My Crime, The Dog

He pisses himself at half past one in the morning. The good news is we use the back of a drycleaners with an old fashioned washroom, floor to ceiling tiles and frequent drains, for just such an occasion. None the less, we three all take a step back the moment the dark stain on his jeans reaches his knee caps, which he is using to keep himself upright. We do this to keep our shoes dry. We are required to wear suits to work. I am wearing tan brogues and a navy three piece. My colleagues are wearing much the same. The focus of our attention is wearing piss-stained jeans and a rolling stones t-shirt. It has taken three hours to find him. Thirty seconds to barrel him into the back of our Lincoln and half an hour to bring him back here. We have been working this guy over for five minutes. So far, all we have are tears and piss for our efforts.

Gail steps up to the plate and slaps him with a vicious backhand blow that knocks him over. His fat body bounces on the hard ground. We watch him cry some more and drool blood from a split lip. The tears make the blood swirl and dilute a little into a small oasis of human desperation in the middle of such a barren place. In here, he is alone. He does not even have us to call companions. I take two fistfuls of shirt and haul him back up. I do not think he is trying to hold out on us. I think he’s too scared to speak and knocking him around a bit won’t help. I check my shoes over for stains and then step back to my friends.

“Let’s give him a moment to collect himself, yeah?”

They both shrug in unison. Gail is the smartest out of all of us. She has been doing this ever since she was young enough to spell ‘extortion’. She could have been Don Pablo Capone a decade ago. The reason I like her so much is because she didn’t want to be queen shit. Not then, not now. Her ambition is small but precise. Her perfectionism is spread over a very fine surface area and therefore her efforts are that much more noticeable. She’ll be slapping bastards like our friend here for years to come. Dermot is indistinguishable from me. We both put the exact same amount of effort into our job. We both do the same thing. We are both young criminal males. We will be dead inside five years or just inside, serving life.

A few minutes pass, we entertain ourselves by pacing or picking lint off ourselves. Our buddy is still sobbing. I walk over to a small plastic table where we’ve laid out all his shit. Keys and wallet. His credit cards all mimic each other. Memberships to clubs and debt. Not the look of a man with the courage to steal from us so overtly but I’ve seen smarter people do stupider things. I get bored so I poke Gail in the shoulder. She looks at me, smiles. I hold my hand out, palm facing upwards. She thinks I’m asking her for something for a second and then she scoffs. She goes to low high five me and I whisk my hand away at the last second. I bring my fingers through my hair and mouth ‘too slow’. She punches me in the ribs and I stumble back laughing. She rolls her eyes. Dermot steps in and cocks his head to the guy. Gail’s face becomes all business.

She crosses the room in three short strides and squats in front of our man. He does not meet her eyes but I don’t blame him. Her eyes, while beautiful, as anyone’s are when you take the time to look, have a steely edge to them. Some grim determination. Although I doubt she finds anything about her role grim. Her arm pistons out so fast it takes me a moment to realise she’s grabbed his face. Under his chin her nails dig in deep and drag his head up to eye level. He fights against her pull and fails. She intercepts his gaze with her own. He shudders, like an animal so compelled to flight that, with no place to go, all that unused energy shivers throughout their body in a spasm of defeat. She spends a moment just looking, trying to find something in his face. Anything that will tell us what he did with the stolen goods.

Fortunately, before he soils himself further under her mental interrogation, her phone rings. The common two-note keyboard riff ringtone bounces off the walls around the room, but it’s the thwack of the screen flipping up that cuts through our prisoner of war. The moment the sound is cut off and she answers he starts sobbing again. She holds up a finger against his wet and bloodied lip and listens to the voice on the other side. She hangs up, stands up.

“We found where he hid them.” She says.

He screams out in anguish. He knows what that means. We stand around for a second longer.

“Right.” I say. “Any further comments.” Two shakes of two pretty heads.

I walk over to Dermot. I run my hands up the lapel of his suit, he wafts his hand by his cheek in mock arousal. I laugh and put my hand in his breast pocket. I frown. He smiles, reaches behind his back and gives me what I want.

