Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single) (2 page)

“Yes,” Mister Sun decided, looking up at the woman again. “I will help you. Do you have a bath?”

The woman, whose name was Amanda, did own a bath: a high-backed claw-foot tub that Mister Sun would not have been surprised to see in an old Western TV show. She was not much help with transporting the client to the bathroom, and was much more interested in talking, very fast, about the client—whose name was evidently Bastard Dogfucker—the successful business they’d shared in, and the apparently spectacularly unsuccessful sexual experience she had regrettably subjected herself to. His client’s decision to take action in her respect therefore appeared to be a direct result of both her intent to move on from him professionally and her refusal to repeat an amorous
conjunction she likened to being mounted by one of those big slobbery animals that take brandy barrels to dying climbers in the Alps.

Mister Sun preferred never to learn the reasons for his being hired, and tolerated her shock-powered ranting insofar as it occupied her enough to prevent her actively hampering his work. She was an attractive woman, in that sinewy, rangy American way that spoke to him of cheerleaders and swimmers. Great candyfloss tumbles of blond hair, and immense green cat-eyes, with features so pale and crystal that make-up would ruin, render overt and crass. He found himself wondering what she’d look like in ten years. Perhaps features like Amanda’s wouldn’t age, not obviously. His own girlfriend, in eighteen months, had visibly aged. He did not enjoy watching people die slowly.

The client was wrestled into the bath. Amanda was prevailed upon to find some garbage sacks. The client’s socks and shoes went into the first black plastic sack. Mister Sun brought his work bags in. The client had stocked them to Mister Sun’s specifications, more or less. Mister Sun found and snapped open the large KA-BAR clone knife. It was, naturally enough, of lower quality than a blade of the actual KA-BAR marque—it may not, he reflected, even have been as good as the chopper jutting out of his client’s brain—but a hell of a lot cheaper, and he was only going to use it once. He sliced away his client’s clothes, depositing them strip by swatch in the sack.

Unclothed, the dead man in the bath was not a picture of beauty. Considering his client’s gut, Mister Sun speculated that one last donut could well have been as lethal as a knife in the head. Additionally, the dense and oily thatching of body hair, and what Mister Sun presumed, at least by its location if not by girth, must be a human penis, somewhat clarified the comparison with a St. Bernard.

A second garbage sack went over the client’s head, knife and all. Mister Sun duct-taped it closed, as tightly as possible, around the neck. Satisfied with the seal, he took up the bag’s slack in his right hand and got a hold of the knife through the plastic. Over seven hundred seconds or so, he very, very carefully worked the blade loose from the head. He did not want to split the bag, and he did not want to suddenly discover his duct-tape seal was imperfect from a rush or spray of blood. All the blood had to stay in the bath, and its flow had to be controlled. There was an audible
pop
when the knife came free. The edge on the knife must have been magnificent, he thought, to have fitted so tightly into the head. He gathered the blade into the slack of the bag, and, with another two lengths of duct tape, safed its edge and segregated it into a new and separate chamber of the bag.

Time for the hammer.

Amanda, watching this, stopped rambling when she saw it.

“Really?” Mister Sun said. “You killed a man with the same knife you use to make brunch, and you’re suddenly squeamish about a hammer. While standing in front of the man you killed, who is now naked in your bath with a bag taped over his head. Really?”

“I just … I don’t know why you need a hammer.”

“Does it matter?”

“I … I want to understand. I think I should understand what’s happening. I should understand the process. If I’m going to do this, I should, I don’t know, I should commit to it.”

Mister Sun was almost touched by this. He smiled. “You want to understand how I do my job?”

“I think so,” Amanda said. “Yes. It will help, I think. Help me to cope. Does that sound weird?”

Mister Sun actually chuckled. “Yes. No. It’s, ah, it’s not a thing I’ve been asked before. Well. The hammer.” He lifted it, and then put it down by his side again, laughing a little, suddenly adrift. “I’ve never had to do this before. It does feel weird.”

He shook his head, laughed again. “Okay then. The process. It has to happen in stages. The presumption is always that we won’t get caught, and we’ll see the process through to its end. But, well, the world is what it is, and surprise or interruption can happen at any time. We have to be prepared for that. So we push the body a bit further down into the bath, like this, and we …”

Mister Sun swung the hammer down into the client’s bagged face. It crunched.

