I don’t like ratting on anybody, to either cops or criminals. Who said every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints? Oh yeah, it was one of those records my Mother used to play, back in the day. For some reason that line stuck in my head. I suppose it meant there is a very blurry line between good and bad, and your choices really come down to survival, not ethics.
The way I saw it, I had no choice but to squeal on the mailman.
I explained the situation with the mailman to Dusty on the phone, then awaited her response with uncertainty, not sure if I would be scolded or applauded.
“Mother fucker, not that guy again,” Dust finally growled between her donut-stained teeth.
“Again?” I asked, surprised she identified him so quickly, when there must be hundreds of letter carriers prowling the streets of Northern Colorado.
“I’m fed up with this asshole. I need you to come back to the office right away, so we can talk about this in person.”
My eyebrows shot to the stratosphere in surprise, but before I had a chance to react Dusty cut me off, leaving me standing there like an idiot, with a drug dealer phone on my ear and a clueless expression on my face.
In a state of mind somewhere between mild befuddlement and pure panic, I drove across Snowmist to Dusty’s office. I found her there as before, surgically attached to her desk. A giant Frappuchino stood before her, three quarters empty. I was thinking she probably guzzled fifteen of these per day, which was why she was so bloated. People in her line of work probably didn’t practice healthy lifestyles, but leaned into gluttony and hedonism, knowing life outside a cage was short.
When I walked in the room, Dusty peeled her fat ass out of the chair for the first time since I met her, then pulled her tight shirt down around her flab, but not before I got a disgusting glimpse of her bulbous belly button.
“Close the door behind you and sit down,” she said with uncharacteristic anxiety, a thin sheen of sweat making her forehead sparkle.
Dusty’s attitude raised alarm bells in my mind that sounded something like cop sirens. I checked the hallway behind me as I closed the door, though I had never seen anybody else in this building.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. “This mailman is screwing up operations all over Snowmist and we’ve got to get rid of him. He calls the cops on my operatives. I’ve had to change the logo on the van twice because of him. I thought I had scared him away with a little strong arm thuggery, but I guess the old fucker’s going to keel over any day anyway, and doesn’t care. He’s a threat to our existence and has to be eliminated. You’re elected as the eliminator.”
My mouth dropped down on its hinges stupidly. Dusty’s words vaguely resembled English, but hit my ears like some incomprehensible dead language.
“What do you mean the eliminator?” As far as I knew, that was a ZZ Top vinyl album stashed inside my Mom’s dinosaur record console. A museum relic that had nothing to do with me.
Dusty was still standing, leaning on her desk with both hands, her stubby fingers flattened against it like the suckers on octopus tentacles. Her annoyance over my news had now morphed into grim determination. I took this as a bad sign.
“What I mean is you’re going to bring him down, take him out. How many fucking prepositions do I have to use before you get the picture?”
“Are you saying…”
“Shhh. Don’t be so direct. There are certain words we don’t use in here. I’m going to give you an envelope with your new instructions. There’s a nice bonus in there for you too. You’ll get double that bonus when you finish the job.”
She reached down into the desk drawer to retrieve the envelope, but I held up a hand to stop her.
“Wait a minute, I didn’t sign up for this shit.”
Dusty took a long pull on her Frappuchino, emptying it in a single slurp.
“You don’t have any choice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I had already observed Dusty’s expression go from despondent to devious in the blink of an eye, but now it turned downright demonic.
“You’re knee deep in this operation. I have plenty of proof of that, none of which implicates me. I also have friends on the police force. They don’t care who gets charged for local crimes, as long as somebody does, so they can clear it off the books and look like heroes.”
I would eventually find out Dusty didn’t have any friends on the police force, but that was still in the future. In truth, I don’t think she had any friends at all. But how was I supposed to know that at the time? I was just a drunken college student. As far as I was concerned, she really did have me by the balls.
Dusty slid the envelope toward me, right through the gaping cracks in my moral armor.
“Just read the note inside. It won’t be as bad as you think.”
