Hero

by J. F. Gonzalez; Wrath James White

  “What’s goin’ on, Big Mike?” That was his right hand man, Tracy. Tracy had retreated from the impromptu gathering on the street and was reclining against one of the cars parked at the curb. “You look like you seen a ghost or somethin’.”

  “No ghosts here. But I heard some screamin’. You hear anything?”

  “’Zat why you went up to Mrs. Smith’s place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure she didn’t just have the TV on too loud?”

  “Fuck if I know. That didn’t sound like no TV though.”

  “So what was it?”

  Mike told him quickly, leaving nothing out. Tracy’s features turned grim. Now he was looking up at the apartment window, which had suddenly gone dark.

  “So what time is it, like nine o’clock or something?”

  Mike checked the time on his cell phone.

  “Nine forty-seven.”

  “I remember seeing that other nurse show up,” Tracy said. “She hasn’t left, either.”

  “I know.”

  “You think it takes two nurses to take care of Mrs. Smith? That don’t sound right to me.”

  “No shit.”

  “And it took awhile for the one nurse to show up at the door?”

  “Yeah. And during the time I was knockin’ I didn’t hear shit until she asked who it was.”

  “Well shit, maybe she was asleep or somethin’.”

  “Yo, Mike, maybe that other nurse is that other one’s girlfriend or somethin’.” This came from Reggie White, one of the other crew members who was now joining in on the conversation. Reggie was the joker of the group, but Mike wasn’t in the mood for jokes this evening.

  “Fuck that shit, I know what I saw, and I know what I heard. Somethin’s fucked up in there.”

  Tracy appeared to understand the seriousness of the situation.

  “Maybe you should call Tonya.”

  That settled it. Mike pressed the speed dial for Tonya’s number and put the phone to his ear.

  “Hi, this is Tonya Brown and I can’t get to the phone, please leave me a message and I’ll call you back.”

  Shit. “’Sup baby girl, Big Mike here. It’s Thursday night, ‘bout ten till ten, and I think you need to get over to your mom’s as soon as you can to check on her. I heard some weird noises comin’ out of her apartment, but the nurse said your moms was just havin’ nightmares. It didn’t feel right to me, and the nurse—that African mommy—wouldn’t answer the door at first. When she finally did, she told me she was gonna call the police. Anyway, you should probably get over here as soon as you can.”

  Mike folded the phone up and placed it back in the front pockets of his baggy jeans. His gaze was still directed at the dark window of Mrs. Smith’s apartment.

  “Maybe we should call the police?” Reggie suggested.

  “Man, you stuck on stupid. You out of your damn mind?” Mike said. “It’ll take them all night just to get over here and when they do the first thing they’re going to do is put us face down on the sidewalk and search us for drugs. By the time they finally got around to checking on Mrs. Smith she could be dead and who do you think they’d try to pin it on?”

  “True dat. It’s fucked up. Fuckin’ bitch ass cops. So then what do we do?”

  “We can go up to the apartment and check,” Tracy said. “You know, listen at the front door?”

  That was a good idea. Mike moved away from the car he was leaning against.

  “Let’s do it.”

  The three of them headed across the street and silently ascended the steps to the building. When they reached the apartment, Mike motioned for silence. They padded across the front walkway to the front door like cats stalking prey. Mike positioned himself at one side of the door, Tracy on the other. Reggie stood by the wall, near the window.

  Mike leaned his ear towards the front door.

  Silence on the other end.

  He locked eyes with Tracy for a moment.

  They both heard the sound at the same time. Mike almost reached for his gun, as did Tracy. Behind them, at the window, Reggie whispered, “Somebody’s movin’ around in there.”

  Mike motioned for Reggie to keep silent and strained to hear the sound coming from the apartment. It was hard to tell what it was, but he could tell Tracy heard it too. It almost sounded like running water from the bathroom.

  “Maybe that nurse is just takin’ a shower,” Tracy whispered.

