Hard Cold Whisper

by Michael Hemmingson

  The porch light was on but I wasn’t sure there was a light on inside; curtains and blinds covered all the windows. There was an old truck parked next to the house. Things looked, and felt, a little weird, so I put on my gloves and took the collapsible baton with me.

  I knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked again, and the door opened.

  On its own.

  Unlocked.

  “Mr. Mendez?” I called out. ”Angel Marco Mendez?”

  A process server is not supposed to enter a premise, even if the door or window is unlocked, although many of them do, knowing that not many people are going to make a fuss or know the law. That can not only be considered trespassing but breaking and entering, but rules are always meant to be broken.

  I went in anyway.

  I mean, how many rules and laws had I already broken? What was a few more in the greater scheme of things?

  I spoke: “Mr. Mendez? I have court documents for you, sir.”

  The floor beneath my feet creaked the way you’d expect an abandoned house to. The place was empty, completely bare, not a single piece of furniture. Mendez was long gone.

  Something, someone slammed into me. I fell to the ground like a matador getting a surprised goring from a bull. I looked up and saw two fat Hispanic guys in their forties or fifties looming above me, one holding a baseball bat and the other holding a greasy tire chain.

  “We’re gonna fuck you up good,” said the one with the baseball bat. He has a thick Hispanic accent.

  “You don’t got a Green Card, do you?” I said.

  He was confused; he didn’t expect me to say something like that out of the blue.

  I quickly got to my feet.

  I said, “If I knew this was going to be a party, I would’ve brought my dancing shoes.”

  Well, I thought it was funny.

  Their disadvantage: they were overweight and middle-aged. Their advantage: there were two of them and one of me.

  My ace in the hole: the steel collapsible baton in my pocket. I flipped it out just as tire chain guy tried to get me with a broad swing and the chain wrapped around the baton. I had a wedged grip on the bottom of the baton, so my grip was solid and I didn’t lose the baton. I pulled the tire chain hombre toward me and got a good punch to his nose, breaking it.

  I swung around, the bat guy’s swing missing me by an inch. I hit him in the face with the baton and also broke his nose.

  Both would-be assailants held their bleeding, shattered cartilage and they gave each other angry, embarrassed glances—getting bested by a younger gringo had not been on their macho agenda.

  “What else you got?” I said.

  They didn’t try anything more. They hustled it to the truck and drove off. So much for Mexican balls.

  “Tell Angel Marco to stop dodging service!” I yelled.

  This wasn’t going to go anywhere. I’d have to tell Ramos that Mr. Mendez was gone from the property, and still charge him half. What a way to make $150. Maybe I’d only charge him $100, for almost getting my ass kicked, having let down my guard.

  Not quite kicked.

  I put the bat and tire chain in my truck. I wasn’t really thinking about it, it was a reflex: stash the weapons so those fellows won’t have them again.

  Gabriella wasn’t ready to go out when I arrived at her house. She said she wanted to treat me to dinner for a change and I was all for that. She seemed distant. “Oh yeah, dinner,” she said, like she forgot the offer she made the night before.

  She brought the briefcase with her. We were going to keep the money and diamonds at my apartment.

  During dinner, she acted like she was somewhere else.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “What? Nothing. The food’s great.”

  “Where’s your head at right now?”

  She smiled. “I just have a lot to consider. You know, selling my aunt’s real estate holdings. It’s complicated and will take a while. I may have to take some low offers if I want to move them fast.”

  She clutched the briefcase to her chest as I drove us to Ocean Beach. She stared out the window and I had a bad feeling that something wasn’t right. I didn’t tell her about the attack; she didn’t need that stress and it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

  There was a visitor waiting at my apartment. . .

  32.

  “Meghan,” I said.

  She was sprawled out on the couch, wearing sweats and a halter. The TV was on, muted. Star Trek. Dr. McCoy was busy, crazy-eyed, re-attaching Spock’s brain into the Vulcan’s skull, while Captain Kirk looked on with a heroic smug smirk, the man who did not believe in the No-Win-Scenario.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Waiting,” she said, “for you and your chica.”

  “Who the fuck is this bitch?” said Gabriella.

  “Who the fuck am I,” said Meghan, and she laughed.

  “Are you drunk?” I noticed several empty beer bottles on the floor, by her feet.

  “I wish I was,” Meghan said.

  “Who is this muchacha loca?” Gabriella asked me.

  I dreading having to reveal the truth. “My ex, the one I told you about.”

  “The stalker?”

  “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” Meghan said, singing it, “but names will never crush my soul—oh oh oh.”

  “She’s high,” Gabriella said.

  “Get out,” I said to Meghan, “get out right now. I’ve had enough of your crazy shit.”

  Sardonic: “You gonna throw me out, big booboo?”

  “I will, bitch,” Gabriella said.

  “Oohh, tough Latina weena. I guess you have to be, to commit murder.”

  That put a silent chill in the air.

  Meghan was on something—not booze or drugs, but adrenaline and power.

