Low Life (4 page)

Simon did the only thing he could think to do. He slammed the flashlight against the man’s head. Blood splattered across Simon’s chest and face, staining his T-shirt and dotting the
lenses of his glasses, but the hand on his throat did not loosen its grip. If anything, it gripped tighter, with more determination. Simon swung again. The room filled with the scent of copper and
sweat, heavy and thick as honey. Enough to make you gag. The grip on his throat loosened, but still he swung – again and again and again. His shoulder ached. His wrist hurt. At some point the
cap was knocked off the end of the flashlight and the batteries flew out and scattered across the wood floor and everything went dark, but still he swung. And then he stopped. Finally it was
over.

He sat there for a long time, straddling this stranger’s chest.

He breathed in and he breathed out.

There’d been moments in his everyday life when he had wondered what it would be like to kill a man. He thought everybody probably had those moments. Those moments made up what he thought
of as a person’s low life – the internal life they lived but told no one about. Those moments that passed through one’s thoughts but didn’t so much as ripple the surface of
reality. Those moments when an exhausted mother on the verge of losing control thought she just couldn’t take the crying any more and considered holding the baby’s head underwater.
Those moments when a scorned lover thought that if he couldn’t have his love, then no one would be allowed to. Those moments when a man looked out of the window, saw a ten-storey drop, and
wondered what it would be like to take that final step. But then a pacifier-placated child went quiet, the turmoil of a scorned lover faded, and a man turned away from the window and went back to
what he was doing before glancing at that long drop. Of course, sometimes a person’s low life broke through the surface, like a breaching whale with an unstoppable momentum. But most of the
time killing seemed impossible; most of the time the thought was downright nauseating. There’d been moments in his everyday life when he had wondered what it would be like to kill a man
– but until tonight it hadn’t happened.

Blood dripped from the flashlight in his hand.

He swallowed back the urge to vomit.

He let go of his grip on the flashlight and it dropped to the floor and rolled in a lazy half circle before coming to a stop. He got to his feet. He took off his glasses and cleaned the blood
from them with his T-shirt – the front of which was littered with tiny holes which had been put there by the caps of beer bottles, as he used the shirt to twist the things off – and
then put them back onto the bridge of his nose. He walked to the wall and flipped the switch. An empty click. A strange laugh croaked from his throat, and then he felt his way to the kitchen. Then
through the kitchen to the fuse box embedded in the back wall, its gray metal door hanging open. He flipped all the switches and various lights throughout the apartment came on, including the lamp
on the end table in the living room. The fridge began humming. Someone on the TV chattered about a political controversy.

Simon walked to the living room and shut it off, killing the news mid-sentence.

He looked toward the telephone.

It sat on the floor, a thin gray cord twisting off it, and curling behind the back of the couch. The man who broke into his apartment was stretched out on his back in the middle of the hardwood
floor, blood pooling beneath his head. He was wearing an expensive gray suit and a black overcoat. His shoes looked new, except that the toes were scuffed. They were dull-polished, hiding their
newness, but Simon saw there was little wear on the heels and only shallow creases in the leather. A green scarf was wrapped around the dead neck, and beneath that and the collar a green tie
knotted with a full Windsor. Simon took a few steps toward either the phone or the corpse. He wasn’t sure which. He could smell the sweat on the man’s skin and the anti-perspirant
he’d applied and the stench of beer and an unidentifiable but thick odor beneath that. Perhaps the stink of insanity. Less than a minute ago this man had wanted Simon dead.

‘Why?’

His voice sounded strange to his own ears.

The telephone sat on the floor. Simon could see the man’s brown wallet poking from the inside pocket of his overcoat.

‘Why?’

He glanced toward the telephone once more, and then reached down and slid the wallet from the man’s pocket. It was warm from body heat and the leather was smooth in his hand. He flipped it
open and looked at the driver’s license inside. The dead man’s name had been Jeremy Shackleford. He’d lived in Pasadena. Inside the wallet were six crisp hundred-dollar bills,
several credit cards, a Ralphs club card, a Borders Rewards card, and an Arclight Cinemas membership card.

