But now he was dead, cold, had eaten three slugs from a 9mm and that’s all she wrote.
Specks, Weams, and Lyon were grunting and puffing, swearing and groaning, but finally they got their sackcloth package up onto the lip of the trunk, balanced precariously. And that’s when one of Zaber’s huge arms slipped out of the canvas, his hand landing on Lyon’s own with a wet slapping sound.
Lyon screamed.
You could say it was shock or superstitious terror, but all that mattered was that Lyon screamed like a little girl with a high, shrill wailing sound. He let go of Zaber and the sudden weight of the corpse overwhelmed the other two and it fell to their feet, slopping in the mud… both arms out now.
“He touched me!” Lyon stammered, rubbing his hands on his wet pants. “Jesus, he touched me, he touched me!”
Specks took hold of him and shook him. “He’s dead, you idiot, he can’t hurt you now! He’s no more dangerous than a side of beef.”
“But cold… damn, he’s so cold…”
Weams wasn’t hearing any of it. He was just looking down at that lolling, grisly bundle, thinking how with those flabby white arms hanging out of the sackcloth Zaber looked like something being born, trying to pull itself free of a placenta.
“Lend a hand,” Specks said.
They took hold of Zaber’s legs under the canvas and dragged him through the muck down the trail. The undergrowth was wet and dripping, the trees tall and skeletal. The night was damp and cool and ominous. When they made the shack, Specks unlocked it and they dragged Zaber inside and deposited their burden on the plank flooring.
Specks found a lantern on a hook, lit it.
“Nobody uses this place,” he told them, the shadows crawling over his face in the flickering yellow illumination. “It’s perfect.”
And maybe it was. Just a desolate tumbledown shack far from the city nestled in a desolate stand of woods like a pea in a poke. The sort of place that stood for fifty winters and might stand for fifty more, or just fall to jackstraw ruin next month.
Specks said, “I’ll be back in a minute with the goodies. If he moves… just scream good and loud.” He thought that was funny. “But not loud enough to wake the dead.”
Then he went back to the Buick to get the tools, leaving Weams and Lyon alone with Big Pauly Zaber, the former syndicate shylock that had made all their lives hell. But he wasn’t going to be doing much of anything now.
“I think,” Lyon said, “I think we screwed up big here, I’m sure of it.”
Weams chuckled low in his throat. “Do you really think so?”
“Fuck you.”
Zaber’s corpse shifted in the sackcloth, one hand sliding free, knuckles rapping on the floor.
Lyon sucked in a sharp breath and did not seem to be able to exhale. Weams just stood there, filled with a gaping terror that was oddly blank and dreamlike. He couldn’t seem to get his mouth to close.
“Gravity,” Lyon said, like maybe he was trying to convince himself.
The shack smelled of moistness and age, black earth and mildewed leaves. It was a heavy, vaporous odor that got thicker by the moment. Both men just looked at each other, then away, their faces gaunt and chiseled by stress, their eyes jutting from their skulls, glassy and unblinking.
Then Specks was back.
He handed out crowbars and hammers from his sack of tools, left the shovels leaning up in the corner. By the shifting lantern light, they yanked up the rotting planks one by one until the clotted black earth below was revealed and a fetid, loamy stink filled the shack.
“Okay, girls,” Specks said, stripping down to his undershirt—a tank top, of course, to show off all his gleaming muscles—and grinning like a skull in a basket. “You know what happens now.”
But Lyon shook his head. “I just don’t know if I can.”
“Oh, you will,” Specks told him. “By God, you will. We’re in this together and together we’ll do what has to be done.”
Specks told them to start digging while he unwrapped their package. He used a knife, cutting the ropes free from the sackcloth, exposing Pauly Zaber’s huge, naked corpse like a grim surprise under a Christmas tree. Zaber had gone white as lace, distended and obese, a thickset rage of chins and pendulous tits, an immense belly like some fleshy beach ball inflated to the point of bursting. And everywhere, just bleached and rolling. The only color on him was the tattoo of an eagle on his chest… and that looked like something hit by a truck now, a mangled crow at best. The artwork had been shattered by blackened bullet holes, streaks of gore that oozed and dried.
He hadn’t bled very much and Specks was quick to point out that was because one of the bullets had shattered his heart. When it stopped pumping, he said, Zaber stopped bleeding.
Weams said, “Look… look at his face…”
It was a white, greasy mass, thick-lipped, one eye open and staring, the other retreating into a pouch of fat. Maybe it was rigor mortis or something, but his mouth was drawn into a lurid, toothy grin. There was something vile and perverse about that.
Specks had a hacksaw out. “Who wants to go first?”
Lyon made a whimpering sound and almost lost his lunch when Specks laid the teeth of the saw against Zaber’s pudgy gullet and began to draw it back and forth, back and forth. Weams had to take him outside. And when they were both there, the night closing in and the rain on their faces, they both got sick, the nausea boiling up and out of them in tangled, gagging tides. But it was more than just what Specks was doing in there, but the sound of it. That shearing, meaty sound like a crosscut saw ripping into a ball of suet. And when Specks struck bone… Jesus.
Weams and Lyon had a smoke out there, pulled from Specks’ flask of whiskey, and wondered to high heaven how they would ever purge this night from their minds. When they went back in, Zaber’s legs and head were missing. Specks had cut them off and bagged them in green Hefty garbage bags. There was blood soaking into the soil, blood smeared right up to Specks’ elbows.
Weams looked down on that legless, headless torso and felt a clawing madness in the back of his skull. Zaber was now an immense, fish-white blobby thing with arms still in place, head sheared to a stump, legs gone where they entered the hip. He could see the grizzled meat in there, marbled and red like fresh beef, the sawed knobs of bone trailing streamers of white ligament.
It was too much, just too much.
“Lyon,” Specks said, enjoying himself, “take off his arms. Me and Weams will go dump this trash in the river.”
Lyon was shaking. “No, no, no… Jesus, you can’t… you can’t leave me alone with that thing…”
Specks started laughing. “All right, Weams you stay. You each do an arm. Start cutting in the armpit, it’s soft there. I’ll take this stuff down to the river, fill the bags with rocks and sink them. By the time the bags rot through, won’t be enough left to float.”
“C’mon, Specks,” Weams said. “Let’s just dump him in the hole as is.”
“No. Arms are hooked to hands and hands to fingers. Fingers have fingerprints. If anybody finds the torso, I don’t want them matching fingerprints to it. And Zaber has a record. He did time. So cut him up.”
He told them to put the torso in the big hole they’d dug and to bag the arms, bury them off in the woods. Before he left, he said, “And don’t let me down, boys.”
He tossed Zaber’s legs over his left shoulder and even bagged in that green plastic, they could see that the undersides of his knees were resting atop Specks’ shoulders.
“Man,” he said. “These legs gotta weight eighty a piece.”
He picked up the bag with the head in it and off he went.
Which left Weams and Lyon alone with the torso, watching it, not wanting to look, but unable to stop. There was a grim magnetism to the thing. So they watched and waited—maybe for it to move.