by Jeff Klima
—
He exists, my brain finishes for me. Or is it they? These are all questions that won’t get answered while I’m sitting at the beach. Someone in some 236 somewhere could be getting knocked off right now, and if I’m not telling the cops about any of it, I don’t have a good reason to be fucking about out at the ocean. I suddenly don’t feel like relaxing anymore.
—
Sunday night around 10:30, I get a text message. It is for an address on West Lime Street in Inglewood. The message directs me to park in the driveway and only go into the garage, which will be unlocked. Leaving my white Trauma-Gone polo hanging in the closet, I dress in dark clothing and quietly take the stairwell down to the street exit—no sense in letting my landlord know I am going out.
—
Driving the Charger south on 405, I toy with the idea of taking the license plates off. In the end I don’t, only because it might make me look even more suspicious. I am equal parts nervous and excited about this text message—I’d once wondered if it would ever even come, but now that it has, my brain is overrun with calculations.
The text has come as a result of a conversation I’d had during the cleanup of a Hispanic kid killed during a drive-by in South Central, some weeks back. The kid was an innocent bystander, popped once in the neck as he was eating a strawberry Charleston Chew outside a liquor store. I know this because I had to pick up his bloody, half-gnawed candy bar and toss it in the bag labeled “biohazard.” As I’d been working, a bald thug in a pinstriped jersey bearing the word socal across the chest in Kelly green approached me for a chat. Among the host of prison tattoos that adorned his hands and arms identifying him as a Sureño Lowrider, he had three teardrop tattoos beneath his left eye, all of them filled in, so I knew to at least listen to what he had to say. He’d started off in a general manner, just asking about my job and how I’d gotten into it. Then he mentioned how he remembered me from time served in Norco. I didn’t recognize him, but then there were a lot of guys who looked like him doing time in Norco, and relatively few who looked like me. It bothered him some that I didn’t know any of the names he was dropping, but apparently not so much, because his questioning took on the line of whether I would ever do side work and if I could stomach dealing with actual bodies. I was weary of the conversation from the get-go, and could see it moving in that direction, but when he finally came out and asked if I would maybe work freelance as a “cleanup man” for his crew, I shocked myself a bit by saying, “Is the pay decent?” He took my number and gave me four hundred dollars as a partial down payment “for supplies” on my first job—if they decided to call on me. If not, he said, forget his face. I’d managed to do that in the weeks since, and might not have even thought the text was coming from him, but I hadn’t given anyone my phone number before that or since, and neither Harold nor the answering service would ever send a text message. I don’t even try to kid myself that someone has sent this text to the wrong number and I will walk into said garage only to ruin a child’s surprise party. Now, as I drive out there, I realize I don’t feel any different about saying yes. I’m not exactly excited about the opportunity—I think I just welcome the break in the monotony. And even if I had been against my newfound situation, I don’t think I’d have been dumb enough to ignore the text.
I pull onto Lime and am met by lines of houses with tall spiked fences and bars thatched across windows. Tenement-style apartments sully the far end of the block, and, farther still, I can see the chain-link walls of Sentinel Field at Inglewood High. Ominously, the rolling gate used for barring the driveway is hanging open at the shack-style flat house matching the address on my phone. Nobody would just happen to be that careless here. I creep up the bump-lip curb, willing the big Hemi engine in my Charger to idle quieter. If anyone is home at the house, the lights don’t show it. And no neighboring curtains have moved at my arrival in the neighborhood, so I take that as a good omen.
The garage is straight ahead, with its large, wooden pull-up door acting as a barrier that separates me from whatever threatens beyond. It and the house could be any color in the dark just before midnight, but on closer inspection they are a badly flaked blue. The summer heat hasn’t done the paint any favors. Here, the night is as hot as the day—92 degrees according to the Charger, and I feel every bit of it as I walk past the grime-streaked windows of the old house. The hairs on my neck climb upward like caterpillars investigating the growing beads of sweat back there, and I swat at them as if they were just such things. It is the kind of heat that normally keeps me awake in bed until my eyes drop shut from sheer exhaustion somewhere near dawn. I shoot a glance around the neighborhood once again, seeking out movement and parked vans that could be filled with undercover police officers. Anyone who might be watching me is doing a damn good job of hiding it, though.