Simon tossed the wallet onto the coffee table, and then looked back at Jeremy Shackleford.

‘Why did you come here?’

The corpse didn’t answer. But then it didn’t need to. He had come here to kill Simon. That much was clear. That much was obvious. Why he had wanted Simon dead was the unknown.

A thorough search of Shackleford’s person turned up a wad of keys but nothing more; his pockets were otherwise empty, the lint which lined their creases excepted.

Simon put the keys beside the wallet on the coffee table.

‘Why?’ he said again.

He put a plastic grocery bag over the corpse’s head, then wrapped duct tape around the neck, one two three times, taping the bag in place. He tore the tape with his teeth
and set the roll aside. If blood continued to ooze from the head it would be contained. Also, Simon did not want to have to look at the corpse’s face and see that mouth hanging open, as if on
the verge of speaking. What exactly do you think you’re doing, Simon? Don’t you think you should be calling the police? He did not want to have to see those closed eyelids which looked
like they might open at any moment. I can see you, Simon. I know what you did – and I won’t forget. I saw it all and I will tell everybody.

He dragged the body out of the way and laid paper towels over the pool of blood where the head once was. He stood silently and watched the paper towels fade to red. Once he got most of the blood
soaked up and the bloody paper towels into a black trash bag, he got on hands and knees with spray cleanser and a scouring sponge and scrubbed away at the red-stained floor. Because the
polyurethane finish had been worn off by years of use, blood had gotten into the grain of the wood and Simon couldn’t get it all out, but he scrubbed what he could for several minutes,
putting all of his weight into it. Once he’d gotten the floor as clean as it was going to get, he threw the sponge into the trash bag with the paper towels. Then he removed his blood-stained
T-shirt and threw that into the bag as well. He tied the top of it closed.

He used a coffee mug to bang a nail into the wall outside his apartment and to the left of his front door. Then he tied one end of a shoelace to the doorknob and the other end
to the nail. He’d found the shoelace in a drawer in the kitchen, but had no idea where it had come from. Once it was tied in place he nodded. That, he thought, would keep the door from
swinging open when he was out. When he was in, he could prop a chair in front of the door to hold it closed. Tomorrow he would buy a padlock to keep the door shut. He didn’t want Leonard or
any of the handymen he hired to come into the apartment, which meant he’d have to fix the door himself.

He looked around to see if he’d drawn anyone’s attention with his late-night noise-making, but the corridor was empty save for him.

He grabbed the trash bag and headed for the stairs.

He parked his car in front of a 7-Eleven, the fluorescent light from inside spilling out through the dirty windows, splashing across the sun-faded asphalt of the parking lot.
He stepped out of the car, carrying the trash bag, and with it he walked around to the back of the convenience store where a dumpster sat smelling of rot. He threw the bag into it.

He stood squinting just inside the door for almost a full minute before his eyes adjusted to the bright lights of the convenience store and he could make out the rows of chips
and pork rinds and candy bars and magazines, all foiled in bright blue and green and yellow packaging.

Once his eyes adjusted he made his way to the back of the store, where a white freezer with steel doors sat, a picture of a polar bear holding up a bag of ice on its front. He opened one of the
two steel doors and looked inside. He counted eighteen seven-pound bags of ice. He thought his bathtub held sixty gallons, which meant there were about a third as many bags as he needed –
give or take. The bags were shy of a gallon, and he wasn’t sure exactly how the cubes would pack. About a third of what he needed, minus however many gallons a body took up.

If you rounded down and said a gallon weighed about eight pounds – a gallon of water actually weighed eight-point-three-five pounds – and if you assumed a person weighed about the
same – eight pounds per gallon of meat – then Shackleford, if he weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and that seemed about right to Simon, would take up another twenty-two and a half
gallons of space himself. So to fill the tub Simon needed another twenty or so bags of ice in addition to what was in this freezer.

‘Is this all the ice you got?’ he asked the man behind the counter.

