* * *
One day, just as it was starting to get into the summer heat, we got a call from the Corona Police Department. Kim was waitressing and my back was feeling okay, so I took the call alone.
I rolled into their station with Dirk's words fresh in my mind. He was adamant that we do everything "right" to impress the cops, because that would entice them to recommend us to the private sector, where the real money was.
The Red Rocket and I were now a familiar sight at Orange PD; I'd grown accustomed to a casual friendliness from most of the cops. I would joke around with them, pissing and moaning about having to clean up piss and vomit and complaining how they had it easy. Whenever unfamiliar cops would approach me about my presence in their underground gate-access-only parking garage, I would respond innocently with statements like, "Isn't this where I go to register as a sex offender?" or "My brother's in there…I'm here to bust him out!" They'd panic for a moment, and then realization would set in and we'd share a laugh.
So when I arrived at Corona PD, it was understandable that I was expecting a similar level of professional courtesy. Instead, the office had me fill out paperwork explaining what my business was bothering them with, and then they left me to fuck off for thirty-five minutes in the lobby while they halfheartedly attempted to page the chucklehead who had contacted me in the first place.
Corona was a newer town on the fringe of the desert, and the residents had that "new town on the fringe of the desert" attitude to show for it, as if they were fucking Palm Springs or something. My rock-star mentality was beginning to get the better of me, and I stood up to announce that they could clean up their own cop car—I had better ways to waste a day. But the lady at the reception counter was even too busy for me to announce my intent, so I meekly returned to my seat.
Finally I was summoned into the police yard, where eight or so fleet vehicles awaited deployment. It was a miserable, cramped yard as far as police-yard facilities went. I'd clearly grown snooty, having become accustomed to the blissful shade of the Orange PD underground. In the desert of Corona, the sweltering sun cut straight through the morning haze and beamed like a spotlight on me, making my skin feel unbearably sticky.
My contact, Winston, led me over toward one of the black-andwhites, its fiberglass exterior cooking in the heat. Winston opened the back door, and the stale stench of death bull-rushed me. Blood has a metallic odor to it, and when it has been cooking in mass amounts in the trapped air of a police car's walled-in cage, you can taste it on the front of your tongue. I didn't have to lean in to see that the backseat was gruesome.
The molded fiberglass buckets of the backseat had large puddles of the red stuff, and in the heat the top layer was beginning to dry, forming a gelatinlike skin across the liquid pools underneath. Phlegmlike snatches of pulpy blood had been flung across the rest of the enclosure, staining seatbelts and the fabric overlay on the ceiling along with the frizzy wisps of carpeting laid along the back window. The twin steel bars that served as reinforcement for the Plexiglas window shield separating the good guys from the bad guys had caught the worst of it; one of them was drenched in a mess of red and black innards with a salsalike consistency. The guts extended out to the window shield, down to the floor, and up to the ceiling in a manner that spoke volumes about the level of violence that had taken place. It was as if a man had been caged up with a live chain saw too large for the enclosure.
"What happened in there?" I looked to Winston, wishing I had one of my assistants with me.
"Prisoner was drunk and didn't want to be arrested, so she beat her brains out on the metal support bar."
"She die?" I asked, amazed at her fortitude.
"What's it look like?" he retorted, and turned, leaving me to it.
It was far worse than any of the poop or vomit or HIV or hep C scenarios Orange PD had ever thrown at me. And because we were trying to shore up the all-important service contract with Corona PD, the job was being done for our "specialty police rate." I wanted to call Dirk out there just so he could see the sort of bullshit that he was sticking me with on a regular basis now, but he wouldn't bother to show.
I knew immediately that it would be in my best interest to suit up fully, because I was going to have to enter the car. With the wettest puddles of stewed guts splashed toward the middle of the ride and my back still not fully able to handle the contortions, I was going to have to climb into the thick of it and sit, my bunny suit absorbing the slimy patches behind me.
I geared up quickly and under the curious eyes of arriving cops who'd evidently never seen a crime scene cleaner before and were only just now learning about the vehicle's last occupant.
Most of the officers were less than thrilled to see an outsider in their clubhouse, and responded to my engaging smiles and polite "Howya doin's?" with an icy stare of mistrust. The ones who did talk were only there to engage in unfriendly mocking, telling me that I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in my protective suit. They also mentioned my striking resemblance to that other obese, white-bodied entity of corporate gimmickry, the Michelin Man.
I smiled through it all as Dirk had implored me, bearing their insults from the back of the car, where I was surrounded by remains and the dense, sweltering desert air, heated immeasurably in the trapped confines of the backseat, scrubbing away. The more daring of the cops would wander up and leer down at me, reminiscent of the gangbangers from my first car job, guns at their hip, silently daring me to question them.
When the car was as clean as I could muster, I once more collected my things and got the hell out of there. Personality-wise, the cops didn't seem too much different from the thugs they arrested.
* * *
During what I later would come to realize was our heyday, it wasn't just crime scenes that were keeping me busy. The Public Guardian's office was proud of us for taking down the Sewer House with an efficiency that a government agency was probably unused to.
We'd actually had to rent a storage space to contain all the salvageable property we'd pulled from the mess—stuff like multiple drum sets, ornate lamps still in the box, and brand-new cooking gadgets. Along with salvaged jewelry and antique coins, it was a rather nice haul awaiting pickup by the county to do God knows what with. It was short by several thousand dollars and an electric guitar, but they didn't know that.
As a reward for our awesomeness, the county allowed us to bid on several more houses. Dirk sent me out with a camera to collect and document the homes in all their atrociousness for him to later compile into a bid. We were up against an unknown number of bidders for the work, if there was indeed anyone at all against us. For all I knew, the county had simply decided to say, "Fuck it. These are our guys."
