Chapter One: “The Smell of Burning Jacob”

   The bullet went off like a force of nature – a blunt act that immediately changed everything and claimed dominion over the room. The temperature of the room had changed and it was very clear whose hands were on the thermostat. The bullet went off as though it were in accordance with a grander scheme or a master plan. For Jeremy Crider, it struck like it was the culmination of what must have been the culmination of a lifetime of bad choices. It didn’t even feel real after it happened. Jeremy felt removed from the situation, as if part of him understood it on a basic level, but the rest of him hadn’t yet begun to comprehend it.

   Jacob Halwright’s head exploded! Such a phrase seemed too dramatic, but, there Jacob Halwright’s dead body laid; head all ‘sploded-like. It was crazy the way the right handgun could blow off the top of a person’s head like a magician’s trick gone tragically awry. For a fleeting moment, Jeremy let his mind wander, imagining being a child at a birthday party, everything being well, til his mother went to slice him a piece of cake, then, stopped, suddenly, removed a fleshy mother-shaped mask, and revealed Jacob Halwright, whose head then exploded.

   Jeremy could tell he was spiraling, doing anything he could to disassociate from the situation unfolding in front of him. Unfortunately, another part of him was doing everything it could to force him back to reality, the part of him that realized there was a man with a glock whose actions could very well spell out his last moments on the planet. Shock scrambled Jeremy’s mind while he tried again and failed to process what happened.

   Jacob had been an acquaintance of Jeremy’s only a few seconds. Jacob owed Jeremy fifteen bucks from a bet, not even a minute prior, but did the shooter give two squirts about that? Jeremy could feel his hands trembling, each drenched with sweat.

   The person with their index finger on the trigger was none other than Robert Spade. At first, Jeremy had a dead, unwavering stare aimed at Jacob Halwright’s corpse as the gun that added the final digits to his epithet. He had never seen a dead body before this moment. He had thought about what a dead body may look like, but, in all those times, he had imagined the body with closed eyes and a solemn expression. Jacob Halwright’s was now an expressionless thing on the ground. Once he brought his eyes away from the body, however, he found himself taken in by a new fixation – Robert Spade. Once their eyes met, he felt his attention taken hold of and grasped tightly.

   The expression on Robert Spade’s face was neither a devilish glare nor a fiery stare. That wasn’t what kept Jeremy so invested and enthralled by the man. Besides the obvious, it was the nothingness behind his eyes and how unchanged he seemed from any other time Jeremy had seen him. Robert’s eyes could have easily told the story of a man who had just finished reading his morning paper, instead of having just murdered a man. There was no discernible change in Robert’s eyes. That, in itself, Jeremy was more intimidated by than if there had been a reaction. It would have been one thing if he had been remorseful, but, even if he had been outright ruthless, that would’ve scared Jeremy less than looking in the eyes of a man who just smited someone and felt nothing of it. Even worse, by there being no emotion to read off the old man’s expression, Jeremy had no way to say for sure if that was the only bullet he intended to fire off.

   Robert’s eyes took themselves off and away from the pieces that were now Jacob Halwright and returned Jeremy’s gaze, but his head didn’t nudge an inch, like the hand of a clock coming around to let him know that his time had come. This would be it. This would be Jeremy’s demise, a fact he had no doubt of in this moment. He was now face to face with death, and death had a thick-gray handlebar mustache and a big-ass handgun that fired bullets off like it was a fucking bazooka.

   Jeremy held the stare with Robert intently, only breaking off in small intervals to keep for certain the barrel of Robert’s gun stayed lowered, pointed toward the pile of Jacob that had been spilled out onto the fake hardwood vinyl floor.

   A small smirk formed on Robert Spade’s face shortly thereafter. Perhaps it was an attempt at comforting Jeremy, a subtle change to let him know he wasn’t the target of Robert’s aggression, but it only served to make Jeremy feel even more uneasy.

