The Untimely Death of Jimmy Gums
By Brandon Meyers
The Untimely Death of Jimmy Gums Copyright © 2012 by Brandon Meyers
Cover photo Copyright © 2012 by Brandon Meyers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
It takes damned little effort to pull a trigger.
The slightest twitch of only a few muscles in a single finger can end a life. This was something that Jimmy “Gums” Viglione realized in the final brutal moments of his natural time on Earth. Looking down the cold, nickel-plated barrel of Tommy Zatel’s Smith and Wesson .45 automatic pistol, Jimmy knew that he had reached the end of the road.
A sole halogen lamp blazed down from the rafters, leaving the dusty warehouse floor illuminated, a fitting stage for the final bloody act in the life of one of the deadliest hired killers Chicago’s streets had ever seen.
Jimmy did not find Jesus. Nor did he reach any grand fortune cookie epiphanies of enlightenment on the meaning of life. No, Jimmy Gums had been on the opposite end of this fatal transaction enough times before to know that any such comforting final notions did not serve to allay the eventual splatter of brain matter on the walls. Whining and pleading were repulsive. Even kneeling at the stoop of death’s door, the thought to beg for mercy never once crossed his mind.
Please don’t let ‘em find a wormy corpse. That was the final culminating thought of Jimmy’s forty-six years of life before Tommy Zatel, at the wave of his brother, gave the trigger a squeeze.
“Heavy son of a bitch, ain’t he?” Tommy asked as he struggled to fit the feet-end of Jimmy Gums’ bulky body into the trunk of the Lincoln Continental.
“Fat fuck didn’t miss any meals,” William grunted. “That’s for sure. Here, fold his legs up so I can…yeah, like that.” He spit out his cigarette and coughed.
With a little creative maneuvering, the brothers managed to get Jimmy’s pudgy body wrenched into the trunk compartment.
William wiped a bead of sweat off his brow, cast one last look around the abandoned industrial complex, and slammed the trunk lid, sealing away the dead man into the closest thing he would ever have to a coffin.
With half their job done, the two sibling enforcers climbed into the car and set out for their favorite dumping grounds, talking of broads and booze. William did most of the talking. His brother, while good with a gun, had unfortunately not been endowed with even a shameful amount of brains, and therefore contributed little to a conversation.
The sedan rolled at a smooth pace down the highway, a sleek chauffer to the dead making its final midnight pass into the territories of darkness. At that late an hour, on the outskirts of town, the men passed only a handful of cars. And not a single one of those a police cruiser: always a reassuring thought on the conscience of travelers in possession of human cargo.
There was only one small problem with the situation. Despite all outward appearances (immobility and the mess of blood and viscera), Jimmy Gums was not dead. His heart yet pumped at a drastically slowed pace. His muscles displayed the faintest amount of tension and relaxation when the Continental bounced over potholes, jostling his stowed body. And his mind—what was left of it—had but one image burned into it by way of muzzle flash: the faces of Tommy and William Zatel.
“That was easy,” Tommy said. “Easy as…well, that was easy.”
William cocked an eyebrow at his simpleton brother and hooked a thumb toward the now full trunk of the car. “Let me tell you something, Tom. No matter what that chubby bastard might look like now, he was one sick fuck.”
Tommy’s eyes darted nervously from his lap to the road. He hoped his brother was too preoccupied with handling the wheel to notice his guilt. “The teeth?”
“Yeah,” William agreed, distaste clear in his words. “The teeth.” He shuddered at the thought of the necklace. “How the hell you think he got the name Jimmy Gums?”
Tommy sat in silence, pondering the thoughts of a man whose mental hamster has not just stepped off its wheel, but jumped off the side of a fucking cliff.
“Tommy…hello? Jesus, are you awake? I’m talking to you.” William spun the wheel, directing them up the road toward the Battlebrook waste dump.
“Yeah, sorry,” Tommy said nervously. “The teeth, right?”
