The Embalmer: A Steve Jobz Thriller Read online

  “I am her man,” he whispers. “I am Her . . . Man . . . I am Herman.”

  Gently, he lays her on her back. Her body is less stiff and more life-like now that the rigor mortis is beginning to disappear from her joints. He pulls up her gown, spreads her legs, and enters her slowly. Lovingly. He stares into her wide-open eyes while patiently he pumps away, feeling the passion building inside his body like lava inside a volcano until he erupts with all the force of a seismic event.

  When he’s finished, he whispers, “I love you,” into her ear. “I love you, Peg.”

  He then cleans himself up, buttons his pants, buckles his belt. He pulls her dress down, pulls her back up into a sitting position. Crouching at the knees, he lifts her off the table, carries her upstairs into the kitchen. By the light of the early morning sunshine that pours into the kitchen, he carries her out to Lu’s van. Does it quickly, efficiently, and without unnecessary noise, praying the next-door neighbor isn’t watching. It would be such a shame to have to kill him, he thinks. The old guy who lives next door is not a bad man. He’s just old, bored, and nosy. The kind of man who is born waiting to die.

  It hurt him to kill Henrietta. He liked Henrietta. For all her tantrums and all her tirades, he’d grown to like her over the time he’d been working for her. Still, she saw him entering into the van with Peg, and she had to go. Now he knows someone else will have to go also. It’s a damn shame because he really likes Jobzy . . . Really likes confiding in him. Showing him things on his cell phone. Pictures of girl’s pussies, of their mouths wrapped around his cock.

  Jobz is the only friend he’s got at the Insurance Fraud Agency other than Lu. And Lu is an idiot. Actually, Lu has been allowing him the use of his cargo van so that he can cart his works of living art without damaging them. What this means is, Lu might have to die too. No great loss. But as for Jobz, it’s going to totally suck having to crack his skull open. But what choice does he have? Jobz knows full well by now that Herman is the mortician killer. No doubt about it, Jobzy is smart. And now he has got to go.

  Heading back into the kitchen, he pulls out a brand-new box of blueberry Pop Tarts from the cabinet along with a new two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. Making his way into the living room, he sets them on the table beside Wendy’s bed.

  “Enjoy your food, my love,” he whispers, careful not to wake her from a sound sleep.

  He thinks: First, I’ll drop Peg off at a very special place. And then I’ll pay a visit to the home of my dear old friend, Steve Jobz.

  He gazes upon Wendy. She’s asleep on her back, her chest heaving as she snores so loud he can’t believe she’s not keeping the entire neighborhood up. Soon will come the day when he will walk into this room and she will not be snoring, but she will no longer be breathing either, her over-burdened heart will have finally given out. That will be the day her bennies run out, but that the insurance will kick in. Enough so that he won’t have to depend on the unemployment insurance fraud anymore. He can just collect his check and skip off to Mexico. Or Guatemala. Or maybe Cuba. He’ll find another mortician to make a deal with to provide him with what he needs and he’ll be back in the love business. The business of creating living dolls who love him to death. He is her man, after all.

  He is Herman.

  For now, my orders are to keep things quiet while Miller organizes a plan for hunting down Herman Healy. Once I pass on all the info I know about him, Miller takes it inside the precinct to run the necessary vitals checks, social media accounts, and inevitably, a precise home address for the creep. Meanwhile, I am also ordered to grab a couple hours of sleep. No arguments. Miller is going to need me front and center for nabbing Herman since it’s me who can ID him without question.

  Driving home in the new day’s sunshine, I’m filled with mixed emotions. I’m so shocked and saddened and just generally pissed off about Henry’s assault that I can feel my entire body shaking while I drive. Yeah, I’m super tired, but I’m also super pissed off.

  But then, I’m also happy.

  We got the bastard. We got Herman. We’re gonna take him off the streets, and we’re gonna put him away for good, and he’s never going to kill another innocent woman again for as long as the poor pathetic son of a bitch lives.

  Driving, the exhaustion settles in like a rock, and I find my eyes closing. I slap my face to wake myself up. Something my father used to do when he found himself falling asleep at the wheel.