   Robert was a middle-aged man, in his late fifties or early sixties at the latest, with wiry limbs and a lanky frame, all except for the small bump over his stomach. Maybe it was a beer belly or maybe he was pregnant with the spawn of Satan? Jeremy did not know enough about Robert to say for certain, all he knew was that his father had always respected and feared the man a great deal.

   At long last, Robert lowered the gun to his side, a relief that kept Jeremy from bursting out at the seams. Robert was not a particularly strong or stout man, he was not a burly guy who Jeremy would ever bet on in a bar fight, but, even now, with his weapon lowered, Jeremy couldn’t imagine a time he would not be intimidated by him.

   “Jacob Halwright,” Robert Spade said plainly. “We will no longer be requiring your services.” He spoke in a monotone, deadpan cadence, before letting a small, almost giddy, chuckle escape him, like a little kid laughing at a dirty word they found scrawled in their school textbook. It was a toothy laugh that reminded Jeremy a little of a rabbit – a terrifying, evil, little rabbit.

   As a way to sooth his own nervous discomfort, Jeremy forced out a hearty laugh of his own. Beside Jeremy, a person Jeremy had momentarily forgotten all existence of, was a man named Bill Meiner, one of the two men Jeremy had spent the last three hours with, robbing one of the wealthiest families in Hardan. He was now the only other one of those three men alive and, judging by the look on his face, this was not the first time Robert Spade had killed one of his co-workers in front of him. Bill looked more inconvenienced than afraid, but he held his tongue, much to Jeremy’s approval.

   Robert Spade swaggered around the room. Every echo made when his white and red (originally, only white) shoes met the floor felt amplified. This was what it meant to have a presence, Jeremy supposed. Although, had that presence been there since before Jeremy watched him kill a man? Jeremy couldn’t be for certain. What he did know was that he would always have it from here on out.

   “Although, as I am for certain you have since discovered, your first day was not without any unnecessary …,” Robert stopped for a moment to reflect. “Excitement. I do believe that things could have gone considerably worse,” he continued, his voice softening and feeling more like the man Jeremy had spoken to earlier in the day.

   Jeremy inspected the man carefully as he spoke, as though he was looking for an explanation to a problem he hadn’t yet come up with. He inspected the black tar in between the gaps of the man’s teeth made by chewing tobacco and took note of the stale scent from his cheap cologne.

   “There is only one more thing left for you to do before you can clock out for the day and be given what you have coming to you. And, I will tell you what, as an added bonus, I will even throw in something extra for your troubles. All you have left to do now is get rid of the body.” Robert’s voice deepened with his final demand and his face was now only a few inches away from Jeremy’s, waiting for his response.

   What came out of Jeremy’s mouth did not have the needed cogency to be considered as actual words. Instead, what came out of Jeremy’s mouth was more comparable to that of a guttural clearing of the throat, resembling what happens when a fork is caught in the garbage disposal. Be that as it may, the response seemed to please Robert Spade. Robert smiled again, patting his hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. Jeremy flinched, instinctively pulling away from him, an act that seemed to only further amuse him.

   “See to it that he does,” Spade said, looking over toward Bill, who, in turn, nodded in agreement.

   Like that, Robert Spade turned his back from the men, and with every second that went by after he made his leave, the sense of finality in his decision began to sink in. Jeremy tried to find the words to speak, but couldn’t. He wanted no more to object to Robert’s absurd demand, but couldn’t muster the courage or will to do so. All he wanted was for Robert to be out of the room and for reality to be allowed to un-pause again.

   As Jeremy heard the door shut, it felt like a pair of imaginary hands, once clutching his throat, had finally released him. He now felt aware of how drenched in sweat his body had become and felt free again to breathe. As the oxygen returned to his brain, he was also able to now truly appreciate his own predicament – there was a dead body in front of him and he had now been appointed the warehouse’s janitor.

