The Embalmer: A Steve Jobz Thriller Read online

  Stepping across the floor to the opposite side of the basement space, he dumps the phone into a vat. Then, careful to avert his face from the invisible fumes, he picks up a stainless-steel ladle with his blue rubber gloved hand, scoops up what’s left of the phone, which is nothing more than a ball of melted and disintegrated plastic.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” he says, dropping the ball back into the vat and hanging the ladle back up on the wall. “Nothing like a little hydrosulfuric for getting rid of the evidence.” Then, stepping back over to the table. “Okay, buddy, I’ll be back. Gotta go clean up Wendy. What a pain in the ass, man. Rather be on a blind date. Plenty of Fish pussy, or Match dot com mams.”

  Herman notices that Jobz is moving now, pressing his weight against the straps that bind him. For a brief second, he considers injecting him again. But then he figures it will be so enjoyable to watch his old friend . . . his only friend . . . suffer when the embalming fluid finally enters his veins.

  Fun stuff, Herman thinks. The most fun you can have with your clothes on.

  The sick SOB is running a lab of death down here. A Frankenstein’s monster butcher shop. And I’m about to become one of his experiments. But at least I am regaining my strength and muscle movement. If I can move, I have a semblance of a chance of making it out of here alive.

  I try my best to get a good look at the place.

  It’s like a four-walled hospital morgue with the bright lights and tiled walls. I spot a long counter with a stainless-steel top and glass cabinets above it. Several long steel shelves are connected to the walls. The shelves are filled with all sorts of crap. But something catches my attention more than the others. Without the full use of my neck it’s difficult to make out, but from down here I can tell it’s something that’s been preserved inside a big clear jar. At first, I take it for an animal. A round, fat, hairy animal. But then, as my eyes focus in through the cracked lenses of my eyeglasses, I can see that it’s a head. A human head. A woman’s head, her eyes wide open along with her mouth inside a bath of formaldehyde.

  Herman, you sick, sick, son of a bitch . . .

  I can hear him running around upstairs. Hear him shouting at his wife, Wendy. His sick wife. We never saw Wendy at agency functions, or out for a drink at Lanie’s Bar. Herman never showed us pictures. The only thing we were told or that we understood to be true was that she was sick and it was Herman’s job to take care of her twenty-four-seven. We had no idea that her problem wasn’t cancer, but instead, gross obesity.

  Her problem is her . . . man. Her problem is Herman . . .

  Herman screams, “You’re so fat your heart is drowning!”

  She shouts, “You made me this way! You force feed me day in and day out. You’re a feeder, Herman Schmerman, Pumpkin Schmumpkin! You want me fat so you can collect on the disability. So you can get all those free drugs. You’re playing the system, you bad man . . . You and those creepy funeral parlor people. You’re cheating, setting up all those phony unemployment insurance accounts. I know what’s going on, nasty Nellie! I see it all happening right before my eyes in this bed you bad, bad, mad, mad man. I hate, hate, hate you!”

  I can’t help but smile. Herman cheating the unemployment insurance system while working for the division that fights it.

  Priceless, Herman. Absolutely priceless . . .

  More banging around overhead. Must be he’s cleaning her and being rough about it. Must be the entire process disgusts him. It would disgust anyone to be sure. But then, true love should transcend anything. Isn’t that what love’s all about?

  I guess I’m doomed never to know.

  Then, “Pumpkin, I’m sorry I said all those nasty, nasty things.” Wendy’s sniffles and tears. “Pumpkin, are you going to make me some eggs? Pumpkin, I’m sooooo hungry, you have to help me.”

  “Give me a minute already!” he barks. I make out his footsteps trudging across the kitchen floor to the back door. A quiet minute or two passes, until I hear Herman come back in. This time his footsteps are laden and heavy. I can tell he’s carrying something or someone. When I hear whatever it is being dragged along the floor and then down the basement steps, I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Herman is disposing of his nosy neighbor, Gene.

  When he gets the body at the bottom of the stairs, Herman drags it across the painted concrete floor to the vat of acid. He tries hefting the deadweight body up by its shoulders and dumping it head-first into the liquid. But Gene is too heavy, large, and cumbersome.

