The Cleaner

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The homework has been completed. The work carried out. Now it comes down to the sales pitch.

Melissa walks slowly across the grass toward me. My gun in her hand. She trusts me enough to meet me in a dark park at night, but not enough to come unarmed. No surprise there. Nor is there any surprise for her when I produce Detective Calhoun’s gun and point it at her.

I stand my ground and wait patiently. She stops a few feet away. She’s not smiling. Perhaps she sees no humor in the situation. Nor does she show any fear.

“Seems you can’t get enough of me,” I say, looking her up and down. She looks good.

“Does seem that way, doesn’t it? You got the money?”

I shake the plastic bag I’m carrying. “I’ve got something better than money.”

She lifts the gun to my face. “Oh?”

I hand her the plastic bag. Both of us are keeping our guns trained on the other. She quickly glances into it.

“A video camera.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s this for?”

“You may want to watch the tape.”

“You bastard.”

“Why?”

She flings the camera back at me. “You fucking bastard.”

I start to laugh. From her abuse it’s obvious she’s figured things out.

“I’ve got copies of that tape, Melissa, and if anything should happen to me along the lines of, oh, I don’t know, anything at all, then a copy of that tape will find its way into the hands of the police.”

“You played me,” she says.

“Wasn’t difficult.”

She grunts. “You’re on that tape too, Joe.”

“Actually, I’m not. Not that it matters. If you kill me, what are the police going to do? Dig me up and arrest me?”

She stares at me silently for a few more seconds, then sighs. “It’s a stalemate then. Just as if anything happens to me, Joe-to use your phrase, oh, I don’t know, anything at all-copies of everything I know about you will make their way to those same people.”

“Sounds like a pretty good deal,” I say, and this is the best result I can hope for. It’s the result I’ve aimed for. Sure, I still want to feed her through a branch chipper, but with self-preservation in mind, it’s not the sort of thing I can do. Maybe one day if I can get my hands on the evidence she has against me, or if I ever discover I have cancer and only weeks to live.

She nods and slips the gun back into her handbag. “Well, I can’t say it’s been fun, Joe.”

“Nor can I.” I too put my gun away.

“What did you do with the cop?”

I shrug. “The usual stuff.”

Neither of us turns away. The conversation is over. The rules have been stated and we both understand them. Yet here we are, a few feet apart, neither of us able to turn our back on what’s happened. We’ve gone through so much, and for us to walk away empty-handed would be heartbreaking. It’s anticlimactic. It would be like waking up on Christmas morning and finding out everybody you know has given you the same style of socks.

The moonlight strikes her face and makes her skin look pale. Again I’m struck by how beautiful she is. If it wasn’t for the fact I wanted to take a knife and. . We both step forward into an embrace and start kissing. She’s stuffing her tongue into my throat as if the Holy Grail is down there somewhere, and I’m trying to stuff mine into hers. Our bodies grind into each other. My hands are roaming behind her back. Hers are behind mine and she’s not trying to get my gun.

I can’t understand it, and for a moment I think of Calhoun’s original description of killing Daniela Walker. One second he’d been talking to her, the next she was dead. It’s happening to me right now and I’m hardly aware of it because my body’s on automatic. Ten seconds ago I was staring at her, and now I’ve got my hands digging into her back and squashing her perfect breasts against my chest. After a few seconds we pull back and look at each other, neither of us sure what to say, neither of us sure what the hell is going on. I think she’s in as much shock as I am.

I can see hatred in her eyes, and I’m sure there must be anger in mine. . and then we’re kissing again, harder this time.

We pull back. I can’t tell if the hatred and the anger are fading away or increasing. She opens her mouth to say something, I do the same, but all we end up doing is grabbing hold of each other. We lock in a passionate embrace, our lips mashing and our tongues darting. Nothing else matters anymore, and I have no doubt that all across the world people are finding love at this exact moment. I’ve no idea what I’m finding, but I like it.

Like the week I spent in bed with my ball sac in tatters, time seems to come and go, as though I am in a place where time doesn’t really matter at all, but only events. The moon is still out and we are walking beneath it, trying to hold each other while stumbling. . where?

