The Dead Janitors Club (29 page)

    We'd already gotten the authorization of payment via a walkietalkie to do the work. Considering it was Dodger Stadium, I would have done the job for free. Of course, since they didn't know that, a couple grand seemed perfectly fair.

    The sheer amount of chunkiness and blood caused me to immediately forgo the sprayer. I was all for AIDS protection, but there was only so much a chemical could do against the sheer volume of a human's gummy liquid insides. Using cloth hand towel after cloth hand towel, I scrubbed at the ground, lifting the jellied mess into the trash bag, feeling it collapse from my hand's pressure the way a water balloon might.

    Gnarled waves of unpaved concrete were exactly the sort of porous surface that I had always dreaded, the reason to employ my caveat in contracts, and as such, I resorted to using a crowbar and rubber mallet that Dirk had in his work crate to attempt to knock off the chunks of dyed rock base.

    After several hours of chipping away at minuscule flecks, which went skittering off beneath the wooden plank bridge, Dirk voiced a bit of sensibility. "We should just paint over the fucker."

    I quickly agreed, the magic of being in Dodger Stadium long gone from my heart.

    "I'll go get some paint," he announced cheerfully, eager to be free of my halfhearted assault on giblets of reddened rock. This meant that he would have to take his truck and go in search of the nearest Home Depot, leaving me in the barren pit, surrounded by poorly excavated chasms bathed in darkness and the weird stench of the air that occasionally emanated from them in short bursts like the breath of some overworked animal.

    "Are you sure you don't want me to go?" I asked hopefully, raising the crowbar and mallet like some poster boy for Russian servitude.

    "I'm sure," he said, leaving, the bouncing of the loose boards sounding his departure. I sat next to the mass of red ground beneath Dodger Stadium, able to only guess at the darkness of the night sky many ceilings above. My bunny suit, tied off at the waist, was a dirty crimson. I heard the muffled slam of one of the blue doors far, far down the corridor, and in that moment I knew what it was to be alone.

    In the cavern of concrete, my cell phone registered no bars, and I cursed Verizon for not sending the "Can you hear me now?" guy into the dungeons of the stadium. And it was there, alone in the dark of night, with no cell-phone reception and only my vivid imagination, that I began to consider the notion of ghosts.

    If someone had asked me at any other time on any other crime scene what I thought about the presence of the supernatural, I would have laughed in their face. I'd never felt a weird "cold presence" or a heaviness hanging over a crime scene that would suggest the presence of the supernatural. But there in that abyss…it was a bit like an atheist finding God in the face of impending doom.

    Alone in the poorly lit arena, above the viscous splatter of a miserable soul, the sounds of non-life quickly began to intrude upon my sanity. A small rain of pebbles sprinkled down on me from the ledge far above, and I had to remind myself that it was wind knocking the loose bits down as it had done the whole time Dirk and I were bantering and scrubbing. It hadn't seemed nearly as sinister then, though.

    Gripping the bloodied steel arm of the crowbar, I turned on my flashlight once more, flicking quickly through the ultraviolet settings that registered the uneven roof in a ghastly purple hue. I scaled the steep concrete as high as I dared, splaying the light across the expanse of silent night, wishing it captured a larger area in its beam. The added glow did little more than call attention to my presence, its rapid sweeping movements signifying to whatever hellish entity that might have been in there with me that I was exposed and vulnerable. I held the crowbar tighter, feeling the dense metal unyielding between my black-gloved fingers.

    "Who's up there?" I called, attempting lighthearted banter with the darkness extending past the lip far above, from which our victim had dropped oh so suddenly.

    No answer.

    I looked farther up to where the concrete hill plateaued above me into further darkness, and the concentrated orb of my flashlight illuminated similarly ragged tunnels etched into the walls at the top of the room. Something could come at me in the cavern from myriad entry points, and I found myself cursing my father for screening
Alien
for me as a three-year-old.

