The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (64 page)

Still no word from Geezler. So if they had closed the burn pits, he had to ask himself, how would he know? And Cathy. He needed to speak with Cathy.

Alerted by the noise (a rough crank of gears and brakes, of a truck reversing at the camp gates rather than coming directly through) Rem came out of the Quonset, first walking then running to the gates. What were they doing? Just what was going on?

Strapped to the flatbed of a long trailer sat the burned-out front of a truck, a Scania – immediately recognizable as the vehicle in which Amer Hassan had died. Glassless and gutted, fire had stripped the interior, seared the seats down to their springs, left a sharp stink of burnt rubber, but the door, scorched and dulled by the heat, still held the HOSCO logo.

Rem stopped the truck as it backed through the gate and clambered up the footplate to ask Clark who was driving to tell him that this was not the vehicle he thought it was.

Pakosta and Santo looked one to the other.

‘Just tell me that you aren’t this fucking stupid. Tell me there is a sensible notion behind this.’ Rem jumped down and signalled Pakosta and Santo to get out. ‘Santo, tell me. Why would you bring this vehicle back to the camp?’

Santo began to explain that a call had come earlier saying that a convoy had passed through the previous night and the vehicle was on fire. Southern-CIPA had asked for it to be removed. Clearly, the vehicle couldn’t be left where it was, it was a danger to the other convoys, and could be set with IEDs, it was a hazard, a potential danger, and wasn’t this part of their job?

Pakosta pointed wearily to the cab on the flatbed. ‘Look. We’re doing exactly what we’re told. Stephen said we should move it.’

‘Stephen?’

‘Sutler. He spoke with CIPA this morning.’

Rem sprang close to Pakosta, face to face. ‘So, how, if it’s such a fucking danger, did you have the stupidity to approach the vehicle in the first place?’

Clark, half out of the cab, began to explain that the vehicle was upright when they arrived – it had been dragged upright, and they’d simply hauled it onto the flatbed. There wasn’t any choice. They couldn’t leave it there.

Santo folded his arms and muttered that he wasn’t paid for this.

‘Take this vehicle away. You back out, you dump this a million miles away, and you take some charges and destroy it.’

Rem drew back and pointed south to indicate where they should take the truck, then walked away without looking back.

Rem couldn’t bring himself to sit with the men at supper. Instead he started up the barbecue and picked out two of the burgers and watched them shrink as they cooked. On the other side of the awning he could hear Samuels and Clark, then Chimeno talking about the morning, and it was clear that they did not know he was there. Sutler came to the tent looking for ice or cold beer but found the coolbox empty. The men were sullen and when Watts asked what that was about earlier, Sutler refused to be drawn. As he left he said he had no idea.

Chimeno couldn’t figure it out. Everything was tits up. Did anyone know if they were working any more, and if so, who for? What was going on?

Clark sounded defensive. He still didn’t get it. What else were they supposed to do, and what was going on last night? His wife, what the hell was she doing? What was with that email – and there were others, they’d all seen them.

Rem could hear them re-load the coolbox. Chimeno struck a conciliatory tone. ‘You should have nuked it right where you found it.’

Clark opened his beer and swore.

‘About the truck.’ Chimeno attempted to reason through the morning. ‘It’s obvious. He feels responsible. Gunnersen sent the man out there. Think about it. There wasn’t any need for a translator, but Gunnersen sent him out. You should have talked with him first. Maybe if he’d known what you were doing there would’ve been a different reaction. Who knows? We’ve all been there. It’s not so unreasonable.’

Clark said he didn’t care. It wasn’t just about the truck. ‘What are we burning here? Does anyone know? Are they closing the camp? What exactly are we doing here? I mean, how do we know were not breaking some law burning this shit? Are we in trouble when we get back? You saw that list. How can any of this be legal?’

Rem waited for the men to disperse, then came around the awning to pick two cans out of the coolbox. He walked to the Beach to find Kiprowski.

He sat in the sand beside the boy and said he was sorry: about Hassan, about the men in the camp, about the camp itself. He offered Kiprowski one of the beers, and as Kiprowski accepted he asked if he’d seen the truck that morning.

Kiprowski nodded. ‘I heard,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see it.’