   He looked over to Bill in search of comfort, but, instead, the overweight man with a saggy, pug-shaped face offered an ambitious look. It was ambitious in the sense that he said more with the curl of his lip than a mere mortal should have been capable of. With his look, he may as well have shrugged his shoulders and said, “Shit happens,” as though he had not spent hours with the same man as Jeremy, the same man whose head now resembled uncooked ground beef.

   It was a cold night, and even though Jeremy had anticipated this and knew he would be exposed to the elements, he chose to wear nothing more than a thin hooded sweatshirt and no gloves – just one more example of his lack of preparedness for the night. The whole way Bill had chosen to ignore his pleas to stop at any nearby convenience stores to see if they carried any, and so, Jeremy had spent a good deal of the night rubbing his hands together to prevent having to chop them off from frostbite later on. To top it off, Jeremy had developed what he chalked off as an ear infection from the cold. Every now and again, they would start to right and his hypochondria would make him wonder if this would be the moment everything in his life went silent. If Jacob Halwright’s death accomplished anything, it was that the shock filled Jeremy with a red hot warmth in his chest. Unfortunately, his ears were ringing far more now than before and he still desperately longed for a pair of gloves.

   “What does he mean by ‘get rid of the body’?” Jeremy asked, at last, finding the words to express the terror he felt.

   “It is not a euphemism, kid,” Bill belched back, then turned his back to him as though that explanation was enough for them to move on.

   Bill lugged his prodigious frame over to the kitchen. A few seconds went by again, comprised of Jeremy flinching every time he heard a rat or cockroach or whatever other vermin were crawling around the rundown trash-heap where Spade conducted his business. His mind fluttered with paranoia, thinking the movement might have come from Jacob Halwright’s remains.

   “Fuck,” Jeremy cried out, letting himself get rattled by his own fear more than any actual act provoking it.

   At last, Bill Meiner returned to him, carrying a filthy mop in one hand and kicking around an empty plastic bucket with his boot.

   “You can’t actually be serious with this!” Jeremy shouted, looking to the door where Robert Spade had stepped out, like a child afraid of being heard badmouthing daddy. Either that, or waiting for daddy to come back and tell him it was a bad joke. Gallow’s humor, Jeremy thought to himself. Gallow’s humor.

   “I am as serious as a heart attack,” Bill answered, freeing the mop from his hand and letting gravity do the rest. Thereafter, his hand went to his back pocket.

   “You can’t be serious, you can’t be serious,” Jeremy mumbled over and over again, circling around the dead body, trying to wrap his head around how to even begin such a task. His eyes found their way back to Bill in time to see him un-peeling a banana.

   “You have said that already, boy, and again, I am,” Bill said, taking an unsanitary bite from the fruit, the night’s events not enough to stifle his appetite, it seemed.

   “You can’t expect, …,” Jeremy stopped for a second, thinking, “Someone will have heard the gunshots. They will have reported it. They’ll call it in and we will have the cops breaking down the damn door, and when they do, they’ll find you and me with a dead body, then, they’ll arrest us. They will take us to prison and throw away the key. Is that what you want!?”

   “No one will call.”

   “You can’t possibly know that for certain.”

   “I can,” Bill countered with matter-of-fact confidence. “As you will come to realize, Robert Spade does not make a whole lot of mistakes. Do you know who owns this building, this beat-up, shanty-town lookin’ hellhole? Well, it’s the same one who owns its neighbors and its neighbor’s neighbors. No one.” Bill laughed at the thought. “This is a ghost city, Jeremy, or haven’t you noticed that? The only ones stopping by Ordos Town are drug-dealers and squatters, either ones too poor to afford a phone-call or ones who don’t want the law sticking their noses in their turf. Even if they did, no two-bit cop has the balls to come out here in the middle of the night.”