    "Can I get some more light in here?" I yelled again, wishing that the whispered air through the earthen tunnels was of human origin and that the human was friendly and capable of granting the odd request. It wasn't.

    I crouched low on the side of the concrete slope, not daring to go back toward my work, where my ample back would be exposed to the dark of the nearby crawl space. Visions of flat red eyes haunted me and made me regret everything I had done in life that might have made me hell-worthy.

    I didn't dare check my cell phone again, for it would displace my grasp on one of my two objects, the crowbar or the flashlight, and I was ill-equipped to suffer the disappointment of zero bars once again.

    "I'm not scared," I announced loudly, my voice betraying me in the midst of the dark. "I'm not scared," I said aloud again, this time more to myself. My inner monologue asked me whom I thought I was fooling. It also assured me in no uncertain terms that I, too, would meet my untimely demise in these dark hollows.

    The electronic snarl of some far-off compressor cut sharply through my bullshit and evoked the terror that I had been concealing poorly. Crowbar held aloft like the sword Excalibur, and the flashlight extended before me creating karate chop motions at the end of my pivoting arm, I ran for it. Ducking and slipping as I exited the hole, my bottom spotted red from odd concentrations of residue, I lumbered across the wooden planks, the wood creaking beneath me, and prayed there were no trolls below to snatch me into the terrifying unknown.

    I leapt down to the platform, connecting with the battered doors, fearing the creatures that had ravaged them, and headed down the length of dim corridors to the safety of the night beyond. My bloody bunny suit whisk-whisked as the material swished against itself and I ran for my life. I hit the exterior doors fist first and blasted through them, emerging from the depths and into the smoky darkness of the Los Angeles night.

    Dirk rolled up forty-five minutes later, casually munching a Big Mac, and found me still gripping the flashlight and bloody crowbar.

    Those Big Macs brought me back to reality, and I graciously accepted one of my own. With me leading the way to show my fearlessness, breathing not a word of my experiences or lack thereof, I carried the cans of paint back to where the red mess was exactly as I had left it. In fact, the whole cavern now seemed exactly as it had before…harmless.

    Not sure exactly how to go about painting over a human, I dumped the gallon can out atop the start of the puddle, its gloppy white thickness pouring out like batter onto a hot griddle. Shaking the last remnants from the can, I marveled at how the paint found its own way down the rocky face of the concrete, not quite washing over the blood trails.

    Using a roller, I began to push the paint outward, thinning it, ensuring that it spread over all the traceable red. As the encapsulating white paint spread and coated the uneven surface, the red mixed with it to form sickly salmon pink patches in the whiteness of the rock.

    I moved the roller around, pushing more paint over the heinous pink blotches, but that just freed up more spots, making the man's death seem all the more sickening.

    "Damn it," Dirk swore. "That's all the paint I bought. Looks like you'll have to come out here tomorrow and lay a second coat."

* * *

When I returned once more to the ballpark's underground, I made sure it was during daylight hours. The second layer of paint didn't do much more to cover up where that guy impacted.

    I'll bet that if you finagle your way into the labyrinth of corridors beneath the first baseline to the battered access door numbered 33 and make your way across the rickety plank bridge, you'll find the rough exposure where construction workers hammered their way through the wall to reach their splattered coworker's corpse. And in the entrance to the massive cave of uneven concrete beyond, you'll find a large splotch of white paint with sickly pink patches creeping through.

    Just do yourself and your sanity a favor…and don't go at night.

There was nothing like an abundance of work to make my lazy ass wish for less work. We had been rolling like crazy lately, as a seeming wave of death was overwhelming Orange County. All of the people who had managed to cling to their meaningless lives during the dry months had now decided to unburden themselves, one on top of another.

    A month ago I had visited the Hotel Pepper Tree, a garish place in Anaheim with a South Beach, Miami, feel to it (though I have never visited South Beach, Miami). I had gone initially with the intention of collecting payment from the ancient and shaking brother of the doll lady. He had come in from South Beach and had made a beeline to a place of familiarity and comfort.

