Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  “I second that, Patrick, and she wants that too. She’s strong, and she’s fighting hard to keep it together, for Hank and for you, but she’s almost sixty years old, and for a person her age with her physical problems, sometimes attitude alone just isn’t enough.”

  He’d researched lung transplants. What Philo found was, she would never fully recover. The prognosis for lung recipients was good for the first year, a four-in-five chance of surviving, but after three years it got considerably poorer, survival only a little better than one in two. Organ rejection could be slowed but never stopped, plus the side effects from the drug therapy often caused kidney damage and diabetes.

  “Why are you out so late at night riding SEPTA?”

  “I look for things when I’m not asleep.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Things and places that might make me remember, sir.”

  SEPTA’s bus, train, and trolley system covered much of the city and had a reach into other nearby counties as well, even across state lines into New Jersey and Delaware. Like Grace had said, Patrick was on a relentless mission to rediscover his past, assuming his past, longer term, had something to do with Philadelphia or its surrounding environs.

  “Any memories of things in my neighborhood?”

  “No. Yeah. Maybe. I check out all the neighborhoods, sir. Today at our cleanup job near the Sixty-six bus route, something was…Something there made me feel good.”

  “Something at the car dealership.”

  “Uh-huh. So I went back.”

  “At two in the morning?”

  “Yeah. And sometimes when I’m on the bus I fall asleep then wake up in my seat. Other times when I wake up, I’m not on the bus.”

  “What, like in a dream?”

  “Not a dream, sir. For real.”

  “So you are a sleepwalker. Why didn’t you tell the doctor this when he asked?”

  “His questions made my head hurt, sir.”

  “Yeah, mine too. Interesting.”

  “Yeah. And confusing, sir.”

  Philo never believed in that sleepwalking shit, unless it was carryover from taking a sleep aid or was drug influenced, yet he was fairly sure Patrick wasn’t capable of lying about it. “You take sleeping pills?”

  “No drugs. I smoked one of Grace’s cigarettes once, sir.” He made a face. “Made me throw up.”

  “Fine then, you walk in your sleep. Where are you when you wake up? Outside? Inside? At home?”

  “Sometimes at tourist spots. Other times at places like tonight, at the car dealership.”

  “Hold that thought.” Philo steered the Jeep into the hospital parking lot, found a space a distance from the main hospital entrance. They exited his Jeep. As they walked, Philo returned his full attention to him.

  “So what I’m hearing is you wake up at jobsites and other places not knowing how you got there.”

  “Um, no. Yes. Sometimes.”

  This was a yes, Philo was learning. Here was an example of sleepwalking to the extreme. “You tell anyone else about this, Patrick?”

  “Grace and Hank know about the SEPTA rides, not the sleepwalking, ’cause they’d worry about me. I don’t have any other friends, except for maybe you and the guys at Pat’s Steaks. Didn’t tell them either.”

  Philo had to analyze this. He didn’t want to keep info from the Blessids, as invested as they were in Patrick’s wellbeing, but with Grace in the hospital this wouldn’t be a good time for them to hear about it.

  “I’m thinking you best not talk to anyone about your sleepwalking or your late-night SEPTA recon trips, okay, bud?”

  “Why?”

  “Just don’t. Especially when we’re on a job. People don’t need any more reasons to think we crime scene cleaners are weirder than we are. Got that?”

  “Okay. I need coffee, sir.” Patrick lowered his hood, rubbed his eyes, then dipped his fingers into the dent in his head that had precipitated his confusing life as a brain-damaged amnesiac; he massaged it.

  “We’ll get some inside. Let’s see what we can do about cheering up Grace and Hank.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “She needs more than cheering up, sir. She needs new lungs.”

  “Soon, Patrick. Hopefully, soon, she reaches the top of the list.”

  Which list, controlled by whom, manipulated by whom, from the list or from some other list, legal or not—at this point Philo didn’t care.

  He and Patrick added sugar and milk to their takeouts. Philo sipped, studying Patrick. Such an enigma. “Patrick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What at the dealership made you happy today? The place grossed me out.”

