Damaged Goods

by Heather Sharfeddin

  “This is Carl Abernathy.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who I am.”

  Kyrellis snorted. “I thought Swift handled all the firearms transactions personally now that he’s back.”

  “I’m not calling on his behalf today.”

  “Then why ever are you calling me, Mr. Abernathy?”

  Kyrellis had always treated Carl as if he were common scum. People did, but Kyrellis was especially acidic. Carl had eventually come to understand that it was because he lived at Campo Rojo.

  “I’m coming over to talk to you.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t you just tell me what you have over the phone? You no doubt know what I’m looking for.”

  “This isn’t about a gun. It’s about Silvie’s box.”

  “How does that concern you?”

  “We’ll talk about it when I get there.” Carl hung up, his insides feeling dry.

  Kyrellis’s house was tucked along the base of Bull Mountain, on a road called Beef Bend. Carl hitchhiked from Scholls to Sherwood, catching a ride with a man who agreed to give him a lift if he sat in the bed of the truck with his border collie. The dog was overjoyed to have company, licking Carl’s face. But once the driver reached speeds over thirty it abandoned him to zip back and forth between the wheel wells, pressing its face into the wind with rapt jubilation.

  From Sherwood, Carl caught a TriMet bus into Tigard, then walked the last two miles. Kyrellis owned six acres, most of which were taken up with an array of greenhouses in various shapes and sizes that looked as though they’d been added over decades, without consideration for aesthetics or continuity. His home, a rambling brick ranch, had been built in the sixties. But it was upscale, with a stunning circular rose garden in front, flanked by rhododendron and laurel hedges for privacy. An old wisteria vine twisted up the front porch and ran across the entryway. With its leaves gone for the winter, its silver branches looked like hundreds of snakes in a hypnotic, intertwining embrace. As Carl waited for the man, he listened to a large chime sing out low, minor keys.

  Kyrellis came to the door with a handgun strapped to his chest, visible through his cotton shirt. He scrutinized Carl for the same but eventually stepped aside, allowing him to enter. The house smelled of meat loaf and aftershave. Its dark interior was well appointed but outdated. The leather sofa in the living room appeared never to have been used.

  “I heard about the incident down at the migrant camp yesterday,” he said, studying Carl’s eye and jaw. “You made the news.”

  “I’m not here about that.”

  “Are you the one who called immigration? I underestimated you, but it’s good to know you’re a red-blooded American after all.”

  The short hairs at the back of Carl’s neck went up. “With a name like Kyrellis? Isn’t that … what? Greek?”

  “You know your linguistics; I’ll give you that.” Kyrellis led Carl into the kitchen and motioned for him to sit at the table. “Who are you, exactly, Carl Abernathy? Have we overlooked a scholar among us?”

  “Hardly.” Carl regretted the comment about Kyrellis’s name. And though he knew the man mocked him, he would never let on that he had gone to Berkeley on a scholarship and completed his degree in literature. It didn’t matter, either. That life was a kid’s idealistic dream. Then came Vietnam, heroin, and reality.

  “Well, then, let’s get down to business. Why are you here?”

  Carl reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the folded copies. He was careful and deliberate as he laid them out on the table. “Eighteen seventy-eight Frontier Colt. Seven hundred dollars. May 2004. Harpers Ferry M1842 musket. Twelve hundred. August 2006. Glock Model 23. Three hundred. December 2006.” He went on through a list of twenty guns.

  Kyrellis stood perfectly still, listening, eyeing the papers.

  “Winchester Grand American—small-gauge. Forty thousand. April of this year.” Carl laid the last sheet down. He stilled his face, preparing the sternest bluff he’d ever delivered. “I have a record of every single firearm. Its price. The date. Its origin. Its serial number.” He looked at Kyrellis. “And its buyer.”

  “So you do,” Kyrellis said quietly.

  “I want the box. This information stays with me if you give me Silvie’s box.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I go to the police.”

  “You know you’ll ruin Hershel, too.”

  Carl stared at Kyrellis for a long serious moment, then gave him a simple nod. A flash of Vietnam went through his mind.