    In that initial visit to the Hotel Pepper Tree, I had been struck by the tropical, pastel feel of the place, full of palm fronds and the sound of running water. It wasn't located in the most colorful part of Anaheim, the spectacle that was Disneyland, and so it stuck out in the dusty, drab surroundings like an oasis in Antarctica.

    What had captured my attention about the place was not its sore-thumb exterior, though, but rather its decorating scheme. In this temple to the tropical, the decorating scheme was completely Arnold. Evidently the owner of the place had been unwilling to completely shy away from his SoCal roots, and the twin corridors running the length of the building were adorned with a multitude of framed movie posters from the Governator's long career in Hollywood. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger's face glaring out at me from among the palm trees that I remarked upon later to anyone who would listen at the frat house. And then a month later, I was back.

    Since my back still wasn't 100 percent normal, I brought Kim, from my work crew on the Sewer House, with me. She'd begged me to take her on a job, and though I had obliged on the Sewer House, she wanted more. Kim was attracted to the ghoulish side of life, the dark and dirty aspects of human nature, and as such, my job captivated her.

    I had been unable to bring along Misty, the attractive woman who was actually employed by O.C. Crime Scene Cleaners, because she was too busy lately with school and her other job. Kim was attractive, too, though, and as she'd tellingly informed me at one point, she had her clit pierced.

    Kim had been among the collective at the frat the day I had described the outlandish splendor of the Hotel Pepper Tree, and so it felt like a badge of honor that she could verify its gaudiness. We were there for a young man who had violently stabbed himself in his heart, cutting a hole in his Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and creating a trail of blood that ruined his Seven jeans.

    From there the blood had found its way across the wide, polished brown tiles and into grout lines of the floor that were a little too deep and narrow to fit the head of the cleaning brush. The half of the room that the bed was on lay undisturbed, save a four-foot-long narrow patch of carpet lying adjacent to the affected streaks of tile. Kim was through the roof at the possibilities of cleaning up this dead guy; I was thinking about her clit ring and how the bed opposite the carnage was unstained. I tempered that thought, though, with the memories of my karmatic diarrhea on the dog job, and we got to work.

    Kim was adorable bundling up in her bunny suit (one of Misty's). She was concerned about the possibility of disease, so she actually taped her gloves to the wrists of her suit with duct tape, something she'd evidently learned off a TV show, as it was never anything I had been trained in.

    I cinched my suit off at my waist, so as not to ruin my shorts, and crouched down slowly till I was at face level with the tile. I wasn't worried about disease myself, feeling like an old pro now that I had been cleaning crime scenes for a full year. Besides, what sort of disease could I possibly get from the blood of an impeccably fashionable young man who'd come down to a kitschy and flamboyant hotel to kill himself in an overly dramatic manner?

    The work itself seemed easy enough. I cleaned the blood off the tile with my paper towels, and Kim mirrored me every step of the way, busting her ass to show her value as a team member. She was working as a waitress and hating every minute of it. If there were any way she could get aboard with the crime scene cleaning and get out of her old occupation, she would do it. I knew the feeling.

    Dirk was a bit of a pervert and would have been more than happy to go for it, and I myself couldn't imagine the downside of having two attractive girls working with us. We were paying both of them peanuts. Dirk and I split pay in half for all the jobs we did and now excluded Schmitty from all the ones he didn't immediately contract us for, while we paid the girls twenty-five dollars an hour for their work.

    Kim said she wasn't in it for the money, but had she known I was making $250 or more an hour, she might have changed her mind. She was a good worker when there weren't neighbors around for her to gab with, and I did my part to make sure she kept on task. In the end, she seemed to fit right in with us as a member of our unit. Of course, we were a motley crew of slap-dicks, scumbags, and morons with little to no moral fiber, so maybe saying she fit right in wasn't exactly the best compliment.