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  THE CLEANUP

  John Skipp & Craig Spector

  Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by John Skipp & Craig Spector

  Cover Design by Cover Design by

  Joanna Luna Dillinger: http://daysleeper.joannedillinger.com/

  LICENSE NOTES

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN SKIPP & CRAIG SPECTOR

  NOVELS:

  The Light at the End

  Deadlines

  Animals

  The Scream

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  To Melanie Rose,

  who waited for just the right moment to arrive

  PART ONE

  NO BOTTOM

  "Well, some folks get bent

  In strange ways.

  Like some folks seem meant

  To feel the pain.

  The sorrow gets sent

  Down on their heads.

  The sadness, it twists them.

  They're never the same. . .

  Billy Rowe

  Twisted Toward Life

  ONE

  ON STANTON STREET

  He was drawing a white chalk line around her body.

  The cop started with her left foot, broadly tracing something that looked more like Frankenstein work boots than the tiny, slightly decadent black heels that she wore. He outlined the curve of one delicate, fishnetted calf, stopping at the point where the right leg crossed over at the knee, then swept back down the right shin to describe another blocky piece of footwear.

  There were nine other cops down on Stanton Street; their cars had cordoned off the area, slammed into park at jagged angles and left there, red lights rhythmically strobing. An ambulance had also arrived; a pair of paramedics leaned casually against the back, smoking cigarettes and tapping their feet.

  Two cops were still digging around on the north side of the street, flashlights slicing into the darkness of the construction site. The rest were busy holding back the slowly-expanding crowd: tenants, almost exclusively, from the tenements that lined the south side. The low-budget hookers and johns had cut out at the sound of the sirens, leaving only a handful of Bowery bums to round out the inevitable vulture contingent.

  The guy with the chalk had gone all the way up the back of her right leg. The line curved, almost lovingly, around the tight black slit skirt that adorned her outthrust buttocks, then moved slowly along the perimeters of her zebra-striped blouse, her gracefully-arched back.

  He had to stop at the pool of blood.

  The kid's name was Billy Rowe, and he'd been staring out the window ever since they arrived. Shock. Understandable. He was their star witness, and what he had witnessed was nasty.

  But Detective Frank Rizzo had spent the better part of the last ten minutes staring at the back of Billy's head. Which was terrific, if you liked shoulder-length scraggles of filthy blond hair. Rizzo did not. In fact, Rizzo disliked almost everything about Billy Rowe: his voice, his face, his scrawny frame, his shithole apartment, his idiot dog.

  The only thing he liked was Billy Rowe's memory. It was fantastic. It was also the kid's most important characteristic, in terms of the investigation. It made everything else worth putting up with.

  If not tolerable. Which it wasn't.

  "Mr. Rowe," he said wearily, still addressing the kid's skull from the rear. "Just a few more questions, if you don't mind terribly."

  "Just a minute," Billy said. He was lighting another cigarette off the butt of the last. It was the third in an unbroken chain of smoke that Billy'd dispensed in their short time together. He also had a quart of Bud that had been full when they met. It was almost empty now. "Hey, no problem. We've got all night. Maybe I should just curl up in front of the TV or something." Rizzo pulled a cigarette of his own from his breast pocket, brought it to his lips, continued to speak. "Think you might be in the mood in a half hour or so?"

  "You know somethin'?" Billy droned. He had a high-pitched voice, but it was dragging along its lowest register. "My roommate's an amateur comedian, too. You oughtta meet him. I'm sure that you'd get along famously."

  "Frank. Leave him alone for a minute, okay?" This from Dennis the Menace, Rizzo's faithful protégé. Dennis Hamilton, of course, was playing with the dog. Dennis Hamilton was a perennial kid. Rizzo cast a sour glance at his junior partner, whose dark features were locked in a Stevie Wonder grin as he tousled the ridiculous mutt's facial fur with vigor.

  Hamilton had the uncanny knack of finding bright lights in the most repulsive circumstances. It was a wonderful quality. It pissed Rizzo off.

  "Okay," the senior detective muttered. He took a deep drag and sighed out smoke, then cast his gaze around the charming decor of Billy Rowe's apartment.

  It was disgusting. With the possible exception of pigsty, no word could peg it better. If you took a picture of it and enclosed the caption, "What's Not Wrong With This Room?", the answer would have to be, "Damned if I know!"

  For starters, there was the laundry. It hadn't been done in at least two months. Every stinking bit of it was scattered across the floor, rumpled and sweaty and fetid as hell. It was joined, at his feet, by a sprawling jumble of miscellaneous junk; roughly a hundred albums and record jackets, disengaged from each other; a half-ton of comic books, paperbacks, and magazines; a full ton of notebooks and loose sheets of paper, all bearing the same neat cursive prose. Billy's handwriting, no doubt. God only knew what he was writing.

  And then there were the empties.

  It was something that Rizzo'd seen a lot of, since the Bottle Law. But this had to take the proverbial cake. There were hundreds of them, all over the room. Most of them were dusty. Most of them were growing slime.