  Kyrellis reached into his shirt and took the pistol from his holster.

  Carl’s dream beside the rice paddy flooded in on him. The oppressive heat.

  “You forgot this one.” He held up the gun so that Carl could see it. “Do you remember this one?”

  That familiar sense of doom, intangible yet overwhelming.

  “You called me about it yourself.”

  Carl stared at the Taurus semiautomatic. He remembered it. He’d sold it to Kyrellis while Hershel was in the hospital. Ironically, to pay the utilities at Hershel’s house because the accountant wasn’t authorized to handle his personal affairs.

  Kyrellis pointed the gun at Carl’s head.

  He won’t shoot me here, Carl told himself. Not in his kitchen, sitting at his dinner table. He closed his eyes and thought of Yolanda’s smile, then a lightness, a release. No craving. No relentless urges. Nothing—just a small flash. Then nothing.

  18

  Kyrellis stood over Carl Abernathy, afraid to touch him. His breath was pinched and tight. “I’m having a heart attack,” he stuttered as the gun clattered to the floor and skated across the polished linoleum. He grabbed at a side chair and collapsed into it, laying his head and shoulders on the table. “I’m … having … a … heart … attack,” he wheezed.

  He closed his eyes and cleared his head. After several minutes, the pains eased, leaving him shaky and ringed in sweat. He peered across the table at the man he’d just shot. The bullet hadn’t exited Carl’s skull. There wasn’t much blood.

  Kyrellis hadn’t wanted to do that. He hadn’t planned it. But Hershel Swift’s flunky had proved himself a sly man, after all. The way he’d stated his demands with such cool deliberation; it was clear that he held no allegiance to Swift. He’d obviously been planning this for years to have kept such precise records.

  Kyrellis rested his sweaty face against the wooden table. What would he do with the body? This had all gone wrong.

  The dead man gurgled and blood suddenly poured from his nose onto the oak surface.

  “Oh!” Kyrellis staggered up, his head pounding, and found a dish towel. He lifted the man’s face and shoved the cloth under, watching it expand in scarlet. He ran his index finger down Carl’s neck, seeking a pulse, but the skin was already cool and clammy.

  Kyrellis slid into the chair once again and tried to organize his thoughts. It was a problem that the bullet hadn’t come out the other side. It could be traced. Kyrellis nudged the corpse’s leg with his foot. The bullet would be traced back only to the man who consigned the gun to Hershel and no further, assuming that this man slumped over his kitchen table hadn’t left evidence behind. Even if he hadn’t, this was too close to home. Kyrellis sized up the body, seeing it in pieces.

  Something clicked for Kyrellis, seeing Carl’s bruised face. He could tie this back to the fight at the migrant camp. It was his good luck that Carl had been involved, and that it had been both recent and reported. With an immigration raid that was likely this man’s doing, who would question the link?

  Kyrellis suffered a new shiver, recalling the way Carl had punctuated the Winchester in the list of guns he’d bought. It was rare, worth more than any gun he’d ever handled. It sold instantly to a private collector he’d been working with. The man paid sixty-two thousand dollars—more than its market value. Kyrellis had naïvely believed that its sale—the money—would bring an end to his troubles. Carl had bee
n more dangerous than Kyrellis ever imagined, walking around with evidence like that. Kyrellis hadn’t thought twice about the man all this time, even though he was well aware of Carl’s involvement in Hershel’s business. Who else might be lurking in the shadows, collecting damning evidence, preparing to blackmail him? It wasn’t about the pictures, that was for damn sure. That was simply a test to see what he could get. Kyrellis knew it would never have stopped there. The man would have moved on to money, and he’d have done so rapidly. Kyrellis composed himself. He needed to clear his thoughts and figure out how to dispose of this body.

  Silvie soaked up the sun in a wicker chair on Hershel’s front porch. Billowy gray clouds formed and dissipated in the moody afternoon sky, occasionally stealing away the warmth, then bringing it back again like a sweet gift. She could hear Hershel tinkering with the Porsche, but so far he’d failed to get it running, despite its new tires and battery.