  He drops the body with all the tender-loving-care of dropping a too heavy side of beef. He looks around the room until he finds what he’s looking for, even if he didn’t know precisely what he was looking for. He goes to the opposite wall which contains a pegboard and some tools hanging from it. He pulls a manual saw off the board, carries it back over to the body. Grabbing hold of Gene’s left hand, he picks the arm up, positions the blade at the tender underarm, and begins to saw.

  I turn away because even with Gene being dead, the sight of the arm being sawed away from the torso is too much to digest. But then, I’m not sure Gene is dead. His face might be mashed into something unrecognizable as a human being, but he is most definitely issuing a high-pitched wailing sound with each swipe of the saw blade. His body is trembling and convulsing as the blade rips through skin, flesh, muscle, tendon, and bone.

  I, too, find myself convulsing, my chest heaving against the thick straps that bind me to the table.

  “Jesus Christ almighty, finish him off, Herman!” I scream.

  Holy crap, I can scream. My voice works again. My body works.

  “Help!” I shout. “Somebody help me!!!”

  Herman peers at me with wide open eyes, his face tight and panicked. Gene’s arm separates from his body. It drops onto the floor. Herman bends over, picks it up by the elbow, drops it into the vat of acid. From down on the table, I can hear the hiss and boil of the arm disintegrating in the acid. Reaching overhead, Herman pulls on a chain that hangs down from the ceiling. A fan motor hums to life, the fumes from the acid now being sucked out of the basement.

  “Yo, Jobzy, I’ll have to ask you to refrain from screaming,” he calmly requests, while working on the other arm, a massive pool of dark arterial blood forming at his feet. “It might upset the wife, and as you’ve probably already heard, she’s raging out on me today.” Shakes his head. “Women. Can’t kill ‘em. And you can’t kill ‘em.”

  “Help me please!” I scream again. “Somebody!!!”

  He begins sawing into the other arm, and Gene convulses once more. How can he possibly still be alive? I can only pray that he bleeds out rapidly. Faster than rapidly.

  “Herman!” comes the shout from upstairs. “Who’s yelling like that? What are you doing down there!? Herman!”

  “Wendy!” Herman responds at the top of his voice. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m just messing around with a good buddy of mine from work. Wrestling.”

  “Pumpkin, you are up to no good, I just know it. I’m going to call the police. I’m going to get out of bed and find the phone.”

  There’s a commotion coming from directly above Herman’s head. It sounds like a locomotive is about to ram into the house and drop through the flimsy wood floor.

  “Oh my God,” Herman says, as the second arm comes away, “Wendy’s attempting to get out of bed.” Plopping the second arm into the vat. “This . . . can’t . . . be . . . happening.”

  There’s a crash and the entire house rattles. For a brief second, I’m convinced Wendy’s about to come crashing through the living room floor. But instead, I make out the sound of her moving, crawling across the floor and into the kitchen. It must be like a beached whale desperately searching for a way back to the water.

  Herman is now covered in blood. His hands, feet, legs, all bearing the spatter from the suddenly severed limbs. By the looks of it, Gene is finally dead. By the grace of God.

  The air is filled with the smell of death and decay. It’s filled with pani
c and the inevitable murder not only of Gene or me but maybe Herman himself. Something tells me that Miller is finding a way right now to apprehend him and that Herman will not go quietly. There’s something else in the air. Sirens, and rotors slapping the air.

  A helicopter . . . A chopper . . . A police chopper . . .

  “Herman!” shouts Wendy, her voice strained and somewhat muted from the massive weight bearing down on the floor. “You are up to no good down there. I just know it.”

  The basement door slams open. The rumble that follows is thunderous. Boards and wood collapsing. Plastic popping, glass shattering, clothes tearing. It’s like a tornado funnel has descended on the house.

  I cock my head over my shoulder, strain my eyes to steal a glimpse at the staircase. The staircase has collapsed, and a naked Wendy is now lying in the basement atop a pile of kindling wood, crushed glass, and other household junk. She is a massive pile of flesh. There is no other way to describe it. A pile of jelly-like flesh topped with a face inside a round head covered in greasy black hair. Her eyes are unblinking, irises wide and foggy. It tells me she is either passed out or dead. Right now, from my vantage point on this table, I’d say the latter is more accurate.

