Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single) (4 page)

BOOK: Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single)

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“Could I learn how to do it, do you think?”

He smiled. “I’m positive, Amanda, that you could learn anything, with great speed.”

“My laptop’s in my bag,” she said.

“What?”

“I can work from anywhere. We have an office manager. At the company. I work remotely as it is, from home, a lot of the time. I can work from anywhere in the world. I brought my purse and my passport.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you leave I want to come with you. You haven’t lied to me. Not once. You keep smiling at me. I know I’m talking really fast but everything just seems to be fitting together and I am hoping
so hard
I’m not wrong about any of this and you want me to come with you.”

Her eyes glittered and sparkled and spun.

“So hard, David,” she said. “I am hoping
so hard
for this.”

Her hands reached for him tentatively, as if they’d just been untied. Wrists twisting, fingers unfolding.

Mister Sun, whose first name was not David, smiled at her. Amanda smiled back with relief and joy.

He touched her face with a fingertip, and then two. He brought his other hand up, and stroked her cheeks. She closed her eyes and swallowed back something that may have been a sob of reprieve from all the fears and questions in her aching and confused heart. He sighed and snapped her neck.

Mister Sun decided that it was very much time for a cigarette.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. She didn’t, so he fished his cigarettes and lighter out and lit up.

“Here’s what happens now,” he said to her. “I move you into the driver’s seat. Your belt won’t be fastened. I think I’ll probably put the gun in your lap, to amuse any crime scene investigators who peruse the remains. Then what I’ll do is push the van down off the side of the road. I’m hoping I can aim it at a tree, but I’d also like to get it quite deep into the vegetation down there. Once we’re all down there, I’m going to change out of these clothes, throw them in the back with the client and the tools, and start a fire.
After that, I will get changed. The keys to my other car will be taped under the wheel well.”

He smoked for sixty seconds, looking around until the silence bothered him.

“Around here, this time of year,” he said to Amanda, “the chances are good that I could start a full-on wildfire. Which would be helpful. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s quite hard to make a car’s petrol tank explode with fire. I mean, think about it: if fire made cars explode that easily, every car manufacturer in the world would have been sued to death decades ago. But being in the middle of a big California wildfire … let’s say I have hopes.”

He stopped himself. No, it was going to be a while before the words
hope
or
hoping
were completely comfortable for him.

“Anyway. That’s the end of the process. I drive back to the hotel, eat, shower, and get some sleep, and fly out in the morning. Back home, Amanda, where it’s cold and everyone seems a foot closer to death every day. You wouldn’t have liked it a bit.”

He brushed his fingers through her hair. “And you would have been scared, all the time. Just as soon as you’d worked out the logical progression of things. Disappearing with a strange man the day your business partner went missing, his car parked in front of someone else’s house just a street or two away from your place. Spending the rest of your life feeling like you were trapped in a pen.”

He spent a hundred and twenty seconds or more just looking at that face, ageless and peaceful.

Mister Sun pulled his bag of clothing out of the footwell and got to work.

Mister Sun parked the car in the agreed collection spot, which was the same space the van had occupied earlier. He taped the keys back under the wheel well, adjusted his shades, tucked the screenplay under his arm, and walked back to the Mark.

The same car attendant was outside the hotel. “How’d it go?” he asked Mister Sun.

“Hollywood people are stupid,” Mister Sun said, smiling. “I’m done for the day. Time for dinner and a drink.”

“Damn right,” the attendant agreed, opening the lobby door for Mister Sun.

Mister Sun briefly used the hotel’s small business area to shred the screenplay, then repaired to his room. He found an acceptable beer in the minibar and took it out onto his balcony to have with another cigarette or so. The beer was over-cold for his taste, but clean and crisp, and so it would do.

His phone buzzed. Balancing the beer on the balcony rail, he pulled it from his pocket. There was a message in his self-destruct app. A client request, from the Provence region of France. He’d never been there before, and decided it might be an interesting trip, if the client was up to scratch.

Closing the app, he saw the text-message notification and tapped it open. It seemed that, over the course of the day, his girlfriend had decided that he was no good and of no further use. She communicated, in language far clearer than her usual style of discourse, that it was all over and she was done. The messages didn’t read like her speaking at all, until the final word of the final text, which was
dogfucker
.

Mister Sun wondered if he really believed it was true that the heart is just a pump.

A Note About the Author

WARREN ELLIS is an author, graphic novelist, columnist, and speaker. His latest novel,
Gun Machine
, was released in January 2013, and is being developed for television by Chernin Entertainment and FOX.

Crooked Little Vein
, his first novel, was described by Joss Whedon as “Funny, inventive, and blithely appalling … Dante on paint fumes.”

His graphic novel
RED
was made into a successful film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren, and its sequel film will be released in August 2013. His other graphic novels, including
Transmetropolitan
,
Planetary
,
Ministry of Space
,
Global Frequency
,
Gravel
, and
Freakangels
, have won multiple awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Eagle Awards and the NUIG Lit & Deb’s President’s Medal in recognition of support for free speech.