She takes me back to her place. She drives us there. We keep looking at each other, and every intersection, every traffic light, I keep waiting for the spell to break, but it doesn’t. Then we’re in her bedroom, and if I could think I’d be thinking she’s going to kill me. Only we’re not killing each other, instead we’re both naked and she’s lying on top of me with my testicle pressing against her, and I have no idea how much time has passed since we first kissed. I expect to feel the damp grass on my back, even though I can see her ceiling.

Is this really happening? I look up at her, and she’s got this grin on her face. It’s a similar grin to when she ripped apart my left nut, but I can’t see any pliers nearby. The hatred has gone.

Yeah, this is happening.

Time becomes muddled again as we play beneath the sheets for what feels like forever, then we’re lying side by side and staring at the ceiling. Finally I fall asleep. Saturday rolls around and starts with us being all over each other. We take a lunch break. It’s pouring with rain outside, it lands heavily on the roof and I never understood until now how the sound of rain can be romantic. It’s just like all those books I read said it’d be like. We eat cheese on toast and we don’t really talk about much, if anything really, yet there is nothing awkward about the long patches of silence, just as there is nothing awkward about the fact I’m down to one testicle because of her. She doesn’t apologize for it and I don’t tell her how annoyed I am by it. We spent the afternoon in her bed and the room gets darker as the evening sets in. The rain keeps getting heavier. The house is comfortably warm. We soak in the bathtub for an hour and now we finally do talk beyond things like are you hungry and do you like how this feels. We talk movies and books and music.

Saturday becomes Sunday and the rain eases but doesn’t disappear. I wake up and stare at Melissa and I can honestly say I feel no desire to kill her. I watch her sleep, but I’m thinking about how it would feel to tear her apart, to dig my fingers and a knife into her flesh, and deconstruct her as painfully as I can. . And I could too. . and it would be fun-but I would never hurt her.

I know what this feeling is. Watching her, knowing I could kill her at any second, I know that eventually-if not today, if not tomorrow-I am going to need to sort out my life. She wakes and smiles and wishes me good morning.

“So, Melissa, apparently you kill people,” I say, after wishing a good morning back to her.

“Apparently.”

“You any good at it?”

“Exceptionally.”

“You want to meet my mother?”

She laughs, and we end up making love. Afterward, I think back to that moment when I stood in the crippled woman’s house, looking at her fish. At the time I didn’t take any because I knew they would not fill the emptiness I felt. Did I know then what I know now? That I was in love with Melissa?

All the killings, the fantasies, and now they’ve ended and what I’ve found is love. It seems as though my life has followed the pages of a typical romance novel. I feel like a regular Romeo, and Melissa the beautiful Juliet.

I get up, get dressed, make conversation, and suddenly I am on the street, walking to my apartment, cars and pedestrians moving around me, and life is still a blur. Every now and then I’ll realize I’ve crossed a street or gone around a corner without being aware of it. The city looks pretty good on a Sunday morning. I get wet as I walk, but it doesn’t bother me. I think of my future, which is something I never really think too much about. I know that I’ll never be caught. I’m far too clever for that. In contrast to what everybody learns, in contrast to what they believe, sometimes the bad guy will get away with it. That’s just life. Live and learn.

A happy ending to a happy life. That’s what it comes down to. I was happy as Joe the Christchurch Carver, but now I’m even happier as Joe the Romeo. This crazy mixed-up world has taken it upon itself to find me true love, to find me companionship. I’ll leave my job and find something far less menial. With a cat, and with a wife-to-be, the possibilities for my future are endless. I’ve lost two fish, but I have gained something even better.

I’m at the steps to my apartment building when a car screeches to a halt right next to me. I start to go for my gun, but then I see that it’s Sally driving. That’s why the car screeched-people like her are crap drivers. I can’t even imagine how somebody with her condition can have got a license, but figure it must be in the same tradition that they are given jobs-that whole forcing her kind into trolley-pushing positions. She opens the door and races around the car toward me, leaving it running. She’s puffing, as if the twenty-feet jog has taken it out of her. I have a can of cat food in my hand that I can’t even remember buying. My briefcase is God knows where. The sun is out, the breeze is warm, and for once it isn’t too hot. It’s just perfect. One moment I am alone, the next Sally is here. And she is crying.

Sighing, I put a hand on her shoulder and ask her to tell me what’s wrong.