  Herman runs to her.

  “Wendy,” he cries, dropping to his knees. “My God, what have you done?”

  He holds out his bloody hands, lifts her head. He sticks his fingers into the loose flesh on her neck in search of a pulse. He doesn’t find one. That’s when he starts to cry.

  “Your heart, my love,” he moans. “I told you your heart couldn’t bear the stress and the strain. Now, look what you’ve done. My sweet love, Wendy.”

  I’m pushing against the straps, frantically searching for a way to get myself the hell up from this table. But I might as well still be drugged. The straps are just too tight. I simply cannot move.

  My eyes dart back on Herman. He wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands, some of the blood staining his tear-coated cheeks. He sets his wife’s head down and slowly raises himself back up. He suddenly assumes a smile. But it’s not a happy or welcome smile. Not by a long shot.

  “It’s you,” Herman says, his voice deep and guttural, the tone accusatorial. “You made my wife get out of bed. You screamed for help, and you knew she would come. Because that’s the kind of soul she has. She’s a good soul. A caring soul. I was her man. I was her Herman. Her Pumpkin Herman.”

  He slowly steps up to the table, until he’s standing over me, that creepy, killer smile still planted on his face. It’s like the Joker from Batman, only worse.

  “You’ve got me confused, Herman,” I say. “You killed your wife. You force fed her until she couldn’t physically do without the food, the calories. You made her into an addict, you sick fucking puppy. You wanted her to become obese and unable to get out of bed. You wanted her to be sick so you could collect on disability, collect on her unemployment insurance, and who knows what other bennies you’re stealing from the state. Because once you become a government insider and have all the computerized information at your fingertips, all it takes is a false social security number here, and a stolen identity there to create an illegal stream of weekly income. How am I doing, sick creepy puppy? Am I close?”

  The sirens are louder now. Not directly outside the house, but definitely coming from the perimeter of the small neighborhood.

  “You nasty man,” Herman says, frowning, pouting. “I thought we were friends, you and me, Jobzy. I thought we were pals. Instead, you hate me just like everyone else.”

  “I don’t hate you, Herman. I don’t feel anything for you, other than sorry for your pathetic soul, may it forever rot in hell.”

  He purses his lips together for a moment, until he turns that frown upside down and smiles once more. He steps around the table, over what’s left of Gene’s body, and grabs hold of a clear hose that’s attached to a translucent twenty-gallon plastic jug filled with bright pink liquid. He carries the plastic tipped hose back over to the table, sets it down.

  “Tell you what I’m going to do for you, Jobzy,” he says, renewed optimism in his tone. “I’m going to show you just what kind of man I am, and how mistaken you are about me. I’m going to make you a new man with a new life. You’re going to look far better than you ever have. No longer will people refer to you as Steve Jobz the loser. When I’m through with you, they will elevate you to a status deserving of such a wonderful name.”

  Stomach goes stone tight. Pulse skyrockets. Mouth feels like it’s suddenly filled with sand.

  “What are you going to do to me, Herman?” Me, swallowing something bitter tasting, and dry.

  “I’m going to embalm you, of course. So that the old you can die and the new you can live for all eternity. Now does that sound super freakin’ cool or what, Jobzy?” Shuffling to the table, leaning down, his lips tickling my ear. “Told you I had your back, bro,” he whispers. “Jobzy and Herman . . . Best friends forever . . . For everrrrrrrr!”

  He goes to the counter, grabs hold of a scalpel, carefully brings the razor-sharp business end of the stainless steel surgical instrument to my bear thigh.

  “This is gonna pinch a little, Jobzy,” he says, making a slice. “But you know, like they say, no pain, no gain.”

  The pain is electric. I thrust myself up against the straps. The blood spurts out of the severed artery. Grabbing hold of a clear tube that’s attached to the underside of the table, Herman shoves it into the wound. It’s like he’s sticking a hot poker into the raw open flesh. My vision becomes clouded in red, while I feel myself going in and out of consciousness. I also catch sight of the blood filling the plastic tube and draining into one of the basins under the steel table.