I talked Chris into tagging along as he had done with me on the Sewer House; it had seemingly become a way of bonding for us to invade properties and assess the cost to remedy them. Dirk and I were granted a remarkable level of trust by the Public Guardian's office in that we were allowed to come by, pick up keys to properties vacated by death or insanity, and explore them at our leisure, unhampered by bureaucracy and county needling. As such, Chris and I would make days out of it, taking multiple sets of keys and hitting one property after another, exploring through the refuse like pirates, searching out money or loot that had been left behind by the owners.
In one house the mold was growing thick over the piles of kitty poop that had acclimated into small hills throughout the premises, and you had to be careful to not slip on the stacks of newspaper covering the floor, which would doubtlessly land you leg first in one of the ancient piles.
In another house that didn't seem too dirty at all, we emerged to find that our lower halves were thick with mites crawling up and down our naked legs. Removing our footwear, we spent the next few minutes slapping at and squashing the scrambling insects off our bodies.
At yet another house, we were attempting to open the garage door first when a rough-looking homeowner from nearby approached us cautiously. "Are you with the county?" he asked with all the suspicion of a self-important neighbor.
I nodded, figuring that it was close enough to the truth.
"I'm glad you're here," he admitted, his hard edge seeping away. "I hate looking at this house—it gives me the chills."
"Why's that?" Chris asked.
"Because the man who lived here was a child molester."
I had dealt with my fair share of those in the last year. "What makes you say that?" I probed.
"Weird sounds from the house…he was always taking kids there, but he lived alone…it was all weird. Everyone around here hated him. The police never would do anything. Finally they found him dead in his living room; apparently the place was kind of a wreck." The neighbor neglected to mention how the man had met his demise.
"We'll see," I said with a nod, looking intently at the alleged predator's den. I figured that the ex-owner was just an eccentric uncle or something who caught a bad rap from the overzealous locals. We waited until the neighbor ran out of things to say and retreated, promising that we'd consider his offer to join him for a beer later.
Although each was far beyond the level of "messy," none of the houses we'd seen had been anywhere near as bad as the Sewer House. The suspected child molester's house came close, with garbage scattered in abundance throughout the place and with emphasis on kitchen trash. But where the Sewer House had gone well over six feet of trash in several places, some around the ten-foot mark, this place had its highs in the one-foot range, which was still a goddamned pigsty.
The molester's house had its own unique charms, though, what with boxes of conventional pornography stacked around the place and lurid magazines draped over the wreckage. There was even a large box of porno tapes occupying the space where the toilet should have been, as the porcelain toilet was taking up residence in the living room.
Most telling about the man's personal hobbies, though, and easily the most chilling, was an old, boxy video camera set on a steel tripod and angled downward, waiting to record the action on the master bedroom's king-size mattress. Surrounding it were stacks and stacks of unmarked videotapes, partially or fully recorded through, their content unmistakably toxic. Upon further inspection of the house, all available cabinets were filled with similar videocassettes, similarly recorded. It was enough probing for us.
Desperate to not get burned again on the contracting, Dirk, armed with my documentation and recommendations, bid the jobs above and beyond what it would take to do the work, eagerly scheming out ways for us to milk the county on labor and sanitation costs.
Since our transgressions at the Sewer House, Dirk had become fairly no-bones about his desires to make money any way possible. Of course we bid the jobs too high, and of course we didn't get them. We should have realized all county jobs had to include multiple bids. What Dirk took away from it, though, was that maybe, just maybe, the county guys did know what we had done on the Sewer House and they were denying us future work as a result. After that idea popped into his head, it was like talking with a conspiracy-theorist stoner. Paranoia abounded, and yet he was still after more money.
The county's goodwill toward independent property assessment came to an abrupt end shortly thereafter. In one of the only houses Dirk accompanied me to for the sake of bidding, a cozy little doublewide at a retirement community in San Juan Capistrano that we searched through (Chris was working at his job that day), $180,000 dollars was found in paper grocery bags under the sink.
Of course, Dirk and I didn't find the money; no, in typical "us" fashion, we overbid the assessment like crazy. The winner of the job, apparently a company of honest, good-hearted morons, found the cash and turned it over to the county. Some little old lady with no family members whatsoever was sitting on a gold mine of untraceable bills, and now it was all property of the government.
If it had been me who had found those grocery bags, neither Dirk, nor the county, nor you would have ever heard from me again. Not that I could live the rest of my life on $180,000, but I'm sure that kind of money buys a couple goddamn good years in Thailand. I can't believe we didn't look under the sink.
After the cash was discovered, the county mandated that all assessment visits to homes had to come under strict supervision of a county ward, and my and Chris's brotherly bonding trips went flushing down the drain. Most brothers might have continued to do bonding activities in spite of that, but most brothers probably have never heard the expression "As lazy as a Klima" (only slightly lesser known is "Don't trust a Klima with your wife's underwear drawer"). If there wasn't a possibility for making money, I doubt Chris and I could even muster up the energy for a staring contest.
* * *
Back in the familiar comforts of our regular business, crime scenes, Dirk and I were still trucking along nicely. We'd been out to several cleanups for little old lady alcoholics who had died in their homes.
Alcoholic deaths were always nasty because the people tended to shit themselves (a lot of Type 6s on the Bristol Stool Scale) in their death spasms and puke up stomach blood, which comes up greasy black with all the bile in it. Succumbing to last-stage alcoholism is apparently one of the worst ways to shuffle off the mortal coil, and judging by appearances, it certainly looked like it.