Severed Relations

by Rebecca Forster

  "She likes you fine."

  "Georgia likes me?" Medium Man's eyes lit up.

  "Sure. Why not?"

  Mort lied easily. Georgia couldn't stand the guy. Even Mort could only take him in small doses. It had taken her awhile to even remember that she talked to him. Bottom line, Georgia had remembered, Mort had called back, the date was made and, since all this was so out of the ordinary, Mort was a little curious about the meeting. When Mort finished his beer, Medium Man asked:

  "You want another one? I'll get it for you if you want another beer."

  Mort shoved his mug across the table. Medium Man was out of the booth, scurrying toward the bar, excited because it was kind of like Mort had just given him a prize. Mort leaned back and watched. The guy could've been a ghost for all the service he got. Finally, he got the bartender to draw two and he was back.

  "Okay. I gotta make this fast. What's up?" Mort asked, but Medium Man was drinking and didn't answer. Then he was wiping his mouth with his jacket sleeve and when it looked like he was going to try to make small talk again Mort got in his face. "What?"

  "Well," Medium Man began, nervous now that Mort had shown him his angry face. "Here's the thing. Remember how I told you I like to keep up on things. Especially after a job. I like to read about our jobs in the newspaper. Remember I told you that?"

  Mort sighed. Medium Man's confidence waned, but this was too important to let it go so he forged on.

  "Anyway, I'm reading the paper 'cause that's how I found out about the funeral for those kids, and I went and checked it out so as I could sort of make up and–"

  "Oh damn," Mort muttered. "You went to the friggin' funeral for those kids?"

  "I didn't do nothing. They didn't see me." Medium Man whined even though what he said wasn't especially true. People had seen him, and he was almost sure those two had been cops, but he gave them the slip so things were cool. He didn't think Mort would think it was a good thing, and they were getting off topic anyway. "Okay. So, I just want you to know that I read the newspapers and keep up and such. Just to make sure everyone stays dead."

  "Shut up," Mort growled and pushed himself up against the table. "Don't you know better than that? This is a public place."

  "Sorry. Sorry. Hey, I'm sorry." Medium Man put his fingers to his lips and whispered. This was a chance for him and the boy. "Anyway, that lady with the kids? She's got fifty big ones on the table for information about what we…" Mort's eyes threw daggers and Medium Man lowered his voice even more. "Fifty grand, Mort."

  Medium Man's eyes widened, to underscore the importance of his news. But Mort wasn't excited. He didn't even seem interested. Maybe Mort wasn't as smart as Medium Man thought.

  "That's a lot of money, Mort. Fifty grand."

  "Yeah, a lot of money," Mort answered. "So?"

  "So?" Medium Man laughed a little. It was true. Mort wasn't real smart so Medium Man spoke slowly. "So, we can get it."

  For a while, Mort didn't move at all. He just stared at Medium Man who assumed Mort was so bowled over by his good idea that he couldn't talk. Then Mort kind of shook his head the littlest bit, lowered his eyes, and put his hand up to his mouth. When he looked again he hoped the guy across from him would have disappeared. No such luck. Mort set aside his beer. It was his turn to talk real slow.

  "You are so screwed up. We can't get anything from her."

  "Sure we can." Medium Man was excited now that Mort hadn't walked straight out the door. He twitched and scuffled and wiggled in his seat as he laid out his plan. "You're smart, Mort. You're a good talker. You can go to the police. You'll know how to do it."

  "You want me to go to the police and tell them I have information on who it was killed those kids and the nanny? And you think after I do that, they're going to hand over fifty grand?"

  Medium Man's head bobbed up and down. Mort was so close that Medium Man could smell what he had for dinner. Mort reached over the table and punched the other guy on the shoulder with one finger.

  "What're you going to do with fifty grand if you're strapped on the table waitin' for the needle?"

  "But I won't be. And neither will you," Medium Man exclaimed, just about jumping out of his skin now. He wished he could talk as fast as he was thinking.

  "Yeah? Man, you are nuts. You tell me how you figure that."

