“He’d threatened me with everything he could think of, I suppose,” Amanda mused. “But if I left the company, money and intellectual property came with me. He couldn’t force me out, and he couldn’t scare me out. I guess having me killed seemed like the best option.”
“What I don’t get,” said Mister Sun, “is this: He was just the money, right? You were the brains. Why would he want you out?”
“Monetizing software, especially software with a social purpose, is disgusting. Licensing it, I can accept. We did fine from government licenses for some of the things I built. But sticking ads on everything? Making it so you had to look at ads just to open your phone?”
The client’s right arm came off, a little more wetly than Mister Sun would have liked. “You were selling services, though.”
“We were providing services. We rented tools to the government in order to provide services to people. Do you know how much easier it is for me to interact with people through devices? How could anyone monetize the easing of human contact?”
“He wanted to cover everything with ads? That is kind of repellent,” Mister Sun said, making a start at sawing off the dead body’s left arm.
“It occurs to me now that his life would have been simpler and richer with me dead and a bunch of new hires implementing his wishes.”
“One of my uncles once told me you have to spend money to make money,” Mister Sun said.
“Did he pay you a lot of money?” asked Amanda, who did not smile.
“I charge a fair price,” said Mister Sun, hacking through some intransigent muscle, “but I don’t advertise. Word of mouth only. Human contact.”
“But there’s no human contact with you, is there?”
“An aunt of mine would say that I am currently engaged in the most intimate human contact of all.” He tore through the meat, and began to attack a socket with knife and hammer.
Amanda watched him with glittering eyes, impassive. Mister Sun placed his concentration back on his work, feeling as if he’d impulsively broached something badly.
After an industrious couple of hundred seconds, the left arm came away. The only sound in the room seemed to be Amanda’s breathing.
A head and two arms in one sack, two legs in a second sack, and a torso in a third, all coated in oven cleaner. The gun was out of the dishwasher and temporarily stored in his toolbox, the knife back in its block. Mister Sun very much wanted a cigarette, for a few reasons, but this was part of the discipline of the job, even though the craving was exacerbated by today’s particular working conditions. The bath was sluiced out and wiped over with several alcohol-impregnated wet napkins that were now piled in the torso bag. He figured it for mid-afternoon. Not bad.
The phone in his pocket vibrated again. This time, Amanda heard it buzz. “Who’s that?” she said, quickly.
“Not important,” Mister Sun said. “Someone just waking up in a different time zone. Nothing to be concerned about.”
Her eyes flickered. “Your girlfriend?”
“No,” he smiled. “I don’t have a girlfriend. Just a friend.”
Her eyes jumped around his face before settling on his. “David, I have a hard time telling when people are lying to me. Sometimes I just naturally assume they are. This gets me into fights, now and then. So I’m just going to ask. Are you lying to me?”
He held her stare, evenly. “No, Amanda. I’m not lying to you.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “What now?”
“Now I tie these bags off and carry them to my van,” he said, and then stopped. “Where’s his car?”
“Whose car?”
“Him,” Mister Sun, said, pointing to a bag of bits. “He doesn’t live nearby, does he? If he does, tell me. If he doesn’t, then he drove here, right? Do you know what he drives?”
Amanda nodded.
“Then could you open the front door for me, so I can carry these bags out to my van? It’ll take a couple of trips. And while I’m doing that, can you look for his car?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, for no reason he could see.
“No, Amanda. I should have thought of it. Events have overtaken me a little, today.” He tied off the bags of limbs and lifted them, one in each hand. “Let’s go.”
It was indeed mid-afternoon outside, and a lovely day. Mister Sun walked back from the van to where Amanda stood on the front step, scanning the street.
“It’s not here,” she said quietly.
“Okay,” Mister Sun said, slipping past her. Inside, he added, “This means that either he took a cab here, or he parked a few streets away and walked, not wishing to be seen parking outside your house. Have you known him to take cabs often?”
“He’d use Uber to get to LAX sometimes. That’s it. He likes his car. It’s horrible.”
“Then we’ll assume the car’s in another street,” he said, lifting the last bag. “I’ll put this in the van, and then collect my toolbox and work bag, and I’m done.”
“What will you do now?”
“That doesn’t matter, does it?” Mister Sun said. “This will all be over, I’ll be out of your way, and you can get on with your life. Has it occurred to you that you now control your company completely, and can steer it in any direction you like?”
“I won’t get to see the end of the process,” Amanda said. Mister Sun believed she might be sulking, in her way. He then stopped to consider that someone with her specific cast of mind might be seriously disturbed by being led through only four-fifths of a process.
He had, obviously, also considered that Amanda was seriously disturbed. But he found he was more bothered by upsetting her than that she was possibly crazy. Perhaps it was that unusual emotional make-up that led to her being the one who escaped her pen. That interested him. He decided to provide her with the closure she so clearly wished for.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“Um,” she said. “I actually really, really do. But I don’t want to … I mean … would that be okay?”
“Let me get the van loaded up. Grab your keys.”
He opened the passenger door of the van for her, warning her to be careful as there was a bag of clothes in the footwell. She had a black canvas shoulder bag shrugged over her arm. He chose not to question it.
Mister Sun drove them north, to where Los Angeles turns into lumps and bumps, canyons and trees. It was, he reflected again, not a real city. In what real city could you drive into solitude tens of miles before leaving it? This was an absurd place. It had taken less than an hour to drive them into a place nobody much looked at.
In fact, the only people who’d recently been here, just past this fork in a meandering road scribbled across steep and scrubby drops, were the people who’d placed the rental car for him by arrangement.
“Here we are,” Mister Sun said.
“What happens now?”
“We dispose of this vehicle, and everything in it, and drive back in the car ahead of us.”