   Jeremy said nothing for a few seconds. This was not how things were meant to happen tonight. Jeremy was an actor. Not a criminal. He was an actor. He was a failed actor by accounts, most certainly, but, he was not a criminal. He ruffled with the unkempt hair on his head, feeling the sweat travel down the back of his neck in beads. This was the type of situation he fought his whole life to stay out of. He had fought such valiant and proud battles to stay on the happy, thumbs up side of the law, and not the side that had robbed his father of the last years of his life. Be that as it may, even failed actors faced hardships, in fact, surprising as it may sound, they were even more likely to face them than the successful ones. Even valiant, law-abiding do-gooders could find themselves on the business end of their landlord’s shaft, having to decide between eating that month and paying rent.

   Jeremy laughed, and didn’t know why, and, for a moment, he thought maybe he knew why Robert Spade had managed to smile after shooting Jacob Halwright. It was hysterics. It was a flicker of madness in a life of pitch-black normality. It was only for a moment, however. Jeremy knew it was the same. If it were hysterics that made Robert Spade smile, it was a refined, harnessed version of what Jeremy felt. Robert smiled because he enjoyed it. And, someone who enjoyed doing something, was all the more likely to do it again.

   Jeremy rubbed his hands together, trying to find a good starting point to his newly assigned task. Jacob wasn’t a very heavy man. That was a relief. In a moment of morbidity, Jeremy couldn’t help but thank the heavens that Robert hadn’t decided to shoot Bill instead. Bill was a heavy man. Thankfully, Jacob was light, and, in fact, due to recent events, he had become even lighter (minus one head). Rolling up Jacob’s pant legs, Jeremy grabbed each of his ankles, hunching over while he did so. He looked up at Bill, still eating his stupid fucking banana. Bill looked at him skeptically and shook his head.

   “Oh, I am not a lifter. Have a bad back, you see,” he explained, feigning a hurt back to further demonstrate the fact. For good measure, the bastard even feigned wincing from the small exertion.

   “Bill, …, we have spent the last five hours loading a van with heavy boxes!” Jeremy shouted.

   Bill shrugged his shoulders, “That must be how I hurt my back. It’s a new development.”

   “You’re a new development,” Jeremy mumbled beneath his breath, trying to stagger his feet and get a proper footing.

   “That’s an outrageous accusation,” Bill said dryly.

   “If Robert Spade is so fucking brilliant and ‘doesn’t make mistakes,’ then why would he leave me, a person who has no idea what the hell he is doing, to clean up his handiwork?”

   “Well,” Bill began, at last, finishing his banana, throwing it into a nearby garbage bin in the corner of the room, one that was already long-since overflowing with trash. “For starters, he would be smart enough that he would never use that handgun again. He has many friends who will be able to provide him an alibi should he need it, no questions asked. And, the only person who has left any fingerprints on the body so far … is you.”

   The second the words registered with him, Jeremy leaped back, stumbling on a nearby coffee table and spilling over an ashtray. “Gloves! I should be given gloves for something like this.”

   “Buy them,” Bill said, sounding uninterested with Jeremy’s concerns and ignoring the irony of how he would have had a pair had Bill allowed him to buy some earlier when he’d asked.

   The sweat running down Jeremy’s face was now starting to make it harder to see. He nearly freed one of his hands and wiped it off, but fought the reflex. The last thing he wanted was to touch his face right now. He shook his head back and forth to try and bring himself some relief. He watched all of his sweat hit the ground like little droplets of rain. All of that precious DNA evidence connecting him to the murder of Jacob Halwright. His heart pounded. Which arm was it that hurt when someone was having a heart attack!?

   Jeremy looked around his surroundings, in search of what, he was not exactly for certain. There wasn’t exactly a “get away with murder” kit anywhere he could see.

   On the car ride back from Robert Spade’s trailer with all the loot they had stolen, Bill explained that Robert liked to meet his new recruits face to face. It was a different approach to what Jeremy had expected; a noble, almost business-like tactic. Most criminals Jeremy had ever been around (mostly drug dealer, mostly low-end, mostly weed) were either completely casual because they didn’t think anyone would ever care about them selling pot or were so high strung that you’d think they were human-traffickers. Robert was neither. Robert reminded him of a mafia film, where the head honcho treated his men as employees, providing them with benefits and shit, pamphlets and 401k’s, running it like a real, actual business. Now, however, Jeremy’s perception of Robert had taken a hard left from his initial impression (the mafia similarity remained though).