  A red-tailed hawk sailed out over the river in search of food, and she studied the long driveway that emerged from the orchard a quarter mile or so from the house. This was a good place to be. She’d see Jacob coming long before he arrived, and she could slip into that same vast orchard that wrapped around the house. From the upstairs bedroom she had seen its southern boundary, where it marched into a wild blackberry thicket that folded into a ravine, then up another slope. Then it was forest and hills as far as she could see. Jacob would never find her.

  After a time, Hershel joined her, wiping grease from his hands with a rag that looked as though it had once been a pair of boxer shorts. “Looks like you found a nice spot,” he said. “Mind if I interrupt your solitude?”

  “Want me to get you something to drink?”

  “No, I’m okay.” He eased into the chair, inspecting his clothes for grease stains.

  “Carl seems like a generous person.”

  Hershel appeared to be completely lost in thought. “I should give him a raise, or something. Carl took care of things while I was … you know … recovering.” Hershel sent Silvie a furtive glance before looking away again. “I’ve never been able to figure out why he lives like he does. I used to think he was a loser.” He paused to press his fingers to his scar, absently, as he often did.

  “That’s pretty harsh judgment.”

  “Maybe. He lives in a migrant camp in a one-room shack, shoulder to shoulder with people who don’t even speak English. He’s got no plumbing. Just a woodstove and a shared latrine.”

  “I guess you should give him a raise.”

  “I doubt he’d move even if I did.”

  “What happened to his face yesterday?”

  “Didn’t say, exactly.”

  She scowled. Didn’t he have some idea or opinion about what might have happened? Why didn’t he find out? Had a friend of hers shown up with a battered face, she’d have gotten the story. Or … maybe Carl came to work looking like that all the time. How many times had she arrived bruised before Laree stopped interrogating her? After a while nothing needed saying. It was the same story, but at least her friend knew it.

  “Is Carl married?”

  Hershel looked surprised. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t know? How long has this guy been working for you? And you don’t know if he’s married?”

  “It never came up.”

  She snorted.

  “Why all the questions about Carl, anyway?”

  “Just curious about him. Maybe his wife did that to his face.”

  “Maybe. Do you think he’s married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anything is possible.”

  Silvie pressed her head back against the chair and rolled her eyes. “Men are so strange.”

  Hershel reached between the chairs and took her hand. She hesitated.

  “Kyrellis said something when he came by the South Store.” She ran her finger lightly over his thumbnail, smoothing it, polishing it. “He told me … to ask you where you were coming from the night of your accident.”

  Hershel pulled his hand away and rested it in his lap, staring off at the northern horizon.

  “He hinted that—” She waited through long seconds of agonizing silence. He didn’t even move. She glanced over to see if he still breathed. “He’ll say anything to get the information he wants, I suppose.”

  Hershel opened his mouth as if to speak but closed it again. His eyes seemed fixed on a growing bank of dark thunderheads tinged purple at their base.

  “He told you that I killed a man,” he said finally.

  “Not in so many words.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  She shook her head, but he wouldn’t look at her. “No.”

  He leaned forward and pressed his palms to his thighs, as if ready to get up. Then he turned his head and studied her. “I don’t think I killed anyone.”

  It was a strange answer, she thought. Wouldn’t you know? Even if you had suffered a brain injury, wouldn’t you know in your gut?

  “Look, Silvie. I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know where I was coming from the night I crashed my car. I’ve been trying to work out the days leading up to that wreck since I woke up in the hospital.”

  Silvie ran her hand down his arm, and he took her fingers in his.

  “I don’t think I killed anyone. And I don’t trust Kyrellis to say what really happened.”

  “I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “Don’t be. I like the idea of not having any secrets between us. This is not easy. I’ve never been this open with anyone. But … your company—your trust—has become very important to me.” He pressed her hand to his lips and brushed them lightly back and forth. “I won’t hide anything from you.”