The green side-access door does not fit its frame properly, nor the paint scheme for the rest of the garage, and appears to have been wedged into its hole, with hinges added as an afterthought. A simple hasp with a dangling nameless padlock flipped open greets me and coaxes me onward. I set the lock on the soft earth of the dead back lawn, careful to not use my fingertips in the movement. Everything here has to be considered and careful if I am serious about not going back to jail. The door, with its useless knob, scrapes open against the interior concrete, but I am just thankful it opens at all.
Fairly certain that I am going to earn a case of tetanus for my effort, I nonetheless drag my wrist along the interior wall of the pitch-black entryway, seeking out a wall switch. I must hit something in my search because, after a moment of flickering struggle, twin overhead tubes beam on to bathe the contents of my evening in a soft, fluorescent glow.
A man—a boy, really, probably sixteen and Hispanic—lies centered beneath the fluorescent bulbs, flat on his back, arms akimbo and his white Adidas low-tops touching at the heels to form a V. It isn’t hard to discern the dual gunshot wounds where bullets have cut through his once yellow flannel shirt and punctured his chest. The glossy off-color residue nesting atop the thick red blood haloes out from his head, indicating he’s probably been shot up there too, in the parietal. Likely he’d been shot twice in the chest, and when he’d fallen forward, they, whoever “they” was, shot him in the back of the head, execution-style. Then they kicked him onto his back and let gravity take over. He is fresh too—only a couple hours ago he’d probably been begging for his life, but now he is the textbook definition of dead.
Near him, on an otherwise empty worktable mounted to the wall, sits a cardboard box about the size of a lunch pail. It is addressed to “Mr. Clean.”
I unfold the flaps of the box to find a note and a fresh stack of hundred-dollar bills clipped together. The note reads:
Mr. Clean. $5000 (minus the $400). If that’s good for u, take the money, do the job and shut up about it. If it’s not enough, leave the money, do the job for us as a favor, and we will leave u alone forever. Use whatever tools u need, cut the body into small pieces and bag ’em. Dig out the bullets. Scrub everything. Leave bags. There’s a hose in the side yard if u need water. Be smart, homey. Prob u want to be done before the neighborhood start wakin’ up.
I set the note back on top of the money and leave the box where it is, deciding to see how the job goes before I do anything rash. Back at the trunk of the Charger, I take out my other milk crate. This is a personal one—one I created expressly for the indeterminate day when I would receive said text message. Much like the milk crate of cleaning supplies I utilize in my day-to-day work, this milk crate has bleach, Simple Green, paper towels, Tyvek suits, and scrub brushes, but it also has a few additional supplies, which I’d purchased with my down payment monies. Dremel, Sawzall, bolt cutters, handsaw, scalpel, cleaver, and a long, rounded butcher knife with a finely sharpened, serrated edge. Also, I’d thrown in a whole shitload of trash bags and day-old editions of the L.A. Times I’d collected from a vending machine. The way I figure it, things are gonna get a whole lot more messy be
fore they get cleaner.
Suited with gloves on, I immediately set the Sawzall and Dremel off to the side. The last thing I want is to be in there, buzzing away, separating the kid’s humerus from his scapula, bone dust clouding up the joint, and have Inglewood PD roll in on a noise complaint.
Conveniently, there are several empty metal trashcans against the furthest wall of the dingy, mostly barren garage, and I take advantage of these, fitting black plastic bags inside, and relocating them to beside the body. Next I lay out my tools, readying my workspace for operation. I’ve got roughly six hours to sunrise and, without use of the electric tools, a shitload of work ahead of me.