   Jeremy sauntered over to the kitchen. As far as home decor went, it had certainly seen brighter days, but it did have supplies from squatters and whoever once called it their home. Jeremy searched the cabinets under the sink, finding trash bags and crinkled up plastic shopping bags that had been wedged inside. There was a selection of bottles that had their labels ripped off. Why were the labels ripped off? As an extra in a couple low-budget films, Jeremy had watched the directors rip off labels as a way to prevent a lawsuit. The reasoning these labels had been taken off likely had something more to do with confusing your apple cider vinegar with liquid PCP. They had all of that, and, of course, enough manure to start a garden.

   “God fucking dammit!” Jeremy yelled, then, rubbed the back of his neck. He relented, remembering his failed quest of not touching himself after handling a corpse. In that lapse of judgment, he had been able to feel the stress knots starting to form on the back of his neck.

   He came back to Jacob Halwright without the supplies he would have preferred, instead, bringing back a broom and a poop scoop.

   “And, what the hell do you expect to do with that?” Bill asked, by now, having relocated to an old recliner.

   How Bill was able to stomach sitting in a tattered recliner that wreaked of cat piss, Jeremy knew not.

   “Anyone could walk in here at any moment and see something!” Jeremy exclaimed, now beginning to scoop up Jacob Halwright’s brain fragments in the aforementioned poop scoop.

   It was easy enough, scooping the brain shards(?) no longer intact to his body. Would you look at that, the brain isn’t actually pink, Jeremy thought. You know, I read someplace that salmon isn’t actually pink either. It’s a white, grayish-color like this, and they dye it to make it more appetizing to the public. Cannibals would be so disappointed in Jacob’s brain. Jeremy hated his life at this moment. Finally, he finished scooping what he could. The entire top half of Jacob’s head was now wedged into the scoop, all except for a flap at the back end.

   He knocked over the trash container, spilling out its contents on the floor, then, once light enough, flipped it over completely, emptying it. He looked over to Bill, still sitting in his disgusting recliner.

   “If you grab his feet, both of us can shove him in,” Jeremy pleaded.

   Bill Meiner looked at him as if his suggestion was the craziest, most outlandish thing anyone had ever said, which, it may very well have been. Jeremy sighed, understanding fully now that Bill would be little to no help in this endeavor. He positioned the trash container, hiking over it like he’d just laid a barrel-shaped egg, he yanked Jacob’s hands and pulled him forward. In spite of the horrible technique, he made steady progress, eventually pulling the upper part of Jacob’s torso into the barrel. After some maneuvering, pulling, then, pushing, and even, scooching, Jeremy was finally able to shove the rest of him in as well. Standing the trashcan back to a vertical position and holding it steady, Jeremy was left with the unpleasant sight of Jacob’s legs still dangling out from the container. After some forced bending, however, Jacob was soon able to fit into the trashcan like an everyday gymnast. Then, as Jeremy lifted the metal trash can lid that had been buried beneath all the trash, he stopped for a moment. Aha, he thought, almost forgetting the final remains of his fallen comrade. Once he finished pouring the remainder of Jacob out from the poop scoop, he closed the lid – the closest thing Jacob would ever have to a closed casket. If nothing else, pretending the body was no longer there brought him some level of relief.

   “This all seems … distasteful,” Bill commented, his tone suggesting he was being facetious and that he didn’t give two shits one way or the other.

   “I don’t see you coming up with any ideas. You do realize that if I fuck up that you will be written as an accomplice to all of this,” Jeremy fired back, walking to the abandoned bedrooms of the apartment, hoping he would be able to scavenge up some old towels to wipe up the blood with.