  “There now,” Herman exclaims. “That wasn’t so bad was it, Jobzy?”

  “You . . . fucker,” I manage to spit. “I will . . . get you . . . for this.”

  “That’s now how best friends talk to one another, Jobzy,” he says. “You’ll thank me later. Trust me.”

  He brings the scalpel to my chest, makes another incision, the blood spurting up into my face. I scream and heave my chest. I’m dying, but my nerve endings are alive and ever so raw. He’s still got that whistle-while-you-work smile planted on his pockmarked face while he casually, almost methodically begins to bleed me out.

  But that’s not the worst of it.

  I see it happening with total clarity. See him open the valve on the embalming fluid so that the pink stuff fills the translucent hose, and begins to enter into my veins in the space where the blood has escaped.

  The burn . . . I feel the fucking burn . . .

  Herman is embalming me alive.

  The live rounds shatter the two basement windows located at the top of the block wall to my direct left. Two figures jump down into the basement through the broken windows. Two men, I should say. Both of them dressed entirely in black, both of them holding semi-automatics with laser sights connected to the barrels. One green laser sight is planted on Herman’s forehead, the other on his heart.

  Two shots follow, and Herman’s heart and head explode.

  He drops onto me, dead weight.

  The taller of the two men leaps toward me, yanks both hoses out of my body. I can see now that he’s a black man. A man the size of a house.

  “Tourniquet to the thigh, soldier!” he barks at the shorter one.

  The shorter one yanks the belt out of the loops on his black jeans, wraps it around my thigh, yanks it so tight, I nearly pass out for a second time. But he stops the bleeding.

  “And I’m a fucking Marine, not an Army grunt, Blood,” the tourniquet man says.

  The one called Blood finds a kerchief in his pocket, presses it against the wound. Pulling out his cell phone with his free hand, he speed-dials someone. Whatever happened to Walky-Talkies?

  “Miller,” he says, “the target is down and stone dead. You got two more stiffs down inside this hell hole too. But the package is alive. I repeat, package is alive. But he needs an
ambulance really bad, before he bleeds out or goes into toxic shock. Whichever comes first, you dig?”

  He replaces the phone in his back pocket.

  “You just say, you dig, Blood?” Tourniquet Man says.

  “Yes, Moonlight,” Blood says. “I said, you dig. You got a problem with that?”

  I hear a third man laugh aloud from behind me. Then I hear him jump down into the basement via the kitchen door opening.

  “My Lord in heaven, who is that poor overweight soul lying dead on the floor?”

  “Must be Herman’s wife, Jack,” Blood says. “I have no idea who the armless one is.”

  “Where you been, Marconi?” Moonlight says. “Stop off for a quick tortellini e brodo washed down with a fine Chianti?”

  Blood turns to the Moonlight character. “Watch your mouth, or I pick out every single hair on the stupid goatee, one by precious one.”

  “Be nice, Blood,” the stocky, salt and pepper-haired Jack says. “Moonlight’s just playing. ‘Sides, he can’t help himself.” Extending his free hand, he places it on top of Blood’s far bigger hand to increase the pressure.

  “You’re not cops,” I say, my words somewhat slurred now that my strength is entirely sapped from my body. It’s a question.

  “No, we ain’t no cops,” Blood says. “But we do fight the bad guys. Even if the bad guys sometimes pose as good guys, you dig?”

  “You say you dig a lot,” I mumble, not without a pain-filled chuckle.

  Marconi snorts, and Moonlight laughs aloud. Blood turns to Moonlight.

  “Keep it up,” he says. “I slap you upside the head so that bullet moves and make you brain dead.”

  “Bullet?” I question.

  Moonlight raises his free hand, makes like a pistol with it, presses the index-finger-barrel against his temple.

  “Botched suicide attempt,” he says. “Little piece of .22 caliber hollow-point lodged right beside my cerebral cortex.”

  I can’t help but laugh, despite the pain. “And I thought I was screwed up.”