  “I dunno. The smell, I guess.”

  That, to Philo, was almost always the most difficult part of the job. “Then why use the Tiger Balm?”

  “The dead body smell makes me sick like it does everybody, sir. The other smell I like. The sweetness from inside a body when it’s opened up. Animals have the smell inside their bodies, and people have it, too. From blood and the stuff inside. There was a lot of that smell around those car bays today, sir.”

  From internal organs. Multiple donors had been there, undergoing some kind of guerrilla surgery, getting sliced open to give up one organ or another, or in the cases of the bodies left behind, Philo surmised, any organ that could be worth something on the black market.

  “Sir, can you hand me a few more packets of sugar for my coffee, please?”

  Patrick and raw meat and internal organs. In Philo’s head now was Dr. Andelmo, that judgmental, cannibal-conspiracy-loving fuck.

  Philo tossed him the packets. “No talking to people about liking that smell either, okay, Patrick?”

  “Okay.”

  12

  Two partially cooked bodies were crammed into the pressure cooker that was in turn crammed into the cargo area behind Kaipo’s seat in her van. She was now about to make a stop where she knew she wasn’t welcome.

  Hawai’i was an upscale steakhouse in Center City, Philadelphia, where customers enjoyed seventy-five-dollar custom-aged, hand-selected USDA steak straight from Hawaii’s Parker Ranch, plus traditional island dishes like Kalua pig and poke, a Hawaiian version of sushi. Today’s customers needed to remain clueless as to whatever else would be passing through the kitchen while they ate. The alley where she parked ran the length of the mid-rise city block. Kaipo ran an extension cord from her pressure cooker to an outside outlet. Her stew needed another half hour before she could dispose of whatever hadn’t cooked, the plan being to feed it into the restaurant’s Sledgehammer 5000 commercial garbage disposal.

  She pounded her fist on the restaurant’s back door. It opened, and the Italian sous chef’s surprised look turned to alarm. He poked out his head, checked left and right down the alley, leaned back in, then blocked her entry.

  “No. Not today, Kaipo. No, no, no. If you want a meal, you must eat with the customers in the front. Get out.”

  Kaipo ignored the objection, was already re-familiarizing herself with the gleaming kitchen’s capabilities over the chef’s white-smocked shoulder. “Not here to eat, Plenio,” she said with no eye contact and no love lost for this pissant second-in-command. “Where’s Icky?” She strained to look deeper into the kitchen.

  Plenio was shorter than her by a head, was a young and flimsy food nerd, and had no chance of physically stopping her from finding Icky herself, but the two large hair-netted men busy with food prep behind him could, plus the staring dishwasher, a new guy who stopped mid-scrub to check her out.

  “Mr. Ikaika is out front,” he said, “in the dining room with our guests. This is highly irregular and is the absolute poorest of timing. You must leave.”

  Her appearance there was always poor timing, considering her avocation, but what was it that made this visit the absolute poorest, she wondered?

  Not for long. Two sedans carrying no identifying markings arrived, their tires stutter-stepping and stopping
short, blocking her van’s exit. She retreated from the door stoop onto the blacktop, where she watched one of the drivers march up and produce a badge for the sous chef lookout, Plenio.

  “Department of Public Health,” the badge’s owner said, his team of three technicians crowding in behind him. “We’re here to inspect the restaurant’s premises.”

  The SWAT team approach was all show. The restaurant’s Hawaiian owners boasted an enviable string of never having failed any of the health department’s unannounced inspections, this because there was no such thing as an unannounced anything when it came to inspecting her mob employers’ establishments, a call always preceding a visit. Still, she got a chuckle out of her timing. The cooker off, she discreetly unplugged it from the outlet.

  “You seem to have your hands full,” she said to Plenio, who was now barking orders to the staff. “I’ll wait out here. Tell Icky as soon as he’s done with these folks I need to talk with him.”

  “I’m busy right now, Kaipo, it will have to—”

  “Do it, Plenio. You keep me waiting, Icky won’t be happy. You’re watching those health department guys hunt down mice and roaches you already know they won’t find.” She picked out a spot on the stoop and sat, would keep an eye on things while her e-reader kept her company.

