Far From Ordinary

by M James Murray

  “Just shut off the pump and try to clear it. You should know this, buddy. Don’t waste my time on a goddamned Friday night!”

  Dick could hear the anger rising in Josh’s voice, so he got right to the point.

  “It’s a dude. A big, fat, hairy dude. Floating by. In the pipes. Naked.

  “Wait, what? Why is he there?”

  “I dunno, boss. I think he’s going to clog the pipes.”

  “How big is he?”

  “I don’t know, 220, 230?”

  “Yeah, that’ll clog the pipes. Try and fish him out. I’ll be there in the morning.” In the background, Dick could hear the “inces” intensifying and a voice announcing something.

  “And heeeerrreeeee’s Misty!”

  And with that, he hung up the phone.

  Dick got the impression that Josh wasn’t exactly in the state of mind necessary to make intelligent and well-formed decisions. Still, he was right. If Dick left the body in the drainage pipes, there’d be some serious issues in the plant.

  So he put on as much personal protective gear as he could and went back down to the main drainage room where he fished the bloated corpse out of the water.

  Dick Mitey had seen dead bodies before. His aunt Gladys had died of a massive heart attack when he’d been only 13 years old. His Mama had forced him to come to the viewing. Dick had hated every minute of it – the way she looked, the odd smell in the air and the strange, forced comfortable look which the funeral parlor employed.

  He’d repeat the process ten years later for his Mama’s funeral and had hated it just as much.

  This corpse was ten times worse than either of those. Dick’s face mask which was supposed to neutralize odors didn’t seem to work.

  It didn’t look peaceful at all, not like his Mama had. He fished the body out of the deluge, pulling it up onto the metal flooring with all of his strength.

  It was a big body and Dick was not exceptionally strong, so by the end, he was panting with exertion.

  “Oomph, buddy! Really, you need to lay off the twinkies!” he said, trying to catch his breath.

  He had a sinking feeling that his new friend would never eat another Twinkie again.

  The body was immense, rolls of fat drooped down like a bloodhound’s jowls at many different places of his body. He was mostly balding, though it looked like he had grown out one side of his hair in a vain attempt to comb-over the bald patches on his head and there was a small, greying mustache on his upper lip.

  Dick hesitated for a moment but got up and returned with a towel to cover the dead man’s privates. It was a little bit of dignity, it was the least of what Dick could do.

  He checked his watch on his slim wrist. The time of 4:03 am stared back at him. It would still be a few hours before anyone from the day shift would begin their days. Dick wondered how they’d react to a 230-pound naked man lying dead on the floor.

  There would probably be some sort of Human Resources complaint from someone looking to take a few days off with pay, but that wasn’t Dick’s problem.

  Besides, fishing the man out of the sewage had sapped all the strength from Dick’s slight frame. He wasn’t made for heavy lifting, and he unquestionably wasn’t prepared to carry dead bodies.

  Dick went to a broom closet and hosed himself off. The dirty sewer water always smelled like dead fish and left a film on his clothes which took several wash cycles to remove.

  He shrugged off the jumpsuit and placed the soaking wet contents in a plastic bag in the locker room. The budget cuts of the previous year had eliminated the in-suite laundry service which had formerly been present in the changing area.

  He hadn’t minded at the time since he wasn’t the one who was responsible for maintenance. Now he cursed Josh and the rest of the management at the plant for being so tightly strung with the budget.

  He put the bag outside the door. Even Dick couldn’t stand the smell, and he had worked there for over three years.

  “You don’t get used to a smell like that,” he grumbled to himself. The awkwardly tall man shrugged on a black t-shirt which was many sizes too big and a pair of jeans which fit him well in the waist but were a little too short for his legs.

  With his odd body shape, it was tough to find clothes that fit him properly.

  Dick sighed to himself. He had to do something about the body. He had to call the police. People didn’t merely float down sewer pipes, after all.

  Maybe after putting this outside. The bag stunk.

  He knew that he wouldn’t be able to get back to his comic book tonight.

  Chapter Six

  The sun had not yet peeked over the horizon when he emerged into the parking lot. The air was cold and crisp; a northerly wind had blown all the humidity from the Gulf of Mexico away from the city. Dick shivered.

  He didn’t see the car until it turned on its headlights. They seemed unnatural in the soft early morning light. He shielded his eyes with his arm. He could hear car doors open, and close and intimidating looking silhouettes appeared.

  “Good morning,” said a voice in a low baritone that meant anything but good morning.

  “Morning,” Dick said. “Can I help you?” He had a bad feeling about this.

  Dick looked around. They were alone in the parking lot. Dick would bet that there wasn’t another soul awake for a couple of miles, at least.

