1 Motor City Shakedown

by Jonathan Watkins

  The box he opened was full of bottles, no one of them identical to another. They were salvage. Everything in the locker was salvage, gathered over the years by Malcolm from the abandoned and forgotten corners of the city.

  He picked through them, passing over orange plastic prescription bottles, brown glass chemistry regents, and dozens of other found, bottled treasures. In the bottom of the box, he found the bottle he sought.

  He pulled it out and held it up to the light. It was very old, and the words typed across its white paper label were so faded as to be illegible. Rolling it over in his fingers, he saw the one thing upon its face that was still recognizable: a red skull and crossbones.

  With his free hand, Malcolm reached into his Carhartt jacket and produced a hypodermic syringe. Carefully, he uncapped the bottle and drew its liquid contents into the syringe.

  The bottle went back in the box and the syringe into his coat. He clicked the flashlight once more, killing the light.

  SIX

  Darren was a slouching mass in Issabella’s passenger seat when her GPS announced they had arrived at Vernon Pullins’ crematorium in Westland. She pulled into the crematorium’s parking lot and looked at him beside her. His hair was a wild thicket, he had the passenger seat fully reclined, and his eyes were hidden beneath a pair of sunglasses despite the pale, early morning half-light.

  Issabella parked in the gravel lot close to the squat cinder-block building. The crematorium had no business signs of any sort. The only windows were thin panes running along the top of the one-story building. There was a huge garage door on one side, and an improbably tall smoke-stack running up out of the center of the roof.

  ‘State regs, I bet,’ she thought, craning her head to one side and peering up through the windshield until she could see the top of the smoke-stack, ‘Can’t have the remains of Aunt Ethel wafting through the neighborhood.’

  A yellow truck—the boxy sort that package delivery companies use –was sitting in the shadow of the building near the garage door. Issabella squinted and could make out the bio-hazard symbol emblazoned in a corner of the truck’s body.

  With a disquieting chill, she realized that it must be Vernon’s dead body delivery truck.

  Darren roused himself beside her and offered a weak grin.

  “New rule,” he said hoarsely. “I do the scheduling. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has any damn business being alive at this time of the morning.”

  She opened the door and snatched her briefcase up from the backseat. Inside it was the big ring of keys Vernon’s brother, Eugene, had provided to Darren.

  “I didn’t tell you to spend the night getting drunk, which seems apparent is what you did,” she said.

  “That’s not what I did.”

  “You have a drinking problem, don’t you?”

  Darren groaned and got out of the car. The two of them stood looking at the squat, solid bunker that was their client’s chief place of business.

  “I enjoy a good drink, yes,” he said after a minute. “Maybe a bit too often. But not last night. Last night, I had trouble getting to sleep. It happens. You’re not going to suddenly grow a mommy personality on me, are you?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “Stellar.”

  “But, you know, early bird catches the worm and all that. So, no, I’ll be in charge of scheduling throughout, thank you very much.”

  “You were that girl in school weren’t you?”

  A wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows and she drew in a long breath.

  “What kind of girl?”

  “The one who actually believes all those sayings. Like ‘the early bird catches the worm’ and ‘waste not want not’ and ‘success is ten percent inspiration. “

  “Let’s get to work,” she said and walked off toward the front of the building.

  Darren trailed after her, a mess of wrinkles wearing a playful smile.

  *

  Once the two of them had performed enough of a cursory walkthrough to establish what each room was--a large room that contained the crematorium ovens and the garage door, a janitorial closet, an office, and a bathroom --the two of them stood in the middle of the big oven-room.

  “Remind me why you thought we needed to come here,” she said.

  “I want to know as much about him as I can. You should, too.”

  “We should be attacking the search warrant.”

  “We will. Let’s be nosy first.”

  “I think we’re wasting time.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, and stopped in the center of the room. “Let’s make it a game.”

  “A game.”

  “Yep. Our objective is to observe as much as we can. Fifteen minutes to a room. Neither of us can inspect the same room at the same time. After an hour is up, we get together and compare notes. Whoever has the most useful information to our man’s case is the winner.”

  Isabella frowned and said “That’s totally subjective. ‘Useful’ can be interpreted or argued any which way.”

  Darren nodded, shrugged and said “I’ll trust you to admit if I hit the mother lode, and you do the same. Right? Great. Let’s hit it. I’ll start with the bathroom, since I have to pee.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “It’s fun.”

  “It doesn’t help our client.”

  “You don’t know that yet. Let’s be snoopy and see what turns up.”

  “We should be drafting a motion to quash the warrant. Not playing pretend in a dead-body burning company.”

  “You’re scared I’ll win.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I’m not scared. Without the warrant, the firearms go away. Without the warrant, we get a good argument of self-defense.”

  “I wonder if he has more guns stashed all over this place,” Darren mused. “That would be good to know. Wouldn’t it? But, yeah, let’s go draft a motion for a court date that isn’t even set yet. Maybe we can type our way to setting him free.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her and stuck her chin in the air. Darren arched his eyebrows expectantly, seeming to recognize he’d pushed enough buttons.

  “Shall we play a game, Issabella?”