“Oh my god,” Amanda said.

“It is very important,” Mister Sun said, lifting the hammer again, “that we pulverize the teeth and facial bone structure as well as possible.” Crunch. “If we are caught in ten minutes, then, yes, we are standing over a dead body in the bathtub.” Crunch. “But we will, by God, force them to do a DNA test to identify the body. This purchases us useful seconds.”

“What about fingerprints, though?” Amanda asked. “They won’t need DNA. He has fingerprints.”

“Well,” said Mister Sun, as the hammer’s impact reports degenerated from crunches to sounds like glass dust being pounded into pork chops, “that’s why there’s a thirty-dollar brûlée torch in my bag. We might want some air freshener, by the way.”

“That’s clever,” Amanda said.

Straightening up, Mister Sun said, “I must observe that, at this point, you’re dealing with all this very well.”

“It’s interesting,” Amanda said. “I like protocols. I like processes. Checklists. It’s a bit like building code and workflows. I find it calming, somehow. Can I get a chair?”

“Sure,” he said, bringing the hammer down at a new angle, looking to collapse the cheekbones and eye orbits.

At the bathroom door, she turned and stood, head at a quizzical angle. “What do I call you?”

Mister Sun considered her. It was approaching noon outside, and the light from the frosted-glass window looked like diamonds falling on her skin.

“Call me David,” he said.

“Is that your real name?”

“Yes,” Mister Sun lied.

Her face lit up. “David, then. Be right back.”

He went back to smashing his client’s face into powder, oddly happy.

“This does tend to stink a bit,” Mister Sun said as he pressed the ignition button on the small gray kitchen torch. The flame sprang into life like a spike from hell. He held his client’s left wrist in his left hand and swiftly and efficiently blitzed away each of the dead man’s left fingerprints.

“Barbecued pork,” Amanda commented, sitting on a dining chair at the foot of the bath. “I suppose that’s not an original description.” A green can of air freshener stood under the chair.

“It’s common,” agreed Mister Sun. “Although I have met people who insist that humans taste like veal. And one woman from Canada who will swear up and down that people, like most other things, taste a bit like chicken. But she was crazy. And also Canadian. Frightening people. Have you ever seen what they did to Chinese food? The
Chinese smorgasbord, for God’s sake. There. All done.” He laid the client’s hands back down, and stoppered the bath’s plughole.

Mister Sun replaced the torch in the toolbox. He liked his tools ordered. He’d previously placed the KA-BAR clone in the toolbox, and retrieved it now.

“Now,” he said, snapping the black blade open, “we have destroyed the teeth, crushed the face, and obliterated the fingerprints. And we have not been caught. We can therefore proceed with the first stage of carcass disposal. Fluid drainage.”

Amanda placed her hands together so quickly that they almost clapped. “Ooh,” she said. “What is the process for that, David?”

“Incisions,” he said.

He lifted the client by the neck and expertly stroked six deep cuts into the corpse’s back, like a sketch of wings. He then sank the knife into the side of the body’s abdomen, three times. He thought for a few seconds, shifted his grip, and levered the blade through the bag on the body’s head and under the skull for a single perforation. Lowering him again, Mister Sun turned to his client’s legs and made several deep, angled slashes into the thighs. “Opening the femoral arteries,” he said to Amanda, as he finished scoring the last diagonal.

“I don’t understand,” Amanda said. “Won’t the blood take forever to just leak out of him?”

“Well,” said Mister Sun, “we are still around eleven thousand seconds away from having to worry about rigor mortis. We are still in the phase of primary flaccidity, where the carcass remains entirely flexible.” He went to his messenger bag. The large plastic sheet he’d requested was there, right on top of the two bottles of bleach.

Mister Sun, with the ease of long practice, laid the sheet over the client—it did, as he’d hoped, reach right down to the toes—and cut two hand-sized holes in the sheet over
the body’s chest. He reserved the discs of plastic, placing them next to the roll of duct tape by the toolbox. He got one knee up on the edge of the tub, pushed his gloved hands through the two holes, rested them on the dead man’s chest, and said, “Watch.”

He began to compress his client’s chest, on a ten-second rhythm. The ribs flexed, and, after a minute, blood began to squirt from the slashes and perforations.