  There were some dog-eared posters on the walls. The only one he recognized was from Pink Floyd's The Wall, a movie he'd never had any desire to see. The rest of them were for groups he'd never heard of or political rallies for causes he'd never supported. Three Mile Island came up a lot. From the quality of the posters, Rizzo guessed that they were local, rather than national, affairs.

  No wonder they never won, he mused. Defeated on the home front. Overwhelmed by their own dirty laundry. He grinned, thinking back on the ragtag legions that had overrun the '60's: glassy-eyed and scraggly-haired Utopians who spelled Hope with a capital D. They'd struck him as ridiculous then; and some things never change.

  Nobody'd ever had to pick up after Rizzo, or admonish him about cleanliness and godliness. God was a joke, but cleanliness was simply part and parcel of Taking Care Of Business. The maintenance of a good fighting machine. It was like exercise, a steady job, or changing the oil in your goddam cat. Take care of business, or they mop the floor with you.

  He looked at Billy Rowe again: a little '60's throwback, if ever there was one. Billy stood at five feet seven in his Adidas. His long, spindly hair trickled down from his head like thin strands of moist whole-wheat spaghetti. His beard was a thicket of stout, multicolored hairs; one of them, gray as an old man's coat, dangled crookedly from the right side of his chin.

  He looked old: muc
h older than his twenty-seven years. There were lines on his face that had no right to be there. It was obvious to Rizzo that the kid was drinking himself to death. He wondered if Billy had figured that out.

  Rizzo wondered about a lot of things.

  But he lost very little sleep over any of them.

  The cop had opted to go around the pool of blood, resuming just below her elbow. She'd fallen with her arm tucked under her, as if she'd tried to catch herself and didn't quite have the strength.

  Billy squeezed his eyes shut, rocked back sickly on his heels. Another sneak attack of vertigo. He heard the faceless drone of voices from below, mingling with the incessant scrape of chalk on asphalt, tracing its way along her sleeveless bicep, cutting inward at the shoulder to the crook of the neck

  (cutting inward)

  His eyes snapped open. The room listed thirty degrees.

  (at the shoulder)

  It took a moment to pull himself back together. He drained the rest of his beer, trying to quiet the violent thrumming of his nerves. It didn't work. He doubted that anything would.

  On the street, the chalk made a rounded and featureless sweep past the dead girl's profile. That was the worst part. Her mouth and one visible eye were still open. She looked like she'd just seen something terribly sad.

  Billy found himself wondering, briefly, if any part of her could see the hand that held the chalk that cut in now under her chin, then swept out along her outstretched left arm and arced around the slender, curled, and lifeless fingers at its tip.

  And if so, he hoped that it couldn't see him.

  Bubba was great. That was Hamilton's opinion. Anyone who owned a dog that cool couldn't be all bad. Score one point for Billy.

  Bubba was one of those undifferentiated mutts that seemed to have taken the most lovable characteristics of every breed in his genealogy. He was a gangly short-hair with a long, pointy snoot and the kind of body that looked like it was made out of rubber. Bubba was a wiggler and a squiggler, foot-long tail continuously thrashing to left and right, wide-ass grin accommodating a constant panting and wheezing of joy at each stroke that he got. He was a people-lover, an attention-lover. He was also skinny as hell, but that just made him all the squirmier.

  "Oh, you're a good fella, aren'tcha? Oh, yeah, you're a good boy." Skritch. Skritch. Hamilton listened to himself for a moment. Why do dogs always reduce me to babbling? he wondered. It was a mystery of life. Why fight it? Skritcha skritcha. "Oh, yeah, you're a good—"

  Bubba lunged forward suddenly and started lapping at Hamilton's cheek. He was a sloppy kisser, with lots of tongue. Hamilton grimaced and twisted his face away, laughing.

  His eyes settled on Rizzo. Rizzo wasn't laughing. Rizzo was glaring at him, as usual. The man looked like Harry Dean Stanton: same haggard face, same mussy black hair, same rumpled demeanor and deadpan delivery. He was a persnickety old pain in the ass; he was also an excellent partner and a closet good guy, which he took great pains to conceal.

  Bubba was wriggling and craning his neck to get at Hamilton's cheek. Rizzo let out a disgusted snort and flicked his ashes on a wadded-up T-shirt. Billy continued to stare out the window.

  Poor guy, Hamilton thought. The disgust factor notwithstanding, there were a lot of things about Billy that he liked. He'd known people like that in college—intensely creative, intensely sloppy—and seen a million of 'em while working Homicide.

  Billy was sharp, that much was for sure. His taste in music said it all, so far as Hamilton was concerned: progressive rock, progressive jazz, progressive funk and traditional music from all over the world. From the Bothy Band of Ireland to the Drummers of Burundi, with Mozart and Zappa in between, and a healthy serving of Beatles and Springsteen at the core. The only real difference between their record collections was that Hamilton tended to keep his in their covers and on the shelf.

  And if Billy was really surviving as a musician, he was probably pretty good. Just another guy with a talent and a dream, banging his head against the walls of New York City.

