Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single) (3 page)

The second bottle was empty. Mister Sun swiftly cut five small sections of duct-tape and fixed them around the edge of one of the reserved plastic-sheet discs. The disc was therefore stuck back on the sheet, closing the left hole.

“The farmers could,” he said, “just sell the infected dead pigs into the food market. But, of course, people get sick. Sometimes they die. The food supply is always on the edge of triggering a pandemic. So it’s illegal. People get sentenced to life imprisonment for selling contaminated pig meat. You can draw your own conclusions about the life expectancy in a Chinese prison.”

The second disc fixed on, Mister Sun busied himself with lightly tacking the sheet around the bath with a few more short sections of tape. “So,” he said, “there are people who have learned how to effectively and safely dispose of swine carcasses. If you have a stack of dead pigs, and you don’t want to go to prison, then you pay for a dead pig collector.”

Mister Sun pulled off his gloves and delicately pushed them into one of the empty bleach bottles. Twisting on the cap, he then went to his toolbox, tugged out another pair of gloves, and snapped them on. He looked at Amanda, and gave her an uncertain smile.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Not as such. It’s just that this is an unusual situation, and I’m not sure if it’s correct to ask for a cup of coffee while the blood breaks down.”

“You shouldn’t tell me too much about yourself,” said Mister Sun, sitting with a handmade espresso that had been produced by a strange device whose shape suggested nothing but two cubes fucking. He had watched Amanda get lost in methodically
selecting, weighing, and grinding the coffee beans, tamping the ground coffee and hand-pumping the espresso out of the device with extraordinary focus and vigilance.

“In case something happens,” she said. “I understand that. It just seems somehow wrong that you shouldn’t know anything about the person you came to kill. Does that make sense?”

“Um,” he said. “Not really. I did say there was no emotional content in the work.”

“But,” Amanda said, “that makes me just a dead pig in a pen.”

“Amanda, you killed your own business partner with a cleaver and are in the process of allowing a complete stranger to dispose of the body.”

“I did,” she said. Her eyes were flicking side-to-side, very fast, unfocused. “I did do that. And when I said ‘help,’ you could have said ‘call the police.’ Because he had a gun, didn’t he? I could have claimed self-defense. Home invasion. Even though he had a set of keys. But you didn’t say that. Because you would have been questioned as part of
their
process. Of course you would have been. You broke into my house too. And you might be dressed like a generic service employee of some kind, but I bet you didn’t arrive in America dressed like that. So it was in your best interest to help by doing the job you came to do anyway, thereby guaranteeing my silence.”

Mister Sun sipped his espresso, quietly calculating space and seconds. He didn’t require a weapon for his job. His intent had been to steal into the room, silently approach her, stamp a foot into the back of her knee, and cleanly snap her neck as she collapsed.

He could still perform a similar operation from this position.

“You are a very intelligent woman,” he said.

“I’m good with problems. Breaking things down. Step by step. It’s how code works. Logical procession.”

He gave her a smile whose warmth was not entirely false. “Would you like to finish learning how to break down a dead body?”

Amanda’s head cocked to that querent angle again. “There’s more?”

“Amanda, we haven’t even gotten him out of your house yet. Shall we follow the process all the way to the end, before we go our separate ways?”

“I don’t like that.”

“Don’t like what?”

“The way you said that last part. Like we’d never see each other again.”

“We won’t.”

“I don’t like that.”

Mister Sun’s phone vibrated in his pocket, just once. He realized that that would be his girlfriend, responding to last night’s text. He elected to ignore it, and smiled at Amanda again. She smiled back. He liked her smile immensely.

In the bath was a white body and a couple of gallons of pink muck. Mister Sun reached under the sheet and tugged the plug out. The bath began to drain, sounding like an extended and ugly strangulation the whole time. He gave the cold faucet a half-turn and suggested to Amanda that a couple more blasts of the robot-perfume air freshener might be in order.

“So why have we drained all the blood out of the bastard?” Amanda asked.