  As I take the turn that leads me down to the Hudson River and the boat launch where my houseboat is perpetually moored, I can’t say I’m undergoing any sudden second wind. I’m far too beat for that. But I can say I’m prepared to sleep like a rock, even if only for a couple of hours.

  Parking the Mustang at the edge of the launch, I get out and hop onto the old rectangular, two-level boat I purchased for almost nothing soon after my divorce. I head up the exterior stairs, enter the narrow door that accesses the big second level bedroom, and I collapse face first onto the Futon mattress.

  Between the gentle sway of the boat and my tired bones, I immediately drift off to sleep.

  In the dream, I see myself walking a downtown street. I’m all alone, and the city seems abandoned. There are only the old gray concrete warehouse buildings and sidewalks and the cracked macadam beneath my bare feet. A warm breeze blows against my face, and the smell is foul. Like dead fish left to rot out in the hot summer sun.

  There is no logical reason for me walking a desolate downtown street on my own. No logical reason for not wearing shoes other than I must have left the houseboat without putting them on. Perhaps I was being chased. Perhaps somebody wants to kill me. Perhaps I am already dead and don’t know it yet. Or worse, maybe I have died and ended up in hell.

  Then, comes the sound of screaming.

  It’s not a loud noise, but I hear it just the same. Not the sound of one woman screaming, but instead, several. A collective high-pitched scream that even at low volume frightens me. Now, standing in the distance, four bodies. They are female, their hair filling with the hot wind. They are screaming together as if in pain.

  They are coming toward me, and as much as I try maintaining my distance from them, something invisible and strong is pushing me toward them. Then, in a flash, they cover a distance of one hundred yards, and the four of them are standing in front of my face. The one on the far left is a brunette with brown eyes. She is wearing a scarf around her neck, and her head has been cracked open as if with a hammer. She is wearing makeup including red lipstick. Her mouth is slightly open while she peers at me with unblinking eyes and screams.

  The woman beside her has shoulder-length auburn hair and a pale face. A streak of blood runs from her forehead down over her cheek to her chin where it drips red blood down to the gray/black macadam below. Drip, drip, drip.

  The woman next to her is blonde and blue-eyed, and her hair appears to be filled with the wind like the sail on a sailboat. Unlike the others, she bears a smile. They are all strangers to me, but their wails and screams pinch every nerve ending inside my body. If only I could run away.

  The fourth woman is someone I know well.

  She is my friend and boss, Henrietta. Henry.

  As much as it pains me to look at her, I can’t possibly turn away from her bashed-in head, the exposed pink brains, the blood that oozes down her forehead like water over an overfilled dam.

  “Why didn’t you save me?” Henry says to me. “Why did you let Herman kill me? Kill us?”

  “Herman loves you all,” I say. “No one understands him. Besides, you’re not dead yet.”

  The screaming then becomes so intense that I can’t help but drop to my knees and slap my hands against my now bleeding ears. I scream out in pain, but I can’t hear myself.

  That’s when I wake up to the sound of breathing.

  From flat on my back on a plain Futon mattress that’s rolled not onto a bed frame but onto the floor, I stare up at the figure of a man standing in the doorway. The boat bobs. The sun
shines in through the picture windows that span the length of all four walls. The sunlight gleams against the man, and for a moment or two, I am entirely blinded.

  “Hey, Jobzy,” the man says, tone even keel, if not soft. “It’s me. Your pal, Herman. I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  My eyes burn. They are squinting in the sunlight, and I have no choice but to shield them with my hand against my brow.

  “Herman,” I say, sitting up onto one elbow. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You wanna see something cool, Jobzy?”

  My heart, now beating inside my rib cage. Pounding. From the nightmare in my sleep. And the nightmare I’m waking up to.

  “Herman,” I say, my dry voice feeling as if it were peeling away from the raw skin at the back of my throat. “You need to turn yourself in, man. The cops know what you’ve done. They know everything.”

  “You see, even with a name like Steve Jobz,” Herman says, “you’re not really so smart.”