  Isabella narrowed her eyes.

  “Fine. Game on,” she said.

  *

  The morning haze slowly lifted off the waking city. Malcolm Mohommad leaned his shoulder against the window frame and let his eyes get lost in the muted glow of the low-hanging sun.

  “Illusions are the enemy of a thinking man,” he said.

  The sun grew in his eyes. It swelled and eclipsed the rest of the world. He didn’t blink.

  “I want to peel away every illusion. In my work. In my art. Anywhere I can. I know I’m failing. If I was going to truly peel back the whole tapestry of illusions in this life, I’d have to be willing to kill myself. Suicide eradicates the ability to perceive. Perception is the broken system that creates the illusions to begin with. Real honesty is self-death. I know this to be a fundamental truth.”

  He shut his eyes. The sun’s negative filled his inner vision, pulsing with a seemingly physical pressure so close to his brain. He stared at the negative twin with the same intensity as he had its brother.

  “I suppose my weakness is that I have a great capacity for being offended. Mother used to say I was sensitive. I guess she just saw it from a distance… whatever it is that keeps me from going along with all the little dishonesties and cheapening things in this world. That was the only word she had to try and name it. She was a whore and a drug addict and didn’t have any sort of insight that would have helped me know myself. I cried when I should have shouted. I ran when I should have stood defiant. This was her ‘sensitive’. Maybe she thought I was a homosexual. It doesn’t matter now. She’s long dead and I haven’t shed my dissatisfaction with this world. I wonder if she would still call me sensitive, though, if she knew me as a man. I don’t think she would. I think s
he would find another word now that I don’t cry.”

  The negative-sun in his mind’s eye had dimmed, the pressure relenting. But he kept his eyes closed and continued talking with his face pointed out the window.

  “But that’s not what I wanted to say. I wanted to talk to you about truth. About ugliness, I think. I wanted to…”

  His voice trailed away and he was just a silent mass in the window for a long moment. Then he opened his eyes, let his hands fall slack to his sides and turned around.

  He stared at Vernon Pullins in the hospital bed across the room. The machinery running out of Vernon chirped with the regularity of a metronome.

  “…I wanted to tell you how much I admire your killing an agent of their systems.”

  Malcolm crossed over to the side of the hospital bed and let his large hand rest on the railing.

  “I hope it wasn’t a mistake. Or a rash act. I hope you were deliberate and that you knew you were delivering a blow against their illusory system of order.”

  Malcolm glanced out the doorway at the empty chair sitting on the other side of the hallway. It had been there for the police-guard posted after Vernon’s arrest. But the Detroit Police Department was not an organization that ran budget surpluses, even in good times. Malcolm guessed that Vernon’s comatose condition was enough of a guarantee to the police that he wasn’t going to be skipping out on any court dates.

  He suspected that was not the truth. He suspected the door had been left unguarded in order to allow him unmolested access.

  “I hope it wasn’t insanity or desperation. Derangement has no artistic merit. I hope it was because you saw the illusions, the ideas of protection and security that surround their system and laws. The illusions. Did you see them? Did you recognize the lies at the heart of human designs? Did you despise them the way I do?”

  Malcolm stared at the enormous bulk of Vernon. He hadn’t spoken this much to anyone in as long as he could recall.

  “Anyway…I thought I should tell you that. You aren’t one of the offending things, Vernon Pullins. You delivered a gruesome act. I wish I could have seen it in their eyes when you removed one of them from the world.”

  Malcolm reached into his Carhartt jacket and withdrew the hypodermic needle he had brought with him. Reaching up, he carefully pushed the tip of the needle into the top of the IV bag connected to Vernon. He depressed the plunger and dribbled twenty milliliters of strychnine down the inside of the bag, where it mingled and mixed with the saline solution being fed into Vernon’s body.

  Once the needle was back inside his jacket, Malcolm spared Vernon not so much as a final glance. He turned and walked away, out of the room, past the nurses and attendants, past the suffering and the near-dead, past the blood-soaked newborns, down and out and away into the obscurity of the devastated city where he had been born and forged into what he now was.

  Fifteen minutes later, the machines in Vernon’s room began to sound the alarm.

  SEVEN

  The most disconcerting part of Issabella’s inspection of the crematorium was how the two big ovens looked so…nice. They were the same boxy, shiny-smooth types of machines you’d expect to find in a modern factory or high-tech laboratory. They had sleek digital controls. They were antiseptic in their unassuming efficiency. They had a kind of elegance.

  Because of this, she found herself considering the fact that there were people walking around in the world who had helped to build the better death-oven. They’d made calculations about mass and burn rate and fuel efficiency. They’d consulted designers over aesthetic elements, and made compromises over appearance and ease-of-loading. Programmers had built a little computer to oversee the whole affair, and buried that hidden brain behind a user-friendly digital readout with touch-screen controls. Pamphlets were done up. Web pages, slogans, testimonials and marketing attack plans were all summoned up out of the conscious labor of dozens, nay, hundreds of industrious men and women.

