Body Counting Read online

  “Yeah, I expect I do,” Bubba said, breathing heavily into the receiver.

  “Well then, Bubba, I expect you might as well count yourself amongst the dead because Lyle’s in a killin’ mood.”

  “We’ll see about that, Lyle,” Bubba said, huffing into my ear.

  “Yeah, we will see about that won’t we, Bubba?”

  Bubba said nothing. I could hear his breath blasting noisily into the phone. He sounded like he weighed a couple hundred pounds.

  “Bubba?”

  “Yeah, Lyle.”

  “Watch your back, bitch.”

  I gently placed the receiver back in its place and broke out into laughter. That’ll teach this Lyle to give my phone number out.

  I went back to my novel and continued my writing. The phone didn’t even ring once for the rest of the night. For the next few days I didn’t get any Lyle Mendoza calls.

  By the next day, I began to feel more at ease. I jumped when the phone rang and stared at it nervously like it was an oddly colored bomb.

  Ring-Light. Ring-Light.

  I am most definitely getting a new phone. I’m going to donate this one to that school for the deaf just outside a town and they can knock themselves out watching it ring. The answering machine picked it up.

  “Lyle, this is Bubba,” the voice on the machine said. “I told Jim-Jim what you said and, as you could probably guess, he ain’t too happy. However, he said that maybe we could settle this little situation before it gets too out of hand. He said that maybe we only have some kind of misunderstanding going on. We’re going to come over tonight and try to work something out, okay? We’ll see you in about ten minutes.”

  I tried to pick up the phone, but he had already hung up. This had to be some kind of mistake. They weren’t really going to come over.

  I pulled the phone out of the wall and smashed it into little pieces of plastic on the linoleum floor. The cat tried to flee, but instead slammed headfirst into the table leg. Shaking his head, it ran from the kitchen in terror.

  For some reason I found that cat’s antics hysterically funny, laughing so hard that I actually had tears in my eyes. I stopped laughing real fast when I realized that I didn’t have a cat.

  I hated fucking cats.

  I sat down heavily on the sofa and tried to get my bearings. I was beginning to lose touch with reality. Maybe I really am Lyle Mendoza and not the famous writer Robert Harris. I pulled my wallet from my pocket frantically. The person on the driver’s license was not me. The man in the photo had a mustache and a crew cut. I had never worn a mustache in my entire life. The name on the license was Lyle Mendoza. My heart thumping frantically, I ran to the mirror. The reflection matched the photo on the driver’s license.

  I was about to go look for the cat and put the fear of God in it when the doorbell rang. I froze in place, knowing full well who must be at the door. Bubba and Jim-Jim.

  Like a zombie, I walked over to the door and opened it up. An enormously fat man was standing there, his smile lighting up above his three chins. What little hair he had on his shiny, bald head was bleached blond. He looked like the late actor Divine when he wasn’t dressed in drag.

  “Hello, Lyle,” he said, walking right into my house. I knew by his voice that he was Bubba. Behind him walked in a little man, who could only be about four feet tall, give or take an inch. His hair was so heavily permed it looked like an Afro. This could only be Jim-Jim.

  “Watch your back, bitch,” Bubba said, laughing and slapping me on the shoulder. “That’s a good one, Lyle.”

  “Lyle always was a funny guy,” Jim-Jim said, in a high pitched feminine voice. “So what the hell’s going on here, Lyle? Why in the hell you joking with Bubba when you know we got some serious shit to settle here? I have a good sense of humor, Lyle, but when it comes to business, I don’t fucking laugh too easily. Not only do you threaten to kill me, but also you tell Bubba that you’re going to kill all my friends. Only problem is that I ain’t got too many friends, except for you and Bubba here. Friends are a pain in the ass. Friends want too much for you. Now, enemies, I got a lot of. Which brings me to our business. You going to fill your end of the bargain, Lyle?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, stupidly. This was getting to be too surreal. For a second I actually thought I really was Lyle Mendoza.

