The Intern's Handbook: A Thriller

by Shane Kuhn

  MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODE

  As I mentally climb the walls of my well-appointed office prison, I decide to fully mind fuck myself with all the questions and implications that have come out of me having to whack my intern supervisor in my own apartment. Now that things are clearly heating up over at the firm, what with Hartman trying to turn my head inside out and all, my assignment has just become exponentially more complicated. There will be a fire under my ass like never before, and I’ll get burned if I don’t move quickly and avoid all complications. The more I run through everything in my mind, the more I realize that there is one thing I need to do if I want to make it out of here alive:

  I have to kill Alice.

  I’m sure that sounds cold to some of you. Work on that. To those who have been thinking I should have done it when I first found out she was a fed, you get extra credit. Her presence is only going to make things ten times more dangerous for me now, and I’m too close to retiring to fuck things up and end up getting smoked or, worse yet, eating shit in prison for a dozen consecutive life terms.

  The story will come out about Hartman being found shot dead by his homosexual lover (Bob’s cliché du jour, not mine), and Alice will smell a rat because there is a conspicuous lack of a body to verify the story. That whole habeas corpus thing is kind of important to FBI agents. I told Bob the party line should simply be that Hartman disappeared. Disappearance raises questions, but none of them can be answered without a fucking body. Throw an actual narrative (currently unverifiable) into the mix and you’ve got people like Alice trying to connect the bullet holes to draw a picture of who pulled the trigger and then tried to cover his tracks with a story that would have been summarily rejected in the Murder, She Wrote writing room. Elementary, my dear Watson, he was drilled by Colonel Mustard with his own gun in the IKEA living room.

  My head is going to explode. How did things ever get this fucked-up? Maybe Bob is right. Maybe I am slipping. Then I remember the scene in Blade Runner when Roy Batty shoves a nail into his hand to make sure he can still feel and that he still has life. Sometimes pain can bring about clarity and remind us we’re still breathing. I take a letter opener off Bob’s desk and shove it into my stapled wound. I want to scream so badly that I have to hold my breath. Every part of me wants to run from this feeling, to avoid it at all costs. Just like I want to run from having to kill Alice because I know that, even though it will save my ass, it will ultimately destroy me. But the pain centers me and makes me forget about the outside world. It reminds me that I am alone and always have been. It forces me to focus on what I have to do, what I was born to do.

  * * *

  Rule #8: Jump.

  Along with an innate survival instinct—which is more specifically an animal thing—we are born with a strong emotional attachment to life, which is specifically a human thing. This is something you will need to cut from yourself like a surgeon cuts out a tumor.

  When I first met Bob, as I said I was twelve years old. I was incarcerated at the Tracy juvenile detention center in Northern California, one of the worst in the country. I was serving time there for killing my foster parents in San Francisco. I cycled into their home when I was eight years old after their biological son had died at seven of some disease they never disclosed.

  Seemed like a nice place. My impression was that they were a couple of sad old hippies who just needed a warm body to fill the void. They got a reptile instead. But they didn’t seem to care about my complete emotional disconnection. That was because they were not at all what they seemed. They were running one of the biggest heroin smuggling operations on the West Coast. Which is why, as an homage to one of my favorite films, I will call them Mickey and Mallory. Their deceased son had been their mule, running balloons all over the city. Imagine sending a seven-year-old into the Tenderloin to deliver half a kilo in balloons to a flophouse full of toothless whores and gangbangers. He didn’t die of a disease. He took a bullet when the narcs raided the flophouse. Mickey and Mallory, remaining true to their chickenshit souls, never claimed the body, and their own flesh and blood was buried a John Doe, along with all the other nameless human refuse, in a potter’s field.

  When I later became their indentured servant and replacement mule, I heard that story from one of the gangbangers I was supplying. His street name was Indio, Spanish for “Indian.” Nice guy. He was nice to me anyway. The seven teardrop tattoos coming from the corners of both of his eyes indicated he did not really play well with others. He used to give me money for food on the side because he knew my “parents” wouldn’t and they counted every cent I brought back from my “errands.”