   “Untrue,” Bill countered. “If I thought there was any way you could jeopardize me, I would kill you and be home before breakfast, because I know exactly how to get rid of a body, whether it be one or two.”

   How casually the words escaped from Bill’s mouth sent a small shiver up Jeremy’s spine. It was a sad fate how inconsequential Jeremy’s own life felt in this predicament. He wasn’t a bad guy or a criminal. That wasn’t who he was. He was only looking to take a small risk that would pay handsomely, and now, he was caught in a disaster.

   Robert Spade had been the name his father had always mentioned, growing up. Robert Spade was the guy. Now, in hindsight, he was beginning to wonder if his father said his name as a disclaimer and not as a call to action.

   When the bullet was fired off, all Jeremy cared about was his own life, about making it out of the building and living to see another day. All Jeremy thought about was avoiding a bullet of his own, but now, as he soaked the blood with some tattered blankets he had stripped off from a filthy mattress, he allowed himself to consider some of the alternatives he had overlooked. He thought about the very real possibility he might go to prison for the rest of his life over this.

   Without wanting to, he felt tears stream from his widened, manic eyes and down his cheeks.

   Bill seemed to take notice of this, nodding his head knowingly, “I should have brought you a banana too.”

   Bill, Jeremy had learned, was an asshole.

                                                             ***

   Jeremy hadn’t done very many crimes in his twenty-three years in the world. He once stole a stick of gum from his mother’s purse, only to return it before she noticed. Oh, what an adrenaline rush that had been for him. That moment didn’t help him prepare for this one, however. His father had always been sketchy, dealing hands on the wrong side of the law, but he had always made an attempt to instill in Jeremy a sense of right and wrong, as ironic as that may have been. Maybe it was an effort to prevent this very moment from coming into fruition. The double-edge sword came with the fact that his efforts not only failed to keep him from the path, but kept him without the street smarts to know how to walk it. He momentarily considered searching online on ways to dispose of a body, but the paranoia of his search history coming back to haunt him negated that.

   Bill Meiner was of no assistance, making snide remarks every now and again to remind Jeremy he was along for the ride, but otherwise he did his best impersonation of a mile; useless and irritating to look at.

   He thought about trying to dissolve Jacob’s body through the use of acid or something, but didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about or even the slightest bit of how to go about it. He remembered reading an article somewhere once about how a serial killer buried a dead body six feet underground, and then, after filling the hole about halfway or so, buried a dead animal carcass in there as well. This way, the police officers would chalk up their cadaver dog’s findings as a false alarm. But who could find a possum or a raccoon at this time of night?

   It was a bitch dragging Jacob up the flight of stairs that led to the building’s rooftop, but Jeremy believed it would be a safer approach than dragging the trashcan out into the parking lot. Every step came with a quiet prayer that he wouldn’t end up dropping him and have even more of him spilling out. How stupid am I being? Jeremy thought, then, without even having to ask Bill’s question, he heard his answer in his head: Very.

   If law enforcement walked into this building, the amount of evidence he was both creating and leaving behind would be massive, but, in his head, he supposed he was banking on the idea that no law enforcement ever would. This was a random rundown building in Ordos, and, as Bill said, no one came visiting this place except for criminals and dope fiends who wanted nothing to do with the cops. No one knew where Jacob had gone because Bill had driven to the van to this address without speaking a word of where they were headed. Finding the building would be like finding a dirty needle in a haystack.

   Once he arrived at the rooftop, he removed the lid to the trash barrel and sighed. Next, he poured lighter fluid into the can, starting the flame with a paper ripped out of some tattered magazine he had found, headline read: “Is your husband cheating on you?” Well, if he is, chances are he could still be doing worse things, Jeremy thought.

   As the fire roared on, Jeremy stepped aside, unable to stomach his actions and what was literally the smell of burning flesh. Bill didn’t step away, instead, he stood by and stared at the flames.

