The Dead Janitors Club (6 page)

    The only one not swept up in the hype was my girlfriend of a year, Kerry, who barely acknowledged my enthusiastic slap on her ass. A sensible and fiercely intelligent girl, she was one of those overachievers, destined to do great things in life. She was so smart that Cal State Fullerton hired her to work for them the day she graduated. (Don't tell her I said this, but if she were really smart, she would have gotten into a better school than Cal State Fullerton.)

    Kerry worried about AIDS and disease and my safety, and to a certain extent her safety. I laughed and patted her head, reassuring her that once you were making six figures a year, AIDS was basically a nonissue; ask Magic Johnson. She didn't look reassured, though. I had a stack of generic business cards and pamphlets that contained the 800 number for Schmitty's company, which I was instructed to hand out at all the businesses in the area that dealt with death, such as cemeteries, crematoriums, mortuaries, and funeral homes. Chris had nothing cooler to do, so he tagged along.

    If I thought the reception to a new business in town that brought something different to the party was going to be a welcome one, I was dead wrong. The general reception at each funeral home and cemetery office was essentially that we were lepers selling hand jobs. They couldn't have been more repulsed if we walked in and told them that we were opening up a rival cemetery, complete with a salad bar, next door.

    These people, who charged ridiculous amounts of money to put loved ones in the ground, felt that we, who cleaned up the mess made by those "loved ones," were vultures, feeding on the bereaved. After the tenth reaction that went pretty much the same way, I called Dirk and begged him to let us off the hook. These people were never going to call or refer any business our way, I argued, but Dirk demurred. It was a numbers game, and besides, as he didn't have to tell me, he wasn't the one out there doing it.

    What was particularly depressing was the knowledge that there was no money to be made in this door-to-door work. Now that I was no longer retail, I was strictly commission, and in Dirk's eyes this was merely me "doing my part" to help make the company grow.

    The last straw came when we visited a cemetery where a man was standing in the foyer crying. He was there to make arrangements to bury his daughter. The funeral director insisted that we say what we had to first, because working with the other guy was going to take a while. If there was ever a moment in life where I felt like a ghoulish vulture, that was it.

    I merely nodded an apologetic glance to the man, thrust a pamphlet into the funeral director's hand, and walked out the door. Wanting the responsibility no longer, I threw all the pamphlets and business cards into a nearby trash can. Chris nodded a silent agreement with my actions, and feeling resolute, we headed back to the frat house.

    Kerry made sure she was there to rub it in that I had saved myself from working in a miserable industry. I informed her that I wasn't done with the business; I was just done with the disgusted looks of people who weren't going to call us anyway. Besides, we had nothing to worry about: cemeteries and funeral homes were just the icing. The cake was going to be all those "sure thing" business contacts that Dirk had.

    If only I'd known.

Actually, death waits for right before the beginning of a hockey game, an Anaheim Ducks game that I was supposed to attend. It had been well over a month since I had seen or heard from Dirk, and it was showing in my bank account. I couldn't afford rent at the frat house, so I hadn't paid it in two months, and I was still allowed to live there only because my drinking prowess was needed against the Chi Sigs up the block. Chris wasn't faring much better.

    Having quit BevMo two weeks after "starting" the crime scene business, I was definitely at Kerry's mercy. My credit card payments had come and gone unpaid, and I was a shoo-in for debtor's prison. I no longer even had enough money to go out and eat, let alone take Kerry out on dates. Instead, I sat in my closet all day counting broken dreams and subsisting on expired bologna sandwiches and warm, flat soda. (That last part isn't entirely true, but it frames the context nicely.)

    I was stuck in a new sort of prison, a type of hell that I wasn't sure I deserved. Around the frat, I was starting to develop a reputation as a user, a freeloader who talked a big game about a six-figure income. Feeling cheap, dirty, and nearly bereft of hope, I was tempted to start searching for another job. I still had faith, though, that somehow, someway, I was meant for this line of work.

    Kerry and I had scored her parents' season tickets to see the Ducks take on the New York Rangers on March 14, 2007, in what was promising to be one hell of a game if you're the hockey sort. I had donned my J. S. Giguere goalie jersey and Ducks hat for the trip down to the Arrowhead Pond when my phone rang.

    "Hello?" I mumbled, not recognizing the number on the caller ID.

    "Jeff, it's Dirk," said the voice. I waited curiously, wondering who the hell Dirk was. "We've got one," he eventually said when I failed to answer.

    "Oh, Dirk!" I said, the name having finally clicked. (In case you're wondering, his name's not really Dirk. Who forgets a name like Dirk?)

    "Can you be at my house in fifteen minutes?"

    Another silence, this one was shorter.

    "I'll re-give you directions on how to get here." We never had bothered to get together for any sort of training, and now it was too late.

* * *

I arrived wearing my crisp, black polo shirt, smelling of newness. I had a jacket as well, one of those SWAT-style jackets in black with an "Orange County Crime Scene Cleaners" emblazoned patch on the back, but it was warm enough yet, even in late March, to forgo it. Plus, the jackets cost $150 each, and since Dirk hadn't told his wife he'd ordered them, he preferred if I would keep it on the down low.

    Kerry had been a split decision on the news of my first job. She was relieved that she wouldn't have to pay the bills entirely but annoyed that I was missing the game. I would be damned if I irritated two women that evening, so I left the jacket in my car.

    Dirk was loading his milk crates full of brand-new crimecleaning supplies into the back of his extended-bed 2500 Chevy Silverado. His crates were black, mine were red, and the truck was gray. The color scheme looked like what I thought a crime scene might. I loaded my crates next to his and nodded, nervous but trying to look upbeat.

    "Do we know what we're getting into?" I asked.

    "Nah, the guy, Martin, didn't say. It's out in Riverside, though."