“The heart, you see, is just a pump, and can be manually operated.”

Amanda giggled. “The heart is just a pump. I love that. It sounds so true.”

“It’s a mechanical fact,” said Mister Sun, bringing the compression to a five-second beat.

“In so many ways,” Amanda said. “I’ve never met anyone who had anything other than a pump inside them.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mister Sun saw a new line appear on her forehead. “I’m sure that’s not true,” he said.

“I’ve only been able to wash my hair for the last two years,” Amanda said.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“When I worked for other people? Working in big rooms divided into cubicles? They were like human pens for software writing, and the ratio of women to men was maybe,
maybe
one to thirty. I stopped washing my hair, for years, and wore nothing that wasn’t a Junior Anti-Sex League chastity sack. I met nothing but boys who had pumps for hearts. I’m not great at reading social cues, but even I, after long enough, worked out that if my hair looked like a hobo wig and I wore nothing but thick onesies and lime-green Crocs then they’d leave me alone. The whole point of the start-up, of creating a new business and getting out from working for other people, was that I could start to be myself again. Whatever that means.”

The crease in her brow had gone. Amanda’s face had re-assumed a sort of flat placidity that had informed much of their time together so far. The joy of her smiles and laughs seemed, to Mister Sun, to be in her genuine surprise at their arrival, as if strong emotions traveled some miles to get here and showed up without warning.

“I do understand the pleasures of working for oneself,” Mister Sun offered.

“Well,” she said, gazing at the corpse. “Almost working for myself. He had skills I didn’t have. He had money I didn’t have. He always had money.”

Mister Sun decided not to comment on that, since quite a lot of that money was currently sloshing around in his own bank account.

“Fucking bastard dogfucker,” Amanda said, all in a rush. “I bet you liked him.” Her expression seemed not to change as she said it.

Mister Sun raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never met him, or directly spoken to him.”

“Oh,” Amanda said. “That’s how the process works? How did you communicate?”

“There’s an app for encrypted self-erasing images with text overlay, made by security experts.”

“I know that one,” Amanda said. “Or, I’ve read about it. It doesn’t work on Android phones yet. I prefer Android. You can get much deeper into the operating system. Men like men with money. Even when they profess to hate them, they respect the money and admire its keeper.”

“Respect,” said Mister Sun, pushing blood out of his client’s body, “doesn’t come into it. I provide a service. I like to get paid for it. I may, perhaps, suspect my clients are not people I’d want to spend time with”—he gave the corpse a harder shove, for emphasis, and there was a pattering rainy noise as blood struck the underside of the plastic sheet—“but, happily, I do not have to.”

“It’s a transaction,” Amanda said. “No emotional content.”

“No emotional content is required. I’m a dead pig collector.”

Amanda leaned forward, spotting new information. “I don’t understand that reference.”

Mister Sun stood, unkinking his shoulders and back, taking stock of the liquid in the bath. He approved of that useful slight incline in the tub’s surface, helping the blood run down toward the plughole. It was almost impossible to manually pump all the blood out of a corpse. There always somehow seemed to be a pint left in there. But he’d certainly processed out the lion’s share, and, given the unexpected situation he found himself in, he probably had more time to play with than usual. He went to get the bottles of bleach from the bottom of the messenger bag, nestled there around the small roll of heavy-gauge garbage sacks.

Amanda uncapped the green can and gave a few blasts of something synthetic and cloying into the air. “These things fascinate me,” she said. “It’s like what you’d get if you tried to describe spring to a robot. Not remotely authentic but somehow true. What’s a dead pig collector?”

Mister Sun poured one bottle of bleach through the left-hand hole in the plastic sheet. “China,” he said, “is a place rife with pollution and disease. It’s not
just
that, but that is certainly a part of the landscape. It’s also a place of pig farming. And a part of pig farming—”

The bottle was empty. He stood it by the bath and opened the second bottle. In it went, through the second hole. “There are periods—we’re in one right now, in fact—where serious disease and pollution events will kill the pigs. They will wash up on riversides in their tens of thousands. They will litter fields and pile up in their pens. A small farm—and, in places like Shanghai, they’re
all
small farms—cannot spend what
little time they have disposing of tons of dead pigs instead of maintaining their remaining assets.”