Rem waited before asking how he was doing.

‘I’m fine.’ Kiprowski cleared his throat. The beer unopened in his hands, his hands between his knees. ‘I’m good.’

Rem had to hold his breath before he spoke. ‘This is doing good?’

Kiprowski hung his head and his voice came low as a whisper. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

They sat in silence for a while, the sky barren, pinched of colour.

Kiprowski dropped back into the sand, his arms at his side, unanimated. ‘Something like this was always going to happen. You can’t have so much against you and expect to come out of it without something – I don’t know – happening.’

Kiprowski opened the beer and let the foam pour over his hand, where it hit the sand the grains gathered together as if contracting. ‘You said something to Pakosta about making a mistake you can’t afford.’ Kiprowski took a sip. ‘What did you mean?’

Rem had said this off the cuff after Pakosta had thrown a second flare into the pit, causing the gasoline, now airborne, to ignite and sweep over them; harmless enough, but unexpected.

‘He – I don’t know – has a particular talent.’

Rem looked over the abandoned vehicles at the foot of the dune, and felt a faint whip of disappointment. He’d watched them arrive, slung like dumb cattle and dragged by helicopter over the desert from Amrah City. There were older items, parts of a cart, a wagon without wheels. Un-funny. Mule-less. Foolish.

‘You remember that map. The route we came in on. The highway that stopped in the desert.’

Rem half-laughed. ‘Seems a while ago now, doesn’t it.’

Kiprowski drew his legs up. ‘I’ve been looking at Sutler’s maps. There’s never been a road there. The new maps he brought with him don’t show that road either. It’s only on the map from Southern-CIPA.’

‘Well, some of it does. We were driving on it.’

‘That turn on Route 567. Where we came off. That’s not on the map either.’ Kiprowski cleared his throat. ‘You look at any map and you’ll see there isn’t a turn anywhere on that road. It comes up straight from Kuwait and heads straight to Khat, then straight to Kamkun,
then
it starts turning,
after
Kamkun. You know how many accidents they’ve had on that road in the last nine months?’

Rem had no idea.

‘Twenty-two. I checked. Most are people following a map like ours, or people who haven’t driven that route in a while. Everyone expects it to be straight.’

Rem stood and brushed off the sand, tired at the useless compression of grief, the struggle to find plots and reasons to explain events that just happen because they can happen. ‘Look, I’ll leave you alone.’ He straightened up and pointed at Kiprowski’s beer can. ‘There’s more back at camp. It won’t last long.’

‘I’m stopping here.’

Rem warned that it was getting cold. The sky sucked the heat from the desert, and the temperature dropped quickly. Kiprowski said he’d be fine, for the last couple of nights he’d searched through the hulks of the scrapyard, a blue light in his hand, scanning under the vehicles for scorpions. The creatures absorbed the light and threw it back a spectral green, luminescent. ‘Did his nosebleed stop?’

‘You mean Clark?’

‘No, Spider.’

‘Spider?’

‘Chimeno.’

‘I didn’t hear about it.’

‘It looked like someone punched him.’

Rem made it halfway back to the cabins when he realized that Kiprowski wanted to say something about Chimeno but hadn’t quite managed. As he passed by the tent he avoided looking at the men, and they quietened in any case when they saw him approach.

✩

Cathy arrived late at work to find the store closed, the aisles empty except for the four clerks standing hands on hips or arms folded, nonplussed, an accusatory pitch in the way they leaned back to watch her. She greeted the guard as he unlocked the door and thought he also had some problem, something she couldn’t guess.

‘She’s at the back taking stock.’

Cathy hitched her bag higher on her shoulder as she walked through the store.

‘Maggie wants a word.’ The first of four girls pointed to the loading dock. Chewed black fingernails.
And she handles food
.

What was it with these people, anyway? Voices sharp as pickle-juice, first jobs, more or less, hair dyed whore-black, punched-face make-up, all younger by a good fifteen years, and the attitude. What was it with the attitude?

‘She’s in the back.’