  Kyrellis carefully wiped up all the blood, then walked out and found a plastic tarp in his storage shed. He spread it across the kitchen floor, lifted Carl off the chair, and dragged his limp body onto the plastic, marveling at how thin and light the man was even as deadweight. He arranged Carl’s skinny limbs into a straight line and gathered the tarp at the top, dragging it through the open patio door, across the cement, and out onto the gravel pathway that led between his greenhouses. The idea of leaving his kitchen with any traces of blood nagged him like an unanswered itch. He preferred to do this in stages, but he was gripped by the idea that maybe Carl had told someone where he was going. Had he shared his mission with Silvie? Would someone come looking for him? How long?

  Kyrellis was breathless, and his fingers were cramping by the time he reached the pole barn at the back of his property. “Almost there,” he said to the dead man, and gave the tarp a few hard tugs onto the top of the compost heap. He rolled Carl out onto the soil, where he dumped the spent potting dirt and turned under the rose clippings.

  He returned with a common handsaw and a pair of sharp branch cutters and set to work removing Carl’s head. Blood soaked into the rich ferment, and when he was finished Kyrellis used a pitchfork to churn it under for the worms.

  By dark he’d scrubbed the kitchen with bleach, taking extra care with the tabletop. The saw and the clippers were returned to the shed, dipped in alcohol, and lightly oiled. The patio had been pressure-washed. He showered and bundled his clothing into the bottom of his burn barrel, covering it with a thick layer of dead brush, but he didn’t light it. That would have to wait until the body, again wrapped in the tarp and waiting in the bed of his truck, was fully gone from here. He surveyed the scene where he’d murdered Carl Abernathy, looking for anything he might have missed.

  Rain was both help and hindrance as Kyrellis backed his pickup down the narrow boat ramp along the Tualatin River, not a mile from the migrant camp. He was careful to stay on the gravel path and not to leave muddy footprints. His pulse raced and his chest ached as he climbed into the bed and dragged the headless body, stripped of any personal effects, down to the water. It would likely be found; Kyrellis knew that. Better to make it look like a hate crime and divert attention. He rolled the partially submerged corpse
out into the scant current with his foot. The Tualatin was a silty river, opaque and dirty-looking year-round. It was littered with tree branches and debris, and Carl’s body wouldn’t float far before catching on something. But it would be difficult to find, nonetheless. Through the darkness Kyrellis watched the body disappear into the narrow channel.

  It was just after one in the morning. The boat launch was far from farms or other signs of civilization, and not even an animal stirred tonight. A steady rain cleansed the landscape. When his breath had returned, he drove slowly up the ramp again, shifting as quietly as possible through the gears, and pulled onto the empty highway. He drove south toward the Willamette River, where he would drop Carl’s head, now wrapped in a black garbage sack weighted with a cinder block, off the bridge near St. Paul. Carl had had ample opportunity to show his hand. Years of opportunity. Kyrellis questioned whether he’d murdered the man for something so harmless, a foolishly noble attempt to help a girl he barely knew. Kyrellis could see how a man might be talked into helping her. She had a look about her, helpless and in need, wrapped in a sexy package. Carl might have been more stupid than cunning. Still, Kyrellis told himself as the head made a faint splash, there was no way to know for sure. He had no choice but to protect himself.

  Everyone knew too much. Carl knew about the guns, he knew about Silvie. How much had that girl shared with Carl? Did Hershel have any idea about her? In one of the photos she was tightly bound, hands and feet, with a gag in her mouth. A cascade of dark bruises showed along her hips and thighs. Someone had worked her over, and it looked to him like more than once. Kyrellis had separated the cache into categories. Photos of Silvie in sexy poses—poses that could arouse any man, which he arranged along the mirror above his bureau. The disturbing photos of abuse, which were few but stunning, he bound together with a rubber band and placed in the bottom of the box. These were the ones that the pervert who’d taken them would pay a premium for. There were three photos where the man had been careless. In one, Kyrellis could see his law-enforcement badge on the dresser. In the other two, he’d gotten vain and held the camera at arm’s length and captured the child and himself together. It wasn’t Silvie in both pictures. One of them was a dark-haired girl, much younger. Six, maybe. Those Kyrellis locked in his safe and took out only to examine with a magnifying glass, looking for clues to the man’s identity. And the rest—the photos of assorted other girls ranging in age, printed on photo paper suggesting a span of decades—he set aside.