  "Well." Medium Man whispered now that they had gotten to the hard part, the part he needed help with. "I don't really have it all figured. I thought if you could do the right talking, we'd split it and take off. We could live good Mort. We'd both have a bundle. Look."

  Medium Man reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. He shoved it Mort's way. Mort glanced at it. Dumb shit had to cross out the numbers three times before he managed to figure half of fifty was twenty-five. Medium Man kept talking and pushing that pitiful piece of paper across the table.

  "We could finger somebody else. You know one of them winos that hang around Susie's place or somethin'. I'd give my knife to plant on him. I think that might be good, even though it would be sad to lose that blade to a wino. Then you tell the cops you know who did it and point to the wino that has the knife. But you might have a better way. I guess you should think up how to do it. What do you say? Huh, what do you think?"

  When Mort sat back like he was considering all this, Medium Man smiled. He could already feel that money in his hands. He could feel the sunshine on his face and the boy lying next to him on the beach. But Mort wasn't thinking about Medium Man's plans, he was thinking he was getting old because he hadn't seen something like this coming. When Mort stayed silent for a long time and didn't even drink his beer, Medium Man's smile faded and he curled his fingers around the paper, crumpling it.

  "You don't think it would work, do you?" he said, wishing he could take everything back, especially the clothes he had bought the boy now that there wouldn't be extra money to pay for them.

  Mort didn't answer right away. First, he looked at a couple walking by the table. The woman kind of looked like Georgia: big tits pushed out of the V-neck of her sweater that was too tight. This woman had no hips to speak of but then again neither did Georgia. He liked Georgia an awful lot. She would love having the kind of money Medium Man was talking about, but he didn't love her enough to get himself killed or caught for the extra dough. They had already been paid well, anyway. At least Mort had been well paid since he saved back a little extra for a finder's fee. He took a long drink of his beer, and then pulled his brows together.

  "Can I think on it awhile?" Mort asked. "I mean, that money ain't going nowhere. And if we're going to do this, we gotta do it right. Understand? We gotta make sure they don't think it's us that did it, you see. We gotta find just the right guy to take the fall."

  Mort rolled his eyes and snorted a good old boy snort and Medium Man laughed right back at him.

  "Yeah, oh yeah. That's it. You're smart, Mort. You're really smart." Medium Man was so relieved that he felt his bladder beginning to give away. "You know, if we work it right I bet that broad would give more than fifty. What do you think? Maybe a lot more."

  "Hey, now there's something to think about." Mort took another drink. When he was sure he could look at Medium Man without wanting to smack him, Mort said: "If you have any more ideas, I want to know right away, okay? I'm going to tell Georgia that if you call I want to know about it right away."

  "Hey, that's good. And if you come up with an idea you tell me." Medium Man returned the courtesy.

  "You betcha," Mort assured him. "Yep, you'll be the first to know when I got it figured out. I can promise you that."

  They parted on the street. Medium Man tried not to grin but he did and that made people coming toward him stare. Once, Medium Man looked over his shoulder to see Mort watching him. Mort gave him a little wave, so Medium Man gave a little wave back. The second time he looked back, Mort was gone. That wasn't a surprise. He was probably in as much of a hurry to get home as Medium Man was.

  Th
e boy agonized for almost five hours, and finally figured there were only three things that could be going on.

  First, Medium Man was hiding across the street, watching the building, testing the boy's loyalty, and waiting for the boy to do something he shouldn't.

  Next, Medium Man had gone somewhere but that somewhere was close and he would be able to see the boy walking down the street after he left the building.

  Finally, Medium Man might actually have gone somewhere that a bus had to take him. He had ditched that car real fast after they went to that cemetery. If a bus took him, he would probably be gone a long time.

  The first two options scared the boy silly, so he sat around. He thought. He made one decision and then changed his mind. He started to leave, looked out the window, sat down again, and picked at the sores on his face. With every hour lost, his agitation grew. He began to fantasize.