‘You think I’m holding out on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, that’s where we keep the ice.’

‘It’s where you keep all the ice?’

‘We tried to store extra on the roof, but it kept turning into water.’

After paying for the eighteen bags of ice, Simon loaded the back seat of his car up and headed to another 7-Eleven. There he got another fourteen bags of ice. And at a liquor store near his
apartment he got another six bags just to be sure he had enough. Also a bottle of whiskey, since he was out. Then he headed back home.

There was a hole in the grocery bag that he hadn’t seen, and as he was carrying the body to the bathroom – struggling: a hundred and eighty pounds was a lot of
weight, and this happened to be a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight – the head rolled right, as if the corpse wanted to see where they were going – watch out you don’t bang
my head on the wall, buddy – and the blood which had pooled inside drizzled out and onto the hallway floor.

Simon put the body into the tub and cleaned up the trail of blood. He put the bloody paper towels into his trash can. He thought he should probably get rid of them as he had the others –
by dropping them off in some random city dumpster – but it was late, he was tired, and the chances of anyone finding anything were slim. Still, just to be safe, he made sure there was nothing
in the trash can with his name on it, a bill or a letter addressed to him. It was clean.

That done, he made several trips up and down the stairs, carrying as much ice as he could in each trip, his arms getting damp and cold, and then numb. He broke open the bags once he got them
upstairs, and poured them over the body.

By the time he was done, the ice formed a mound at the top of the tub – like the black dirt on a fresh grave – and only the corpse’s head was visible above it. Or rather, the
bloody bag which was taped over the corpse’s head.

He gathered up the empty plastic bags the ice had come in and threw them on top of the bloody paper towels in his trash can.

He changed back into pajamas, poured himself a whiskey, propped a chair in front of his front door to keep it closed for the night, and walked to the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the tub and
sipped his drink.

The ice shifted and settled as it melted. Simon jumped at the sound, then laughed at himself for being so skittish. He took another sip of whiskey.

He felt cold inside. He had killed a man, a man who was now lying in his bathtub, and he felt almost nothing. He did not feel a loss. He wondered idly if Shackleford’s mother was still
alive, and if she was whether she’d notice his absence – would phone calls go unanswered? He wondered if Shackleford’d had a wife – and if they’d been on good terms.
He reached into the ice and grabbed the left hand and pulled it up to look at it. There was a gold band on the third finger. He wondered if Shackleford and his wife had any children. Would
Shackleford’s wife look into her son’s green eyes and see her missing husband? Did they sit up in bed at night reading novels by Mickey Spillane or biographies of Audrey Hepburn, their
feet touching beneath the blankets and sheets, sharing choice bits of text with one another? He wondered how long they had been married. He wondered if Shackleford ever had cause to remove his
wedding band. He wondered what his wife tasted like when they kissed. Was her breath sweet? Did her lipstick taste waxy? He wondered what it felt like to have a wife, what it felt like to lie next
to someone every night, to feel that warmth.

But mostly he wondered why this man had broken into his apartment, why this man had wanted him dead. For that was why he had come here. This hadn’t been a burglary. This had been an
attempted murder – a premeditated murder: this man lying dead in Simon’s tub had driven here, parked his car, walked up the steps, and broken in through Simon’s front door with it
in his mind to kill a man.

Why?

Simon couldn’t understand it. He lived a quiet life. He had never hurt a soul – until now, and this was self-defense. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want him dead. How
anyone could be filled with so much rage, and all of it directed at him.

He sipped his whiskey and felt cold inside.

The ice shifted again. A sound came from the grocery bag. Simon reached over and put his drink on the small bathroom counter. He leaned closer to the grocery bag and thought he sensed movement
– very slight movement – perhaps caused by shallow breathing. Was Shackleford still alive – unconscious but breathing low? The thought made Simon’s stomach feel sour.

Would he be able to dash out this man’s brains while he lay unconscious in his tub? Would he be able to simply dash out this man’s brains in cold blood, for no other purpose than to
have it done? And if he couldn’t, what was he going to do with him? Let him go?