Cathy walked through Produce, through the soft rubber slats to the loading dock to find Maggie with a man in a short-sleeved shirt and glasses,
George
stitched in orange on the pocket. The man counted while two boys emptied a van, their arms loaded with white and pink boxes. On every surface the same pretty boxes: stacked on pallets, blocking the freight elevator, the firedoor, falling back from the dock to the open back of the truck. Maggie’s gesture, hands held in flat-out refusal, pushing, indicating she wanted everything gone, out of here, now, and when she saw Cathy she hurried forward, relieved.

‘Tell him to take them back. We can’t store these. It’s a mistake. Tell him he has to take them back.’

The man set his feet wide apart, folded his arms, leaned back, stubborn, a stance that might have appeared manly, except the girls in the store stood in the exact same way. He did not instruct his men to stop.

‘What’s going on,
George
?’ Cathy conspicuously read the name on his shirt. He didn’t look much like a George. With a tattoo edging under his shirt-sleeve she guessed he’d have a nickname.

‘Insanity. Mouthwash!’ Maggie waved, exasperated, at the boxes.

Mouthwash. Cathy asked to see the order-sheet. She still had Roscoe’s receipt in her pocket. ‘We don’t have any orders for mouthwash, George, and we don’t sell this brand.’

‘I told him.’ Maggie held out a docket, shook it. ‘Look at the name on the delivery. It’s yours.’

Cathy opened the paper, looked to the top and found her name,
Cathy M. Gunnersen
, underneath the name of the store.

‘I didn’t place this order. We can’t accept these.’

The man folded his arms, a finite
no
.

‘I’m serious. You have to take these back. We won’t pay for them.’

‘No one’s being asked to pay. They’re yours. I’m paid to deliver. That’s all I know.’

Maggie looked down to her feet. ‘This is the wrong day for this.’

Cathy looked over the invoice, searched for a name, a number to call. ‘You’ve come all the way from Connecticut? Who’s PrimeCut? I’ve never heard of them. Says here that the order has come from PrimeCut Supply.’

The man nodded. Now they all had their arms folded.

‘Let me make a call.’

Cathy strode back through the store determined not to show her confusion. She ignored the sales clerks who turned, magnetized, to watch her. She paused at the checkout and turned slowly about to face the shop.

‘Why are you all standing around? Get those doors open.’ She turned her back as she placed the call, not wanting the see the girls disobey her, but feeling better in any case to have said something decisive.

After an hour speaking with different people at PrimeCut Supply in Connecticut, Cathy finally convinced them to cancel the order and take back the goods.

The woman, a clerk called Martina with a summer voice, explained that the order to deliver ninety-five boxes of mouthwash had come to them via a third party. It wasn’t an error.

‘I don’t understand why you have my name?’

The woman couldn’t explain. There was one shipment of ninety-five boxes to Cathy M. Gunnersen placed through this one third-party order.

‘
Third party
? I don’t understand what that means.’

‘It means the order is coming from a customer who wants the goods to be shipped to another party, someplace else.’

‘And what address do you have?’

The clerk read out the address for Happy Shopper, then the address for Clark Street.

Cathy looked out of the window at a small line of shoppers, all static, lost, because the store was closed but the lights were on, and they could see the staff standing about, useless, and it was already one hour and twenty minutes into trading time and the girls had not done what she’d asked. Zombies, she told herself. Undead. Slow. Soul-less. Zombies. In a film they would invent ways to dispatch them one by one.

And why mouthwash?

✩

Sutler brought beer to Rem’s cabin and asked if he could have a word. Rem pointed to Kiprowski’s cot.

‘I have a little scotch left,’ he said, ‘if you’d prefer.’

Rem paused from writing. ‘You manage to get your hands pretty much on anything.’

‘What was that earlier today?’

‘A man died. An accident. Before you arrived.’ Rem paused and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘His name was Amer Hassan, and he had two sons. His wife is now a widow, and she’s barely in her twenties. She’s in another country and doesn’t speak the language, and there won’t be insurance or compensation from HOSCO. He comes from Yemen, and has family, who came with him to Iraq who will be in danger once the word gets out that he was working for us.’

‘You’re not responsible.’ Sutler offered the beer. Rem did not accept.

‘This isn’t about me. This is about a deep and meaningless fuck-up.’ Rem looked hard at Sutler. Was he asking because he was interested, or because it was information? ‘Look. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m tired of trying to figure you out.’