  He didn’t know what the two strangers wanted, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they had something to do with the body he’d fished out of the cistern.

  Why didn’t I call the police sooner? He asked himself.

  “Do you work here?” The dark silhouette on the right asked.

  “I…well,” Dick trailed off. He was afraid, without really knowing why. All of a sudden he felt like the kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar.

  “It’s a simple question,” The voice rumbled in annoyance.

  “Well, I mean,” Dick stuttered lamely. All of a sudden, he’d lost his ability to speak properly. The intimidating figures were giving him what his Mama used to call “the willys.”

  “You’re testing my patience,” the large man said. He spoke like an annoyed father.

  He could see from the dull light of the streetlamps in the parking lot that the stranger was just as tall as Dick, who usually stood taller than most people, but much broader around the shoulders.

  “Y-yes. I work here. Night shift.” Dick said. The lights of the car shut off and he could see them walking towards the entrance to the plant.

  “Good. We need your help getting inside. I’m Agent Browne,” he said, flashing a badge that Dick couldn’t see. “This is Agent Nieminen. We have a tip that something is fishy here at the plant, have you heard anything?”

  Dick considered for a moment. Looking back, he still wasn’t entirely sure why he said what he said next, but the words tumbled out of his mouth before he could think to stop them.

  “No fish in there, officers. Well, not the kind you’re thinking, anyway.”

  Agent Nieminen crossed her thin arms. Agent Browne spat on the ground and wiped his mouth with his palm, the annoyance plain on his dark face.

  “Do you think that you’re fucking funny?” Nieminen asked, her voice a pleasant musical lilt on Dick’s ears, despite her anger. “Because it’s been a long god-damned night and we’re not in the mood for funny.”

  Dick did indeed consider himself funny, but he was almost positive that they wouldn’t want to hear that at this moment in time.

  “No ma’am I do not,” he mumbled, looking down at the ground.

  “Good,” she said, walking further into the light. Dick gasped slightly. She was incredibly beautiful, with soft features and long brown hair that almost reached her waist. “Now please let us in. We have something that we need to investigate, and you’re going to help us out.”

  Now Dick was usually emphatically for doing favors for pretty women who asked politely, but he still couldn’t shake the bad feeling at the back o
f his neck.

  “What exactly is it that you need?”

  “That’s not something we can share,” rumbled the large man. He had a chiseled jaw which hadn’t seen a razor in a few days and arms that looked like they were big enough to crush tube televisions.

  Dick was flustered, and a little bit scared.

  “I’m not supposed to let anyone in who doesn’t have special permission,” he said, remembering something that Josh had said on his first day. “City of Houston policy.”

  “This is urgent. And you wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of the law, would you?” Agent Nieminen asked, smiling softly and pursing her lips. She could be very persuasive, but there was something in her tone that frightened Dick, a sense of desperation and urgency.

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” Dick said reluctantly.

  “No, you wouldn’t suppose so,” Browne echoed. Dick was not so gently directed back towards the entrance of the plant.

  Dick delayed as much as he could, hoping that somehow the police were going to show up. He hadn’t called them, but maybe Josh had? Dick doubted it, but he was desperate and desperate people don’t always think with reason.

  He was almost positive that these two strangers who had barged into his workplace were not who they said they were. His imagination, fuelled by years of comic books and bad television raced to different conclusions.

  They killed the man. They’re just making sure he’s dead. Does that mean they’ll kill me too?

  Dick gulped, realizing that he had inadvertently gotten himself involved in a murder.

  If I say no I don’t think it will end well for me, he thought. The man was much bigger and almost certainly more violent than he was. Somehow Dick didn’t believe that the two strangers in front of him wanted to be his friends.

  He held his shaking key card up to the sensor and heard the beep which unlocked the door. As they walked into the sickly yellow light, he could see Browne’s close-cropped hair, his stubble, and his tired eyes.

  The woman had a distant and cold beauty to her. She was shorter than her partner, but she moved with athletic grace. He didn’t doubt that she was more than capable of breaking his arm three different ways.

  “When did you start work tonight?” Browne asked.

  For a moment Dick thought about lying and saying that he just started but only for a moment - he smelled like he had just worked a whole evening in a sewage treatment plant.

  “I clocked in just before 11.” The evening crew had given him a hard time for that, but Dick had learned years ago that to clock in early meant the other shift left early.

  “What’s your name?” Nieminen asked. Dick tried to avoid looking at her. Her full, soft lips were just as distracting as the hint of cleavage.

  “Richard. My name is Richard. Not Dick, Richard.” Dick hated it when people called him by his actual name.

