Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  From what Philo could tell, the coroner’s office had taken enough of her body to legitimately say it was Phoenicia in her closed casket. Left behind was a toilet full of soupy internal organs and waste, and on the tile floor around it, gooey black blood mixed with what was probably more liquefied human being.

  “Seen it before, sir,” Patrick said, now behind Philo in the bathroom. “And I seen bodies before they took ’em, too.”

  That’s all Philo needed to hear. “Really? Good. So Patrick, how about you—”

  “Good training for you, sir,” Patrick said, not letting him finish. “That’s what Grace told me my first time. ‘Good training, Patrick. You can handle it.’ That’s what she said. And I took care of it, sir. You can do it. Good training for you too, sir.”

  “Um—”

  “No one better than you, Mr. Trout, sir,” Patrick added. Philo was pretty sure his about-face and retreat hid a smirk.

  “Wise guy,” Philo said under his breath.

  Philo produced a bottle of disinfectant. He sprayed the mound inside the toilet. Its surface rippled like a wind gust across a lake. Maggots.

  Easy fix, he thought: flush the toilet. He twisted the handle, realized his mistake immediately. The commode started overflowing.

  “Aww, FUCK!” Philo reached for the shut off valve under the tank, steadying himself with a hand on the plastic toilet seat. Another mistake. The seat snapped, and Philo slipped shoulder deep into the maggoty innards inside the toilet bowl. His scream was prehistoric, lengthening into uncontrollable gagging, and culminating in the elimination of his stomach contents in the bathroom sink.

  Philo changed his Tyvek suit. After Patrick fixed the clog with a plumbing snake, the toilet flushed, and the remainder of the body sludge that the coroner hadn’t wanted disappeared into the sewers. The bathroom generated one hazmat bag, two thirty-gallon biohazard containment drums, and two layers of flooring with the third, glued linoleum, also contaminated. They boiled water and used a shovel to pry the flooring up for removal. Four hours later the bathroom was spotless, top to bottom, from scrubbing with antiseptic and enzyme cleaners.

  Philo called his customer, the woman’s niece, from the front porch.

  “We’re finished, ma’am. I’ll work up a quote for taking care of the rest of the house. You’ll need to let me know if you’d like to be here when we do it.”

  “Fine,” the niece said. “Did you find Marco?”

  “Who?”

  “My aunt’s dog, Marco. He’s an older dog, a midsize spaniel mix. Any sign of him?”

  In the kitchen they’d disposed of two dog bowls, one containing canned dog food and live maggots, the other an empty water bowl with caked, dead maggots, but, “No. No dog. But I can’t guarantee he isn’t inside the house mixed in somewhere with your aunt’s things.”

  Patrick humped the last waste drum out the front door, dropped it onto the porch floorboards, and rolled it on its edge over to the steps. Philo ended the call with the niece and reset the heat thermostat to fifty degrees to keep the pipes from freezing. He helped Patrick guide the drum to the van, where they hoisted it inside.

  “We’re going to bid on cleaning the whole property,” he told Patrick. “Gimme a few minutes while I walk the perimeter.” It was also to make sure that, as he’d already reported to the niece, there was no dog.

  Philo entered the unlocked garage—no car and not in need of a biohazard clean—then he completed his circumnavigation of the house. No need for their services outside, and still no Marco. Back to the step van.

  The engine running and the heat up, Patrick waited inside, his head down and earbuds on, mesmerized by an online video game. Philo climbed in, slid the door shut.

  “No issues in or around the garage. We’ll quote on cleaning the inside only. Yard’s beat up, like the dog spent a lot of time out here, but no sign of him.”

  Patrick stared past Philo’s shoulder. His eyes widened. “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh what?”

  “There, sir. There.” Patrick pointed.

  Philo turned, focused, noticed only the crimped rain gutter. Still hanging low, still terminating in the cracked bathtub. “Where? What?”

  “That brown icicle, sir, coming from the bottom of the tub, it’s, it’s—”

  Not an icicle, now that Philo looked at it. Looked more like frozen leg of dog.