  “Fantastic,” Jim-Jim said, rubbing his tiny hands together. “Me and Bubba are going to drive you there. He’ll be at his house. All you have to do is knock on the door and shoot him full of holes when he answers. And don’t screw this up either, or me and Bubba won’t be laughing at your jokes anymore.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” I said lamely.

  Jim-Jim and Bubba both started laughing at the same time. Bubba’s shoulders shook back and forth silently. He didn’t laugh, but rather hissed quietly, his face turning redder with every shake of his massive shoulders.

  “You hear him, Bubba?” Jim-Jim asked. “He says he don’t have a gun. Lyle’s turning into a regular comedian, ain’t he? What’s that I see sticking out from under your sports coat then, Mendoza, a water pistol? The most dangerous killer I got working for me and he says he ain’t got a gun. Ain’t he real fucking funny, Bubba?”

  Dumbly, I looked down and saw that he was right. A very deadly-looking gun was in its shoulder holster. And what’s more, I realized with fear, I knew how to shoot it. It was as if I always wore it, like it was actually an extension of me.

  Before I could even argue with them they were leading me out of the house and into their Mercedes. I got into the back seat. Bubba got into the driver’s seat and started the car.

  Jim-Jim turned around and peered at me. I could only see his eyes; he was too small to see completely over the seat. “The guy’s name is Robert Harris. He’s a writer. His ex-wife hired me to get this job done, and since I know you’re the best, I’m hiring you to do it. She says he’s been harassing him, or some shit. Not that it’s a big deal to me. I used to harass my ex-wife all the time before you killed her, Lyle.”

  “I think I read a couple of his books,” Bubba said, pulling out of my driveway and taking off down the street. “He writes horror stuff. The one I read, And Getting Buried in the Cemetery was a real page-turner. I read it from cover to cover.”

  Jim-Jim punched him in the arm. “Since when do you read freakin’ books?”

  “I always read books,” Bubba said, staring down into the passenger seat at Jim-Jim. “What in the hell do you think I do every night? Watch the idiot box all night like you?”

  “You surprise me, Bubba,” Jim-Jim said. He was just a voice, I couldn’t see his face. “You learn something new every day. I never woulda pegged you as a reader.”

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Jim-Jim,” Bubba said. “I’m not stupid, you know. I got lots of dimensions that you haven’t seen or explored.”

  “I never said that you were stupid, Bubba,” Jim-Jim said. “I just said that I never figured you for a reader. I never read any of the guy’s books. I never even heard of the guy.” He turned around and tried his best to look at me over the seat, though all I saw was his forehead. “You ever heard of this Harris guy?”

  “I don’t think so,” I lied. “I hate reading. Anyone who writes useless books for a living deserves to die.”

  Jim-Jim started laughing. “I always liked you, Lyle. You’re a simple guy. What you see is what you get with you.” he turned back to Bubba. “See there, Shakespeare? He ain’t heard of him either.”

  After about fifteen minutes, they pulled down a dark, unpaved road.

  “He lives out here in the boonies about a mile up the road,” Bubba said.

  I reached into my coat and pulled out the gun. It was equipped with a silencer. I knew what I was going to do.

  Bubba pulled in front of a well-lit, two-story house and put the car into park. I started shooting as soon as he killed the engine.

  The windshield was entirely splattered with their shared blood in seconds. Bubba was
leaning forward over the steering wheel. I peered over the seat and saw that I had managed to hit Jim-Jim as well. I staggered out of the car, and vomited into the gravel.

  I walked drunkenly up the well-manicured walk and stopped at the front door. I rang the doorbell and waited. No one answered. Trying the knob, I was surprised to find it open.

  I walked inside. “Anybody home!”

  The house, it appeared, was empty. All of the sudden I began to feel very dizzy—almost drunk. My brain felt like it was doing 360s in my skull.

  I sat down heavily on the couch and tried to come to terms with my situation. Suddenly, I felt very confused on just who I was. When the bafflement cleared, I felt like a different person. I felt reborn.