Mister Sun had torn one of his heavy sacks off the roll and was shaking it open. “Because it’s going to make it much easier and cleaner to joint him.”

Amanda just looked at him. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”

“Well, we need to make him simpler and more discreet to transport. Also, every step has the intent of making him harder to identify in case of an interruption. You know
what you might also find interesting? It may seem that I brought a lot of gear in here, but it’s all very inexpensive. If you shopped around, you could probably dispose of a body for under a hundred dollars.”

He pulled the sheet off the bath. Amanda was moved to give another long spray from the can. Mister Sun folded the sheet as best he could, and stuffed it into the open sack. He tied the sack off and put it to one side, and then pulled another one off the roll.

“Right, then,” he said. “Head first.”

There was always a little extra blood during this part, which is why he left the water running as he put the KA-BAR clone to his client’s throat and began to slice through meat and ligament, all the way around the neck until he met his first cut. Putting the knife down, he grabbed the head under the jaw and began to twist. He was rewarded by a little crepitation. With a tight smile he twisted the head the other way, working it, and then pulled. The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.

This time, Amanda did actually clap her hands, as if she’d been shown a mysterious and spectacular magic trick.

“Did you want your knife back?” he grinned, cradling the head and its thin run-off over the bath.

“Please say we can stay friends, David,” Amanda said.

Amanda’s dishwasher thrummed away in the background. The Chinese chef’s knife was terrific, and had gone through the client’s head without a notch, nick, or scratch. It would continue to perform admirably for years to come, and throwing it away had seemed to Mister Sun like a terrible waste.

The stupid gun was in there, too.

The head was in a sack, liberally sprayed with a cheap aerosol oven cleaner whose active ingredient was lye, and Mister Sun was working with the KA-BAR knife and a hammer on a shoulder joint. He was making short, careful strikes, as he didn’t want to spatter the place with bone chips.

Amanda was talking about her business. It appeared to be the sort of classic mismatch that kept Mister Sun self-employed. The business didn’t exist without her skills and perceptions, but it didn’t move without his client’s money. This tension torqued until it became clear that the whole machine of the company had locked fast and was beginning to smolder.

“He’d threatened me with everything he could think of, I suppose,” Amanda mused. “But if I left the company, money and intellectual property came with me. He couldn’t force me out, and he couldn’t scare me out. I guess having me killed seemed like the best option.”

“What I don’t get,” said Mister Sun, “is this: He was just the money, right? You were the brains. Why would he want you out?”

“Monetizing software, especially software with a social purpose, is disgusting. Licensing it, I can accept. We did fine from government licenses for some of the things I built. But sticking ads on everything? Making it so you had to look at ads just to open your phone?”

The client’s right arm came off, a little more wetly than Mister Sun would have liked. “You were selling services, though.”

“We were
providing
services. We rented tools to the government in order to provide services to people. Do you know how much easier it is for me to interact with people through devices? How could anyone monetize the easing of human contact?”

“He wanted to cover everything with ads? That is kind of repellent,” Mister Sun said, making a start at sawing off the dead body’s left arm.

“It occurs to me now that his life would have been simpler and richer with me dead and a bunch of new hires implementing his wishes.”

“One of my uncles once told me you have to spend money to make money,” Mister Sun said.

“Did he pay you a lot of money?” asked Amanda, who did not smile.

“I charge a fair price,” said Mister Sun, hacking through some intransigent muscle, “but I don’t advertise. Word of mouth only. Human contact.”

“But there’s no human contact with you, is there?”

“An aunt of mine would say that I am currently engaged in the most intimate human contact of all.” He tore through the meat, and began to attack a socket with knife and hammer.

Amanda watched him with glittering eyes, impassive. Mister Sun placed his concentration back on his work, feeling as if he’d impulsively broached something badly.

After an industrious couple of hundred seconds, the left arm came away. The only sound in the room seemed to be Amanda’s breathing.

