“I don’t know. Shit happens. Anyway, I’ll tell him to come over to your place,” Simonian said. “He’s at the Olive Garden in Coon Rapids; he could be there in a half hour.”
“What about his license plates? If a cop spots his car…”
“Like I said, man, shit happens. Not real likely, though.”
–
Peck hung up and looked at his watch: two minutes to ten o’clock. He sat through a bunch of ads, then the news came up, Three at Ten, and the first thing on the news was a mug shot of Hamlet Simonian, taken by the Phoenix police, followed by another one, taken by the Brooklyn cops. The Brooklyn shot wasn’t so good, having been taken when Simonian was younger and fatter with short hair, and shiny with what appeared to be sweat.
The Phoenix photo nailed him, might have been taken by National Geographic: “Our Survey of Cheap Hoods.”
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
The problem with the Simonians was that they got caught. He’d known that, from his talks with old man Zhang. Zhang had said that they could lift heavy weights, they could butcher a tiger, but they had the IQs of small rocks. They were that kind of guy, but their job in the tiger theft was so simple that Peck hadn’t worried too much. He should have.
Hamlet had always seemed to be the bigger liability, because he didn’t think. About anything. Peck didn’t know exactly how the police had identified him, but it would turn out to be something thoughtless and stupid.
Hayk, on the other hand, was a sixty-watt bulb, compared to Hamlet’s backup light, but Hayk had an honor problem. Almost any little thing could turn out to be a stain on his honor and would require revenge. He’d get his revenge and then the cops would come, and they’d take him away and fingerprint him, and everything he was wanted for would then come up on their computer screens.
Peck still needed Hayk for processing the tigers, at least for a while, but he didn’t need Hamlet anymore. He thought about it and started to sweat himself, but eventually went out to the garage, pulled a junk box out of the way, and dug the nylon bag out from behind it.
Inside the bag was the dart gun they’d used on the tigers. Still had two darts… didn’t make much noise.
He thought about it some more, exactly how this would work. He put the gun back in the nylon bag twice, and twice took it back out. Eventually, he left it sitting on the hood of the Tahoe, ready to go.
–
Hamlet Simonian didn’t make it in a half hour, leaving Peck in a constant and prolonged state of agitation that even another Xanax couldn’t help. Finally, an hour after his brother called, Hamlet Simonian pulled into Peck’s driveway. Peck had been waiting impatiently behind the access door to the garage and popped it open when Simonian got out of the car.
“Where in hell have you been?” Peck hissed. He checked the street: almost all the houses were dark. “You were supposed to be here half an hour ago.”
Peck backed into the garage as Simonian walked up to the door. “Shut the goddamn door,” Peck said.
Simonian stepped inside the dimly lit garage, pushed the door shut, and said, “Dark in here. Where are you?”
Thut!
The dart hurt. Simonian looked down at his chest, could make out the syringe sticking out of his shirt, right through the left nipple. “You motherfucker!” he screamed.
The garage was dark, but there was enough ambient light coming in through the back access door that he could see Peck, in his white shirt, crouched behind the hood of the Tahoe. Simonian yanked the syringe out of his chest and threw it on the floor, then lurched down the side of the truck and around the nose. Peck had run down the opposite side, and now stood at the back of the truck, waiting for Simonian to fall down: there was enough sedative in the syringe to knock out an eight-hundred-pound tiger.
Simonian pursued him. They did two laps around the truck before Simonian failed to make a turn and crashed into the outside wall, where Peck had hung some garden tools. He bounced off the wall, fell on the floor. A shovel fell on his head. Peck, afraid that he might be faking, waited for a minute or two, peering over the hood of the car, then reached out, grabbed a rake off the wall, and used the handle to prod Simonian. Simonian didn’t even moan.
Peck moved closer: he could hear the other man breathing. The thought flashed through his mind that maybe he ought to strangle him or hit him with the shovel, but his more rational mind told him that the sedative should be enough.
So he waited: and it was. Six or seven minutes after he shot Simonian, the breathing slowed, slowed, and finally stopped.
–
While he was waiting for Simonian to show up, Peck had worked out a plan to dispose of the body. Not a great plan, but it would have to do. At the back of his garage, he had a half-sized refrigerator that he’d bought for his office, when he had an office. Stripped of the shelves, he thought he could squeeze Simonian into it.
He pulled the refrigerator to the empty garage space. He had an ice chipper leaning against the wall, a six-foot steel rod with a point on one end and a one-inch blade on the other. He used it to punch a dozen holes in the refrigerator: he didn’t want decomposition gas to float it.
–
When he was sure Simonian was dead, he turned on the garage light, dragged the refrigerator around to the back of the Tahoe, and opened the hatch. The refrigerator wouldn’t fit upright, so he laid it on its side, with the door opening down. Then he dragged Simonian around to the back of the truck, removed his iPhone and wallet, and tried to stuff the body into the refrigerator. Didn’t fit. There was space, but like a wrong piece in a jigsaw puzzle, one lump or another always stuck out-either an arm stuck out, or a knee did.
As an actual medical doctor, Peck had never been queasy about other people’s blood. He got a meat cleaver from the kitchen and cut off Simonian’s left arm at the shoulder joint. That took a while, but there really wasn’t much blood because Simonian’s heart wasn’t beating anymore, and what blood there was, he managed to contain on a garbage bag. When the arm came off, still wrapped in a shirt sleeve, he tucked it behind the body, and tried to slam the refrigerator door. Still didn’t fit, though there was empty space inside.
“Goddamnit, these guys…” Hamlet remained an uncooperative pain in the ass.
He cut off Simonian’s other arm, and by rearranging all the parts, managed to get the body to fit. The door kept popping open, though, and he wound up using a half roll of duct tape, wrapped around the length of the refrigerator, to keep it shut.
Now for the scary part, he thought. The garage had been private: now he’d be transporting a murdered body on the public roads. If somebody rear-ended him, he’d be spending his life in Stillwater prison.
–
He ran the garage door up, backed the Tahoe out of the driveway past Simonian’s Buick, and began sweating heavily: fear sweat, the worst kind. He drove out to I-94, then east, turned north on I-35, drove precisely at the speed limit to Highway 97, took it east to Highway 95 along the St. Croix River, and turned north again to the Osceola bridge to Wisconsin. He was familiar with the bridge from winter ski trips. There was never much traffic across it, even in daylight hours. At two o’clock in the morning, there was nothing.
Unlike his brother, Hamlet Simonian hadn’t been a large man-probably a hundred and sixty pounds. The refrigerator added fifty or sixty. Normally, it might have killed Peck to lift more than two hundred pounds out of the truck, but all he had to do was swivel it over the railing of the bridge, and let go… and he was so pumped with fear and adrenaline that he hardly noticed the weight. He pulled, lifted, turned, and dropped.
He heard it splash and, one minute later, did a U-turn on the bridge and headed back to the Minnesota side. Waited for the blue lights to come up. None did. He allowed himself to begin breathing again.