The Professional Corpse (The Departed Book 1) Read online

  The

  Professional

  Corpse

  Sean Arthur Cox

  First draft written in 2013 for NaNoWriMo.

  This pretty, typo-free reduced version: Copyright © 2017 Sean Arthur Cox

  All rights reserved.

  Cover designed by LV Book Design www.lvbookdesign.com

  ISBN: 1536829404

  ISBN-13: 978-1536829402

  DEDICATION

  To G.Q., (not the magazine), because apparently it takes a kid being born to push me to publish something.

  Here’s my business card,

  One lone grape to another

  We should stick each other

  I’ll be your sister, be your brother

  It shouldn’t be this hard

  Rolling toward wherever

  But if we keep together

  We’ll make it to forever

  Prologue

  JAMIE

  A REPLACEMENT GRAPE

  Everybody dies, some people more than others.

  If I have learned only one thing in all my many, many, dear sweet oblivion so damn many years, it would be that.

  If I have learned only two things, the second thing would be that destiny is not the set-in-stone affair we think it is.

  It’s no coincidence that the term destiny and destination sound so similar. Or perhaps it is. I can’t remember how the two words originated (it was a very long time ago), but I’m pretty sure they’re related. People tend to think of destiny as being an incontrovertible path to a set conclusion, like a train on tracks (you cannot appreciate how wonderful it is to have the train analogy. It used to be difficult to explain this kind of abstract concept in concrete terms). You’re the train, you’re heading from New York to San Francisco. Your destination is set. What’s more, your path is set. You cannot go off the rails. You will always pass through Chicago. You will always pass through Omaha and you have no choice but to take that winding path through the Rockies. If you ask your average person about destiny, that’s what they’ll tell you. Bad things, good things? These are all specific, unavoidable stops on the road to your cosmic San Francisco.

  I say that’s bunk. Destiny may be destination, but it is no train. It is a destination like the family farm in Kentucky is a destination, but your car breaks down in Clarksdale and by the time it gets fixed, you have eight hours to make the six-hundred-mile drive back home or you won’t have time to shower and shave before work on Monday.

  Better still, destiny is a servant carrying a rimless plate of grapes to an angry, obsessive-compulsive king. He howls all day for a plate of pre-plucked grapes whose total is the sum of two prime numbers. Our hungry king is the destination the universe has in mind for us. Destiny is the servant rushing down twisting stone corridors with a precarious grape stack and a desire to keep his head on his shoulders. And we—you, me, everyone we know and don’t know—we’re grapes rolling wildly across this wobbling surface. Destiny has a plan for us. He personally plucked us all from the vine and placed us upon this platter with the intent of feeding us to the mad monarch. But as free roaming grapes, we’re constantly slipping and sliding, threatening to fall off of this plate. It is destiny’s job to catch us when we fall, to brush off the dust when we roll onto the floor, and to run back to the kitchen for a replacement or at least eat a few grapes until it’s the sum of two primes again when one of us gets squished by some bumbling knight. There is no promise that any of us will reach the king. There is only the promise that at some point, the king will get his thirty-one grapes.

  After countless millennia dying and returning to life, I still have no idea why I can’t stay dead or why it’s happening to me specifically, still no sense of purpose or direction. It’s taken thousands of years, but I have finally come to the conclusion that I am a replacement grape, but where I’m headed or what our metaphorical king represents I do not know. All I know is destiny is making damn sure I won’t fall off this platter, no matter how hard I try.

  Chapter 1

  OLIVIA

  OUT THERE ON MY OWN

  “Remember, Olivia. Take a deep breath, hold it, then squeeze the trigger.”

  Houston, my mentor and de facto father, sits on the hood of his 2007 Prius. It’s an unassuming suburban blue, the kind your eyes just glide over and promptly forget. He keeps the inside neat aside from a soccer ball and a couple of Happy Meal toys he always leaves in the back next to the car seat base and diaper bag. The bumper likewise sports a “My child is an honor student” bumper sticker and a magnetic breast cancer awareness ribbon. Neither of us have any small children, but the details make us look boring, and that sort of thing matters. That’s why his imaginary stick figure family has a cat.

