The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (6 page)

—I did! I did! I called! And after court I had to go explain it to my mom and she got upset and didn't want me to drive because she didn't understand that it was OK, that I hadn't been suspended and I called to tell you I couldn't be at the shop, man.

—No you didn't.

Bang dug in his heels and shrugged off his uncle's hand.

—Fuck your hand off me anyway. I do all the shit work! All of it! You, that fucking round-eye Gabe, you never pull your weight. Not that anyone could pull your weight.

—Nephew.

—No, fuck you! Fuck you and this shit job. I fucking quit! See how long that scrawny fucker lasts doing the heavy lifting for you. See how long he lasts when there's trouble. Fuck you and fuck your fucking wife who can't take a fucking phone message and.

Whoever else was meant to be fucked had their name deleted by Po Sin's hand wrapping around his nephew's throat and shoving him into the graffitied brick wall of the hotel.

Po Sin held him there. Bang turned red.

I took a couple steps.

—Po Sin.

He looked at me. Looked at his nephew. And let go.

Bang slumped, gagged and wheezed. Po Sin put a hand on his chest.

—Dingbang? I. Dingbang.

Bang knocked the hand away.

—Don't call me that!

He pushed from the wall and ran to the end of the alley.

—Gonna pay for touching me, man! No one touches Bang!

He took a step, stopped, and pointed at me.

—You too, shitbag, you're dead!

And he rounded the corner of the alley and was gone.

Po Sin stood there for a second, turned and walked toward me.

—Sorry. He's my nephew. But. He.

—He's a dick, Po Sin.

He pulled the end of his moustache.

—Well. Yes. Like father like son. Nothing like working with family to bring out the best in a man.

—Or to make him want to strangle them.

He smiled.

—Don't know about you, but some of my family, I don't need to be anywhere near them to want to strangle ’em.

—I find it helps that my mom lives out of state.

—Never had a problem with my mother. My dad I could have throttled a couple times.

—My dad spends all his time in a bar out in Santa Monica. That far west, may as well be another state. He's safe from me.

—Yeah, distance makes the heart grow fonder.

—I didn't say that.

He started for the service entrance.

—My mother and father are both permanently out of reach. And my brother. Well. We're out of touch. Last thing I need at this point is less family.

He stopped and stared at the end of the alley where Bang had disappeared.

I bent and picked up a shitbag and tossed it in the bin.

—He was asking for it, Po Sin.

He kept looking down the alley.

—He's a boy I'm a man.

He turned his head to me.

—A man should be able to retain his composure.

I looked at the shit at my feet.

He made for the entrance.

—It's about lunch. Finish up with that and we'll go grab a bite.

—Where?

He waved a hand over his shoulder.

—Doesn't matter. With a job like this, wherever we eat it's gonna taste like shit.

I watched him go inside. I massaged my finger and rotated my wrist and swung my arm around, making sure it all worked. Then I started. Putting more shit in the bin.

He was right about lunch.

What with the smell of well-marinated crap in our hair and on our clothes and up our noses and down our throats, lunch didn't have much
appeal for me. Not so, for the more experienced hands. I watched Po Sin tear into his third cheeseburger, and Gabe scrape the last of his chili from the bottom of the bowl.

Po Sin washed down a bite of burger with chocolate milkshake.

—Different things bother different people.

I picked up one of my fries and took a bite of it. It still tasted like shit.

—So you're saying I shouldn't be disturbed by the fact that having my nasal passages smelling like dung ruins my appetite? What relief. I was worried it was me, I was worried I might be some kind of deviant not wanting to eat when all I can smell is ass butter. What a load off, knowing that I'm not alone and everyone has their own problems.

Po Sin wiped his mouth.

—Thought that'd make you feel better.

I dropped the fry and pushed the unfinished bulk of my meal to the middle of the table.

—So what bothers you?

Po Sin grabbed some of my fries and shoved them in his mouth.

—Me? Nothing.

Gabe rubbed his nose.

—Nothing but kids.

Po Sin looked at me.

—Kids are hard. No one likes kids.

I looked away from Po Sin, watched some teenagers at the Fatburger counter shove each other around, laughing, and chose to ignore whatever the fuck point he was trying to make.

—I like kids. Kids are OK.

Gabe drained the last of his ice tea.

—Dead kids. No one likes dead kids.

Po Sin threw me another look, I refused to catch it, and he ate another fry.

—On a trauma job. When it's a kid. That's rough.

Gabe leaned back, the table warped in the lenses of the sunglasses he hadn't taken off since coming out of the hotel.

—Doesn't really count anyway. Kids bother everyone. None of the other stuff bothers you.

Po Sin shrugged.

—Do the job long enough, you see it all.

He dipped his head at Gabe.

—Gabe can't stand the smell of mold.

—Mildew.

—Right, mildew. Water damage. Doesn't like it.

I looked at Gabe.

—Mildew?

He didn't look at me.

—Yeah.

—Rancid mounds of feces are cool, but mildew freaks you out.

He scratched a scar that ran down the top of his left forearm.

—I don't like it much. That's all.

Po Sin's phone rang. He looked at it and answered.

—Clean Team. Uh-huh.

He felt his back pocket, found a notepad, and reached behind his ear for his stub of pencil.

—Sorry to hear that. Uh-huh. I'm sorry. Yes. Yes we do. Uh-huh. Well, we're on a job right now, but we could be there tonight. Or tomorrow morning. Uh-huh. I'm sorry to hear that. Yes it is. Yes it is. I'll. Yes. Well, I'd like to ask a few questions if I may. Well, it gives us an idea of what's involved. How many of us might be needed and such. Uh-huh. Well, most important is, have the police and the coroner released the scene? Good. OK. And can you tell me what room it happened in?