  When the phone rang, I jolted into alertness. Alertness is an attribute you need in my line of work. Being a hired hitman always made me feel paranoid. You never trusted anyone. I had to kill Bubba and Jim-Jim because I knew that they had a contract on my head. Now probably half the hit men in the city were after my ass.

  The phone was starting to piss me off. Somebody had been calling my house all week and asking for some Robert Harris guy. I bet that if they knew I killed people for a living they would stop calling real quick.

  I picked up the phone. “Listen, asshole!” I shouted. “There is not, nor has there ever been, a fucking Robert Harris here, okay! My name is Lyle Mendoza. Now, if you call here one more time I will hunt you down and shove your phone so far up your ass that your tongue will tickle when it rings!”

  That was only the beginning. Things got real fucking weird after that.

  The Mind of Hunter Castle

  “If I could somehow get you alone in a room, I would torture you until you fucking die,” Jack Trey said, spittle flying from his mouth into the bulletproof glass. He was clutching the phone so tightly that his knuckles threatened to burst through his skin. “I would cut the flesh from your body with the precision of a surgeon, laughing so hard my stomach would hurt as you screamed.”

  Jack watched Hunter Castle’s face through the glass, studying him for some kind of reaction. Castle’s head was shaved down to the flesh, emphasizing his round, fiery eyes and sharply chiseled cat-like cheekbones. Across his skull snaked tattooed lines, meant to give his head the appearance that it was breaking open like a cracked glass.

  Castle met his stare, licking his lips before exposing a stabbing smile of arrogance and impossibly white teeth chiseled down into dagger-like points. “That line actually sounded rehearsed, Jack. Did you think that up on the way here, or did you write it last night?” He stopped for a minute, studying him like prey before speaking again. “Oh, and I like the way that little vein winds down your forehead when you get angry, it’s cute.”

  Jack gritted his teeth and fought the urge to punch the glass, something he knew would do nothing but give the bastard exactly what he wanted. He closed his eyes and counted to ten, struggling to bring his anger down before it detonated into uncontrollable wrath.

  “Ah, so that is what you look like when you sleep,” Castle purred, enunciating every word with almost British precision. “You look so peaceful with your eyes closed. I can only imagine the dreams of a man who has lost so much. Do you dream about Robby and Samantha, Jack? That must be so painful. My heart breaks for you.”

  Despite Jack’s fight to stop it from happening, a single teardrop fell from his eye and dripped down his face. “Why are you doing this, Castle? Did you have me come here out of your sick desire to torture me? I’m already fucking broken here. I’m nothing but a shell because of you. There is nothing you can do to me to break me any worse.” He said the last sentence passionately—Castle actually closed his mouth and studied him, swallowing with Zen-like calm.

  Neither Robby’s nor Samantha’s bodies were ever found, but the detectives found dozens of others rotting underneath the floorboards of Hunter Castle’s basement. They did, however, find a severed finger that contained Jack’s wife’s DNA. Investigators also found some photographs of the both of them lying on the basement floor. It could not be ascertained whether or not they were dead, as they appeared to be merely sleeping. Jack had studied the photograph for hours, sometimes imagining he could see their still forms breathing, as he wept in the dim light of his bedroom.

  Castle’s kitchen had produced mounds of grisly evidence that he had eaten his victims. Pieces of human flesh had been wrapped neatly into little plastic bags, stacked in the refrigerator and labeled by name. Some of the meat had even been peppered with herbs and spices, a detail that the press had jumped on with major fanfare. A vat of hydrochloric acid was next to the sink, full of the fleshless bones of his victims.

  “Castle, you have been trying to talk to me for over two years now,” Jack whispered, his voice shuddering weakly. “I wouldn’t have come, but what you said to me filled me with hope, even though I knew it was a lie. That’s the problem with people like me—those who have lost families. We cling to anything that even remotely resembles a chance.”

  “Do you remember what I said?” Castle asked, his eyes twinkling like jagged pieces of glass in the sunlight. He looked over at the prison guard and winked lecherously, offering a grin.

  “You said that there was hope, that I would be happy if I came to see you.”

  “Very good, Jack. I bet you were curious.”