“You planned that?”
“I did. Every job has a method, right? This is mine. No one else has gotten to see it before. It’s been really quite nice, being able to show someone.”
“Could I learn how to do it, do you think?”
He smiled. “I’m positive, Amanda, that you could learn anything, with great speed.”
“My laptop’s in my bag,” she said.
“What?”
“I can work from anywhere. We have an office manager. At the company. I work remotely as it is, from home, a lot of the time. I can work from anywhere in the world. I brought my purse and my passport.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When you leave I want to come with you. You haven’t lied to me. Not once. You keep smiling at me. I know I’m talking really fast but everything just seems to be fitting together and I am hoping so hard I’m not wrong about any of this and you want me to come with you.”
Her eyes glittered and sparkled and spun.
“So hard, Da
vid,” she said. “I am hoping so hard for this.”
Her hands reached for him tentatively, as if they’d just been untied. Wrists twisting, fingers unfolding.
Mister Sun, whose first name was not David, smiled at her. Amanda smiled back with relief and joy.
He touched her face with a fingertip, and then two. He brought his other hand up, and stroked her cheeks. She closed her eyes and swallowed back something that may have been a sob of reprieve from all the fears and questions in her aching and confused heart. He sighed and snapped her neck.
Mister Sun decided that it was very much time for a cigarette.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. She didn’t, so he fished his cigarettes and lighter out and lit up.
“Here’s what happens now,” he said to her. “I move you into the driver’s seat. Your belt won’t be fastened. I think I’ll probably put the gun in your lap, to amuse any crime scene investigators who peruse the remains. Then what I’ll do is push the van down off the side of the road. I’m hoping I can aim it at a tree, but I’d also like to get it quite deep into the vegetation down there. Once we’re all down there, I’m going to change out of these clothes, throw them in the back with the client and the tools, and start a fire. After that, I will get changed. The keys to my other car will be taped under the wheel well.”
He smoked for sixty seconds, looking around until the silence bothered him.
“Around here, this time of year,” he said to Amanda, “the chances are good that I could start a full-on wildfire. Which would be helpful. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s quite hard to make a car’s petrol tank explode with fire. I mean, think about it: if fire made cars explode that easily, every car manufacturer in the world would have been sued to death decades ago. But being in the middle of a big California wildfire … let’s say I have hopes.”
He stopped himself. No, it was going to be a while before the words hope or hoping were completely comfortable for him.
“Anyway. That’s the end of the process. I drive back to the hotel, eat, shower, and get some sleep, and fly out in the morning. Back home, Amanda, where it’s cold and everyone seems a foot closer to death every day. You wouldn’t have liked it a bit.”
He brushed his fingers through her hair. “And you would have been scared, all the time. Just as soon as you’d worked out the logical progression of things. Disappearing with a strange man the day your business partner went missing, his car parked in front of someone else’s house just a street or two away from your place. Spending the rest of your life feeling like you were trapped in a pen.”
He spent a hundred and twenty seconds or more just looking at that face, ageless and peaceful.
Mister Sun pulled his bag of clothing out of the footwell and got to work.
Mister Sun parked the car in the agreed collection spot, which was the same space the van had occupied earlier. He taped the keys back under the wheel well, adjusted his shades, tucked the screenplay under his arm, and walked back to the Mark.
The same car attendant was outside the hotel. “How’d it go?” he asked Mister Sun.
“Hollywood people are stupid,” Mister Sun said, smiling. “I’m done for the day. Time for dinner and a drink.”
“Damn right,” the attendant agreed, opening the lobby door for Mister Sun.
Mister Sun briefly used the hotel’s small business area to shred the screenplay, then repaired to his room. He found an acceptable beer in the minibar and took it out onto his balcony to have with another cigarette or so. The beer was over-cold for his taste, but clean and crisp, and so it would do.
His phone buzzed. Balancing the beer on the balcony rail, he pulled it from his pocket. There was a message in his self-destruct app. A client request, from the Provence region of France. He’d never been there before, and decided it might be an interesting trip, if the client was up to scratch.
Closing the app, he saw the text-message notification and tapped it open. It seemed that, over the course of the day, his girlfriend had decided that he was no good and of no further use. She communicated, in language far clearer than her usual style of discourse, that it was all over and she was done. The messages didn’t read like her speaking at all, until the final word of the final text, which was dogfucker.
Mister Sun wondered if he really believed it was true that the heart is just a pump.
A Note About the Author
WARREN ELLIS is an author, graphic novelist, columnist, and speaker. His latest novel, Gun Machine, was released in January 2013, and is being developed for television by Chernin Entertainment and FOX.
Crooked Little Vein, his first novel, was described by Joss Whedon as “Funny, inventive, and blithely appalling … Dante on paint fumes.”
His graphic novel RED was made into a successful film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren, and its sequel film will be released in August 2013. His other graphic novels, including Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Ministry of Space, Global Frequency, Gravel, and Freakangels, have won multiple awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Eagle Awards and the NUIG Lit & Deb’s President’s Medal in recognition of support for free speech.
Previously a commentator for Reuters and Wired (UK), he is currently writing a weekly column for Vice.
His first nonfiction book, Spirit Tracks, is due in 2014 from FSG Originals. He lives mostly in Britain.
www.WarrenEllis.com
@warrenellis
Facebook.com/officialwarrenellis
Also by Warren Ellis
Gun Machine
Crooked Little Vein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2013 by Warren Ellis
All rights reserved
First ebook edition: July 2013
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71187-0
Author photograph by Ellen Rogers
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral
Cover art by Ben Templesmith
www.fsgoriginals.com
Warren Ellis, Dead Pig Collector
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