  A chunky, oval-faced Hawaiian man in a Hawaiian shirt, white shorts, and loafers without socks, exited the restaurant’s back door, totally underdressed for the weather. The costume was the saddest of stereotypes, but it was good for business.

  “’Sup, Kaipo?” Icky lit a cigarette, offered Kaipo one.

  She declined. “Icky, I need a favor.” She gestured with her head at the rear of her vehicle, the door slightly ajar. “See the pressure cooker in my van?”

  “I’ll see that cooker and raise you another cooker from my restaurant,” Icky said, satisfied at how clever his bad self was. He sucked hard on his cigarette. “We get a new one at the end of the month. The way I hear it, you get the restaurant’s old one as an upgrade. The one you’re getting is a beaut, Kaipo. Higher tech, bigger capacity. A faster, more even cook.” He glanced at her van again, something just now clicking for him. “Wait. Why the hell is it here?”

  “The job I had the other night was too much for it. Took too long, and the stew didn’t cook enough. I need access to your garbage disposal today.”

  “Are you shitting me? And with these Health Department people here?” He tossed his cigarette at the pavement. “This is a high-class establishment, Kaipo. I can’t be having you cart any of your slop into the kitchen.”

  “Relax. You stuff the equivalent of full sides of bone-in beef down that thing every day. It’s a disposal, not a broiler. It’ll do fine. I just need some chopping power. We’ll wait until they leave.”

  “Kaipo, damn it, no.”

  “Let me run a hose through the door and into the drain after the inspectors are gone. Ten minutes tops and I’ll be outta there.”

  Icky lit another cigarette, sucked in the smoke through an if-looks-could-kill frown, still in assessment mode.

  “Look, Icky, it’ll be fine. You’re the best, bud. Next time I speak with Olivier, I’ll tell him that. And soon as my replacement cooker’s available, let’s get it done. This one needs to be retired.”

  They both knew the frustrated fat Hawaiian had no choice. He marched off, his cold breath and cigarette smoke trailing him into the back door of the restaurant, oblivious to the This is a smoke-free establishment sign posted overhead. The door opened again and he popped back out, his face grumpy, to flick his cigarette in the direction of her and her van, then he disappeared back inside.

  She had more to mention to him, specifically about things she was seeing over the past few assignments. She’d hit him up about it after she was finished dealing with today’s mess.

  Her cleaning jobs had always dealt with recycling the trash. Cleaning up after bad actors who Ka Hui had removed from the environment. Always a fine line for her, what she did and how she felt about it, and how she compartmentalized the brutality, but these people knew the risks of being in the life. Except these new assignments involved remediating innocent, victimized people whose only significant crime was they were poor. The little guy. Yes, she had a very specific question for Icky after she was finished with the disposal.

  The heavy-duty, Gilmour-28-series, three-quarter-inch-wide pro-golf-course hose had the girth for the job. After the Health Department left, Kaipo connected the hose to the bottom of the cooker and threaded it through an open window, across the kitchen floor, and into the wide expanse of the garbage disposal’s mouth at the bottom of a massive sink. Icky had cleared that part of the kitchen of its staff. She signaled him to switch on the disposal, then she threw the pressure cooker’s ignition on and hustled back inside the kitchen. It was all good, Kaipo mused, as the cooker and disposal hummed through their jobs. Icky stood beside her, motionless, sweat gathering on his forehead.

  He patted his face with a hanky. “Don’t you need to be outside so you can turn that thing off if anything goes wrong?”

  “In a minute. Got a question for you. Your dishwasher—is he new?”

  “What? I have no fucking idea, Kaipo. Maybe.” Icky was considerably underinvested in the conversation. He leaned over the disposal and grimaced when it occasionally stopped its purring and coughed, needing to grind through some small chunk more formidable than the pablum that most of it had been, crunching through it in a ferocious manner. “Where’s that stuff you put under your nose for the smell, Kaipo? I need it.”

  She handed him her balm. “What happened to your other dishwasher?”