  Jack sighed, his voice shaking, arteries throbbing in his neck and temples. “If you were capable of any feeling whatsoever, any empathy at all, you would be able to imagine what it’s like to lose a child. If I could ever somehow steal something as valuable from you, somehow make you feel this kind of pain, I would.”

  Castle offered a slow smile. “Oh, I know pain. I suffer from an affliction that allows me to feel pain, to empathize in ways that you never could. I know exactly what Robby felt like. I can feel it now.”

  Jack got up from his chair and stared defiantly through the glass. “I hope it hurts when they kill you. I hope you know the fear that your victims felt. I will be a witness and I will be standing there smiling the whole time.”

  “Now, now, Jack, such anger isn’t good for the heart. What you don’t realize is that if you kill me, you kill Robbie and Samantha.”

  “Are you trying to tell me they are alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Jack sat back down in the chair. “You are lying, you bastard.”

  “You won’t think so when you leave here today.”

  “Please, Castle, if you have any humanity in you at all … even one fucking scintilla of a soul, you will tell me where to find them.”

  With every word he spoke, Jack was accosted by haunting images of his wife and son. Not knowing if they were truly alive or dead sat in his stomach like a pile of broken glass. He had not slept longer than one hour without waking since losing them.

  Castle smiled, dragging his sharpened teeth across his lower lip until they drew blood. “Well, if you want to find the shells, that would be in the fields just near my old house. Look under the large oak tree just about one hundred yards from the main road. You will find both Robby’s and Samantha’s skeletons there. I buried them right on top of each other, in an almost embrace. It’s hard to make the dead embrace each other. Hell, I bet Samantha’s hands are caught inside his ribcage by now. There couldn’t be much flesh left, there wasn’t much there when I buried them.”

  A squeak of pain escaped Jack’s lips as he felt the pain of his loss flare into his chest—he wavered for a moment trying to keep his anguish under control, his heart pounding in his ears. A few seconds later and he felt his despair rush from his body like a punctured wound, sobbing so hard that his chest heaved in painful tremors. The closure was too much. Robby and Samantha were dead.

  Even though he knew it was beyond unlikely, he had never had a day go by that he did not entertain some glimmer of hope that they may be alive.

  “If you could say one thing to your wife and son, what would it be?” Castle said, his voice dancing through the air like poiso
ned gas.

  “Fuck you,” Jack whispered, wiping the tears away from his rage-filled eyes, He got up from the chair, leaving the phone sitting on the tabletop. “I’ll be sitting on the other side of the glass at your execution, you soulless piece of shit.”

  “Robby wants me to tell you that you don’t have to build the spaceship anymore, Jack!” Castle shouted to be heard through the glass. “He understands that it was just all in fantasy!”

  The words fired into Jack like explosive bullets and he winced visibly, suddenly losing his ability to stand. He fell into the chair, grinding his teeth together furiously.

  Castle was pointing his long fingers at the phone and nodding, a sickening smile of superiority on his face.

  Jack picked up the phone, his fingers shaking as he put it to the side of his head. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “Robby told me. I told you he was alive.”

  “You just told me where his body was.”

  “I told you that was just a shell,” Castle put his hand on the glass and then pulled it back, his fingers slowly curling into the sign of a gun. He put the finger to the side of his head and nodded knowingly. “I told you where his shell was, yes. See, you call me evil, Jack, but none of my victims are dead. They all reside in here. So, I ask the question again. Anything you want to tell Robby?”

  Jack tried to say something, but the words would not leave his lips. There simply was no way to answer such a bizarre question, doing so would only put him into the sick world of Hunter Castle further than he already was.

  “Daddy?” Robby said, his voice trailing from Castle’s bleeding lips. “Help me, Daddy. I want to come home.”

  “Oh my god,” Jack whispered, his voice falling lower with every word. A tremor ran through his face, shaking his left eye back and forth with a nervous spasm. He tried to speak again, but his jaw was trembling too violently.

  “Daddy, I can see you,” Robby’s voice said through Castle’s bloody teeth. “Why are you crying?”