   “This won’t be enough to dispose of Jacob, … at least, not all of the way,” Jeremy said, not expecting confirmation or denial of the fact from Bill, but, instead, wanting to think out loud. “Once the bones have burned awhile, they should be brittle enough to pulverize with a hammer.”

   “Seems reasonable,” Bill said, seeming as though he was only halfway listening to Jeremy.

   “What exactly is going the fuck on right now, Bill!?” Jeremy asked. The longer he had the chance to become acclimated with his fear, the more he found himself in touch with his other emotions, in particular, his own anger and frustration. “Does Robert Spade always blow people’s heads off and leave his recruits to clean up the remains?”

   “Everyone has their hobbies, Jeremy.”

   The fire roared. It had a little more oomph to it than Jeremy had initially anticipated. With the amount of homeless people frequenting the area, he doubted anyone would come to investigate a barrel fire, but he still tried to calm the flame and make it less conspicuous.

    “What happens after this?” Jeremy asked, the heat from the fire reminding him of how scared and afraid he had felt the second Robert fired his weapon.

   Jeremy’s body had already felt beaten and worn down after a day’s work, but with the night sky overhead and the adrenaline wearing off, he felt exhausted. It all felt so surreal to him. For a reason he didn’t understand, he stepped forward, until he stood side by side with Bill. He looked at the fire, he felt the heat of it. It soothed his worn body from the chilly night air. Maybe it was because he thought he deserved it, that he had to literally stand by his decision, the other part of him felt like it had disowned and disassociated from the whole situation and just wanted to stand by the fire.

   “Everything happens a day at a time, kid. You will take your share of the money that is in my back pocket, … Robert has even added to your pay, and you will head home and sleep this off like a bad dream.”

   “When, …,” Jeremy began, two parts of him, once again, being at different wavelengths, realizing something at different times, “When did he give you the money?” He asked, taking his eyes away from the fire and looking at Bill.

   At the same time, he re-imagined the painful memory he had of Robert Spade coming into the room, a vision he had repeated for himself again and again through the night. At no point did Robert Spade hand Bill an envelope, as afraid as Jeremy may have been in the moment, he felt sure of that.

   “Robert trusts me, kid. We go way back. He paid me in advance before I even took the job.”

   “But, how would you know the bonus he was going to give me? How do you know how much that is? Are you generously taking it out from your own cut?”

   Jeremy knew the answer to the last question without Bill needing to answer. Bill did nothing generously.

    Bill merely stared at Jeremy. It was another moment where what he didn’t say spoke volumes.

   “Both of you planned this. Even you knew what he was going to do!? Did I survive tonight because of some fucking coin toss!?”

   “After you dispose of the body, I will pay you your cut, and a bonus on-account of the incident that occurred, a fixed amount Robert Spade has informed me of in such situations. We are splitting Jacob’s cut, kid. It isn’t rocket science. You will go home, and, like I said, this night will be nothing for a bad dream you had after a few too many beers, a bad dream you were paid handsomely for.” Bill Meiner spoke like he was reciting lines; a fact Jeremy did not know what to make of.

   Jeremy tried to nod, but it was a half-heart effort. His head ached and his body and mind were both at the end of their rope. If he was to be arrested and imprisoned for the rest of his life, at least it could be done after a full night’s rest. He did not offer Bill a second glance, opening the rooftop door and heading back down the flight of stairs to retrieve a hammer.

   Once Jacob’s bones were crushed and reduced to dust, he would be free to dispose of them in their final resting place. His remains could be spread across the Amisoic Sea, perhaps. That would have been an almost thoughtful and sentimental gesture on his part. The chance of a scuba diver swimming by them and identifying them as human remains was unfathomable, but part of him still felt apprehensive. Besides, it was a long drive to the sea – one that he’d be driving with a persons’ cremated remains in his car. What he would do instead was drive out into the first woods he found and scatter them.

   When he returned to the rooftop, he saw that the fire no longer blazed on. Looks like Bill is finally making himself useful, Jeremy thought. Deep down, Jeremy imagined that he wasn’t the only one who wanted to put this night behind them.