He hands me the box cutter. I do not consider myself a physically intimidating man, but context has made me slightly unsettling from time to time. Like right now. I roll my sleeves up, leaving my jacket behind on the table. I wrap my shoes in plastic bags. I slide the blade up and look at the man. I think about how I’m going to do this. I lay it out in my mind and then start walking to him. Just following instructions. Steps one through ten, easy as breathing. He starts talking. First words he’s ever said to us. I tune him out before he graces us with syllables. I know the routine. Same script, different face. It’s all about wives and husbands and children and money. About a life we don’t care about. You cannot rely on us for empathy. We are not people. We are only human shaped. We are ruthlessness. We are callousness. We are violent means to violent ends. I take a handful of receding hair and yank his head back sharply. It’s important to follow on from this quickly. Do not dilly-dally. Just start cutting. I see his big, weeping eyes say ‘Stop, don’t do this, there’s another way, please.’

What he actually opens his mouth to say is “I have a dog.”

My wrist gets most of the splash back. Its good to keep your fingers relatively dry to maintain grip. It’s more of a sawing action than simple slice, as the films would have you believe. I carve into his neck in jerky, short strokes. Muscles, fat, ligaments, all come away under my ministrations. No screams. A loud gurgle, like spitting out toothpaste and he is silent. I let him fall. He hits the ground for the last time.

Next, we get to work. I scrub up. Dermot wraps the body. Gail works on the floor. Shower, mop, spray, mop, and it’s good as new. I leave my messy clothes behind in a pile in the corner. I help vacate our departed guest and dump him in the plastic lined boot of the stolen car outside. I hug Dermot, slap his back twice. Hug Gail. Kiss her cheek. They get in and drive away. Everything we’ve left anything behind, the drycleaners will deal with it. They always have before.

Sunday comes quicker than expected, as time has a tendency to do. We don’t work on Sundays, not if we can help it. I spend a lot of it at a birthday party. She’s eight. She is already beautiful, a shooting star pretending to be a child. Her name is Zoe. I buy her a tiny microscope, the kind that comes with harmless chemicals that pop and fizz when they touch. She goes ape shit and shows her mum, who laughs and gently puts her hand on her back. She nudges her benevolently over to her father who receives her in exalted open arms. The mother talks to me, asks me how I’m doing. I lie and say I’m fine. She lies and says she dreads throwing parties for the stress. Looking after her little madam as she buzzes past the kids and parents and me. Her husband comes over and we talk some, about Springsteen and other seminal albums our parents donated to us, with love. We argue about Hendrix and Dylan. His wife chimes in with Meat Loaf and we all go ‘Oh well of course Meat Loaf.’

I meet some of Zoe’s friends. A boy called Sammy and another called Richard. They shove a water pistol into my hands and just like that I’m enlisted in a long and bloody shootout. I hold my own pretty well, some tactical decisions land me some pretty stellar shots against the opposition. Then Zoe flanks me and pins me against the wall with a barrage. Her mates come to her aid and I become, true to the word of the guns, super soaked. I admit defeat and the victorious girl pins me down with a foot and roars to the heavens, her conquest complete.

I dry up and then help clean up plates and tables and the banner that says ‘Birthday!’ The other people, long gone now, all said how wonderful it was to see the kids together. Because they’re that age now. Where they become fun and interesting. I think Zoe was always these things before she even had hair. Her parents and I sit on the porch. Night makes its way into the sky, darkening the clouds. The laughs come easily, and even easier when the booze comes out. We sing loudly, shush ourselves for the child tucked up asleep inside, then sing again. Eventually I stand up on uncertain legs and say goodbye. He shakes my hand and winks. She holds me close for a second and pulls away. I can’t stop grinning when I look at these two, even now when everything inside of me hurts. I walk away, waving over my shoulder.

I drive back slowly, the street lights hazing together with a little help of my failing sobriety. I let myself into my house. It is modern and small and perfect and lonely. Brick studio walls and fine laminated flooring. I lie down on my bed. I don’t bother taking my clothes off. I can’t stop myself from imagining. I murdered a man two days ago. He lived alone. He had few friends close enough to check up on him, especially at a weekend. Probably no one has been back at his house for two days. I don’t know why I keep focusing on this. I know how days work. Friday was a long time ago now. I keep wondering why I feel like this, until, reluctantly, I admit that I really do know what’s been bugging me. Why I’m not okay. I can’t stop thinking about the goddamn dog.