Once they were on the street Mike saw that the informal party was breaking up. Reggie’s girl Britney was waiting for him and Mike nodded. “Make sure she gets home.” Reggie nodded and darted off to join Britney.
“Whatcha wanna do?” Tracy asked.
Mike looked up at the apartment.
“I’m gonna wait out here for awhile and keep my cell phone on.”
“You think Tonya will call you back?”
“I hope so.”
“You still worried?”
“I don’t know.” That was the honest truth. Mike didn’t know whether he should be worried now. When he was talking to Natsinet through the door he’d had a bad feeling in his gut, but after being away from the problem and listening to what was going on inside…well, that changed everything. He hadn’t heard anything unusual, and they hadn’t seen that other nurse come back out. Maybe Reggie was right and the two nurses had a thing going on. Maybe she was simply at the apartment to help out. He hadn’t seen anybody exit the building, although he supposed it was possible that she’d exited the building from the rear and walked around the end of the block to her car if she’d parked it around the corner—parking spaces along the curb on this end of the street were slim. If that was the case, he wouldn’t have seen the second nurse leave.
“You want me to stay?”
“Nah, go on. You got some rounds to make anyway.”
“You got that, right. See you back at your crib ‘round two?”
“Alright.” They tapped fists and Tracy melted away into the night.
“That nurse was kinda fine. We should have busted in there and pulled a train on her ass.”
“Go home, Tracy.”
“I’m just sayin’. She was kinda fine though, better than these crackwhores.”
Tracy’s voice trailed off as he disappeared around the corner.
Big Mike remained on the street, leaning against his parked car, watching Adelle Smith’s apartment. He remained there long after everybody else had left.
Chapter Sixteen
It took some time, but Natsinet was eventually able to completely dismember Rachael Williams’s body in the bathtub.
She got most of the messy part done with the shower running. She worked in the nude. Her small pear-shaped breasts were covered in blood. It dripped from each nipple as if she were preparing to give suck to some vampiric infant. She had laid plastic garbage bags along the floor and around the base of the toilet and worked as quickly as she could, putting all her strength into the job and relying on her medical training to get her through it, cutting through tendons and cartilage where she would find the least resistance.
Thanks to her medical background, she was able to slice through the joints at the shoulders and hips pretty quickly. Likewise, when she decapitated Rachael, she felt along the back of the dead woman’s neck first to locate the vertebrae. Then she started between the sixth and seventh vertebrae, cutting expertly between the disks to sever the spinal cord and cutting through the cartilage. A third stroke went through the rest of the neck easy. There wasn’t much blood; some leaked out into the tub, but most of it remained in the body due to the stopping of the heart.
Natsinet picked up Rachael’s severed head by the hair and looked at it in disgust.
“Fuckin’ nosy ass bitch comin’ in here.” She tossed the head aside toward the end of the tub where it hit the porcelain with a thud.
With the running water from the shower she was able to wash any excess blood down the drain, but she knew she’d have a bigger problem with the woman’s torso. Rachael Williams had been a big woman. Natsinet realized this as she was cutting through the hip joints to separate the legs. The woman was big boned. Probably part of her natural body chemistry. Which meant she was going to have to divide her torso in half to make carrying her out of here easier.
Natsinet paused in her work, suddenly realizing she had nowhere to store the body, and headed through the darkened living room to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. A staff assistant at Hospice Nursing had made sure there was food for the nursing staff who would be providing onsite care. There was a jug of milk, some half and half, a couple of Tupperware containers that held leftovers, and a carton of eggs. She opened the vegetable drawer and was surprised and rather pleased to see that Rachael had put a serious dent in what had been a well-stocked supply of broccoli, carrots, and lettuce. Not that eating healthy would do her good now; the bitch was dead. Natsinet opened the freezer. There was a frozen pack of chicken legs, a couple of boxes of pre-prepared frozen meals (Weight Watchers), and a carton of ice cream. Natsinet stood in front of the refrigerator, thinking. Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer store one of his disarticulated victims in his refrigerator and freezer? If she moved some things around, she might be able to fit Rachael’s body parts in both compartments. It would be a stretch, but she had to try.
She turned her attention to the sink and flipped on the overhead light. After some poking and prodding she found a switch that turned on the garbage disposal. Natsinet grinned. With a combination of the refrigerator/freezer and the garbage disposal, she had a way out of this. Pour the blood and organs like the lungs, liver, and pancreas down the garbage disposal, store the limbs, head, and as much of the torso in the refrigerator/freezer tonight. She could probably even flush smaller organs down the toilet. Then she would have to clean the carpet, get the blood out of it. She would be working all night, but she was pretty sure she could pull this off. She would also wait until the early dawn to see if that thug was still hanging around outside. He’d have to go home sometime, and once the coast was clear she would carry body parts out of the house wrapped in plastic trash bags and dispose of them in the dumpster at the back of the building, making sure they were well buried within the rest of the garbage.
With a new sense of purpose, Natsinet started rooting around under the sink for some cleaning material. She had to clean the carpets as much as possible before the blood dried and set in permanently (of course, if that happened she could play it by ear and pay somebody to come in to rip up the old carpet and install a new one—she’d pay for that out of her own pocket and keep Mrs. Smith nice and doped up while the job was being done). She quickly found carpet cleaner, a plastic bucket, and some rags. She went into the living room and turned on the light. Blood spattered the living room wall, the front door, and one of the chairs and an end table. There was a huge blood stain on the living room floor, a big gob of it actually, right where Rachael’s head had once lain. For the first time Natsinet cursed herself for losing her temper so quickly. It was going to take a minor miracle to remove all this blood so it would appear nothing happened.
Natsinet got to work, still nude. No sense getting dressed now since I still have that bitch’s body to deal with when I’m done, she thought. Four hours later the walls, the door, and the furniture were free of blood and the carpet was scrubbed clean. Natsinet stood in the kitchen, her chest and face sweating from the exertion of scrubbing the blood out of the carpet with hot water, carpet cleaner, and chemicals. She’d made so many trips to the kitchen sink to pour dirty, bloody water down the drain that she couldn’t count them. She glanced at the digital clock on the counter. It was two-thirty a.m.
After checking Adelle’s vital signs and noting them in her chart, she headed back into the living room, pondering her next move.
If only that nosy bitch hadn’t shown up, Natsinet could have gotten out of this situation in a less precarious way. She would have found the right drug combinations that would have triggered another stroke, maybe a heart attack, and the old lady would be no more. She was pretty sure the nurse had not told anybody she was coming by here, but she couldn’t take that chance. She wondered if any of those hoods across the street had seen Rachael enter the apartment. She had to assume they had. She also had to assume that some of them had police records and couldn’t be trusted.