  “That’s riiiiiight,” said Meghan. “I know your dirty little secret. I saw it all with my own two peepers,” and then she launched into a yarn of how she had followed me twice to a house in Chula Vista, how I parked in the alley and went in the back way, how the second time she decided to find out what I was doing and who I was seeing, most likely the woman she smelled on me that one time. She looked through several windows until she came to a bedroom window and witnessed me placing a pillow over an old lady on a bed and suffocating her, while Gabriella stood and watched, not stopping me. She quickly figured out what we both had conspired to do and she ran away from the scene. She almost called the cops, until she came up with a better idea.

  The movement by the window, I thought. It was Meghan, not Miguel.

  Gabriella and I stood there, stone cold, glaring at Meghan with her smug grin. She thought she had the winning set of cards.

  “What’s the matter, lovebirds?” Meghan said. “Kitty kitten got both your fat killing tongues?”

  “Fuck you,” Gabriella said.

  “Fuck me, fuck me hard,” Meghan said with a loud groan. “David, do you know how shocked I was, in awe? I mean, really, I couldn’t believe you’d do such a horrible terrible thing, that you’d murder some poor old lady in her sleep.” She stood up on her feet; maybe she was drunk, the way she weaved and almost lost her balance. She continued: “Then I looked at it differently. That was such a bad boy thing to do—I knew you had it in you, to be a badass killer, not the silly pussy you sometimes can be. I’m impressed, David, so much that I will have you back. So it isn’t fuck me,” she said to Gabriella, “but fuck you, cunt.”

  “What the heck is she talking about?” said Gabriella.

  I wanted to know the same, and I almost laughed at her use of “heck.”

  “Get to the point,” I told Meghan. “You want something, spit it out.”

  “I want us back,” she said. “Us. It’s only fair. You dump this Mexican whore the way you dumped me for her, and we go back to the way we were. If you don’t, you go to prison. Period.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said.

  “You’re a killer. I saw it.” />
  “You’re making it up,” I said. “You’re crazy and you’re out for revenge, because I rejected you. I’ll deny it, and no one will believe you.”

  Meghan knew about Aunt Yolanda, but she didn’t now about Miguel; she hadn’t stuck around long enough for that.

  “I don’t believe you,” Gabriella said to Meghan.

  Meghan kept that grin on her face. “Yeah? You willing to risk it?”

  “You want me to go to prison?” I said.

  She lowered her eyes for a second. “You’ve hurt me.”

  Gabriella said, “How about I give you something better to keep your mouth shut?”

  “Yeah?” Meghan said. “What?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Fifty what?”

  Gabriella held up the briefcase. “I have fifty grand here. It’s yours to walk away and forget what you saw.”

  Gabriella gave me a look that said play along.

  I said, “She does. Fifty K.”

  “Bullshit,” Meghan said.

  Gabriella opened the case a little and got out a stack of one hundred dollar bills and tossed it to Meghan.

  Meghan held the money and whistled. She said, “Well this changes everything.”

  Money makes people forget about crime.

  “It sure does, bitch,” and Gabriella reached into the briefcase again, this time pulling out a gun.

  Miguel’s gun.

  I forgot about it.

  Gabriella aimed.

  “No,” I said.

  Gabriella was a damn good shot. Or a lucky one. She seemed to know how to handle a handgun. She put a bullet between my ex-girlfriend’s eyes.

  Meghan’s head jerked back and her body fell and she soiled herself the way dead people always do and I looked at Gabriella and she looked at me and cried, “What?! You have an opinion?!”

  33.

  I calmly said, “You killed her.”

  “You think?” she replied sarcastically.

  “She would’ve taken the money.”

  “I didn’t want to give her my money, David. Do you really think she would’ve kept her mouth shut?”

  Probably not.

  “The risk was too great,” Gabriella said.

  It was.

  “It had to be done, David. There was no other choice,” she said.

  I knew she was right.

  “Well?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, pacing. “What are we going to do?”

  “We easily got rid of one dead body,” Gabriella said; “we can get rid of this one too.

  “Tijuana,” I said.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  She was full of them lately.

  “Just keep calm, baby, all right?” she said. “Leave everything up to me.”

  I did.

  My first concern was that someone from the apartment building heard the gunshot. No one was looking out their doors or windows or coming by to see what happened. I lived close enough to the beach that the sound of the ocean waves, with the high tide, probably sounded out the gunshot. In one apartment someone was playing Pink Floyd loudly, so they didn’t hear anything but their stereo system. “Shine on you crazy diamond,” sang the band.

  A fitting soundtrack.

  Gabriella cleaned the blood and urine off the floor while I took care of the body. I got some clean bed sheets out of the closet and got to work, thinking this sort of thing always looked easy in the movies, but if you ever have to deal with an actual dead body and the issues of deceased flesh, it’s a whole other thing.

  I quickly carried Meghan’s body, wrapped in bed sheets like a half-ass mummy, out to the Mustang and stuck her—it—in the trunk. I read somewhere, years ago, that when someone murders another, the body (wife, girlfriend, husband, whatever) ceases to have gender and becomes a mere object. It. And that’s what Meghan was now: a body. Not my ex-girlfriend but garbage and needed to be transported to a hole in the ground.

