Although hard to read—and impossible for this mousey hit man to understand—the man on the bed accepts the consequences of what happens next. A good heavy does not look away. He accepts the consequences.
The needle goes in, punctuating the end of Allerton’s suffering.
It’s over within seven seconds.
Outside the mansion, on his way back to his innocuous little two-door sedan, the second contractor passes a shadowy figure wringing his hands at the foot of the driveway.
“Is it done?” the figure asks.
The mousey gentleman turns and approaches Marvin Zuckerman, and in the pitiless, cold darkness he says, “Oh yeah, we’re good.”
Zuckerman hands over the envelope of cash, an amount he had raised, in trademark fashion, from the insurance reimbursement for the home-care expenses (after putting Allerton on the agency’s payroll).
Pausing to thumb through the bills, the mousey man says, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we agreed on twenty K.”
“It’s short my commission,” Marvin Zuckerman explains. “Fifteen percent.”
The man in black just stares at the grief-stricken, toupee-wearing agent.
A mitzvah is a mitzvah.
But an agent is also an agent.
I remember, as a kid, carrying Ray’s collection R Is for Rocket around in my Partridge Family lunch box. Flash forward forty years and I’m now toiling in the vineyards of Hollyweird and Publishers’ Row, and always with that magical Bradburian inspiration tucked into the back compartment of my creative lunch box. I now read Ray’s stories to my children at bedtime. The other night, I’m reading “A Sound of Thunder,” and we come to the part where the dinosaur makes its majestic appearance. These words were written in 1952, for God’s sake, but they still ring more vividly and three-dimensionally than any CGI. When presented with the chance to create an original crime story—informed by Bradbury—I felt as though I had been given the shoes from “The Sound of Summer Running.” The Bradbury mythos came over me in a seizure as I spun my little yarn: the sadness at the core of human nature, the love of the Golden Age of Movies, the scabrous view of capitalism, and the plain, unadorned beauty of friendship.
THE GIRL IN THE FUNERAL PARLOR
Sam Weller
When I was twenty, I got a job delivering flowers. Three days a week, I drove a maroon-colored Chevy van, the words FORGET ME NOT painted on the sides, down barren two-lane western Illinois county roads.
There was a solitude to the job that I liked. As soon as the van was loaded and I drove away from the flower shop, no one could tell me what to do. Sometimes, on busy days, I would be gone for three, four hours, maybe longer. Talk radio and a supersized soda kept me company, and I just lived in my head.
I delivered to offices all over town for all their celebrations—every week someone threw a faux fiesta, marking ersatz holidays like Sweetest Day (seriously, do we really need a Sweetest Day when we have Valentine’s Day?).
Then there were Saturday mornings at churches, where weddings were set up; Saturday afternoons included dropping off arrangements for the following day’s services.
I also delivered to rickety bungalows in our small city, brick apartment buildings in the center square, and lonesome houses miles outside of town. In winter, when it’s dark early and ghosts of snow drift across the rural highways, it’s always a little eerie. After driving down a gravel road to some farm, I’d have to step out into the subzero windchill and go up to the dark house. Sometimes, a dog with an apparent case of rabies would bark after I knocked. I’d wait a minute or two, hoping no one was home except Cujo—then I could just leave. But a light inevitably would blink on. I’d hear heavy footsteps; several dead bolts, one after another after another, being unlatched, and the door would open a sliver. A pale face would peer out.
“Yes?”
“Flower delivery!”
In those moments, out there in the stubbly frozen hinterland, facing some stranger in shadow, I shivered, wondering if I would ever be seen or heard from again.
Without a doubt, though, I found delivering to funeral parlors the weirdest of all. My job was to lay the flowers around the casket. Averting my eyes, I’d crouch and set up the floral sprays and plants quickly around the body and never once look. Sometimes, with a casket spray arrangement, I would actually have to place it on the closed bottom half of the coffin itself.
It felt odd being there, alone with the dead. Here I was, a community-college kid studying English lit and living with his parents, arranging flowers over the mortal remains of the departed. They never knew me while they lived, and I felt like I was violating them in a way. It just felt wrong.
On one of these occasions, at the old Peterson Funeral Home, I encountered Catherine Courington. She was dead, yet more alive than anyone I’d ever known.
It was a morning in June, when specks of sunlight shone brilliantly through oak leaves over the funeral home, casting a champagne glow. The van was packed from end to end and perfumed heavily with fountains of crimson pansies, white lilies, plum peonies, and waxen orchids. The labels on some of the flowers were marked:
The Peterson family had run that funeral home for more than a hundred years, in a Victorian built atop a hill in town that led down to the Rock River. A cupola topped the three-story house, and a winding red-brick walkway led up to a wraparound porch. Hanging geranium baskets twisted in the hot summer breeze. Lead-glass windows, thick and wide, were set on the façade, and they were all gauzed over on the inside with delicate lace curtains.
I parked the van behind the house. The old mansion had a back door, reserved for deliveries. I think this was where they brought in the bodies, to prepare them for the services, but I wasn’t certain. An antiseptic odor that I imagined came from cleaning supplies and embalming fluid hung in the air.
With a bulky arrangement cradled in my arms, I went to the back door. It was opened a crack, so I pushed it wide with my foot. I waited for my eyes to adjust from the bright sunshine. After a while, after calling out and no one answering, I ventured into the darkened back hall. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. No one was around, but that’s the way it was a few hours before a service. I pictured the funeral-home people upstairs, in their administrative offices, hurriedly tending to final details.
The parlor I found up front was long and rectangular, with brass light fixtures and velvety sofas. The papered walls had a textured swirl pattern of moss green. Paintings hung in crusty frames, landscapes of rivers, prairies, and meadows. Over the fireplace was the main painting—of William Peterson, the first of the family proprietors. He looked stern; his cravat was stiff under his chin. I supposed the room looked exactly as it did when old William ran the place. It sort of freaked me out, being alone in that parlor. It was just me and the body in the casket. It was open for viewing. Old William watched me; it was like an episode of Scooby-Doo, where only the eyes move in the painting. I laid the floral arrangement below the casket.
But something caught my eye—a flash, and quickly gone. I don’t know why I looked, that day, over to the top of the casket. Perhaps it was the shimmer of long blond hair.
I stood and stared. Jesus. Young—she looked my age, maybe a little older. She wore a cardigan sweater, soft-looking and lilac, and a single strand of pearls. Her face had that slight bloating of the deceased, but it was smooth. A horizontal scar ran across the right side of her forehead, angling down into her manicured eyebrow. It threw off the symmetry of her otherwise perfect face. But in an odd way, it made her look more alluring and enigmatic.