  He could have already been gone fifteen minutes…

  Half an hour…

  An hour…

  Almost two if only he had left when he thought he should.

  It was just after two in the morning when, more afraid of staying than of leaving, the boy slung his pack over his shoulder, looked out the window again, and left the apartment. He kept his head down as he shot out of the stairwell, onto the sidewalk, and turned left. Forcing himself to walk fast instead of run, he was almost at the end of the block when he started to breathe easy for the first time in a week.

  Georgia was asleep when Mort got home. She had dyed her hair and it looked like a white Brillo pad on the pillow. He looked in on the girls. They were sleeping like angels in the middle of their messy world. He checked the back door. It was locked. He checked the windows. They were closed.

  When he was sure his house was secure and his women safe, Mort went into the living room and dialed a number. That number went to another number, and it was the person at that number he wanted to talk to. The man had been sleeping, but Mort knew he was awake enough to understand what he was telling him.

  It wasn't that this man needed to know what was going on, but Mort called out of courtesy since he was Mort's bread and butter client. He didn't want him hearing second hand that there was another problem. The guy said it was no skin off his nose. Whatever Mort wanted to do, but the solution to his problem would be on his dime. This man had never seen Mort. If he had ever seen Medium Man, he would never remember. The phone numbers they used during a job weren't traceable since the forwarding number changed all the time and the cells were disposable. It was a class operation all the way and Mort liked being part of it and he was glad to get this off his chest.

  Mort said thank you. The man ended the conversation by warning that he expected no more glitches. If there were, he would have to take his business elsewhere. Mort assured him there wouldn't be. They said goodnight, and Mort crawled into bed. Mort slept with Georgia's leg over his skinny hips and his fingers dug into her ample thigh. His household was quiet, and his mind was at rest in this early hour. He fell asleep only to be wakened a while later by a noise. Georgia's leg landed heavily on the mattress as he turned away from her. Mort's hand went under the pillow for the gun he always kept there, but it was only Bobbi standing by their bed. He smiled sleepily thinking how sweet she looked in her girl-power pajamas. Mort let go of the gun and reached out his arms. Bobbi went to him. He lifted her off the floor and pulled her into bed with him.

  "I had a bad dream, daddy," Bobbi whispered as Mort arranged the covers under her chin.

  "Bad dreams can't hurt you," he mumbled and laced his arms around his little girl. He fell asleep again. He could rest awhile before he had to go to work. It was only three. But, Mort couldn't get back to sleep, so he listened to his little girl breathing softly, and his wife snoring and waited until it would be time to go.

  CHAPTER 39

  DAY 9 – MORNING

  It was four in the morning and light enough that anyone could have seen Medium Man sitting in the alley weeping, but he didn't care. He was inconsolable as he held the boy, and stroked his face, and rocked back and forth. The boy, dead now for some time, looked quite lovely since the blood had drained from his face leaving it all one color. His eyes were closed but his long lashes were still pretty. It was also nice now that his eyes didn't move around the way they had when he was alive, like he was looking for a way out. The boy looked like he was sleeping because there wasn't a mark on the front of him. Sadly, the back of him was kind of a mess. Medium Man had got him good, right between the shoulder blades, pulling down and then pulling up again so that he laid the boy's back open.

  Imagining that he was sleeping helped Medium Man stop crying. Realizing that he really had to go helped too. Even in this neighborhood, there were folks who would call the cops on a guy walking around all bloody and all. That would not be fair since what happened was pretty much the boy's fault but they wouldn't know that. As he was thinking of going, the boy's body jerked a little. That surprised Medium Man. He was a little delighted, too, so he petted the boy and cooed and tried to get him to wake up. When he didn't, Medium Man got up.

  He stood over the boy for a second and thought about how awesome he had been when he saw the boy hurrying away. He had never moved so fast in his life. Up the stairs. Down again. Knife in hand. Then Bam! Bam! Bam! Into the boy's back. Bam! Wham! The boy didn't even have time to scream, that's how fast and good Medium Man was with his knife.