A head and two arms in one sack, two legs in a second sack, and a torso in a third, all coated in oven cleaner. The gun was out of the dishwasher and temporarily stored in his toolbox, the knife back in its block. Mister Sun very much wanted a cigarette, for a few reasons, but this was part of the discipline of the job, even though the craving was exacerbated by today’s particular working conditions. The bath was sluiced out and wiped over with several alcohol-impregnated wet napkins that were now piled in the torso bag. He figured it for mid-afternoon. Not bad.

The phone in his pocket vibrated again. This time, Amanda heard it buzz. “Who’s that?” she said, quickly.

“Not important,” Mister Sun said. “Someone just waking up in a different time zone. Nothing to be concerned about.”

Her eyes flickered. “Your girlfriend?”

“No,” he smiled. “I don’t have a girlfriend. Just a friend.”

Her eyes jumped around his face before settling on his. “David, I have a hard time telling when people are lying to me. Sometimes I just naturally assume they are. This gets me into fights, now and then. So I’m just going to ask. Are you lying to me?”

He held her stare, evenly. “No, Amanda. I’m not lying to you.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “What now?”

“Now I tie these bags off and carry them to my van,” he said, and then stopped. “Where’s his car?”

“Whose car?”

“Him,” Mister Sun, said, pointing to a bag of bits. “He doesn’t live nearby, does he? If he does, tell me. If he doesn’t, then he drove here, right? Do you know what he drives?”

Amanda nodded.

“Then could you open the front door for me, so I can carry these bags out to my van? It’ll take a couple of trips. And while I’m doing that, can you look for his car?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, for no reason he could see.

“No, Amanda. I should have thought of it. Events have overtaken me a little, today.” He tied off the bags of limbs and lifted them, one in each hand. “Let’s go.”

It was indeed mid-afternoon outside, and a lovely day. Mister Sun walked back from the van to where Amanda stood on the front step, scanning the street.

“It’s not here,” she said quietly.

“Okay,” Mister Sun said, slipping past her. Inside, he added, “This means that either he took a cab here, or he parked a few streets away and walked, not wishing to be seen parking outside your house. Have you known him to take cabs often?”

“He’d use Uber to get to LAX sometimes. That’s it. He likes his car. It’s horrible.”

“Then we’ll assume the car’s in another street,” he said, lifting the last bag. “I’ll put this in the van, and then collect my toolbox and work bag, and I’m done.”

“What will you do now?”

“That doesn’t matter, does it?” Mister Sun said. “This will all be over, I’ll be out of your way, and you can get on with your life. Has it occurred to you that you now control your company completely, and can steer it in any direction you like?”

“I won’t get to see the end of the process,” Amanda said. Mister Sun believed she might be sulking, in her way. He then stopped to consider that someone with her specific cast of mind might be seriously disturbed by being led through only four-fifths of a process.

He had, obviously, also considered that Amanda was seriously disturbed. But he found he was more bothered by upsetting her than that she was possibly crazy. Perhaps it was that unusual emotional make-up that led to her being the one who escaped her pen. That interested him. He decided to provide her with the closure she so clearly wished for.

“Do you want to come with me?”

“Um,” she said. “I actually really, really do. But I don’t want to … I mean … would that be okay?”

“Let me get the van loaded up. Grab your keys.”

He opened the passenger door of the van for her, warning her to be careful as there was a bag of clothes in the footwell. She had a black canvas shoulder bag shrugged over her arm. He chose not to question it.

Mister Sun drove them north, to where Los Angeles turns into lumps and bumps, canyons and trees. It was, he reflected again, not a real city. In what real city could you drive into solitude tens of miles before leaving it? This was an absurd place. It had taken less than an hour to drive them into a place nobody much looked at.

In fact, the only people who’d recently been here, just past this fork in a meandering road scribbled across steep and scrubby drops, were the people who’d placed the rental car for him by arrangement.

“Here we are,” Mister Sun said.

“What happens now?”

“We dispose of this vehicle, and everything in it, and drive back in the car ahead of us.”

“You planned that?”

“I did. Every job has a method, right? This is mine. No one else has gotten to see it before. It’s been really quite nice, being able to show someone.”