The woman flexed her body and whined a muffled plea against her gag. Exemel left the man where he lay, arms spread by the fireplace, and went to get a chair from the ultramodern dinette table. Pink and blue and black sex toys of many sizes and odd configurations, as well as three bottles of bright lubricants, had been lined up on the table with the cold precision of instruments in an operating room. He dragged a chair across the floors and stood on it to lift her off the hook. She gasped for air, bending at the waist, as he unfastened the strap holding the ball gag. She was Asian, either Filipino or Vietnamese, he thought. Beautiful.
“Are you okay?” He tried to avoid looking at her nakedness as he picked at the tight knots on her wrist.
“What the hell took you so long?” she said. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”
He blinked. “Uhh, there was an accident out on 215, traffic was stopped both ways. A big truck-”
“I didn’t want to go through his crap again. Ever.” She turned toward the man by the fireplace, pulling her bound wrists from Exemel, and spit. “Sick bastard!”
“It’s a good thing I came along when I did,” said Exemel.
“Get something to cut these damned ropes!”
“Uh, yes, ma’am.” He spun toward the kitchen. On the other side of the dinette counter he saw a chef’s knife in a wooden holder. By the time he got back, the woman was standing over the man.
“He’s still breathing,” she said.
Exemel looked at him. “I don’t think so.”
“I tell you he’s still breathing. Garbage doesn’t die.”
“Maybe we should call the cops or something.”
“Oh, like right,” she said drooping her jaw. “Why don’t we just call the Sun? Or how about Fox News?” Her face twisted with anger. She lifted her foot and stomped the man’s lower belly with her heel. The man’s arm flew up, then dropped limp.
“Whoa!” said Exemel. “He moved.”
“I told you!” the woman shrieked. She grabbed the arm of Shiva that wasn’t embedded in the man. Her wrists still tied together, she rocked Shiva back and forth like a video game joystick, then tugged the statuette. It made a sucking sound. She raised it high and, with a grunt and an aiee!, threw it down. It bounced off the man’s head and clanked against the hearth. Shiva’s bloody arm was now bent in half.
“Whoa!” said Exemel, reaching to her, forgetting the twelve-inch knife was still in his hand.
“Watch it!” she barked. “You could cut me with that thing!”
“You shouldn’ta done that!”
“Will you please shut up and cut these damned ropes off!”
“Okay. I’m sorry.” He concentrated and carefully sawed the thick rope in the space between her wrists. “You’re gonna be okay now.”
“Just don’t cut me. How did you get in this business anyhow?”
Exemel shrugged. “I didn’t have any other possibilities. I hate not having possibilities. I was a games programmer. The business tanked. You ever play Galaxy B72?”
She laughed. “That’s what people used to ask me. How I got in the business.”
Exemel had sawed through the first strand, but the rest of them did not fall away. She struggled with them, staring at the dead man. “Then I thought I got out of the business. The Americandream! Right. Marriage is the same thing, only worse. Worse and boring. The time never runs out.”
Finally the ropes fell away. She rubbed the raw, red bands on her skin.
Her nakedness had distracted him and what she had said slipped through his grasp like a handful of sand. “I’ll get you something to cover up,” he said.
“Never mind that,” she said. “What are you going to do with him?”
“With him?”
“You’re supposed to clean it up.”
The pool?
“Well, what do you do? Bury him in the desert?”
What?
Her eyes narrowed and she took the chef’s knife out of his hand. “Do you need to cut him up? I want to help. I know exactly where I’ll start. You think he could still feel that? Maybe he’s looking down on us from somewhere. I’ll cut it off and leave it somewhere the coyotes could eat it.” She laughed. “It might make them sick.”
He grabbed her upper arm as she turned toward the body. “Whoa, Jesus, lady. We’re not going to chop him up. Man! Look, I understand you don’t like the dude. He hurt you. I’m with you on that, but he’s dead now. What if, like, coyotes dig him up and somebody finds him? How are you gonna explain that? They can find teeny-weeny drops of blood and hair and DNA and, uh, stuff.” He could see she was thinking. “You get me. You’re just going to, like, tell the truth, see?”
She suddenly tossed her head and laughed. “You’re right.”
“You’ve got to tell it like it happened. Exactly.”
“Then everything matches the clues. Ha! I love it.”
“There’ll be publicity, you can’t help that. It’ll be embarrassing, but people forget stuff and you’ll get over it.”
She smiled. “Sure. Perfect. You don’t look like you know what you’re doing, but you do.”
“Uh, thanks.” Exemel stuck his thumbs in his belt loops.
She rubbed her hands across her hard stomach, smearing two drops of blood towards her navel. She pursed her lips. “I ought to give you a bonus. I’d like that. How about it?”
This kind of thing had happened to Exemel before in the boredom of the upper class suburbs like Red Rock and Spanish Trail. Old man’s out golfing, the wife is sunning by the pool getting ideas from reading Cosmo or some book about men in riding boots. But the woman was usually so old or so fat or so ugly that turning them down wasn’t easy. They’d get offended after he left and call for a different pool boy. He said he was gay a couple of times, thought that would work, but one woman offered to cure him and another offered her husband, provided she could watch. He said he had an infection one time. She freaked and wouldn’t let him clean the pool. So sometimes, if he could stand it, it was easier to go ahead with it until she kept calling up over tiny spots of algae and he couldn’t stand it anymore and decided that cleaning that particular pool was more work than, well, really cleaning a pool. This time the woman looked a lot more like pleasure than work, but there was a guy who was, like, dead, ten feet in front of the huge leather sofa that she was lying back on.
“It would be, ahh, unprofessional,” he said. He waited for her anger, but she merely wiggled her hips.
“Oooh, a professional!,” she purred. “Now I know I would really enjoy it.”
“We got a code. Well, it’s not a code, but it’s sort of a code.”
She sat up and shrugged. “That’s amazing! Even more study.”
“Don’t, like, be offended or nothing.”
“I’m not. I’m impressed. I didn’t think you handled it well at all, being late and everything-”
“There was a big pile-up on 215-”
“-but the proof’s right there. My life’s about to get a whole lot better.” She flipped a finger at the dead man. “Sick bastard!”
“You want me to dial the cops for you?”
“I can handle it,” she said. “I’ll just concentrate on those five million reasons to say the right thing. Cha-ching. It’s my jackpot. The jackpot every tourist dreams about.”
He nodded.
“I’ll get your money,” she said, walking along the far wall and avoiding the glass.
“But I haven’t-” she was already in the corridor to the back “-done the pool yet.”
Exemel stared at the dead man. He knew he was missing something. This was like one of those games where you have to travel through some cyberspace world gathering objects like keys and talismans and sometimes you know where the last door is, but you can’t figure out what opens it. Of course you can always cheat and go to the chat board at Gamester.com and somebody will tell you, but only junior high kids who don’t appreciate the tao of gaming would ask or answer a question like that, though he’d have to admit that once or twice when he was really stuck…