The envelope sat there on the desk, winking at me, saying look aren’t I beautiful. It was the same old opaque brown envelope Dusty always used, but much thicker than usual.
That’s a helluva lot of beer money, I thought, and picked it up.
I took Dusty’s thirty pieces of silver, which bulged beautifully on my dashboard all the way home, but I didn’t open it until I got back to my apartment, being afraid to flash so much cash in public.
My annoying Chinese roommate Pete was still there, waiting to step out with his fellow Asian imports, where they would eliminate any possibility of female contact by boasting how good they were at math, and what excellent civil engineers they would be someday, building bridges and canals for Chairman fucking Mao. I had to cool my heels, rolling my eyes as Petey chattered about how prime numbers are scattered randomly along the number line, and no simple formula predicts where the next one will fall. “That’s something like magic, don’t you think?” he asked. I could only grunt because I really didn’t give a fuck, but he was really only talking to himself anyway. Finally, his home boys picked him up and I got down to business.
After this hellish interlude in Purgatory, I opened Dusty’s envelope at my desk in our squalid room that always reeked of piss and puke, no matter how hard you tried to sanitize it.
I pulled her handwritten note aside, because naturally I wanted to count the cash before committing to anything. What kind of cheap fucking whore do you think I am, after all?
I was face to face with the biggest wad of green I had ever seen in my life. Benjamin Franklin and twenty nine of his clones were stacked neatly on top of one another.
I couldn’t do math as good as nerdy Pete and his sexless asian spaz patrol, but it’s easy to multiply by 100. I was gawking at three thousand dollars in this envelope. Three thousand dollars that would double once the deed was done.
I counted the bills twice, then doubled the amount in my head. Six thousand buckaroos. Not a lot for some educated urban professional with an exorbitant, million dollar mortgage, but more money than I had seen in the course of my tender, poverty-stricken years.
With my face aglow from reflecting the god of mammon, I now turned to Dusty’s note. As I unfolded it, a small ziploc bag filled with some kind of white powder fell out.
I jerked away from the substance like it was anthrax spores. Although encased in protective plastic, it looked deadly to the touch.
Keeping a wary eye on that baggie, I turned my attention to Dusty’s words.
The message was written in feminine, curlicue script, the same as Dusty’s other envelope notes, designed to evoke phoney-baloney kindness and happiness – all puppy dogs, rainbows, and unicorns. The saccharine style could not conceal the heartless bitch she was in real life.
Inside this envelope is a baggy with some powder. Put it inside his water jug. He always leaves his vehicle unlocked when he walks Valerie street, because it’s so run down it doesn’t lock properly. Use your car, don’t take the Dogwalker van. He’s usually at that street about 3:30 PM. It’s his last delivery. Call me immediately when you’re done. Don’t worry, the stuff is harmless over the long run. The goal here is only to force him into retirement.
Did Dusty really expect me to believe that? How dumb did she think I was? If the stuff was harmless, why three thousand now and three thousand later? That was hit man money. You could hire an assassin on the dark web for less than that. I know, because in a drunken rage I had once searched for how much it would cost to take out a professor who had the audacity to give me a “B” on a paper. A “B” for me, of all people.
I looked at the pile of bills, and for a moment contemplated disappearing with them. But something told me Dusty was not someone to fuck with. If I ran, I would have to run a long ass way. She had all my contact details on my application. She knew I was a student, where I lived on campus, and where my mother lived. Not only would I have to leave school to escape her, I would have to leave the state completely. Even that might not be enough. Her domineering manner of speech told me she was a determined, dogged woman, pun intended. She might hound me to the ends of the Earth, another pun that wasn’t so funny, but suited her perfectly.
I decided to get drunk and sleep on it. Fortunately, I already had a refrigerator well stocked with beer, plus a bottle of Fireball hidden behind my textbooks on the shelf, to keep it from Pete, who I feared might go blind on it. Nothing worse than a blind Asian dork. That liquor should be enough to calm my nerves, put me to sleep, and allow my dreams to sort out the decision.
