The Cleaner (2 page)

She has never found any answers to her questions, not here, not even once she has walked away. In that, nothing will ever change.

After an hour, she turns away from the grave. She wants to tell her dead brother about the man she works with, who in many ways reminds her of Martin. He has a pure heart and a childlike innocence that is identical to Martin’s. She wants to tell her brother about this, but leaves without saying a word.

She heads out of the graveyard thinking of Martin. Even before she reaches her car, the crucifix starts to take away her pain.

CHAPTER THREE

The newspaper no longer holds any interest for me. Why read the news, when I’m the one making it? So I fold it in half and lay it on the bed next to me. I have newspaper ink on my fingers. I wipe them on the bedspread as I study Angela. She has this look on her face as if she’s trying to digest some really bad news, like her father has just been hit by a car or she’s all out of perfume. I’m watching her towel. It’s sagging down her body. She looks pretty damn good standing there almost naked.

“Name’s Joe,” I say, reaching toward my briefcase. I select the second-to-biggest knife I have clipped in there. A blade with a fine Swiss design. I hold it up. We can both see it. It looks bigger to her, even though I’m closer. It’s a perspective thing.

“Maybe you’ve read about me. I’m front-page news.”

Angela is a tall woman with legs that go all the way up. Blond hair, obviously natural, that comes down to meet them. She has a good figure with all the right shapes and curves that have brought me here. An attractive face that could be in
magazines marketing contact lenses or lipstick. Blue eyes full of life and, at the moment, full of fear. The fear in her eyes excites me. The fear in her eyes suggests that yes, she has read about me, probably even heard about me on the radio and seen the stories about me on TV.

She begins shaking her head, as if answering no to a whole lot of questions I haven’t even got to yet. Drops of water fly left and right, like it’s raining inside and horizontally. Her hair swishes behind her, the wet ends striking the walls and the doorframe. It flicks around onto the front of her face and sticks there. She’s walking backward too, like she’s got somewhere better to be.

“What, w . . . what do you want?” she asks. All the confident anger from her first question of who I was left around the same time she saw the knife.

I shrug. I can think of several things I want. A nice house. A nice car. Her stereo is still playing that same song—our song now. Yeah. A nice stereo I wouldn’t say no to.

But she can’t provide me with any of that. I wish she could, but life isn’t that simple. I decide to keep this to myself for now. There will be time for conversation later.

“Please, please. Just. Leave.”

I’ve heard this so many times I almost yawn, but I don’t, because I’m a polite guy. “You’re being a poor host,” I say, politely.

“You lunatic. I’m calling the . . . umm . . . the police.”

Is she really this stupid? Does she think I’m going to stand here while she picks up the phone and dials for help? Maybe I’ll sit back on the bed, do the crossword in my newspaper while they arrive to arrest me. I start shaking my head, like she was before, only with dry hair. “You could go ahead and try,” I say, “
if
the phone was on the hook.” Which it isn’t. I took it off while I was eating my pizza.
Her
pizza.

She turns and makes a run for the bathroom at the same time I move toward her. She’s quick. I’m quick. I throw the knife. Blade over hilt, hilt over blade. The trick to throwing a
knife is all in the balance . . . if you’re a professional. If you’re not, it all comes down to luck. We’re both hoping for a bit of that at the moment. The blade brushes off the side of her arm and clatters off the wall onto the ground as she rounds the bathroom door. She slams it shut and locks it, but I don’t slow down, I just barge sideways into it. It barely rattles in its frame.

I take a few paces back. I can always go home. Pack up my gear. Close the briefcase. Take off my latex gloves. And leave. But I can’t. I have an attachment to both my knife and my anonymity. That means I have to stay. Plus I’m an optimist at heart—I’m not one to give up on myself.

She starts screaming for help. But the neighbors aren’t going to hear her. I know this because I did my homework before arriving. The house is far back on the lot and backs onto a field, we’re on the top story, and none of her nearby neighbors is home. It’s all about homework. To be successful, with anything in life, you need to do your homework. It just can’t be stressed enough.

I stroll across the bedroom and select another knife. This one is the biggest. I’m about to head back to the bathroom when a cat walks into the room. Damn thing is friendly too. I bend down and pat it. It nudges my hand and starts purring. I pick it up.