  Mike nodded. That was a possibility, and he had to admit that the more he listened, the more he could discern the sound. It was definitely the sound of running water. Probably the shower. Faint, but unmistakable.

  They remained on the stoop of the apartment for nearly fifteen minutes, silently listening for any unusual sounds. After ten minutes the shower turned off. There was silence for a minute, then what sounded like movement from deep inside the apartment. Probably the bathroom, Mike thought. Maybe the nurse is taking a shower.

  Mike motioned for Reggie and Tracy to follow him and they stole quietly back down the stairs.

  Once they were on the street Mike saw that the informal party was breaking up. Reggie’s girl Britney was waiting for him and Mike nodded. “Make sure she gets home.” Reggie nodded and darted off to join Britney.

  “Whatcha wanna do?” Tracy asked.

  Mike looked up at the apartment.

  “I’m gonna wait out here for awhile and keep my cell phone on.”

  “You think Tonya will call you back?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You still worried?”

  “I don’t know.” That was the honest truth. Mike didn’t know whether he should be worried now. When he was talking to Natsinet through the door he’d had a bad feeling in his gut, but after being away from the problem and listening to what was going on inside…well, that changed everything. He hadn’t heard anything unusual, and they hadn’t seen that other nurse come back out. Maybe Reggie was right and the two nurses had a thing going on. Maybe she was simply at the apartment to help out. He hadn’t seen anybody exit the building, although he supposed it was possible that she’d exited the building from the rear and walked around the end of the block to her car if she’d parked it around the corner—parking spaces along the curb on this end of the street were slim. If that was the case, he wouldn’t have seen the second nurse leave.

  “You want me to stay?”

  “Nah, go on. You got some rounds to make anyway.”

  “You got that, right. See you back at your crib ‘round two?”

  “Alright.” They tapped fists and Tracy melted away into the night.

  “That nurse was kinda fine. We should have busted in there and pulled a train on her ass.”

  “Go home, Tracy.”

  “I’m just sayin’. She was kinda fine though, better than these crackwhores.”

  Tracy’s voice trailed off as he disappeared around the corner.

  Big Mike remained on the street, leaning against his parked car, watching Adelle Smith’s apartment. He remained there long after everybody else had left.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took some time, but Natsinet was eventually able to completely dismember Rachael Williams’s body in the bathtub.

  She got most of the messy part done with the shower running. She worked in the nude. Her small pear-shaped breasts were covered in blood. It dripped from each nipple as if she were preparing to give suck to some vampiric infant. She had laid plastic garbage bags along the floor and around the base of the toilet and worked as quickly as she could, putting all her strength into the job and relying on her medical training to get her through it, cutting through tendons and cartilage where she would find the least resistance.

  Thanks to her medical background, she was able to slice through the joints at the shoulders and hips pretty quickly. Likewise, when she decapitated Rachael, she felt along the back of the dead woman’s neck first to locate the vertebrae. Then she started between the sixth and seventh vertebrae, cutting expertl
y between the disks to sever the spinal cord and cutting through the cartilage. A third stroke went through the rest of the neck easy. There wasn’t much blood; some leaked out into the tub, but most of it remained in the body due to the stopping of the heart.

  Natsinet picked up Rachael’s severed head by the hair and looked at it in disgust.

  “Fuckin’ nosy ass bitch comin’ in here.” She tossed the head aside toward the end of the tub where it hit the porcelain with a thud.

  With the running water from the shower she was able to wash any excess blood down the drain, but she knew she’d have a bigger problem with the woman’s torso. Rachael Williams had been a big woman. Natsinet realized this as she was cutting through the hip joints to separate the legs. The woman was big boned. Probably part of her natural body chemistry. Which meant she was going to have to divide her torso in half to make carrying her out of here easier.