I watched him write
bedroom
on the notepad.

—Sure. And if I may, can I ask how? Right. I know.

Gunshot.

—And if I may, the type of weapon?

Handgun.

—Do you happen to know the caliber of the weapon?

9mm.

—I know. I know.

He took the phone from his ear and rolled his neck around. I could hear crying, cut off as he put it back at his ear.

—Can you tell me if any doors or windows were open? Can you tell me how many?

2 doors.

—Uh-huh. No. Well, it's pretty much impossible to give an estimate on the phone. Sure. What we'll do is, we'll come out, tonight or in the morning,
whichever you prefer, and we'll take a look and we'll do an assessment and we'll tell you just how much time it will take and how much it will cost. No, free of charge, we do that free of charge.

He talked a little more, wrote down an address in Malibu and a phone number, and hung up and dropped the phone in his pocket. He picked up the last of his cheeseburger and put it in his mouth.

—Nine millimeter in the mouth. Gonna be an earner, that one.

Gabe nodded.

—The bigger the gun, the bigger the mess.

I knew that already. That bit of wisdom about guns and the messes that they make.

After lunch we brought the last of the boxes down to the bin, followed by the few pieces of spavined furniture. With the floor cleared throughout, the one-bedroom apartment didn't look half big enough to have contained all that we had hauled out of it, and the stench seemed worse than ever.

I pointed at a stain on the carpet that seemed to be the epicenter of stink.

—What the fuck is that?

Po Sin came over, holding the mask to his face.

—That's where the decomp was.

—Huh?

—The guy who lived here, that's where he died and rotted till one of his neighbors smelled him.

I stared at the stain.

—What's the? Why's there a stain?

—Fluids, Web. A body dies, sits in a hot room in L.A. in July, you get a lot of fluids coming off it.

I stared, and the stain's Rorschach shape arranged itself into sprawled limbs and a bloated trunk.

—What's that black stuff?

Po Sin took a collapsible pointer from the pocket of his Tyvek, snapped his wrist and it shot open and he put it to use.

—Blood here. All this. A body decomposes, it starts to swell up, fills with gases. Eventually, it's gonna pop. Blood comes out of that, it's like dirty motor oil. Same color and consistency. This yellow, that's where the fat has started separating, that's tallow.

I squatted to look at something and the reek slapped me in the face. I turned my head and stood and took a couple steps back.

—Jesus.

—Yeah, he was ripe.

I pointed at the little lines wiggling off the stain; traceries, like veins under the skin.

—What are those?

—Maggot trails. They hatch in the corpse then go looking for a better life. All those little black things are the dry maggot shells.

He slapped his palm over the end of the pointer, collapsing it, dropped it in his pocket, and pulled out a carpet knife.

—Let's get this shit up off the floor.

We began cutting, peeling away flat industrial weave patterned in precise geometries of grime that outlined where boxes had once been stacked. And on the wood floor, just under the stain left by the decomp, a larger stain. More abstract. And in need of scrubbing.

So I scrubbed.

The apartment stripped and bare, cockroaches fleeing through every crack, seeking refuge in the neighboring apartments, Gabe brought up an ozone generator and plugged it in.

Po Sin took off his mask and wiped his forehead and pointed at the machine.

—It'll bond oxygen to oxygen. Essentially purify the air. Eliminate the odor, not just mask it.

I was looking at the stain on the floor. Fainter now, but there was no way to get rid of the entire smear of the man's death.

Po Sin followed Gabe to the door, leaving the ozone generator behind to do its job. He stopped and looked at me.

—You OK?

I scuffed at the stain with the toe of my paper-covered boot.

—Sure.

—Never seen that one in a horror movie before, huh?

I stood there for another moment before following them out.

I hadn't. I hadn't seen that kind of thing before.

Not exactly.

—He does accommodations at night.

My head was out the window of the moving van, blowing some of the stink out of my hair. I pulled back inside to hear better.

—Accommodates what?

—Bodies. For the coroner. He picks them up. It's what they call it. Accommodations.

—No shit?

—Sure. Some wino goes stiff on Skid Row, who ya gonna call? His buddies gonna take up a collection, get him a nice casket, a mausoleum at Hollywood Forever? Damon Runyon don't live here no more, man. Once they grab his last can of Sterno and his shoes, if he's got any, they walk away. Sooner or later, someone at the mission or one of the treatment centers, or a cop cruising by because he took the wrong fucking turn, will see the body. Sometime after that, the coroner gets a call. They have a service they call to do the pickup. Gabe works for one of those services. It's his night job.

He took a bite out of a Slim Jim he got from the box beneath the driver's seat.

—That's why he can't drive you home.

—So what's up with him? Know he keeps a sap in his glove box? And what's with all that camping gear?

—Gabe's between places of residence just now.

—What, he's homeless?

—He prefers to have no fixed address at this time.

—Uh-huh.

I tapped my cheekbone.

—And that tattoo, that tear under his eye, that's gang shit, right? He some reformed O.G. or something?

He shoved that last six inches of the Slim Jim in his mouth.

—Don't talk shit you don't know shit about, Web. 'Sides, you got a problem with him if he has a history? You don't want to ride with him? You'd rather ride the bus?

We rolled on Beverly, the street bending east at the ramps to the 101.

—I don't ride the bus.

He crumpled the empty wrapper and threw it under his seat.

—I know.

Traffic crawled to a full stop for no visible reason. It being in the nature of all LA. drivers to be suddenly seized en masse by retardation and start hitting the brake pedal when every light in the immediate vicinity is a nice bright green.

Po Sin, taking advantage of the respite, removed his hands from the wheel, stretched, looked at me.