Back at the bathroom door I call out to her. “Come out or I’ll break your cat’s neck.”

“Please, please don’t hurt her.”

“The choice is yours.”

So now I’m waiting. Like all men do when women are in the bathroom. At least she’s not screaming. I scratch Fluffy beneath her floppy neck. She isn’t purring anymore.

“Please, what do you want?”

My mother, God rest her soul, always told me to be honest. Sometimes it simply isn’t the right approach. “Just to talk,” I lie.

“Are you going to kill me?”

I shake my head in disbelief. Women, huh? “No.”

The lock makes a definite twang as it disengages on the bathroom door. She’s actually going to take her chances with me rather than have her cat killed. Maybe it’s expensive.

Slowly the door begins to open. I’m motionless, too amazed at her stupidity, which is increasing by the second, to actually move. When the door opens enough, I dump Fluffy on the ground. She lands in a pile of clumped fur, her head twisted sideways and her legs sticking out in every direction, trying to point to the reason why. Angela sees the cat but doesn’t get the chance to scream. I shove my body against the door, and she isn’t strong enough to hold me out. The door goes slack as she loses balance. She falls against the shower, and her towel falls from her hands.

I step into the bathroom. The mirror is still fogged over with steam. The shower curtain has pictures of a few dozen rubber ducks all smiling at me. They point in the same direction and are uniform, as if they’re swimming off to war. Angela starts back with the screaming routine, which hasn’t done her any good so far and doesn’t do her any good this time. I drag her back into the bedroom, and I have to hit her a couple of times to get her to go along with the plan. She tries to stop me, but I have more experience at subduing women than she has at self-defense. Her eyes roll upward and she has the audacity to pass out on me.

The stereo is still going. Maybe when all this is over I’ll take it home with me. I pick her up and dump her on the bed, then roll her onto her back. I move around the bedroom, taking down the photographs of her family from the walls, and turning down the others that rest on windowsills and shelves. The last one I look at is a picture of her husband and two kids. I guess he’s about to be granted full custody.

The next step I take toward romance is placing my Glock automatic nine-millimeter pistol on the bedside table so it’s within easy reach. Nice piece. Bought it four years ago when I
started work. Three thousand dollars it cost me. Black-market guns are always more expensive, but anonymous. I stole the money from my mother, who blamed neighborhood kids. She’s one of those crazy women who are afraid of using banks because she’s suspicious of bank managers. The gun is in case the husband comes home early. Or if a neighbor comes over. Maybe she’s having an affair. Maybe her lover is pulling into the street right now.

My Glock is like a magic pill—it will cure all possibilities.

I pull the phone from the wall. Tear the cord from the end of it. Use it to secure her hands. I don’t want her thrashing about too much. I tie her hands to the headboard.

I’m just finishing tying her feet with her underwear when she wakes up. She notices three things at once. The first is I’m still here and this is no dream. The second is she’s naked. The third is she’s tied to the bed spread-eagled. I can see her checking these things off in her mind on this big mental list she has. One. Two. Three.

From there she’s noticing things that haven’t happened yet. Four. Five. And six. I can see her imagination running wild. The muscles are pulling in her face as she considers asking me a question. Her eyes are darting back and forth as she struggles to work out which part of me to focus on. Her forehead is shiny with sweat. I can see her gripping at levers in her mind, searching for the one to pull that will show her options. I watch her pull all of them, but the levers are just coming off in her hands.

I show her my knife again. Her eyes come to a stop on the blade. “See this?”

She nods. Yeah, she sees it. She’s crying too.

I place the tip of the blade on her cheek and ask her to open her mouth. She becomes eager to help out when the blade starts to scratch her. Then, reaching over to my briefcase, I pull out an egg and slip it into her mouth. Cooperation comes easy once they find acceptance. The egg is nothing abnormal,
just a standard unboiled egg. The thing about eggs is they’re high in protein. They also make great gags. “If you’ve got a problem with this,” I say, “just let me know.”

She says nothing. No problems, obviously.