  Mickey and Mallory weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed though. First of all, they started cutting the heroin with a lot of things other than heroin to boost profits—even though I know they brought in about $25,000 a week in cash. Ah, greed. The fact that it is the undoing of just about every criminal is one thing that is very accurate in the movies. And far be it from Mickey and Mallory to do anything other than immerse themselves in this cliché.

  Indio was the first to tell me that he knew what Mickey and Mallory were doing and that their days were numbered. He had two “customers” croak in two weeks because of some toxic shit Mickey and Mallory cut into the H. Most greedy dealers were at least smart enough to use something nontoxic because, as Indio used to say, “dead don’t pay.” Also, if word gets out that you’re selling the death trip, the dealer down the block just got a whole new revenue stream.

  I saw this as an opportunity. These fucking assholes were using and abusing me, and even though I was eight years old, I was over taking shit from anyone ever again. All of the pent-up frustration and rage that had been building in me since my cognitive abilities were mature enough to process just how fucked-up my life had become was now coming to a head. Combine that with my hatred of Mickey and Mallory—mostly because of what those evil motherfuckers did to their own son—and my mind was like a blacksmith, hammering hot metal into the tip of the spear that I would shove right up their asses.

  I was going to kill them.

  Homicide prior to working with HR, Inc. is common among us, and I am most certainly not the first of our breed to grease my foster monsters. You know who you are. Hell, for some of you, I’m practically telling your story right now. Let’s just call whacking these losers our gateway drug. It was for me. I had a hard-on for it when I first started planning the whole thing. In fact, apropos of our current work, I was going to make it look like one of the dealers they had been fucking over did the deed.

  So I spoke to Indio. Granted, this was not a very secure thing to do. First rule of murder: don’t tell anyone. Second rule: do it alone. Hey, I was eight years old, so don’t judge. And it turned out to be a very sound tactical move anyway. Indio was very supportive. We made a deal. He would give me access to weapons and offer any support I needed in exchange for access to Mickey and Mallory’s heroin stash and whatever else he wanted to lay hands on after they were gone. We shook on it. He even taught me the secret handshake of his set—the Twelfth Street Vatos. From that point on, I was family.

  We got started right away. Indio is actually the first person who taught me to never wait to execute a plan, because when your head gets going, throwing out a bunch of fucking second thoughts, you’ll kill the whole plan. Anyway, he gave me the perfect revenge profile. He fully described to me his competition: Hollow Pete, a Crip out of Oakland. Indio had heard Pete talking shit on his corner about how he was gonna peel back Mickey and Mallory’s caps for cutting his shit with, well, shit. So Pete provided the publicly displayed motive for killing them. Now all I had to do was the actual killing. Indio told me Pete had a signature killing style and the police would quickly link Pete to the murders if we used it. To hold my hand, Indio assigned his boy Diablito (little devil), a five-foot-three psychopath with a full-face tattoo of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. I shit you not, when he closed his eyes, Jesus’s eyes had been tattooed to the lids with their
signature look of despair and longing.

  We decided to pull it off on a Friday night because that was when Mickey and Mallory liked to do a lot of acid and fuck on their 1970s-era waterbed. They would be in there for hours, sloshing around and making zoo noises while I sat out in the living room, watching TV and eating my dinner—handfuls of dry cereal right out of the box. I started to get nervous when midnight rolled around and there was no sign of Diablito. Then the pager Indio had given me buzzed in my pocket and I quietly unlocked the front door. Diablito walked in. He looked like the devil himself, dressed all in black with black gloves. For a brief moment, I panicked and thought that he was just going to kill us all and take the drugs. That would be the easiest thing to do. But he saw the fear in my eyes and smiled. He gave me the Vatos shake and winked, giving me a look at his face when one eye is Diablito and one eye is Jesus. Ever heard of duality? Look it up.

  “Tranquilo, mi hermanito . . .” he whispered.