I begin, first mopping up the wet blood surrounding the corpse, not worrying so much here about being thorough, just getting enough of it out of the way to keep it from soaking up through the suit and onto my knees. I have to roll the body up on its side, and it takes a considerable bit more work than I expected, as the onset of rigor mortis has made some parts of him stiffer than others. A fresh trickle of hemoglobin slimes from the wound in his skull—from the chest wounds too, I imagine, though they are faced away from me. Much of the blood has already spilled out of the boy, but reddened lividity marks show in the visible part of his back, below where his shirt has bunched up. Grabbing newspapers with my free hand, I line them down two deep on the clean area of concrete where the weight of the body has prevented seepage. For the head wound, I set a folded cloth towel to it, and drop the head back down, leaving the cloth to catch the draining fluid. The newspapers will collect the remaining blood, which I need to expel from the body before I can begin my dissection. I scissor away the fabric of the shirt and toss it into the trashcan farthest away, deeming this the can responsible for the fabrics and saturated newspapers. The closer trashcans will collect the various chunks of meat. Using my scalpel, I slit incisions across the skin along the boy’s back where pockets of dark blood have pooled. The boy is not fat by any means, but there are natural fatty deposits interspersed throughout the musculature of his lumbar and thoracic areas, and I have to push the scalpel deep. Blood squirts from deeper reserves like burst acne, and I yank my hand back, momentarily forgetting I’m wearing gloves. The newspapers do their part, though, sucking the blood up into their pulpy, block-print headlines with reassuring stories about how L.A. crime is on the decline. When the bottom newspapers are saturated, I stuff more beneath the boy, and dab, not blot, at the overrun areas with a chamois cloth.
When he spills the last of his blood, I roll him onto his face and collect the dripping newspapers, tossing them into the can with the remnants of shirt. The boy’s an empty husk now, and his pallor reveals it; he’s gone from the sun-worn deep tan color of his people to a jaundiced yellow, as if the blood had been one of his pigments, now stripped away. I am making better time than I anticipated, and I know I shouldn’t, but curiosity overwhelms me, and I decide to open him up—if nothing else, I can do it under the pretense of removing the bullets.
With fresh newspaper down, I roll the boy onto his back and stuff the Dremel beneath him to elevate his chest cavity, which will make for easier slicing. I feel oddly calm about everything, confident even. I start on the right side, just below his clavicle, dragging my scalpel in a diagonal line through the skin down to below the kid’s sternum. The blade cuts easily enough, but I have to go shallower as I run across the bumpy mounds of his rib cage. I drive another incision from above his left pectoral down to meet the first incision, and then continue down past his belly button, forming a large “Y” on his chest. Had my med school studies not been interrupted by the trial and my subsequent incarceration, this was the sort of thing I’d have been gearing up to do.
It takes several quick cuts to shear open the streaked, wet layers of fat and pectoral muscle to reach the skeletal structure of his thorax. Ragged hunks of tissue cling to the bones, connected by strands of nerves resembling loose threads. Out come the bolt cutters, which crunch through the shaped cartilage bricks of his sternum, encountering brutally small resistance, as if snapping through a series of small tree branches. I have to make multiple breaks here, snapping through the seven true ribs on both sides of the chest to remove the breastplate. It, pockmarked by the two narrow bullet holes, goes into a trashcan. Now the whole of the boy’s midsection is exposed and open for me and I can go fishing for the slugs. It is eerie to see the inside of a human; the anatomy books, with their bright colors of greens and blues and purples to highlight everything, don’t do it justice. No, everything in here seems to be a different shade of red, some much darker, almost purple, and some yellow, which is fat. The meat and veins under the poor fluorescent glow are definitely rosy and well marbled, though. I recognize much from my studies: the dark red lungs, the internal thoracic arteries running like twin interstates down into the abdomen, and the pericardial sac containing the kid’s heart. Right away, I can tell that the first bullet, almost certainly the kill shot, has punctured the sac and torn down into his left ventricle. Not especially delicately, I use my scalpel to hack at the wound, widening it, and then jam my index finger and thumb into the thick of the ventricle. Had I been asked yesterday what I was going to be doing with my Sunday evening, I could not have guessed this scenario.