“Yeah,” William said. “All those dirty little teeth on that necklace of his…”
Tommy fingered the bulge in his pocket gently, getting a bad feeling that his brother might be angry if he knew he’d stolen the macabre piece of jewelry as a trophy from the dead man’s neck.
“Those are the teeth from guys he’s taken out. Now, you gotta figure…this guy’s been at it as a freelancer for almost fifteen years. That’s some collection he’s got there. Rumor has it that half of them are from Bert Dupont’s old gang. Crazy fuck took all them guys down one at a time with a pair of garden shears.”
Tommy swallowed hard, letting his fingers trace the prickly outline of his pocket’s pilfered contents. “Wow,” was all he could manage to string together. Outside, the last of the passing street lights marked the end of their trip by vehicle.
“That man was a goddam terror, Tommy. It ain’t nothing to be too proud of, but we’re lucky we caught him on the can,” William added. “Not saying it’s any great accomplishment on our part, but hey, you and I are both still breathing.” He threw the shifter into park and sighed. “Let’s get this shit over with. I’ve gotta get some puss tonight.”
Neither of them spoke again through the events of the following minutes. They heaved Jimmy Gums out of the car and tossed his plastic-wrapped body into the depths of a bottomless mound of garbage. Security at Battlebrook wasn’t exactly a concern. Their employer, Paul Geffert, owned the entirety of the property, as well as the waste management business that operated upon it.
In the past twenty years, an unknown number of bodies had been disposed of in such a manner on the filthy premises. And even though some of his hired help might have considered it risky, Paul Geffert ran a very tight operation. He was a man who valued his privacy and kept up payments to the right people to prevent any unnecessary snooping. And, being a good businessman, he even allowed some of the larger local industrialists to dump some of their nastier—and more toxic—byproducts there that would otherwise have cost quite a pretty penny to get rid of in far more legal (and environmentally sound) ways.
Jimmy Gums landed in a crumpled heap at the base of a garbage pit. One of his own shoes stepped on his face. Ten feet above, his executioner swiftly kicked a pile of trash that produced an avalanche of sludge. Jimmy, still grasping to the finest threads of unconscious life, wheezed as the air was crushed from his lungs and replaced with something far worse. Irradiated liquid waste bathed his entire body, entering his nose, ears, and mouth. His skin sizzled upon contact with the swirl of noxious chemicals.
An unbearable pain tore through Jimmy’s ravaged body, pulling him back to the land of consciousness. His senses were overloaded with the sinister burn that filled his face, hands, and lungs. And then his nerves simply stopped sending signals, switched off at the source by noxious liquids. Hours passed while he drifted between life and death, his body corroding in the foul, slimy pit. Exposed by blazing ichor, many of Jimmy’s muscles began to twitch and jerk with immense force.
As his body convulsed, the faces of the Zatel brothers swam to him out of the blackness. One smirked stupidly in his rumpled suit; the other sucked a thin cigarette and smiled in relieved triumph.
Jimmy watched the fat one grin while tensing at the last moment, expecting the recoil of the trigger. The man had good teeth, Jimmy thought. Great teeth. He could not recall either of their names, but that was no matter. Thanks to a stray nerve misfire, a flash of his former self’s memory told him where to find them.
Jimmy opened his single unburned eye and started to climb.
Tommy Zatel had reluctantly followed his brother to his most favored midnight haunt: The Spindle. William’s girl, Nina, danced for dollars on the center stage at the top of every hour on Saturday night. And William, being the caring lover that he was, was always present for the peak hours of her routines to ensure that some jackass didn’t let his hard-on get the better of his judgment and decide to thrust his face into the buffet table.
Tommy hated The Spindle. The pretty girls, though always friendly, ignited an inner insecurity that fired his hatred for their existence. The way they looked at him, as if they really wanted him, and not the money in his wallet, made him want to vomit. No woman could ever want fat Tommy Zatel, he thought. Not like they wanted his handsome brother. So their expectant and lusty stares pummeled him into a silent, self-loathing rage. It was for this reason he rarely let his eyes drift above their necks. And he never tipped.