  “What’s that mean, Herman? It’s just a name.”

  “The police don’t know the half of it.”

  He raises his right arm. There’s a pistol gripped in his hand. I’ve never known Herman to be a gun guy. But then, I’ve never known him to be anything other than a creepy kind of pervert. Now, this.

  “Check out how cool this is,” he says.

  When he pulls the trigger, a dart flies out, embeds itself into my thigh. It’s a little plastic dart with a metal tip. The pain travels like an electric current throughout my body. I can’t breathe. I grab hold of the dart, pull it out.

  “Herman,” I spit, my head beginning to spin, my vision going blurry, distorted. “Her . . . man.”

  “I’ve had that freakin’ dart gun since I was kid. You know, when it was cool for boys to play with guns and girls to play with dolls. Everything is all bass ackwards now, Jobzy, you know. Guys are girls, and girls are guys, and the whole world is turned upside down.”

  “Oh, I agree,” I say, the words coming from my mouth, but sounding like they are coming from someone entirely different from myself.

  “You’re not gonna pass out, Jobzy,” he says. “But you are gonna get really, really weak.”

  “Are you . . . going to . . . kill me, Herman?”

  “Not at all,” he says. “You’re no longer going to be a total loser. I’m going to create a whole new life for you, Jobzy. You’re going to be better than ever.”

  He’s right.

  I don’t pass out entirely.

  Instead, whatever drug he’s injected me with via that toy gun, has caused me to enter into a kind of coma. But here’s the thing. I can feel, I can see, I can hear. I just can’t move a muscle. I can’t talk, or even move my mouth enough to scream. I’m paralyzed but entirely aware of what’s happening around me.

  Herman is bigger than me. A lot bigger. It’s no real problem for him to scoop me up, toss me over his shoulder, carry me out of the upper room, down the exterior stairs, off the boat, onto the launch, and then to the parking lot and his vehicle. It’s not a weekend morning, so the launch is entirely empty other than my Mustang and Herman’s white, high-ceilinged van. But hey, wait a minute, this looks an awful lot like Lu’s van. Lu Chin.

  He opens the side slider door, tosses me down onto the carpeted metal pan floor. For a minute, I lose my breath. It sends me into a panic. It’s one thing to lose your breath when you have control of all your muscles, but another entirely when you can’t fight it. You begin to drown in your own air. You go in and out of blackness while your oxygen starved brain begins to shut down. But then slowly, bit by agonizing bit, the air comes back to you.

  Herman hops into the van behind me, pulls me up onto the seat, buckles me in. Immediately, I collapse, chest to knees. But he pulls out a roll of duct tape from the front glove box and tapes me to the bucket seatback so that I’m sitting up straight. My head is lowered chin against chest, but my eyes are open as if the muscles in them are immune to the drug, and I am able to see out the window on my left.

  “More cool pics, Jobzy,” Herman says, pulling out his cell. He goes to the picture gallery, turns his phone around and places it in front of my face so I have no choice but to view the picture. It’s a picture of his mid-section, positioned between a pair of smooth white legs. He flips through several versions of the photos for me to view everything he owns and everything his victim owns. If I weren’t drugged and paralyzed right now, I would at the very least scream, kick, and claw at the son of a bitch. Instead, I have no choice but to sit there and look at the filth.

  “Man, oh man,” he says, pocketing the phone. “What a freakin’ night, Jobzy. I sooooo still got it.”

  Herman jumps behind the wheel, starts the van.

  “Now, I’m gonna show you something else that’s cool, Jobzy,” he says. “Wait till you see this shit, man.”

  We drive out of the launch, and he hooks a right onto Broadway. The road is still empty this early in the morning, but soon the morning commute will begin, and the daily migration into the city commencing along with it. It dawns on me that I don’t have my cell phone or my shoes. It’s just like my dream. I don’t have anything . . . or the use of anything . . . other than my eyes, and maybe they can’t even be trusted.

  “Not long now, Jobzy,” Herman says from the front seat. “It’s really something special. My best one yet. You just wait.”