  One swing from the sledgehammer and the porcelain tub split in two. Beneath the crunchy leaf topping, Marco the Dog’s body was encased at the bottom of a bathtub-shaped block of dirty brown ice. Poor Marco, who no doubt had been thirsty rather than looking for an ice bath. Philo lightly rapped the ice block on its side a few times with the sledge, not knowing why he was being so tentative, the ice chipping but otherwise not cooperating. He put his back into an overhead swing. The block separated, giving up the dog’s stiff body like a gooey chocolate Easter egg.

  “Patrick, get me a fifty-gallon. We’ll put him in with some of the ice. He’ll keep that way until we can get him to the bio waste drop-off. Patrick? Yo, Patrick?”

  Patrick was nearly catatonic, staring at the dog’s body amid the chunks of split ice on the grass. After a moment, he broke the trance.

  “I think I had a dog when I was a kid, sir.”

  5

  One scheduled stop became two. Patrick needed it to be this way, and Philo complied. The planned stop was at a hazardous waste facility in the Kensington section of Philly, open to anyone with a biohazard dumping permit. Everything from today’s job should have exited their truck in Kensington, but it hadn’t, not after Patrick’s pleading. Their second stop was the neighborhood animal shelter.

  “I’ll pay for it, sir,” Patrick said. He rolled the biohazard container with the dog’s remains out of the truck. A shelter employee directed them to the rear entrance.

  “Relax, Patrick, the company will pick up the tab.”

  “No. I’m taking the ashes. They’re for me, so I wanna pay for it, sir.”

  “Patrick—”

  “No one better than Patrick, sir. I’m paying for it. Done deal, sir.”

  They were ushered inside the rear door, where an attendant talked money. Three hundred bucks for cremation, a stained walnut urn, and an engraved plaque. Without a plaque, two forty-five. Turnaround time for the ashes, a week to ten days.

  “No need for a plaque, right, Patrick?” Philo said.

  Patrick agreed, but wasn’t fully convinced. “Maybe later, sir. When I think of something to put on it.”

  Philo watched him retrieve the cash, twenties, tens, fives, then ones—each denomination from a different hazmat suit pocket—watched him peel the bills off. More uniform pockets probably meant more cash, maybe in higher denominations. “You carry a lot of cash, Patrick?”

  “Yeah. It’s so I don’t get beat into another coma.”

  Back in the van, Patrick put his earbuds back in. They entered traffic, headed south to meet with the ER doctor at Pennsylvania Hospital. Four miles from their visit with Dr. Andelmo, it would be long enough—fifteen minutes in traffic—for Philo to do some gentle probing.

  “Remember anything else about your dog?”

  Patrick hummed along to the noise in his ears, a rhythmic rap track. He lifted his head, stared unfocused out the front window and removed an earbud, his look distant. “His name was maybe Poy, sir. He looked like Marco. Brown and white. Poy sounds right. Yeah. Maybe. I’m not sure, sir, but Poy sounds good.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Um…” He raised his head again, was now in full ponder mode, his face contorting. In front of them the dense noon traffic on Columbus Boulevard was at least moving, their original ETA to the doctor still looking good. “Umm…”

  Philo held his breath, wanting him to go deep, to dig inside that dented melon of his, to find the name of a town, or a street, something.

  Patrick’s head drooped. He returned his interest to the phone in his lap, his enthusiasm gone. “We became a state in 1959.”


  Alaska. Somewhere in the Aleutian Islands. A canned response. The reflex equivalent of I don’t have a fucking clue. Hundreds of thousands of godforsaken square miles. No record of him there, alive, dead, sick, or missing.

  “Okay, sport, we’re close to the hospital. Ready to say hi to Dr. Andelmo?” Philo resisted saying “again,” as Patrick had no recollection of being in the ER with this man the first time.

  “Ready, sir. No one better than Patrick, sir.”

  Inside the parking garage, Philo ran his hand through his hair, tamping down his rooster comb top and the side tufts that belonged behind his ears. He checked himself in the rearview, then assessed Patrick. Not bad, the two of them tradesmen-chic in their luminescent blue uniforms. Patrick’s light brown face had skin as thick and shock-absorbing as whale blubber; something pro boxers would kill for. Still, an off-center dip the size of a revolver’s gunstock menaced his head just above his hairline, a distance above his left eye.

