No Safe House

Twenty-two

Bert Gooding was running the Buick’s headlights off the battery. He wasn’t too worried about anyone noticing the lights out here in the country on a farm, but thought leaving the engine running might attract some attention. It was a big V-8, sounded like a tractor, and pumped out exhaust like a coal plant.

But he needed to see what he was doing. So he positioned the car just right.

He’d brought an ax along, given the kind of job it was, and a change of clothes. It was hard to do something like this and not make a mess of yourself. When he was a kid, his dad used to take him twice a year to a cabin up in Maine, where they had a woodstove, and Bert always volunteered to split the already cut firewood into smaller pieces. He loved the feeling that came from making a perfect swing, blade meeting wood, forcing its way through cleanly without getting stuck. That satisfying sound of cracking wood. Using sufficient force so that you didn’t have to hold the wood down with your boot to pry the blade free. It was all physics.

Not quite the same as what he was doing now. But the principle remained the same. You wanted to take a good, strong swing, connect in just the right place, make as clean a cut as possible. But there wasn’t much chance of getting your blade stuck, and the sound wasn’t nearly as satisfying.

Sickening was more like it.

Didn’t feel good about this. Didn’t feel good about this at all. But sometimes you just had to do what you had to do, at least so long as you were still working for Vince Fleming.

He raised the ax over his head, swung down hard in a perfect arc.

Smoosh.

Moved over about a foot, swung again.

Smoosh.

It wasn’t quiet out here, not even with the car turned off. He was right up against the pen where the pigs were kept, and all the commotion had awakened them. They were grunting and snorting and bumping up against one another against the fence. They knew a treat was coming.

Bert tossed some morsels into the pen.

“Eat that, you fat fucks,” he said.

He had the ax up over his head, was getting ready to put some momentum into it, when his phone rang.

“Shit,” he said. Threw him off. He brought the ax down to his side, leaned the handle up against the front bumper of the Buick. He fetched the phone from his pocket, getting some blood on the screen, but not enough that he couldn’t see where the call was coming from: HOME.

Jabba.

He put the phone to his ear. “Yes, Janine?”

“Where are you?”

“Work.”

“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

“You said you were going to be back by ten. You had a short thing with Vince and you’d be back.”

“Something came up,” Bert said.

“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?” she snapped.

“Forgotten what?”

“The meeting? At ten? At the home?”

How could he forget? She’d been reminding him about it all week. They’d moved Janine’s eighty-year-old mother, Brenda, out of her apartment and into a seniors home in Orange a month before, but it wasn’t working out. Brenda was making everyone’s life hell. Hated the food, dumped it on the dining room floor in protest. Accused staff of stealing from her even though she couldn’t tell them what was missing. Cheated at cards with the other “inmates,” as she called them. Pushed people in wheelchairs out of her way so she could get on the elevator first.

The managers of the home had compiled a list of grievances about her, and now they wanted her out.

Janine said there was no way her mother could return to her apartment, so she’d just have to move in with Bert and her.

Bert had objected. But Janine wasn’t hearing any of it.

“I won’t be able to make the meeting,” Bert said.

“You have to be there. We’re probably going to have to move her out right then and there,” Janine said.

“I told you, something’s come up, and it’s going to take all night to sort it out.”

“I’m not happy, Bert.”

“You’ve never been happy,” he said. “Jesus could return to earth and paint a smiley face on your puss and you’d still be miserable.”

“Don’t you—”

He ended the call, muted the phone. She’d call back. She always did.

Bert returned to the task at hand, imagining that it was Janine he was cutting up into pieces and feeding to the pigs.

He wondered whether the beasts had any kind of standards. If he brought his wife here, tossed her into the pen in bite-sized bits, would they turn their snouts up at her? Give her a pass? Bert guessed she’d be too distasteful even for them.