Security was of utmost importance, William argued when his brother voiced displeasure at the thought of visiting the strip joint. “You and I, we gotta stick together. That’s why we’re so damn good at what we do, Tommy. You don’t want to go splitting up a dynamic duo, now. That’s just plain dangerous. We ain’t the only hitters in town, and there’s more than a couple young shitheads that’d like to see us six feet underground.”
Two hours passed before the Zatel brothers emerged from the smoky, neon and black-light glow of the strip club. As it always was during the small hours of the morning in any Chicago suburb, the chilled air was quiet.
Tommy poured his brother into the car, where he fell asleep. Between the shots of Crown Royal and his two hour stint with Nina in the green-room, William had effectively exhausted his need to party. Tommy shook his head, lit a cigarette, and leaned against the trunk.
One at a time, drunks stumbled out of the establishment and to their vehicles, washing the parking lot in a haze of ruby taillights. The music stopped. The spike-haired disc jockey was likely popping lines in the back of the club with the weekend manager.
By the time Tommy’s Camel was near the filter, the parking lot was all but deserted of cars. He cast one last look around before approaching the driver door, only to be halted by the sound of breaking glass. His ears pricked up immediately, heart quickening to match. Instinctively, he put his back to the car, examining the surrounding wooded area, which gripped the parking lot and building in an alcove.
Alert sobriety was one of the upsides of not wasting money on seven dollar drinks at The Spindle. Tommy let his hand slip into the breast of his jacket to unbutton the catch on the holster. And then the culprit caught his eye. There, near the back side of the building, a spider web of broken glass was splayed across the asphalt. A busted bottle, he guessed. But where had it come from? Tommy took a step away from the car to peer at the shadowed rear of the faux-wood-sided structure.
If you had asked him his thought process on the matter, Tommy wouldn’t have been hard up to explain why it was he decided to investigate the broken bottle. The honest truth was that being cooped up inside the strip joint had gotten him agitated enough to want to hurt someone. Sometimes giving out a beating did all the wonders in the world to uplift the big man’s attitude. And the fact that he’d already ended a man’s life tonight changed nothing. It wasn’t the same as actually letting his hands break down a living body. Even if it was just a drunk. And then he saw the teetering figure of a balding, dirty man round the corner. The louse was undeniably tanked. Drunks were the best. Because they never quite remembered they were supposed to stay down.
Fortune had smiled upon Tommy, and he was never one to turn down a kind turn of chance in his favor. His knuckles grazed the grotesque necklace in his pocket and he grinned. He had a new lucky charm.
Tommy gave one last look at his brother, snoring softly in the passenger seat and decided that, yes, this was his lucky night. Fifty yards away, the man fell to the ground, yet continued crawling. Shit, this might actually be too easy.
A thought crossed Tommy’s mind with such quick sense that it should surely have knocked him over. He un-holstered his weapon and set it on the driver’s seat. If he got a little too carried away, it wouldn’t do anyone any good for him to lose control and get trigger-happy. He’d learned that lesson long ago.
“Hey, shitmeat.” Tommy loosened his tie and laid his suit jacket on the hood of the Continental.
Still a good distance away, the drunk shot his head upward, fixated on the sound of Tommy’s voice. He let out an unintelligible snarl of air.
That’s right, Tommy thought. Time to get scared. “Yeah, you. Having a good night? Maybe a little too good, huh?”
Feeling the blood rise in his cheeks, Tommy sauntered forward, putting on what he hoped was a menacing display of swagger. To both his surprise and excitement, the drunk actually managed to climb to his feet. The center of the parking lot, where the soused fool had stopped to sway, was ill-lit. All the better for Tommy’s purposes. Even though there was a small camera trained on the lot, this far away from the building’s single row of lights, it would be impossible to discern two men in a scuffle. Or rather, one man beating the other into a bloody mess.