  Icky fingered a glob below his nose. “How the hell would I know? These guys come and go. Minimum-wage disposables.”

  Disposables. That word again. He was toeing Ka Hui’s party line.

  “Sure, Ick. Right. Minimum wage. That’s funny. You probably pay them half that, under the table.”

  “Hey, I don’t set the market. It’s their choice to come here. They don’t like it, they can get a second job, or they can go the fuck back to Mexico or Venezuela or wherever the hell they came from and starve.”

  Kaipo’s major point, coming right up. “Or they can supplement their income by selling off parts of themselves, right? A kidney here, a cornea there? Except the surgery sometimes doesn’t work out.”

  “What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Your old dishwasher. I saw him yesterday.”

  “Pedro? How about that. How’s he doing?”

  At the car dealership Kaipo hadn’t been sure, but she was plenty sure now. Seeing a new face here had confirmed it. “Not well,” she said, pointing to the gurgling garbage disposal.

  She left Icky hanging, headed quickly outside soon as the chug-a-lug noise started, to turn off the cooker’s laboring motor, the cooker now empty of its contents. She propped the hose’s disconnected open end upright, spilled bleach in and ran water from an alley garden hose through it, then she stuffed it with other bleach-soaked and biohazard enzyme-soaked rags. She reentered the kitchen to do the same with the hose’s other end, to rinse it out with kitchen sink spigot water and bleach, then stuff it with more biohazard-killing rags.

  “Turn your disposal off, Icky, we’re done. Ick?”

  Icky stood solemnly over the sink’s drain, his hands folded, offering a prayer on Pedro’s behalf. He blessed himself then flipped the disposal’s switch off, the kitchen faucet still running.

  The first thing Kaipo did at home after the car dealership fiasco was find the Blessid Trauma website. Something, a niggling intuition, or maybe a sixth sense drive-by, had suggested she search for it after she’d re-checked her phone photos. Specifically, the photos from the distant vantage point across the cornfield of the techs who cleaned up after her short-circuited attempt at purifying the dealership.

  The small company had a basic website describing their services and the people who performed them, some testimonials and FAQs, and a “What Do Crime S
cene Cleaners Do?” primer. Plus, something out of the ordinary: a page dedicated to one of their current employees, with a riveting story about him being a trauma-induced amnesiac with a brain injury, searching for his identity. For Kaipo, the sixth-sense niggle was strong here.

  She’d retrieved her phone, thumbed her way to the footage she took of the cleaners and their dancing-like-nobody’s-watching technician making a spectacle of himself.

  “Mr. Patrick Stakes. Well, aloha.”

  The story was touching, but it wasn’t quite correct. She decided she’d help them correct it with what little she was sure of. Starting with her next assignment, none of the commercial crime scene cleaners who were any good at what they did would miss her hidden message, yet it would mean something to only one of them.

  13

  Hospitals. Visiting them was not Philo’s strong suit. He’d had to make too many visits in the past, in and out of the States. Makeshifts, M.A.S.H. units, even third-world facilities. Too, too many. Colleagues sick, colleagues missing limbs, colleagues dying. Colleagues dead and needing identification when their country disavowed knowledge of who they were, or where they’d served, or what had killed them.

  “You okay, sir?” an observant Patrick asked, entering the hospital elevator first. Philo was lagging.

  “I’m good. Thanks, bud.”

  They found Grace in a double room with no roommate, resting. Wires, tubes, beeping machines, low lighting. Everything Philo did not want to see, and yet he was glad to see it all turned on and working, doing its job. The alternative always sucked.

  “Grace. It’s Philo and Patrick.” Philo moved in a little closer. “’Sup with this shit?”

  “Patrick, honey,” Grace said in a whisper, reaching, “come give me a smooch, please. Philo, you can fuck off,” she said, winking at him.

  A spontaneous lung collapse, an attending said. No trauma involved. Nothing any more specific than that, according to the docs, but after they took X-rays of both diseased lungs, they reinforced that she needed something to shake loose on the transplant horizon almost immediately. Hank sat forlorn in a side chair, unshaven, his hair a mess, his eyes unfocused, looking lost.