But dreamland turned out to be just another confounding rat’s maze of confusion and chaos. Even in my heavily numbed state, my subconscious was determined to dream vividly, and within the walls of my psyche I stumbled into the curtainless home of those disembodied eyes.
I was looking for a place to fap after running across purple-haired girl, picking up merchandise off that old lady’s front porch. This house appeared so unkempt I believed it must be abandoned, so I crawled through the tangled brush with Bruno to the front porch where I had first witnessed that ethereal spectacle, my nocturnal visions feeling so vivid I thought my waking world was blending into the sleeping one.
I looped Bruno’s leash around the spigot on the porch, and he seemed to sit there obediently, his wagging tongue flopping out of his mouth. Surely I can get some privacy in here, I thought, there’s nothing but ghosts inside. Then I pushed on the door handle, and like it always does or doesn’t when it’s not supposed to or supposed to in dream logic, the door opened.
The inside of ghost-eye’s house didn’t look like a residence, but was more like an infinite series of public bathroom stalls. That will serve my purpose well enough, I thought, I’ll just take off the edge and get back to work. However, I discovered to my distress that the first stall I entered was only closed on three sides, leaving the other side open, where I would be exposed to public view. Of course, there was no public in here, only dead people, so that shouldn’t be an impediment to the business at hand, literally in hand. Yet when I unzipped myself and got ready to drop my load, I felt prying eyeballs on my back through the open end of the stall.
I exited again into the infinite maze of toilets, their privacy walls distinguished by varying colors and degrees of maintenance. Some were blue, others green or beige. Some were freshly painted, others had rust stains around the bottom, and several dripped with some sort of discolored ooze. Their surfaces were often decorated with nonsensical graffiti, written in languages or alphabets I couldn’t understand. Many of them had shit splatters on their floors and toilets, causing me to recoil in disgust and back out before the hand party got started.
I finally found a stall that had a complete set of four walls and looked reasonably clean. Again I dropped my drawers and positioned myself over the bowl, intending to purge myself quickly then flush away the evidence, leaving as little a mess as possible. My young male adult hormones, raging with the thought of that purple-haired girl and her near naked ass, assured me this should be a quick and dirty process.
Then a shadow moved in my peripheral vision and I turned back to see Bruno sitting in the stall behind me, his tongue still flopping away innocently, which made the object in my hand revert to a similar flaccid state.
I couldn’t fap with someone looking at me, even if the someone was a dog who could tell no tales.
“Get out of here you damn dog!” I shouted, “Go back to the porch where I left you!” And though he whimpered a bit for the scolding, Bruno obediently walked out. But he took the stall door with him, and I stood there exposed again.
I desperately searched for an acceptable refuge, moving among toilets surrounded by two or three doors, or no doors at all, some encrusted in dried poop, others decorated with a nauseating, multi-colored substance that could have only been puke. I roamed through this strange universe of plumbing fixtures for what seemed an eternity in irrelevant dream time, my business end bulging in my drawers, craving just a bit of affectionate petting to slobber out its steaming goo.
At last I found a stall surrounded by four clean, sturdy walls, and opened up the solid door to go get that load off my mind, at last.
The inside of the lavatory was as immaculate as the outside. It felt unnaturally clean, in fact, almost creepily so, but I wasn’t going to let any such reservations hold me back now.
A little plastic pink flower in a vase adorned the tank top, a nice feminine touch to augment the overall sanitized appearance. On one wall hung a small painting of a Victorian street scene, with a man in a top hat, holding a cane, walking past horse drawn carriages clopping beneath stately brick buildings, one of them the tall steeple of a church with a clock embedded in its tower.
Everything suggested sanitation here, and I should have no further excuses to get cranking and get the hell out of this endless purgatory of unsettling commodes. But as I dropped my drawers and stood there, preparing to get a grip, I saw a mirror above the bowl.
Was that there when I walked in? Often in dreams objects will materialize out of nowhere, like this mirror had done, or dematerialize, like that stall door in my first attempt to get a handle on my problem.