Had Tommy known what he was walking into, it is likely he would have continued onward anyway. Angry brutes and puny logical reasoning were not well-suited bedfellows. Nonetheless, disbelief still brought a confused laugh to his lips when he recognized what was left of the face of Jimmy Gums. For the briefest moment, he faltered, the film reel of his memory bringing to mind the recollection of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
The left side of Jimmy’s face was reduced to a few tatters of oozing, blackened flesh. His hair was matted down with the blood from the exit wound on the periphery of his skull. Chunks of soft, grey material poked out and were capped off by stray bits of the morning newspaper. The man’s clothes were melted to the point of deterioration on his front side, leaving an unappealing amount of sore-covered flesh and bone open to view. His left arm hung limp at his side.
He laughed out loud. Even in Tommy Zatel’s mind, the ludicrous similarity between this walking dead man and those fictional zombie characters was only able to muster a brief moment of fear. Even zombies (which this pathetic former hit-man assuredly was not) could be killed.
“Gonna have to start taking pulses on you fucks before we toss ya into the pits from now on, aren’t we?”
At some level, the words registered in the decimated ranks of Jimmy Gums’ functioning brain cells. The voice of the man who had pulled the trigger called him forward. He growled at the sight of the fat, grinning face of the man he had come to kill.
“Not looking too good tonight, Jimmy,” Tommy said. “Say, that’s a pretty bad rash.”
With incredible speed for an overweight man, Tommy delivered a stunted kick to the rocking man’s knee. There was a sharp snap. Jimmy crumpled to the ground without a sound, but again, made to stand. Like meaty sledgehammers, Tommy dropped both his fists in succession on the top of Jimmy’s head. They met with satisfying impact.
“You stay down this time. You…stay…down.” Now his feet had joined the rhythm, with Jimmy sprawled and convulsing on the ground. He continued without relenting, determined to ensure the man’s complete and successful death this time.
“When I say die, you die, shitmeat.” Eventually, his overpriced Florsheim’s were slick with blood and oily residue from the dump. He kicked on for another full minute, until his feet and ankles began to ache and the rage inside him had begun to subside.
The man on the ground was motionless, a heavy, broken husk of his former legend. He had been stomped effectively into oblivio
n.
Tommy spit on the body, grinning like a madman. While catching his breath, he realized that the man would have to be again loaded back into the car’s trunk. He looked back at William. Out like a light, he knew, and not likely to awaken until well into the morning. This was looking like a one-man job. And he needed to be quick about it.
He grabbed an ankle out of the crumpled heap and heaved. The body of Jimmy Gums dragged behind him with the sound of heavy grit sandpaper as skin-embedded pebbles ground at the pavement in resistance. In a few moments, Tommy sat at the rear of the car, looking with disdain at the disgusting pile of bubbled flesh at his feet.
“Shit,” he said. Tommy was by no means a small man, but even at his own two-hundred and fifteen pounds, it was going to be a whore of a chore to stuff the tooth collector back into the trunk.
Unfortunately for Tommy, the battered and burned corpse presented him with a new problem. Jimmy, chemically numbed and unrelenting, still continued to live, even despite a multitude of broken bones and ruptured organs. He reached out and clenched Tommy’s ankle with such ferocity that a squeal of painful surprise escaped the killer’s lips.
With his head at an unnatural ninety-degree angle, Jimmy Gums glared up at his quarry. The ravaged and skinless left half of his face revealed a decayed rictus of chipped teeth and bone.
Tommy struggled to wrench his foot free, but the grip on it was inhumanly strong, almost mechanical. He felt something snap and screamed aloud. In a jerking spasm, his head met the lid of the trunk. Black haze swallowed the left half of his vision and he lost the balance of his free foot. A bolt of pain surged up Tommy’s spine upon impact with the ground. But, he hardly noticed it. His foot was now alight with such pain that it blinded all other sensory input. Jimmy’s charred fingers forced themselves into the muscle of his leg with the force of pneumatic screws.
Thanks to the aid of chemical assistance, Jimmy managed to make use of his other arm. He batted away Tommy’s protesting flails and reached intently for the man’s throat. The two large men remained locked together in stillness for the next few minutes. The lot was silent save for the crickets of the nearby copse of evergreens. Finally, one of them began to drag himself to his feet.
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