  Natsinet paused in her work, suddenly realizing she had nowhere to store the body, and headed through the darkened living room to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. A staff assistant at Hospice Nursing had made sure there was food for the nursing staff who would be providing onsite care. There was a jug of milk, some half and half, a couple of Tupperware containers that held leftovers, and a carton of eggs. She opened the vegetable drawer and was surprised and rather pleased to see that Rachael had put a serious dent in what had been a well-stocked supply of broccoli, carrots, and lettuce. Not that eating healthy would do her good now; the bitch was dead. Natsinet opened the freezer. There was a frozen pack of chicken legs, a couple of boxes of pre-prepared frozen meals (Weight Watchers), and a carton of ice cream. Natsinet stood in front of the refrigerator, thinking. Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer store one of his disarticulated victims in his refrigerator and freezer? If she moved some things around, she might be able to fit Rachael’s body parts in both compartments. It would be a stretch, but she had to try.

  She turned her attention to the sink and flipped on the overhead light. After some poking and prodding she found a switch that turned on the garbage disposal. Natsinet grinned. With a combination of the refrigerator/freezer and the garbage disposal, she had a way out of this. Pour the blood and organs like the lungs, liver, and pancreas down the garbage disposal, store the limbs, head, and as much of the torso in the refrigerator/freezer tonight. She could probably even flush smaller organs down the toilet. Then she would have to clean the carpet, get the blood out of it. She would be working all night, but she was pretty sure she could pull this off. She would also wait until the early dawn to see if that thug was still hanging around outside. He’d have to go home sometime, and once the coast was clear she would carry body parts out of the house wrapped in plastic trash bags and dispose of them in the dumpster at the back of the building, making sure they were well buried within the rest of the garbage.

  With a new sense of purpose, Natsinet started rooting around under the sink for some cleaning material. She had to clean the carpets as much as possible before the blood dried and set in permanently (of course, if that happened she could play it by ear and pay somebody to come in to rip up the old carpet and install a new one—she’d pay for that out of her own pocket and keep Mrs. Smith nice and doped up while the job was being done). She quickly found carpet cleaner, a plastic bucket, and some rags. She went into the living room and turned on the light. Blood spattered the living room wall, the front door, and one of the chairs and an end table. There was a huge blood stain on the living room floor, a big gob of it actually, right where Rachael’s head had once lain. For the first time Natsinet cursed herself for losing her temper so quickly. It was going to take a minor miracle to remove all this blood so it would appear nothing happened.

  Natsinet got to work, still nude. No sense getting dressed now since I still have that bitch’s body to deal with when I’m done, she thought. Four hours later the walls, the door, and the furniture were free of blood and the carpet was scrubbed clean. Natsinet stood in the kitchen, her chest and face sweating from the exertion of scrubbing the blood out of the carpet with hot water, carpet cleaner, and chemicals. She’d made so many trips to the kitchen sink to pour dirty, bloody water down the drain that she couldn’t count them. She glanced at the digital clock on the counter. It was two-thirty a.m.

  After checking Adelle’s vital signs and noting them in her chart, she headed back into the living room, pondering her next move.

  If only that nosy bitch hadn’t shown up, Natsinet could have gotten out of this situation in a less precarious way. She would have found the right drug combinations that would have triggered another stroke, maybe a heart attack, and the old lady would be no more. She was pretty sure the nurse had not told anybody she was coming by here, but she couldn’t take that chance. She wondered if any of those hoods across the street had seen Rachael enter the apartment. She had to assume they had. She also had to assume that some of them had police records and couldn’t be trusted.

  Rachael approached the closed curtain that covered the window overlooking the street below and peered outside. The street was empty. Those gangbangers were gone now.

  An idea was forming in Natsinet’s mind. She crossed the apartment to the bathroom. Rachael’s clothes were piled in the sink where she’d put them after Natsinet took them off her prior to dismembering her. Her purse lay on the floor. Natsinet picked up the purse and rifled through it, finding a set of keys. Her fingers ran across the black surface of a car alarm key fob.