  Philo expected this meeting to be about Patrick’s progress, the doc no doubt wanting to hear someone tell him he’d done good by bringing Patrick out of the coma, considering all the bad press Andelmo had received recently. If one could ignore the allegations and instead key on what Grace had shared about Patrick’s treatment, the doc came off sounding like a hero.

  A beaming Dr. Francisco X. Andelmo waited for them inside an office near the ER, his smock personalized in a red longhand script above a breast pocket. His eyes were friendly but dark, their corners crinkled by deep crow’s feet. His nose was wide above a capped, glistening smile, and below that, his upper torso looked buff under his tailored doctor whites. Remove the smock and replace it with gold bling and a wolf-toothed necklace on a bare chest, he could have passed for an aging Mayan high priest who colored his hair. Patrick and Philo sat across from him and one other doctor, a Dr. Barry Heineken or something, someone Philo now didn’t give a damn about, because Dr. Barry wanted Philo to leave the room.

  “You’re not a family member, Mr. Trout,” Dr. Barry said. “You’re his employer. You shouldn’t be here. You don’t have a horse in this race.”

  The comment hung out there, its pointless stupidity making Philo squint. He waited for Dr. Andelmo to straighten his associate out. When that didn’t happen, Philo’s mood spiraled, escalating from puzzled to incredulous to barely being able to contain his temper.

  “Where the hell are you and your horse from, Barry, Mars?” His stare drilled a hole into the bridge of the balding little fuck’s nose. “Patrick’s here because I drove him here, because he doesn’t drive, because he can’t drive, because no one will give him a license to drive. Because he doesn’t know his name. No family members are here because he doesn’t know if he has any, and if he does, he doesn’t know who or where they are. Isn’t that the whole damn point of this visit? To see how he’s doing while he tries to get his life back on track?”

  “Dr. Heinzman to you, Mr. Trout,” the doctor said, stiffening his jaw. “Head of transplant medicine here, and the hospital’s chief administrator. And I don’t care for your tone. If you don’t leave this office, I’ll call Security—”

  “Listen, Barry, you pompous fuck, if you think I’m leaving Patrick alone with you, you’re more confused than Patrick.”

  Patrick remained calm, a stoic presence belying his intellectual shortcomings. Dr. Andelmo keenly observed the exchange, and Patrick’s demeanor during it, which seemed unaffected by the heat coming from Philo. The Latino doctor stayed out of the disagreement until finally addressing his colleague. “Barry—calm down, Barry.”

  Philo smiled. Not Dr. Heinzman—Barry.

  A little dressing down from your associate, Barry-boy, you giant sack.

  “Your point is well taken, Mr. Trout,” Dr. Andelmo continued. His diction was formal, precise, his accent confirming him as Central or South American. “No one is here to discuss any malfeasance, or anything detrimental to your employee-employer relationship. Barry, Mr. Trout is clearly here as a friend of, and representative for, Mr. Stakes, not as his employer.”

  “But Dr. Andelmo—”

  Dr. Andelmo waved his hand at his protesting colleague and addressed Patrick directly. “Mr. Stakes. Can Mr. Trout be here while we speak with you?”

  “Er, yeah, sure.”

  “That handles the HIPAA requirement, Barry. Perhaps it would be best if you leave me your notes while you get back to the business of running your hospital. All I want to do as his former physician is to check on his condition. Just leave him to me please.”

  With Dr. Heinzman gone, the desk in front of this neurosurgeon and alleged organ trafficker—Philo had googled him after Grace’s tirade—now held folders with pages and pages of hospital forms, notes, and charts. Posted outside the office door were two security guards who arrived soon after Dr. Heinzman’s exit; they stood peering through the glass at them. Dr. Andelmo left his seat and closed the blinds.

  “There. A little more privacy for us. My deepest apologies for my associate’s behavior, gentlemen. HIPAA requirements dictate that administrators err on the side of caution. So. Patrick.” He refolded his hands on the desk. “It has been a while. Three years, I see. May I call you Patrick?”