  And over backyard barbeques, the death-oven revolutionaries would affect fake-humility about their calling in life. ‘What line of work? Nothing much, Earl. It’s Earl, right? I’m sorry, I’m terrible with names and Judy has so many friends, you know? Good to meet you, too. Hmm? Oh! Well, my official title is lead engineer. Which sounds impressive, but it’s really not, believe me. Mostly just busy work like anything else. No, not bridges, Earl. Civil engineers work on things like bridges and that. Me, I’m in the commercial end of things. Furnaces. Sure, like that. How hot? Heh. Hot, Earl. Believe me, buddy, those babies burn hot as hell. Let me freshen that for you.’

  She fiddled with them until she was able to get the loading doors open. Inside, they were clean and, apparently, well-scrubbed. She thought about being loaded into one of them, laying there while the computer brain counted down to the moment it would order the gas jets to ignite. She wasn’t as creeped-out at the idea as she would have figured she would be.

  Opening her cell and checking the clock told her it was about time to call the game concluded. She’d been fairly idle in her inspections ever since she had taken her turn to search through the office. Confident that she had actually found the winning bit of information—even if she hadn’t quite worked out the reason why it was the winning information –she had contented herself with cursory perusals of the rest of the building. The bathroom had been unclean and dingy the way they are when under the sole dominion of men. The janitorial closet had been nothing more than what it was supposed to be.

  While it was still in her hand, Issabella’s cell rang.

  “Hey, Mom,” she said.

  “Bella! So tell me everything.”

  Her mother’s general opinion of her daughter’s career choices had experienced a sudden upward tick, so that it was currently holding just shy of ‘Unabashed Approval’.

  “Actually, I’m right in the middle of something right now, Mom.”

  “I am so happy for you. This is all so exciting, isn’t it?”

  Issabella closed the door of the human-oven and smiled despite herself.

  “It kind of is, yeah.”

  “And that Mr. Fletcher is helping you get up to speed on things?”

  The smile wilted as quickly as it had bloomed.

  “We’re partners, Mom. Equal partners.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  “No, don’t be.”

  “I really am happy for you, sweetheart.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Is he handsome?”

  “Who? Darren?”

  “That’s a nice name, isn’t it? Is he—“

  “I have to go now, Mom.”

  “—single?”

  “Bye, Mom. Gotta go.”

  She clicked the cell shut and stuffed it back inside her briefcase. Her fingers brushed against the papers she’d found in the office, the ones she thought would win her this game. Darren had been first to search the office, so she didn’t feel like a cheater for scooping them into her briefcase. If he hadn’t noticed the oddity in the papers, that was his own fault. She’d actually read them. She’d read everything in the office, except the pornographic magazines stuffed in the lowest drawer of the desk.

  ‘Who buys dirty magazines anymore?’

  “Ding!”

  She turned on her heel. Darren was in the doorway to the office, beaming with that playful, secret-filled smile he seemed to think everyone wanted to see all the time.

  “Time’s up, kiddo,” he said.

  “For you.”

  He stepped to the side so she could walk into the office past him.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  *

  After a few minutes of wrangling over who would go first, Issabella finally got fed up with it and yanked the papers out of her briefcase. She tossed them onto the desk. Darren was sitting behind it in, presumably, Vernon’s chair. He had his feet on the desk, legs stretched out in front of him. He gave the papers a quizzical frown.

  “The bills?” he said. “Really?”
r />   “Really.”

  Darren shrugged, reached into his own briefcase on the floor beside him and withdrew a large red apple. Issabella smirked.

  “An apple? Really?”

  The apple made a crunching noise as he bit into it.

  “Don’t be silly. I brought this with me. So, okay, tell me about the bills.”

  “Okay,” she said, putting her hands in the air the way she did when she was going into lecture mode. She had taken litigation courses in her last year at law school, and somewhere in them she had settled on hand movement as being preferable to having her arms crossed in front of her. She paced in front of the desk as if it were the border of the jury box.

  She said, “We know Vernon has a successful crematorium business. In fact, we know that he owes some of this success to the fact that he holds contracts with the county to dispose of unknowns and indigents.”

  “All true,” Darren agreed around a mouthful of apple.

  “We also know…hold on. I’m operating on the premise that there’s some wacky, nutso thing going on here other than our client’s behavior when he was arrested. I mean, this is your idea. I’m just playing pretend that anything we find here could be useful. Agreed?”

  “I acknowledge that you are humoring me. Continue.”

  She nodded and resumed her pacing.

  “We also know that Vernon operates a second crematorium in the Upper Peninsula. In fact, according to those bills, this second crematorium is in Marquette. Which, by the by, is the most populated city up there.”

  “I did not know that.”

  “I have a friend from there.”

  “From law school?”

  “Yep. She’s in a firm up there now.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Alright. So here’s the big, weird thing that doesn’t mean anything in the real world, but we’ll pretend it does to get this game over with. Ready?’

  Darren wiped apple juice from his chin and smiled.

  “Dazzle me.”

  “Look at the utility bills,” she said. “His gas bills don’t jive with what we know. For this address, he’s being billed next to nothing. My apartment is using about as much natural gas as this place, and my place doesn’t come with a fancy people-burning stove.”