  Looks like the walls are winning, Hamilton mused, staring out past their witness.

  And into the flashing red October night.

  The chalk line was complete. It made her look much larger than she actually was. The paramedics wheeled over a stretcher and a body bag, preparing to pack her up. They flipped her over first.

  And Billy turned away abruptly.

  "Oh, Jesus," he moaned, features knotting in revulsion. He wasn't prepared for the actual wounds, staring up at him in the hard light of the streetlamp. The maniac had opened up her belly and poked holes in her chest; wet things were threatening to tumble through the gashes. His eyes squeezed shut, trying to drive out the vision . . .

  . . . and then the image coalesced for him with soul-numbing clarity. It was a face, carved into her torso with jagged-edged artistry. The twin puncture wounds above her breasts were like eyes; the crooked gash across her belly was a monstrous jack o' lantern smile, wide and brimming over with—

  "No," he gagged, falling backward a step. Bile seeped in through the walls at the back of his throat.

  "You okay?" The black detective, his voice accompanied by the sound of movement and shifting debris. Billy turned to see that the guy was moving toward him, Bubba at his heels.

  The vertigo, receding like a vanquished wave. "I… I just felt kinda sick for a second. It's okay." The bile lingered, made his voice thick and husky. He took a stab at clearing it, then continued to croak, "I just got a good look at the wounds, that's all."

  Hamilton wrinkled his face. "Then don't look. You've seen enough."

  "No, you don't understand," Billy said, looking into the cop's eyes. "I want to see it. I want to burn it into my memory banks. I want to carry those pictures with me for as long as I live. You understand?"

  "Yeah," Hamilton met his stare. "I think I do."

  Billy managed a half-hearted smile. Bubba kathumped through the rubble and jumped up to him, front paws resting on his chest, tail wagging ferociously. "Down, Bubba. C'mon," he murmured, then turned his gaze back to the street.

  They were just loading the girl into the back of the ambulance. The crowd was beginning to disperse: the thrill was gone, and the rain was coming. In minutes, Stanton Street would be right back where it was, with no lingering traces of the tragedy to remind him, except…

  Except…

  The white chalk line, bright against the dark pavement: an empty thought balloon that he proceeded to fill with memory . . .

  The pictures were as vivid as a dream in progress. He could see all of Stanton Street spreading out before him: the blonde black hooker in the purple hot pants, leaning against the Chrystie Street lamppost, adjusting her stockings; the head bobbing in the '67 Rambler at the curb; Fred Flintstone, one of the Bowery Boys, passed out on the sidewalk by the Ray Ban's Pizza Supplies parking lot; traffic whizzing by on the Bowery.

  The darkness surrounding the construction site.

  He was absently doodling with the strings of his guitar when she rounded the corner of Chrystie and started down Stanton Street. He'd been doing it for roughly an hour and a half. It was not inspired, but it took his mind off his problems. Or tried to, anyway.

  Fact was, his problems were the only things he could think about. They were various and sundry. They loomed behind his eyes.

  The party, just for starters. There'd been five phone messages in the last two hours, reprimanding him for his absence. Three for Larry. One from Lisa. One from Mona herself.

  It was important to Mona that he show up at the party. It was important to Mona that he show up looking decent. This party was one of the most important events in Mona de Vanguardia's life. She wanted to share it with him. She was his lover.

  On the verge of what looked like success.

  But he was out on the fire escape, doodling with his guitar, letting his answering machine do his dirty work for him. He was serenading the rats and roaches and bums and hookers and johns.

 
Until the girl rounded the corner and started toward him.

  As soon as she hit the pool of streetlight, Billy recognized her. She was the ticket-taker at the 8th Street Playhouse, where he frequently took in his midnight movies. She had translated New Wave in epic fashion: the spiky hair and garish color/patterns made her genuinely hot, as opposed to the ugly pieces of modern art that many of her contemporaries had become. He'd joked with her, successfully, on many an occasion. She was a complete and utter sweetheart, from her sense of humor to her smile to her visual extravagance of beauty.

  Billy remembered his heart beating faster. He remembered the dull throb of his genitals, summoned by the thought of her. He remembered the subtle shifting of gears, the music from his fingers growing solid and strong as an audience worth impressing drew near.

  She was weaving, just a little. Billy suspected that she was drunk. It was either that or 'ludes or smack, but he could always hope for the best. The blonde black hooker stared after her, with what Billy deduced to be vague contempt. The bobbing in the car continued, unabated. Fred Flintstone slept on.

  Billy was really jamming when she stepped into the circle of light directly beneath him. She paused there, smiling and staring at him. She was clearly impressed. She was clearly on drugs. She was clearly as lovely as he'd ever seen her.

  He thought about asking her up. Of course. The nature of fantasy: imagine the best, imagine the worst. He thought about slipping inside her while she moaned and stroked his back. He thought about Mona, and the warm insides that he knew so well. He thought about Mona, at the party, pissed off. He thought about the fact that she would not be apt to walk in on them.

  The girl was still down there, in the streetlight, smiling.