  He crept to the bedroom while I stood there, paralyzed with a box of Lucky Charms in my claw of a hand. Then I heard Mickey . . .

  “What the fuck?”

  He didn’t yell or anything. They must have thought Diablito was part of their acid trip. After all, he looked like a sawed-off Jesus Gangbanger Christ. What happened after that is kind of a blur. I remember standing there a long time hearing muffled grunts and the ripping off of large strips of duct tape. After what seemed like an eternity, standing there frozen in fear with a late-night infomercial about Zamfir, master of the pan flute, as a sound track, Diablito emerged from the bedroom. He was smiling like one of Santa’s elves, kind of skipping around on his heels with glee. He had blood spattered on his shirt and face, and that made his mirth all the more disturbing.

  “They are ready for you, hermanito.”

  He led me into their bedroom, a place I was normally forbidden to enter. They were both duct taped to chairs, sitting back to back. Their mouths were stuffed with bloody socks and then duct taped shut. Mickey had a gash across the top of his forehead—probably the source of blood all over Diablito. Mallory seemed only half sane, her eyes wildly searching the ceiling like some mental patient waiting for the aliens to return whatever they found in her asshole the last time they were here.

  On the floor next to the bed was a massive suitcase completely FULL of heroin kilos. Diablito saw me looking at it and did a little dance around it. He looked like a psychotic Mexican leprechaun.

  “You see this, hermanito? This is the future! With this, we will OWN this fucking town and every junkie in it. And it’s all because of you. Twelfth Street Vatos will tattoo you on their arms and talk about you over forties in the morning gloom, staring at the dead bodies of their enemies.”

  Then he spat in the faces of Mickey and Mallory.

  “And for you, hermanito, I give you these two gringo hippie pieces of shit. They made you their bitch, their fucking slave, kid. Running shit for them at eight years old? You fucking kidding me? I didn’t break my fucking cherry ’til I was fourteen. I was playing soccer when I was eight, eating chili mangos and running into the summer night until I was out of breath . . . innocent. But you, your innocence was taken by these animals. And, on top of it all, they killed their own flesh and blood. Blood we must avenge with theirs.”

  Diablito was crying now, and the tears were collecting the blood on his face and turning red. Crimson drops dotted his shirt and the floor. He embraced me, and for the first time, I felt what I believed might be love. It made me miss everything I never had.

  It was in that moment I decided I would find my real parents someday. I would find them just so I would know who I was. I looked at Mickey and Mallory and thought about their dead son and envied him. For better or worse, he knew where he came from. He may have been raised by these animals, but there were no questions for him, questions that plague orphans and compel us to search for answers, even if knowing them may destroy us.

  “And now, for the pain they have put you through, and the pain all them motherfuckers put you through, you gonna get to experience the best fucking feeling life has to offer . . . revenge. It’s better than sex, bro!”

  He motioned to Mickey and Mallory. They looked at me like dumb, scared animals in the stun gun line at the slaughterhouse.

  “What do I do?” I heard my child’s voice say from another galaxy.

  “Hollow Pete likes to bag ’em. He’s a cheap ass and hates to waste bullets. Pretty cold thing to do, but these assholes got it coming.”

  He handed me two thick plastic bags and a roll of duct tape. I just stood there, feeling as if the weight of this moment was going to crush my small body like an insect. That was my first experience with duality. I completely understood the situation, yet it simultaneously felt utterly confusing to me. I knew that killing them meant justice, freedom, and a shitload of catharsis for everything they had done to me. Even half of what they had done was reason enough. But despite my bloodlust and lack of empathy, there was still a morsel of innocence deep inside me that wanted to run from there as fast as my legs could carry me.

  You’ve heard of attempted suicide survivors who’ve jumped off bridges and had second thoughts about dying as they plummeted to the water below? This was me. I jumped. I was falling. But I wasn’t having second thoughts because I didn’t want to go through with it and kill them. I was having them because I did. To this day, I have never felt so compelled to do anything. And that scared the shit out of me. I wanted their blood on my hands, yet somehow I knew that it would be my blood too. What was left of the child that still liked to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle, run after the ice cream truck, and yearn for a normal life would be dead. And I would be his killer.