  I heed his advice and peer down the scope of Bonnie Prince Charlie, my L115A3 AWM sniper rifle. The wind comes in from the southwest at four and a half kilometers per hour. My target stands about twelve hundred meters away in the middle of a Mississippi soybean field. I adjust my sights and put the back of that poor bastard’s skull square in the center. Taking the humid southern air into my lungs, I clear my thoughts, still my body, and squeeze the trigger.

  The air erupts with the rifle’s booming rapport as hot lead roars from my barrel and plows home, splattering the surrounding crop with bits of bone and brain matter. The remaining half of the head slumps down, though the body does not. The scarecrow stand works just as hoped. If he hadn’t been a cadaver to start with, the man would be undeniably, no-respawns dead now.

  “Well,” I say, beaming with pride, “I don’t know about you, but I would call that a successful kill.”

  Houston squirms a little on the hood as he considers my shot. His rumpled slacks give the car perhaps the only polish it has seen in some time. When you couple his khakis with his off-the-rack short sleeve shirt and tie combo and his rounding center, he looks about as innocuous as a man of thirty-five could, like Dilbert without glasses. Had I not personally seen him kill a man, several in fact, I would never believe he was perhaps the most accomplished assassin operating in the Western Hemisphere. He gives me a working-class shrug, the kind a TV dad gives after a long day at the office when the kids ask to watch that one cartoon that makes him nostalgic for the good old days. “He would be dead, I’ll give you that. The shot was sloppy though.”

  “Hollow points are going to leave a mess.”

  “That isn’t what I meant, Olivia, and you know it. Your bullet placement was off center by a couple of inches.”

  “I took off half the guy’s head!”

  “Half,” agrees Houston in a way that manages to say he’s more right than me. “Against a perfectly still target. An inch or two more to the left and you would have missed entirely. What if he sneezed? The closer you can hit to center, the less likely you are to miss when fluke events spring up on you.”

  I glower at him, one of those epic glowers that only teenagers being told no can pull off. He returns the stare, but there is no wrath or malice. It’s a compassionate stare that says, “I only want to see you succeed, sweetheart.”

  Two can play that game. I square my feet and plant the barrel of my rifle in the dirt, supporting myself on the shoulder butt. This could be a long face off, but I’ve settled in. I can keep this up all day.

  “Respect your weapon,” he says and nods toward my muzzle.

  Groaning, I pull the gun up again and set about clearing the black Delta dirt from the barrel. With practiced precision, I quickly strip my weapon and begin unclogging the muzzle, only half listening as he prattles on.

  “You need to keep your gun clean. Store it properly. When you fire it, listen to it, feel how it mov
es. Your gun is your dancing partner. Her recoil is her tango. Learn her steps, dance with her, sway with her, and she will take care of you every time.”

  “She?” I blurt without realizing. “A sniper rifle is the most phallic piece of machinery ever invented by man, anatomically correct sex toys included. Hell, the whole point of one is to shoot your payload without having to get close to anyone. What strikes you as feminine about that?”

  “I guess it’s just the romantic in me,” he says. Sliding a knife from his pocket, he rises from the hood of his blue sedan and crosses the long field to the body. I don’t know where he gets them, but he insists I practice on real human cadavers. Without one, he often tells me, I’ll never learn the right amount of pressure to put on a blade or the practical difference between a full metal jacket and an open tip. He’s probably right.

  I lean my rifle against the passenger side door and follow him into the field. “Need a hand?” I ask as I draw near the corpse.

  “I should make you do this all yourself,” he says. “You’re as bad at body disposal as you are at shooting.”

  “That’s not…” I want to say fair, but one look from him cuts me short. “…entirely inaccurate,” I finish after much deliberation.