  “Full name,” she responded.

  “Richard Mitey,” he said, looking at the ground. Technically his actual name was Dick, but he tried as hard as he could to avoid that distinction.

  “Dicky Mitey,” Browne said. Was there a chuckle in the big man’s voice? It was tough to tell.

  He’d never been good at figuring out if someone was making fun of him or not. Over the years Dick had gotten used to that feeling of not understanding the joke, but laughing anyway.

  And also, he’d often had the feeling throughout his life that someone’s kind words or actions were somehow still to mock him in ways that he didn’t understand. He’d seen the whispered comments, the group of friends laughing in the background as one of them came over to talk to him.

  “Richard. R-I-C-H-A, um, R-D!” He shouted. Just because everyone called him Dick didn’t mean he liked it.

  One of the cops seemed annoyed at his outburst, but the bigger one didn’t even seem to be listening.

  “Did you see anything strange here tonight, Dick?” Browne rumbled. They were mocking him for sure. Dick had seen their kind his entire life. They’d make fun of how his ears stuck out too far from his body, or how awkwardly tall and thin he was, or how his nose looks like a ski slope. Somehow, even after he’d broken his nose in a childhood altercation, he still had that ski slope nose. Only now it was as though the middle of the ski slope had caved in.

  Maybe they’ll go away, Dick hoped beyond hope.

  “No,” he said. Dick thought about the body laying on the steel floor in the primary maintenance tunnel. What would they do to him if they found it? “What exactly are you looking for?”

  Dick wondered how long he could play dumb before they grew tired of the game. If they searched the facility they’d find the body fast enough anyway, and he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of that one.

  Neither the large man or the slender-hipped woman answered him. They looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to continue.

  “I mean, there was a blockage in one of the pipes. I had to shut down a pump and clear it.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it, really. It doesn’t happen very often. I had to put down my comic book to check it out.”

  I just lied to a pair of murderers.

  “Do you mind if we take a look around?” Browne asked.

  “I really would rather you didn’t,” Dick responded. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone that we were here,” Nieminen said. Dick had a lot of trouble saying no to anyone, especially pretty ladies.

  But this wasn’t an everyday situation.

  “I’d really rather you both leave,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “Well, what do you think?” Browne asked Nieminen.

  “There’s nothing else around,” Nieminen responded. “He’s got to be here.”

  I don’t think I was supposed to hear that.

  The two mysterious people turned away from Dick, talking in harsh whispers with one another.

  They were both facing the window which looked down into the cistern where Dick had dragged out a corpse mere hours beforehand.

  Don’t look down. PLEASE don’t look down. Dick held his breath. Neither one had looked out it yet.

  “Hey, Connor, look at that,” Nieminen said, looking out the dirty window.

  Dick’s eye’s bulged with panic and anxiety. He considered running for a moment.

  That wouldn’t work, he thought, looking at the two athletic people in front of him. He could picture it now. Running with all the strength in his thin legs, only to be tackled behind by Browne.

  That would hurt, would probably break a few ribs.

  But still… Dick inched closer to the exit slowly, trying hard to tiptoe so his shoes didn’t clank against the stainless-steel plating on the floor.

  “What do you see? Anything worthwhile?” asked Browne, looking out the window.

  Dick held his breath. He was almost at the door now.

  “Of course, it’s worthwhile,” Nieminen bristled. I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t. Looks like a trail of shit,” Nieminen looked over at him, freezing him in place.

  He expected them to get mad. He had lied, after all. They would have been able to see the enormous body, laying on the floor beside the pipe. But why weren’t they doing anything?

  Dick shuffled over to stand beside them and looked down at the cistern.

  The body which he had fished out was gone.

  He’d been dead anyway, hadn’t he? Dick wasn’t an expert on that kind of thing, but he thought that he knew when someone was gone.

  Maybe the corpse had fallen in again, had sunk to the bottom where they couldn’t see it anymore. Maybe it was some sort of vampire, risen from the dead.

  Dick knew that the last one was a stretch, but you never know!

  “Dicky,” Browne said, “Why is there a trail of shit down there?”

  Dick honestly didn’t know why there was a long trail of sewage across the steel floor. Could it have been from him? He had hosed himself off at a broom closet, after
all.

  But where the hell is the body?

  Dick was in full panic mode now. He pictured Agent Browne bringing him down to the open sewage pipe and shooting him in the back of the head, execution style.

  Would they clean up the body like he had? Dick wondered. Josh would be mad if the pipes got clogged up, too.

  “I… I fell in. Happens sometimes. Something big was coming down. I didn’t want it to clog up the pipes.” Well, that was partially true, anyways.