   “What will you do with the remains?” Bill asked, thrusting his large gut forward to pop his back, feigning it as though he had made even the slightest effort in helping the situation.

   “I will drive until I find the nearest forest. I will spread them over the ground or bury them someplace, spread it out. No one will ever know,” Jeremy replied, feeling relief in his own confidence to the fact. Anyone who stumbled on the remains, by some chance, would see, at most, the remnants of an animal carcass, and if he buried them, that would make it years before they found the body and, by then, any chances of identifying the remains would be long gone.

   “It sounds like you have it all taken care of then. I will leave you to it,” Bill said, putting his hand out in front of Jeremy. “It has been real, kid.”

   Bill Meiner had a shit-eating grin on his face that showed he took some amusement in the Jeremy had been dealt. Had this been an initiation of some kind? Was Jeremy the one of the two that had “made the cut”? Why did he need to get rid of Jeremy’s body. None of the night made any sense.

   Jeremy shook his head at Bill, “You are lucky I am too tired to get rid of a second body tonight, Bill.”

   Bill chuckled. “You will be alright, kid.”

                                                            ***

   Bill stood by the van outside and watched as the headlights to Jeremy’s car sped off and away. The poor boy had been so nervous and afraid Bill was surprised his car didn’t rattle along with him. Bill, on the other hand, was mostly fine, if a little amused. He smiled, going over everything in his head. When the moment came that he felt for sure Jeremy was gone for good and wasn’t coming back, he took out his phone and dialed.

   “Yeah,” Bill said, at once, responding to the person on the other end. “Yeah, he sure did. Kid’s a go-getter, but he is also a complete and total dumb ass.” Bill laughed, as the person on the other end spearheaded him with one question after another. “Man, … I don’t know where to start. The kid didn’t even try to clean up the blood. Just kind-of forgot not to do that. I tell you, there are a bucket’s worth. I thought he’d at least scrub it down, try to use bleach or something, but, … nah. Dumb as a box of rocks. Burned the body in a trash can … left the barrel!” Bill stopped for a second, laughing some more. He was almost at the point of tears, the longer he thought about it. “You guys are going to want to track him. Says he is going to just ditch the burnt remains someplace. Guess it could’ve been worse – guess he could’ve just flat out panicked and left altogether. Maybe that’s enough to pass for Robert, I don’t know.”

                                                               ***

   True to their word, and to his own surprise, Jeremy lived to see his apartment again, a feat that had never seemed like an accomplishment until this moment. The agreed upon payment of a thousand dollars for what was intended to be a small heist had since been raised to fifteen-hundred, an amount that frankly seemed like a bargain given all of what Robert Spade fucking got. Sometime later the next day, Jeremy reflected on how he benefited from Jacob’s death. It was a realization that didn’t rest easy with him.

   The hot water from his shower beat down on his head and soothed his aching muscles. Once or twice during, he flinched or shivered, brushing off his arms or thighs like a spider was crawling up them. It was nothing – all in his head – like he thought some of Jacob Halwright’s brain goo became sentient and was trying to crawl into his ear and take over his body like something out of a cheesy, low-budget horror flick. For what it was worth, Jeremy would have loved to have been in that movie. It would have had terrible special effects and ugly fuck actors whose buck teeth looked like they somehow went cross-eyed, but at least he would have been paid and at least he would not have had to buy a hammer. And, at least it would have been acting and not reality.

   He slid into bed and the covers held him in a warm embrace, welcoming him to the soundest sleep he had ever had. The money earned would be enough to cover a month and a half’s rent, and would be enough for him to land back on his feet.

   The lesson may not have been easy to learn and, in truth, he was not exactly sure what the lesson even was, but he had definitely learned it. If you see Robert Spade, duck. One thing he did know was that a life of crime was not for him. The hammer would not be bought in vain. With it, he would build a better, more wholesome life for himself. Either that, or he would start his screenplay.