My finger grazes something solid in the spongy tissue, and knowing, I jam my hand in further to extract the impacted bullet from its resting place. I pull out a small metal wad, looking about the diameter of the .22 caliber slugs we’d fired when I was in Boy Scouts, except this one is shorter, a hollow-point, and has mushroomed down severely upon impact. How something little bigger than a Tic Tac, when projected with enough force, can kill a man befuddles me. I set the warped plug of lead aside and go back in after the other one.
I find the second bullet buried in the muscular tissue behind his right lung. It had passed through a bifurcation, leaving the lung seemingly unharmed. Without the shot fired through his heart, there was a good chance the boy might have survived. Of course, that isn’t accounting for the one in his skull.
Snipping at the lines of nerves and arteries dipping in and out of his remaining vital organs, I one by one remove the large viscera, taking the time to hold them, feel them, and then drop them in the trashcan with their buddies. His torso, a hollow cavity now, is much easier to flip over as I go for the boy’s head, carving into his skull with my handsaw. I’m not trying to preserve his brain for an anatomy class or anything, so when the steel teeth of the saw chew into the soft cranial lobes, colored gray now from the absence of blood, I keep right on sawing, not stopping until the serrated tips of the handsaw punch out through his forehead, and his skullcap drops to the floor, mounds of parietal and frontal brain matter included. Mushing my fingers around in the soft matter within the cap of his separated skull tells me the bullet isn’t in there, so it all goes into the trash bin as well. A sudden, unusual wave of nausea passes over and through me, and I have to steady myself. I don’t think I will puke, but something in the smell of the room catches me and forces me to consider the reality of where I am and the nature of the task I am now performing. I stop, breathe, and the feeling subsides. It’s no different really than the worst aspects of your day job, I remind myself as I suck in clean air from above my head. With that, I stick both hands into the remainder of the boy’s head and tear apart his brain, as if searching for a wedding ring in a Jell-O mold.
This bullet is lodged in the rigid mass of his spinal column, and though mushroomed as well, it is quite a bit larger than the .22 caliber short slugs that have punctured his chest. It had been fired from a different gun, from a different angle. I can piece together the scene in my mind: at least two shooters, more people there probably, surrounding, watching, and the first shots fired are the two to the chest. If I put my detective cap on, I would say that due to the small caliber of the chest bullets, it was a younger member of the gang that did the shooting, utilizing a lighter pistol with less recoil—possibly someone earning their stripes. When the victim went down on his stomach,
gasping as the blood ejaculated from his now-malformed heart if he wasn’t dead already, a second shooter, a more experienced member of the gang, stepped in with his own, larger-caliber pistol and finished the job. Urban recidivism is a bitch.
Quickly I grab up the clusters of loose brain and toss them into the trash as well. The three slugs, tinged with blood, go into a Ziploc baggie, which I put, for the time being, in my milk crate. Since the boy is already facedown, I decide to leave him that way as I begin my cuts, sawing first through his neck to decapitate what is left of his head, and then through the limbs at his major joints—separating humeri from scapulaes, femurs from os coxae. The femurs are the worst of my cuts, for to get at the meaty tendons and head bone of his leg joints, I have to remove the lad’s pants and boxers, then pass the saw back and forth beside the soft limp skin of his testicles. It isn’t that I feel bad for the little gangster-wannabe cocksucker, but I can just imagine somebody cutting into my ball sack with the jagged, dulling blade of a handsaw and that sucks. This is the kind of shit they should put on anti-gang posters.
My only real dilemma comes from the torso itself. It is considerably larger than all the extremities, and I don’t know what size pieces my employers are expecting. Intact, it will necessitate its own trash bag, but cutting across the abdomen will take up some serious time, and judging by the color of night seeping in through the crack beneath the main garage door, it isn’t the kind of time I have. Besides, there is still much to complete. I’ve dallied too much with my “forensic examinations,” and now morning and its problems are bearing down. Fuck it, the torso stays, I decide, and stuff it into a new trash bag. If they don’t like it, they’ll probably kill me.