  He’s really excited about this. So much so, he’s beginning to bounce up and down in his seat while driving the van. He’s like a big creepy kid, with a creepy thin cancer mustache, a major league receding greasy hairline, white doughy skin, and a pockmarked face. And he obviously has no idea between right and wrong and just plain all fucked up.

  He hooks another left onto State Street and Albany’s old downtown business district. If this were just a half an hour later, the sidewalks would be filled with people heading to work inside one of the many stone, brick, or glass-faced high-rises that bookend both sides of this historic old road. Or maybe they’d be heading up to the top of the hill to the marble Capital Building that Teddy Roosevelt built back when he was the Governor of New York State. I think I could bang on the window, scream, grab someone’s attention.

  But then, what the hell am I saying?

  I’m paralyzed. I don’t have a shot in hell of capturing anyone’s attention. Doesn’t matter how many or how few people occupy the city street. I’m screwed one way or the other. A middle-aged man with a funny name caught up in the Twilight Zone of fuckedupness.

  Herman turns the wheel to the right, and we drive another few hundred feet until we come to a large, century and a half old stately, cathedral-like building that’s built of brownstone and serves as Albany’s city hall. He positions the van so that I have no trouble viewing the façade from where I’m duct-taped to the back seat. Like the rest of the city and its buildings, City Hall is empty at this hour of the morning, just another extension of Albany’s ghost town-like quality that exists once the workday is finished and all the workers commute back to their homes in the suburbs.

  But when I look, the place isn’t unoccupied after all. The more I am able to focus in on the landing at the top of the steps leading to the entrance of the building, I can make out a someone standing by the two sets of big wood and glass doors. She’s standing casually, her left shoulder leaning against one of the big pillars.

  “Well, would you look at that beautiful woman,” Herman says. He sniffles, wipes his eyes with the back of his hands. The SOB is actually crying. “She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever loved and one of the most beautiful women who has ever loved me back. I am sooooo her man.”

  He raises his smartphone, snaps a couple of pictures.

  I’m staring at this woman who possesses wide eyes and is dressed in a black gown, her hair done up in a bun, her face masked in makeup including bright red lipstick I can see even from a distance. She’s standing in high heels, and her right, silk-gloved hand is held out before her like she’s
about to greet someone who is presently coming up the stairs. Someone who, no doubt, will be ascending the stairs very soon. Someone who works in this old building. Maybe even the mayor himself.

  I want to scream and rip myself out of this seat, but I can’t move. All I can do is watch this sick bastard . . . this funeral home flunky . . . live out his perverted psycho fantasy with some poor soul he’s kidnapped, filled with embalming fluid, and dressed up like a living doll. No doubt there is a love note pinned to her clothing that’s signed “I have always been her man . . .” Or something like that.

  Then, blaring out of the inner-city distance behind me—sirens. Cop cruisers speeding along State Street in our direction.

  “Here come da fuzz, Jobzy,” Herman casually chants. “Maybe we should park somewhere safer, you know, buddy?”

  Like I’m about to agree with him and his tactics. That is, if I could speak. He puts the van into drive, pulls across the street to Academy Park, makes a U-turn in order to shield us somewhat from view by the park’s old trees. At the same time, however, we can still get a good look at the city hall entrance and the woman he’s murdered.

  Coming from the driver’s seat, the sound of Herman’s heavy breathing. If I didn’t know any better, I would swear he’s pleasuring himself. Because that’s the kind of man Herman is. A creep. A psychopath.

  Then, coming into view, four cop cruisers and a fifth unmarked one arrive on the scene, flashers flashing, sirens blaring. The cars come to a screeching, rubber-burning stop, diagonal to the building façade. The uniformed cops jump out, their weapons drawn and aimed at the dead woman as if she’s alive just enough to take aim on them with a firearm.

  The driver’s side door of the unmarked cruiser opens, and Miller slips out. My God, does the man ever sleep? Does he have a home? Is he, in fact, human? He stands taller than most of the blue uniforms while he draws his service weapon from the shoulder holster hidden under his navy blue jacket and makes his way from his vehicle to beyond the marked cruisers, toward the city hall staircase.