  Keys in hand, Natsinet went into the second bedroom where she was sleeping while taking care of her charge. She dressed quickly, pulled on a pair of tennis shoes and, as an afterthought, picked up the gun, which she’d left in the room. She’d wiped Rachael’s blood and strands of hair off it earlier in the evening. She slapped a full clip in and made sure the safety was on, then jammed it in the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. Then, with Rachael’s keys in one hand, her own keys in her front jeans pocket that contained the key to the apartment, she stepped outside, locking the door behind her.

  She knew she would have to make this quick if she wanted to avoid detection. She darted out of the building and, holding the key fob in front of her, began pressing the disarm button. She turned left, heading east, walking down the sidewalk, key fob pointed at the cars parked along the curb as she pressed the button, trying to see which vehicle might be Rachael’s.

  Nothing.

  Come on, come on, you had to have parked somewhere, Natsinet thought. She made it to the end of the block, looked both ways. The coast was clear. Making a random guess, she turned left again and headed up the street, depressing the disarm key and five houses later she got a reply: a blink of headlights.

  Sighing in relief, Natsinet ran up to the car, pressed the key fob again. This time she heard the disengaging of the car’s locks. She took a quick look around and was surprised to see nobody out. She approached the driver’s side door and got it open quickly. The vehicle was a Toyota Camry, a nice one. If it wasn’t brand new, it was well cared for. Somebody would appreciate this car once they saw it. Moving quickly, Natsinet leaned inside, inserted the keys in the ignition and turned the key one notch to power on the electrical system. That not only confirmed these keys belonged to Rachael’s car, it would allow her to roll down the driver’s side window to make the bait more enticing.

  She pressed the button of the power windows, let them go down halfway and stopped. Then she pulled the keys out, shut the door without locking it, and headed back toward the apartment.

  Her nerves were on fire when she let herself back into the apartment. She leaned against the locked door, trying to catch her breath. Natsinet was positive that Rachael’s car would be stolen by eight o’clock. Probably by one of the punks that was hanging out in front of the house last night. Next step was to work on getting the rest of her body out of the apartment.

  Natsinet glanced at the clock. Two fifty a.m. Only a few more hours until daybreak.

  Figuring she’d better make the best of it,
Natsinet stripped her clothes off in her room, and headed back to the bathroom to resume her work on Rachael.

  By four o’clock, Rachael’s blood and most of her soft tissue organs except for the stomach and intestines had been poured down the sink, ground up in the garbage disposal, and flushed down the toilet.

  By five o’clock Rachael’s torso was cleanly bisected below the fifteenth lumbar vertebrae, and the limbs themselves were wrapped up in newspaper and ready to be stored in the freezer. Fifteen minutes later, the bisected torso was wrapped in plastic garbage bags; the head now sat in the kitchen sink, ready to be bundled up for storage.

  Natsinet stood in the kitchen, her muscles screaming in agony. She’d never been put through such a heavy workout in her life. She knew that most of her exhaustion probably had to do with the stress. She was looking out the kitchen window, trying to track what had to be done next when it suddenly came to her. No sense taking the body out now. People are already out and leaving for work. They’ll see you take a bunch of garbage bags out to the dumpster. No, your best bet is to wait until tomorrow night real late, two or three in the morning. Get rid of her then. Besides, waste management will show up six hours later to pick it up. Then you’ll be free and clear of her.

  Free and clear.

  Natsinet ran her fingers through her dirty, sweaty hair. She was beat. And she needed a shower.

  She stepped into the bathroom, which was more or less spotless even after all the work she’d done to take apart another human being, and took a long, hot shower. Then she checked on Adelle Smith, gave her another shot of Demerol, and went into her room to lay down on the unmade bed. She was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tonya didn’t realize she had a message on her cell until she was at work, getting ready for the first of a series of meetings with the firm of Deloitte & Touche for a surprise audit of their accounting system.