  Before he left, he laid the boy out on the ground nicely and brushed his greasy hair into place. There was trash in the alley that he collected and put over the body. It wasn't a lot but it was better than nothing. He couldn't do anything about the trail of blood that was left after he dragged the boy into the alley, so he didn't try to clean that up. Medium Man walked three blocks to the all night liquor store near his place. That's where he bought himself a bottle. He hadn't looked back when he left the alley. That was the way they did it in the movies when someone wanted to be strong. Medium Man would never know that he should have looked back. If he had, he would have seen the boy's eyes flutter open.

  "Come on, Todd. This isn't going to do you any good, and you know it."

  Cori sat in the same chair she had taken thirty minutes earlier when she and Finn entered the small, windowless room at Men's Central to interrogate Todd Webster. Finn got the call about the collar at five a.m., Cori at five-oh-five and both of them met up here at six thirty. Finn looked fresh as a daisy, Cori had barely managed to get her hair sprayed into place. It still hurt a little to sit, but it hurt more to stand up. She didn't want Webster to know the damage he'd done so she sat. Not that she held anything against him. Being a prick was his job, and without guys like him she wouldn't be gainfully employed. Still, none of this made for a good mood. The silver lining in Cori's dark cloud was that Todd actually had something to say.

  "I never, never killed anybody much less two kids, and sure as hell not Rachel." Todd's head swung from Cori to Finn and back again. "And since it doesn't matter now, and the whole thing is screwed without her anyway, I might as well tell you. Rachel wasn't my girlfriend she was my partner. We made good money. I mean real good money. She's the last person I wanted to see dead."

  "No one would pay big money to see that woman naked, Todd," Cori said.

  "Tell me something I don't know," he snorted. "Rachel was the distributor, not an actress. We've been working together almost a year. Europe's a big market for the kind of smut we turned out. I wouldn't care who she slept with as long as that pipeline didn't dry up." He scowled and thought for a minute and then added: "How much did she have in the bank again?"

  "Thirty big ones. And that's just in the checking account." Cori twirled the little blue plastic stick in what was left of her coffee. She punched the bottom of the cup and felt the Styrofoam give.

  "Then she was holding out on me, man." Webster complained. "She told me the exchange rate sucked. I'd make a couple hundred hard copies, we'd sell 'em cheap, and I'd pick up two grand free and clear every time we s
hipped. The digital stuff we priced way low to get traffic. I just figured it hadn't caught on yet. I should have paid more attention to the business end, but I'm an artist. You know, left brain/right brain?"

  "How about no brain," Cori drawled.

  He didn't contradict her, he just shook his head and the orange jumpsuit seemed to swallow him up. Then he grinned and Cori shivered thinking about all the Todd Webster's out there just waiting for a single gal like her to hit on; a gal with a regular paycheck.

  "I give her credit for scamming the old scammer," he said. "I'll miss her. She really got into the production, you know. She didn't look so good on film, but she had energy. Yep, that woman had energy. Sometimes I used her when the script called for a threesome."

  "You had scripts?" Cori asked, but Finn didn't want to get waylaid.

  "She fought real hard before she was killed," Finn said. "If you didn't do it then someone you know might have, so we'll be wanting a list of your associates, Todd."

  "Aw, come on. That'll put me out of business for sure. There's probably still a domestic market."

  "And if one of your associates took out Rachel and you don't cooperate with us, then you are complicit in a triple murder. An accessory after the fact," Cori warned.

  Todd's eyes got big, but before he could profess his innocence again, Finn asked:

  "How did you meet her?"

  "Cholo's. That was her favorite. She was hard to get to know but then she'd tie one on and talk a blue streak. I saw her a couple of times. I told her what I did. I thought I'd impress her, but she turned the tables. She impressed me. Rachel was a distributor in the homeland until her producer got out of the business and she started looking for something new. The nanny gig was the easiest way to get over here. She started to troll on the weekends and we hooked up. The rest is history."

  "Did you ever go into the house where she worked?" Finn asked.