  There I was, trotting out of my apartment building with a wrapped body, confident that if I played it cool, no one would notice or see. Or care.

  I nervously looked around. The street was quiet, as it often is, Ocean Beaching being a laid back community.

  With the body on my shoulder, I opened the trunk of the Camero and easily slid the evidence of crime into the compartment. Meghan was a slender woman and her body did not take up half of the trunk; I morbidly thought (as I had before with Miguel) that I could fit a second corpse in there.

  All seemed fine until I was about to shut the trunk and a man’s voice said, “David Kellgren!”

  I almost pissed and shit my own pants.

  Would these surprises ever end? I thought. Will I ever get some fucking peace?

  It was the incensed auto mechanic, Roy Erics. He looked drunk and angry; I could smell the whiskey and body odor twenty feet away. I noticed that he had a fifth of Jack Daniels in one hand.

  He also carried, in his other hand, a large piece of wood with nails sticking out.

  What the hell was going on tonight? Everybody was after a piece of me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the baseball bad and tire chain next to Meghan’s body. I grabbed the bat and swung, blocking Roy’s drunken attempt to harm me, preventing the wood and nails from making contact with my head.

  Roy wasn’t expecting that, and I got him square in the nose with the end of the bat.

  Three broken noses in one night; not a bad average.

  He dropped the piece of wood and shook his head, regaining his bearings. He charged with a huff, faster than I figured a man his weight and size could. He knocked the bat out of my grip with his head and got both his fat, huge hands around my next, pushing me against the side of my car.

  I reached for the tire chain and wrapped it around his neck and kneed him in the balls. He went down.

  I positioned myself behind him and pulled hard on the chain, crushing his windpipe and cutting off all oxygen.

  He tried to buck me off like a wild bull in a rodeo but I wasn’t going to let go until he stopped moving.

  He stopped resisting.

  He wasn’t breathing anymore.

  Was a tight fit; I managed to cram Roy’s body in with Meghan’s. When push comes to shove, you can get away with the nearly impossible.

  Gabriella said, “What took you so long, baby?”

  I told her what happened on the street.

  She said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “No.”

  And then she burst out laughing, tears in her eyes.

  “Noting funny about this,” I said.

  It did hurt.

  “It’s Aunt Yolanda’s curse,” she said; “it has to be. Shit like this doesn’t happen to normal people, only people who got the mal mojo on them. The mucho mojo hee-bee-gee-bees!”

  I sat down on the couch.

  She sat next to me, wiping her eyes.

  I said, “We have two bodies to deal with.”

  She nodded.

  “Tell me you have a plan.”

  34.

  At first, her idea was to dump Meghan’s body at El Fin del Mundo along with Miguel’s gun. “The federales will eventually trace the gun to him,” she said, “and he’s dead, right, so they’ll figure someone in the cartel or a rival gang got his gun and killed him with it, and this gringa.”

  “She’s my ex,” I said. “This gets to the San Diego Police, and they trace her back to me . . .”

  “But she’s your ex, and you wanted nothing to do with her anymore, right? You don’t know what she’s been up to, who she’s been seeing and getting mixed up with. Maybe she was dating Miguel, maybe she was buying drugs from him and things went wrong somewhere. Who the fuck knows? You play dumb. If it even comes to that. You and me, we’ll be long gone when they start piecing things together.”

  The same with Roy—he had tried to sue me. And he had tried to kill me. Technically, that was self-defense, and Gabriella murdered Meghan and Migue
l. We were two for two and I started to wonder if we’d have to kill anyone else before we could run away and live in peace.

  We put on our gloves and she helped me with the bodies.

  “This fat fucker stinks,” she said about Roy.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Then she had the gun out and pointed it at Roy and fired once into his un-beating heart.

  She dropped the gun between the two bodies.

  I didn’t question her actions, assuming she had it all mapped out and, by this time, knew what she was doing.

  She picked up the shell casing that was spent from the gun.

  I didn’t want to know what she was doing.

  She said, “No professional shooter would leave this behind.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “That’s a message.”

  “To who?”

  “To not fuck with the wrong people when you’re talking money and drugs and business. A Tijuana postcard,” she said.

  She didn’t want to go back to the States and neither did I. Gabriella suggested we drive down to Rosorito Beach and relax for a few days, a week, longer.

  “Baby, we have so much money, we can do whatever we want.”

  35.

  We rented a furnished condo, $75 a night or $300 a week or $800 a month. Rentals in Mexico are incredibly cheap and I started to wonder why I had never looked into south-of-the-border living before. I hopped online at Craigslist and saw two, three bedroom places going for less than $500 a month. With the money we had in the briefcase, we could live like royalty for several years down here, and once she liquidated her inheritance, the world was ours.

  If the world could not be our oyster, it damn sure would be our enchilada.

  I called Allen Marshall and told him I wouldn’t be coming in, not that day, not tomorrow, not next week, not ever again. He was flabbergasted and none too happy; I mean, I was supposed to be the serious, career-minded process server who wanted to be a private eye.