  He cuts away at the ropes that hold the body up and lets it crumple to the ground. My stomach turns no small amount as it contorts before me, its half-of-a-head staring me down. What’s left of the brain slides out of the skull with a slosh like Jell-O from a bowl, and I just know he’s going to make me pick it up.

  “I don’t see why I have to learn this. If I’m using a sniper rifle, I’m probably not going to have to dispose of the body. That’s a pretty public execution. And if a guy has an aneurism or gets drunk and drowns in his pool, I don’t need a gun, and I don’t need to do any clean up. Accidents are meant to be found.”

  “If you want to be a proper killer, you have to get your fundamentals down. You’re a prodigy at staging accidents. When it comes to natural causes, you’re spot on. But sometimes the client wants to send a message. Sometimes that message needs to be public, but sometimes it’s showing their enemies that sometimes people just disappear. What are you going to do then?”

  I want to tell him I’ll turn down the job or that I’ll figure it out when it comes to it, but I know he won’t take either of those answers, and I don’t want to let him down besides. Instead, I keep my mouth shut and help him carve the body into the six major pieces. A few construction-grade trash bags later and we’re ready to head out.

  Houston reaches into the back seat and pulls out the diaper bag. Without looking, he tosses me the baby wipes to clean my hands and shoves a few diapers into the body bags to soak up any fluids that might drip out. Blood stains tend to ruin the illusion that this car belongs to a wholesome family

  “Thanks,” I say and toss the used wipes into the bags along with the dead-guy-splattered plants that had taken too much gore to clean off quickly.

  As I pull out my rifle’s case, I hear the crunch of tires on gravel and turn to see a Coahoma County sheriff rolling up on our location. My heart pounds in my chest like the steady burst of fire from a nice automatic pistol. I’m brandishing Prince Charlie about as openly as any person can, obviously not expecting company. This deep into Delta country, who would? Instinct makes me want to turn quickly and hide it, throw it away like a grenade, anything but stand there holding it. Sensing my fear, Houston gives me a calming nod.

  “We’ve been over this a million times, baby girl. You know what to say. You take this one.”

  I smile back at him and slip into character. Given the circumstances, I decide to use Reese Witherspoon from Walk the Line. It’s one of my better impressions. Leaning the rifle against the Prius, I give the officer a warm Southern wave. Reflexively, I constrict my throat a little, shift my tongue back, and ready my country girl accent.

  “What’s goin’ on, officer?” I ask in a drawl as thick and sweet as molasses.

  He eyes my gun, then my breasts. I’m not exactly flaunting the girls, but then, that doesn’t exactly matter. He seems like the kind of fellow who would never turn down an opportunity to look at a pair, no matter whose. Maybe it’s the greasy black hair or his beady, almond colored eyes that drift back and forth between my face and chest. It takes more than a little of my steely reserve not to shudder under his unsettling leer.

  “I think that’s my line,” he says as he leans out the patrol car window. “I’m just drivin’ through. Thought I heard a gunshot a couple minutes ago, and just wanted to see what the action was.”

  Houston steps up beside me, puts an arm around my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. Then he offers his free hand to the sheriff, who politely accepts it.

  “Just takin’ a day from the office to teach my daughter how to shoot her new toy,” Houston says in his own warm, affected twang as rich as the black soil. Then his expression becomes hard steel wrapped in velvet. “My baby girl’s a mean shot, sheriff. You don’t need to worry about anyone behaving in any untoward fashion against her.”

  He emphasizes the last words enough to draw the policeman’s eyes off my figure and onto just about anything else. The lawman glances at the trash bags, the diaper bag, the bumper sticker.

  “Got kids, I see?”

  “Yessir,” I say. “Two of ‘em. Little boy in first grade and a little baby girl. They’re with their mawmaw right now.”

  He eyes my hands and clicks his tongue a little. “Not married?”