I head into the bathroom, find her towel, bring it back out, and cover her face with it. I take my clothes off and climb onto the bed. She hardly moves, doesn’t complain, just keeps on crying until she can cry no more. When we’re done and I climb off, I find that at some point the egg has slipped to the back of her mouth, at which point it proceeded to choke her, successfully. This explains the gagging I heard and, at the time, mistook for something else. Oops.

I shower, dress, and pack my gear together. The faces on the photographs lining the staircase watch me as I walk downstairs. I keep expecting them to say something to me or, at the very least, complain about something I’ve done here. When I get outside and away from them, I’m washed over by a warm flood of relief.

The relief is short-lived, and within a few seconds I start to feel rotten. I cast my eyes down and watch my feet as I walk. Yep. Feeling bad. Feeling blue. Things didn’t go as they should have, and I ended up taking a life. I pause on the lawn and pluck a flower from a rosebush. I hold it to my nose and smell the petals, but it can’t bring a smile to my face. A thorn pricks my finger and I put the wound into my mouth. The taste of blood begins to replace the taste of Angela.

I put the flower in my pocket and make my way to her car. The sun is still out, but lower now, shining directly into my eyes. The day has cooled so maybe the heat I feel isn’t from the sun, but is inside me. I want to smile. I want to enjoy the remaining day, but I can’t.

I have taken a life.

Poor Fluffy.

Poor pussycat.

Sometimes animals have to be used as tools. It’s not my
place in this crazy, mixed-up universe to question that. Still, I can’t help but feel sick for breaking the little cat’s neck.

I climb into Angela’s car and have to drive over the front lawn to avoid the stolen car in the driveway. It’s a nice ride—a couple of years old at the most. I wish I could keep it. The picture-perfect home that represents a picture-perfect family life grows smaller in my rearview mirror. The manicured lawn I can no longer smell looks like a miniature-golf course as I glance back at it. The rose from that lawn is warm in my pocket. I pass three or four parked cars. People are walking up driveways and arriving home. Two old women talk over a low fence about whatever it is old women face in life. Another old woman on her knees painting her mailbox. A young boy delivering the community paper. People are at home here, and they are at peace. They don’t know me and pay no attention as I drive past their windows and out of their lives.

Technically we’re approaching the middle stages of autumn, but nobody has told Mother Nature, so we’re all still experiencing the heat of summer. It hasn’t rained in over a month. None of the trees are getting ready for the winter and losing their leaves. Some of those leaves right now are rustling above me in a light breeze, attached to a line of birch trees that grow from the sides of the road and make an arch overhead where fingerlike branches interlock. Birds are at play up there. In the distance, I can hear lawn mowers closing out the afternoon and starting the evening. This is going to be a beautiful night. It’s going to be the type of night that makes me glad to be alive. The type of night New Zealand summers are famous for. Just not normally in April.

Finally I begin to relax. I turn on the car stereo and hear the same damn song that was playing in Angela’s house. What are the chances? I hum along, singing my way into the evening. My thoughts turn from Fluffy to Angela, and only then does the smile come back to my face.

CHAPTER FOUR

I live in an apartment complex that would be worth more if sold as scrap. Because of its location, it will never be torn down and replaced because a new apartment complex isn’t going to fetch any more rent. It isn’t exactly the worst part of town, according to those who live here, but it is according to everybody else. It’s barely habitable, but it’s cheap, so that’s the trade-off. The complex is four stories high, covers the best part of a block, and I live on the top, giving me the best part of a very poor view. In total I think there are maybe thirty apartments.

I see none of my neighbors as I make my way upstairs, but this is neither bad nor uncommon. I find myself dwelling on poor Fluffy as I unlock the door and walk inside. My apartment has two rooms. One of these is a bathroom, and the other a combined everything else. The fridge and stove look so old I doubt carbon dating would identify an age. The floors are bare and I have to wear shoes all the time to avoid splinters. The walls have cheap, dark gray wallpaper so dry that it
crumbles a little bit more every time I open my door and create a draft. Several edges of it have peeled away and hang like flat tongues. A set of windows runs along one wall where my view consists of power lines and burned-out cars. I have an old washing machine with a noisy spin cycle, and hanging on the wall above it is a dryer that’s just as loud. Along the window is a line where I hang my washing during the summer. Currently nothing is hanging on it.