Well, whatever, what’s the big deal? I would just be face to face with yours truly. My own reflection wouldn’t judge, or try to bust me for indecent exposure.
Then I heard music crank up from outside the stall, the familiar opening bars from a Rolling Stones song my Mother used to play. What the fuck is up with the Rolling Stones lately? First sympathy for the devil, and now this?
Oh well, let’s get on with it. I stood there and began to stroke my own instrument before that mirror, but was afflicted by coitus interruptus once more. Something was off that would keep me from getting off. Because it wasn’t my own reflection looking back at me in that glass.
I recoiled in horror. The object in the mirror was a hooded figure, something like the grim reaper, but without a skull beneath its bonnet. Instead, inside that dark space where a head should be I saw a pair of eyeballs flying solo, those same eyeballs I had seen through the glass, on that day Bruno and I first blazed a trail through the clutter of vines and branches at the ghost-house.
“What’s the matter?” a young female voice beneath the hood spoke. “Can’t you get no satisfaction, my…”
I heard Bruno baying in agony as I woke up in my room, his howls of pain ringing in my ears, as clearly as if he was lying in bed next to me. I jolted up on my elbows and looked around in a panic, but his canine cries gradually receded into the distance, then disappeared altogether.
I should have been shocked by what I had just seen, whether real or dream, but I felt strangely calm. Something told me my destiny would be splattered with shit, like those toilets, no matter what I did, and I would never get no satisfaction, regardless of which way I turned. The outcome of my mission was somehow pre-ordained. The hooded figure standing behind me was inevitable, inexorable.
I lay there looking at the sparkling pinpoints of light on the cheaply spackled ceiling until I went back to sleep, where I had no further dreams. I woke well after sunrise, determined to carry out Dusty’s plan.
I felt weird driving back to that neighborhood in my own car, without Bruno, and I wondered how he was doing inside the van, baking inside his shaggy pelt. To Dusty Bruno was just a prop, an object to be exploited for her economic benefit, a mindless brute who could be easily substituted with another dog once he no longer served his purpose. But I knew he was the real brains of this operation, and I wished I had the guidance of his keen nose as I went forward on this latest crime of mine.
I headed for the place where the mailman did his walking loop. It just so happened to be the next block over from the house with the disembodied, shape-shifting eyes. I felt their mysterious gravity as I approached the place, as if they were luring me to either my doom or delight, and I really didn’t care which.
I parked down the block beneath a tree, at a safe distance where I could see the mailman’s approach, but hopefully go unnoticed by him. I knew he was a cagey old son of a bitch, so I hung back a long way, lowering myself back in my car seat as much as I could while still being able to observe his coming and going.
I sat there sweating with the windows cracked open, but it wasn’t so much the June heat as the implications of my actions raising my temperature. Not even the deed itself, but its repercussions. I was sure I could carry this out coldly, swiftly, and without hesitation, never having been one to hem and haw over pulling the trigger on any act. But this was a serious sin, and I knew it would change my life one way or another, whether I got away with it or not. Even if I made the score I would be a different person on the other side, and I was kind of shocked I didn’t really give a fuck.
In my hand I held the deadly little ziploc from Dusty’s blood-money envelope. Being tensed to do battle I had to be careful not to squeeze it too hard, like when you’re lying in the dentist’s chair, with the drill buzzing overhead, anticipating pain, and you have to stop yourself from digging your fingernails into the sides of the seat.
I kept glancing at the time on my phone as I sat stewing and steaming. I had arrived an hour early, so as not to miss my window of opportunity, but I should have guessed the old fucker was a slave to time and routine, as people from the boomer generation usually are. That crusty old fart showed up at 3:28 PM, almost on the dot.
I reclined in my car seat, careful not to raise my head too soon, lest that alert enforcer of neighborhood morality do a wac-a-mole on it, and foil all my plans. I watched him get his mail together in the back of his truck then step off. Once he disappeared around the corner I made my move, without hesitation.
Image by Copilot from author’s prompt