  So I did what any eight-year-old would do when faced with an earth-shattering moral dilemma: I froze like a deer in the headlights. As I stood there with the hair on the back of my neck standing up and every muscle tense to the point of exploding, Diablito tried to talk me off the ledge.

  “Hermanito. Maybe you’re not ready, bro. Go in the other room. I’ll take care of this.”

  He tried to take back the bags and duct tape. Then, like the man falling from the bridge, I hit the water at 120 miles an hour.

  “No.”

  “Think you can handle it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead. I got your back.”

  As I walked up to them, I felt the black rage surge behind my eyes. Mickey looked at me, frozen with dumb animal fear, and I raised the bag. As I covered his head, I conjured up all of the bad memories of the things he did to me. And that was like pouring gas on a fire. Next thing I knew, I was wrapping duct tape tightly around his neck. Then I was doing the same to Mallory. As they struggled to breathe, suffocating in agony, Diablito touched my shoulder.

  “Vámonos,” he whispered.

  “No. Wait.”

  I wanted to be sure they were dead. So I watched their final breaths and watched their bodies go limp. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a little kid crying. For a long time I thought it was someone in one of the other apartments, but now I know it was me. I was that far from truly feeling anything anymore.

  Then I turned to Diablito and nodded that I was ready. And we left. A couple of weeks later, the police picked me up coming out of the flophouse hotel I was hiding in. One of the neighbors had seen Diablito and me leave the apartment the night of the murders. Since I lived there, they compared the fingerprints on the few toys I had stolen and hidden under my bed to the ones on the plastic bags. It was an open-and-shut, but the police and DA wouldn’t accept the fact that an eight-year-old had done such a heinous thing. They wanted to blame it all on Diablito and offered to drop the charges on me from murder one to second degree manslaughter if I gave him up. But I’m proud to say I never dimed on him. Not because of some honor code, but because I wanted to take full responsibility for my actions. It was the only thing I felt I had ever done that had made my mark on the world, and there was no way I was going to give it up. So they sent
me up to juvie and threw away the key.

  I was there three and a half years until Bob came to visit me on my twelfth birthday. Our conversation was short and sweet. Bob was going to become my guardian and enter me into a special program for “gifted children.” Or I could stay there until I turned eighteen and they transferred me to Folsom Prison, where I would, more than likely, remain for the rest of my life. When Bob explained to me what I would be doing, it didn’t faze me in the least. Because I was uncomfortably numb. I had no emotional attachment to life. That’s why I’m here today and Alice is a not-so-gentle reminder that being attached to anyone is the death of purity for people like us. We are in our own dark Eden where the snake is not selling the Tree of Knowledge. He is selling love, and if you take a bite of that apple, you will go the way of Abel when this is clearly the land of Cain.

  * * *

  That night I dream about Eva. I walk into her room. It’s dark but I can hear her giggling on her bed. She’s telling me to take my clothes off and join her. I do. I am smiling, happy to see that she is really alive. I tell her I thought she was dead and she giggles again.

  “Get in bed, silly.”

  I get in. She holds my hands, still giggling. I hear the sound of a police car siren outside. As it comes to a screeching halt in front of Eva’s building, its police lights shower the room with bright colors—like a trippy bubble gum machine. I go to kiss her and the lights sweep across her face. She is a rotting corpse. She giggles when she sees my look of horror.

  “Don’t you want to kiss me, John?”

  Her eyes are completely black. She comes at me and I am trying to scream but nothing comes out of my mouth.

  “Your mother says hello.”

  I wake up. It’s 5:00 A.M. Bob is sitting in a chair across from me.

  “You looked like one of those dogs dreaming that you’re chasing something. Your hands were moving like paws digging in the earth. What was the nightmare?”