  An attempt by the doctor to bond. Patrick responded. “Yes, sir. You can call me Patrick, sir, because that’s what people call me. Patrick Stakes.”

  “Wonderful. First, I appreciate if you’d leave your phone number with us for any follow-ups, Patrick. So. I am sure you are wondering why I asked you here.”

  The doc emerged from behind his desk, raised his stethoscope to his ears, and listened to Patrick’s heart and lungs. “It is to see your progress for myself, considering you left my care in such a hurry the last time. To see how you are assimilating despite your challenges. A colleague of mine called yesterday, and he said he saw you at that tragic Amtrak train suicide near the Philadelphia Zoo. That must have been horrible.”

  “Yes, sir, horrible. Messy. Sad. Sir, what does ‘assimilating’ mean?”

  The doc took Patrick’s vitals while hitting all the right marks conversationally, explaining himself to his former patient. He then shared his satisfaction at how Patrick was managing to fit in, leading a productive life despite the brain damage and the loss of practically all his memory.

  “Patrick, I am curious. How did you end up working for Mr. Trout?”

  “’Cause of Mr. and Missus Blessid. They were at this place in, ah, South Philly, near, um, um…”

  Philo offered him a prompt. “The Italian Market, on Ninth Street. Not far from Pat’s Steaks, right, Patrick?” Affirmative, Patrick’s beaming face told them.

  Philadelphia’s Italian Market was block after block of open-air stalls filled with fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, spices, and some restaurants smart enough to be located nearby, plus, it was the origin of the iconic footage of a jogging Rocky Balboa forever emblazoned into everyone’s memory. For Philo, Stallone’s Rocky bordered on a religious experience.

  “The Blessids were cleaning up after a crime scene,” Philo said, continuing when Patrick didn’t. “There was a violent murder in a second-story apartment overlooking the street vendors. The forensics people—cops, detectives, a coroner, even CSI sometimes—they do the investigating, but secondary responders, biohazard people like us, we do the cleanup.”

  “Yeah, a crime scene,” Patrick parroted. “I was outside, sir, looking for something to eat.” He scrunched up his face, the memory not a good one. “The kidney was mixed in with Joey the Butcher’s meats.”

  A puzzled Dr. Andelmo looked to Philo.

  Philo explained. “Patrick was living on the street, homeless, a hungry kid who the Blessids later learned had been hanging around the Italian Market for weeks, around the open stalls, because that’s where the food was. He’d picked a human kidney out of the meats and seafood displayed there on shaved ice; maybe it looked like a bloated rib eye. There’d been a messy execution upstairs. A shotgun blew someone out the secon
d-story picture window, onto a cloth awning that split under the weight. Some of the victim landed on the street. The coroner collected the body, just didn’t get all of it. On one of the Blessids’ trips outside, Patrick handed the kidney—er, I should say, what was left of the kidney—to Grace Blessid.”

  “Joey said I should give it to Grace, sir. It tasted different than the other meats,” Patrick said.

  Philo patted him on the shoulder. “I understand, Patrick.”

  “Joey threw up ’cause he saw me take a bite out of it.”

  “Okay, we got it, Patrick, thanks.”

  They waited for the doctor’s reaction; this couldn’t have been something he heard every day. The dead air finally got the best of Philo. “So, Doctor, he’s looking great, isn’t he? You need anything else from him? You have any new info on him?”

  The doctor finally spoke. “Your mistake about the kidney, Patrick,” he asked, “it was fortuitous, yes?”

  “He means lucky,” Philo said to Patrick.

  “Yeah, lucky. Grace took the rest of the kidney and asked me if I needed a job. She said if I had a job, I’d be able to buy my own food instead of stealing it, maybe even cook it if I wanted. I said yeah, gimme a job, please.”

  “I see.” The doctor clicked his ballpoint multiple times, his smile gone. “Patrick, in the ER you were frostbitten, bloody, and unconscious, and whatever signals your brain was giving you”—he checked his notes—“what came out of your mouth was gibberish. Nonsensical things, or so we thought.” He turned to Philo. “The delirium—it was expected, considering his bloodied skull. But his mouth was bloody too, his lips caked with it. That blood, Mr. Trout, was not his.”