    I maintained a positive outward appearance but groaned inside. Riverside was a dump. It was a dirty, dusty area from which the poorer people commuted to work cleaning houses for the poor people in Fullerton who were out cleaning houses for the rich people in Laguna Beach. Riverside made Fullerton look like Bel-Air.

    It wasn't so much the poor part that got me, though; it was the knowledge that at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday, the freeway would be a parking lot. There was no chance I was going to even make part of the game. It was an hour drive to Riverside without traffic, so with traffic it was going to be misery, and I was already beginning to have butterflies about the mission ahead. Serial-killer leanings or not, this was real.

    The most blood I had ever seen was when I was younger and my dad made me take down my tree fort, claiming it made the backyard look like shit. (Plus, at fifteen, I may have been too old for a "secret" tree fort.) I was pissed about having to rip apart the rotting planks attached to the overhang that I called my fort and was yanking at the nails angrily, forcing the crescent head of the hammer to act as leverage in prying the long lumber nails toward me.

    One of the nails slipped out too easily, though, and the hammer careened around, completing its arc when its sharp claws stabbed into my forehead. The blood rolled slowly across my vision, dropping down like one of those grand theater curtains, and I was sure I had cracked open my skull like a hatched egg. Death was surely upon me.

    I must have been shrieking, because I heard my father's voice below me, annoyed. He insisted that I climb down from the fort by myself, because there was no way he could come up and get me on the rickety ladder that barely supported my weight. I couldn't believe his ignorance; his eldest and most handsome son was going to be worm food in a place the worms couldn't possibly reach.

    Neither of us was in the mood for rich irony at the moment, though. The blood had washed out my vision completely, so I carefully put my hand out where I remembered the rusty metal ladder to be, perched against a beam. Descending slowly, the wet red drops plunking down onto my hands, I wondered how much blood was in the human body and how much was left in me.

    Guiding me into the house, my father was careful to keep me from dripping onto any carpeting or laundry between the bathroom and the back door, taking his time, unconcerned. I was melodramatic as hell, though, and crying out for last rites, which was a Catholic ceremony, but you couldn't have told me that at the time.

    With a washcloth soaked in cool water, my dad absorbed the blood off my face, restoring my sight. With the first glances of my newfound vision, I looked upward, marveling in the beauty of colors that weren't red. It was as if I'd never really seen the world before. (Like I said, I was melodramatic as hell. At that age, my parents had voted me most likely to be a homosexual.)

    As I glanced at my wound, I expected the puncture to be raw, exposed, and jagged, a bloody chasm with hints of white skull and pink, pulsating brain peeking through the punctured head vein. Instead, I was disappointed to see only a tiny ripple where the skin of my forehead had been nudged aside barely, resulting in something more akin to an acne scar.

    "Where's the rest of it?" I wondered aloud, hoping for some complicated answer about impacted contusions and how sorry my father was for making me take down my childhood playhouse.

    "That's it. Cuts on the head bleed a lot even when they're not serious," my dad said, matter-of-factly.

    I was robbed. I felt like that kid who didn't get his BB gun on Christmas. Although technically I was doubly robbed, because I never got a BB gun for Christmas either. My parents didn't like guns.

* * *

We finished loading up the truck, adding a wet-dry vacuum and a broom, just to be safe. Dirk gave a quick kiss good-bye to his wife while I gave a long kiss good-bye to my hockey tickets, and we were off.

    I could tell the traffic would be bad right from the outset. Lines of traffic snarled around the block, all cars impatiently awaiting entrance to the California 55 freeway heading north. We had a lot of time to kill but surprisingly little to talk about, both of us just exclaiming that we were glad to get a call, me especially.

    "The first of many," Dirk said optimistically.

    "The first of many," I agreed, daring to dream that it might be true.

    I stared out the surrounding windows of the truck as we crept down the freeway, our brand-new tools loaded in back. I was in awe of the vehicles traveling next to us, purposeful, oblivious. They were full of dads and moms and teens and poor Mexican day laborers stuffed into rusty trucks, all headed for home. None of them knew anything about Dirk and me, where we were going, or what we were in for that night.

    We finally made our way onto the 91 freeway heading east, and the traffic picked up a bit.

    "Do you think you're going to puke?" Dirk asked, smiling.

    "No," I said, suddenly uncertain. "You?"

    "Nah. I've seen these things before, as a sheriff…course I never cleaned one up before," he added, suddenly uncertain as well.

    The traffic let up further, as if God had cleared a path, special for us, understanding our divine purpose. Dirk geared down on the accelerator, nosing the large truck forward faster. I picked up the handwritten directions detailing how to get to the scene of the crime, consisting of a lot of off-ramps and streets I had never heard of before.

    Suddenly the truck lurched slightly as we ran over the shredded remains of a big rig's tire, left torn in the road. Dirk yanked the wheel hard, sending the Silverado barreling into lanes of traffic that I didn't have time to hope were clear. I expected a flash of memories—me eating ice cream, my first love, me eating more ice cream, me wondering why my first love said I was too fat to date—but the memories never appeared. Instead, we ended up on the side of the road under a freeway overpass littered with trash, a twin line of tracks behind us, the skid in the dust barely visible in the waning sunlight.

    "The tire's flat," Dirk said.

    I thought he meant the piece of big-rig tire we had run over, until I noticed that my section of the cab had an unnatural lean to it. It was like God had airmailed a loogie from heaven.

    "Shit," I said, cursing in front of Dirk for the first time and not caring how he took to it.

    "Shit," he agreed. He hopped out and took the long way around to survey the damage on my side. I clambered out—my fresh, black shirt cool from the air-conditioning that had been blasting inside.

    The outside of our large tire had ripped almost completely away from the rest of the rubber and hung down over the rim like a black bib.