is beading on my forehead and dribbling into my tired eyes.  Despite drinking a gallon of water and taking a handful of headache tablets my head still feels like it’s been the test site for high explosive ordnance.

I’d figured that if the police hadn’t already showed, they weren’t likely to do so
until the morning.  I’d wrapped Junior up in sheets and duct tape as with Marino.  Then I cleaned up the hall as best I could, picking up the stand and phone, repotting the plants, sweeping up the soil and wiping down the walls.  I’d also had another go at the bedroom, scrubbing the walls and floor, and replacing the duvet.  I’d shoved the sheets and debris into garbage bags, which were now at the back of the Choi’s garden. 

‘Where’
d you hide the body?’ I ask, rubbing my face with my filthy t-shirt.

‘In the garage
, like you suggested.’

‘I have another one.  He
’s in the bushes.’

‘Another one!
’ His harsh whisper rises an octave and two dozen decibels. ‘For fuck’s sake, Tadhg.’

‘
There were two of them.  The smaller one pissed off the mean motherfucker and he shot him in the head.  The gun must have had a silencer.’

‘They weren’t cops?’

‘No.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Double fuck.’ 

Two people had been murdered in my house in the space of a few hours and I had absolutely no idea why.  And now I possessed two bodies. 
An Italian bad dude and a Black bad dude.  At least I’m assuming Junior is a bad dude.  He sure as hell hung around with one.  And Kate has done a runner, but not to the police.  So far.  The obvious conclusion is that this is either a case of mistaken address or something to do with her.  She’s kooky and sees the world in a way I just can’t fathom, but I have a hard time seeing her mixed up with Marino.  But then anything is possible, as the last hour has just proven.