  “No, sir. Their daddy’s a good for nothin’ bastard I wouldn’t piss on if he was on fire. But he’s locked up in Yazoo, so he ain’t no concern of mine. Not for a few more years at least.”

  “Well, if you ever need anything…”

  Houston squeezes me tighter and gives the officer another hard stare. I wonder how much of his protective embrace is an act and how much he means. “Don’t you worry about that. My baby girl’s got the second amendment to keep her safe, least until those godless Democrats take it away.”

  The officer nods, taking the hint. “Amen to that. You shoot straight and listen to your old man, little lady, you hear me? And keep those babies of yours safe.”

  “Yessir,” I say with a warm smile and a wave. The sheriff looks like he wants to say something else, but must think better of it, because he pulls his arm back inside the car, rolls up the window, and drives off.

  Houston has always told me the best place to practice targeting was the South. Sparse population, varied terrain, and nobody bats an eye when they hear a gunshot or see a big ass rifle next to a baby carrier. I tease him about it, tell him it’s all just his thin excuse to get authentic shrimp and grits. It’s not until now that I realize the sense of it. The man’s a professional through and through, and he knows his trade. I don’t know why I never gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  I pack up Prince Charlie and climb into the passenger side, grateful for the AC and satellite radio. Who knows what sort of god forsaken stuff they play on the FM stations this far away from civilization. I swing up and down the thirties looking for something good and luck upon “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen. Houston pulls himself into driver’s seat. I give him a smile, my eyebrows bouncing as I nod toward the radio.

  “Eh? Eh? I’d call this a pretty auspicious beginning for our Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

  Houston only shakes his head, so I up the ante, shoulder bumping him as I belt the lyrics at the top of my untalented lungs. A small groan escapes his lips, and his eyes roll as he cranked the car.

  “What?” I ask, about as defensive as they come.

  “Echo and the Bunnies?”

  “Bunnymen,” I say. “How can you not like the Bunnymen? You grew up with them!”

  “I grew up with my brother. I don’t like him.”

  “But… but… ‘The Killing Moon!’”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like Echo and the Bunnymen. I don’t like the Smiths. I don’t like the Cure. I don’t like any of that New Wav
e crap. The 80s were a vomited mass of black clothes and black make up and gloom, gloom, gloom, or its opposite, spandex, Aquanet, inch thick make-up, legwarmers, and toxic, blinding neon colors, and dumb hair all around. Why you young people get so excited about the 80s, I’ll never know. Flush it all and never look back, I say. Except for Peter Gabriel. He can stay. Genesis too, obviously. And the Talking Heads. And Peter Gabriel. And Billy Joel. And a lot of the movies. But as to the rest, get thee hence, Satan.”

  I furrow my brow and screw up my lips at him, but not for long. It’s a dad’s right not to like your music, even if it was his music first.

  “Thanks for my princess present,” I say. “I really like Prince Charlie.”

  “So that what you’re naming this one?”

  I nod as I watch the endless fields roll by out the window.

  “Any particular reason?”

  “I don’t know. He just looks like a Prince Charlie.”

  “Yeah.” Houston shrugs, his head bouncing a little as he considers the firearm. “Yeah, I can see that. I’m glad you like it.”

  “So,” I ask after a pause, “what’s the occasion?”

  “Can’t a guy do something nice for someone just because?”

  “They can. You don’t.”

  He just gives a noncommittal grunt and keeps his eyes on the road.

  Since I was a kid, Houston’s been giving me princess presents. Guns in pretty pink dress boxes. Poisons in jewelry cases. Usually I get them for my birthday or Christmas. I’d come downstairs and see the box waiting for me with the note, For my little princess. No names. Just that tag and something that killed or helped kill. Recently, he’s begun giving me presents out of the blue. Then he teaches me all about it, maybe takes me out to practice using it. He’s always done that, but lately, afterward he’s taken to having me help plan a job using that particular item, explaining how what I’ve learned could help kill this diplomat or that mobster.