"This is definitely a several-man job," I said, incredulous.
"I've got some bad news," Dirk said, and I had to work to take my eyes off the blood-mottled floor where the little boy had breathed his last. "Because the news is here filming, they've probably got footage of me on camera. I can't call in sick to work today; my boss might see me on TV…so I've got to go. I've got to get some sleep."
"What would you have done if I hadn't picked up the phone?" I hissed, furious but mindful of the milling cops and not-too-distant media boom mikes. This was exactly the kind of shit I was beginning to expect from him.
"I'll try to call Kim or Misty to help you out. I can stay for maybe forty-five minutes, but after that you're on your own."
Between the sheer amount of carpeting that needed to be removed, and walls and floor that required sanitizing, not to mention children's toys and furniture, it was a tall order for several people, let alone one man. One drunken man who was in desperate need of sleep.
Our suiting up got the attention of the cameras, and straightfaced, I looked past them.
Dirk and I started in on the dead kid, scrubbing at the shaped smears of blood that hinted at his tiny outline. The coroner had taken the little boy's body only minutes before I had arrived, and his blood still had its vibrant freshness. It was nice when we were able to deal with fresh blood—it requires a lot less elbow grease. Dirk wanted to clean the dead kid's fire truck, while I was of the opinion of "fuck it, chuck it." But it seemed he felt some sort of emotional victory in saving the toy.
It took him awhile, but he got it all cleaned up and looking like its owner's blood hadn't been splashed all over it. Not that it mattered much; the kid would probably be buried with the thing if it fit in his tiny coffin.
Once the fire truck looked innocent again, Dirk had to go. He promised to keep calling Kim and Misty, though, neither of whom had picked up.
I gave him the keys to my car, needing to keep the truck for all the work I had left to do. I was completely sober by that point, and my head was throbbing, begging me for water and sleep, neither of which it had coming.
Using my razor blade, which had dulled from cutting apart many a mattress in times past, I had to saw through the carpeting, enduring "Looks like you need a new razor" comments from any cop who wandered by.
As the hours passed and I worked in silence, the police presence began to dissipate. The more work I did, the less the house looked like an interesting crime scene. The higher-ranking officers got bored or tired and departed. And as they left, some of the media followed, to my relief. It was awkward having them filming and making commentary every time I lugged something out to the truck. ("He's bringing something out of the house, Jim…It looks like…more carpeting… We've got another section of carpeting.")
By the time I started cleaning up the dad's outline smear, which was the worst mess of the lot, the attitude at the house had lightened up considerably as the remaining cops hung around watching the news footage on a large TV in the den.
"Wanna see me become a TV star?" one of the grinning cops asked me. He briskly walked out through the garage door, unhooking his flashlight from his belt. Sure enough, a moment later there he was on the big TV screen, anxiously training his flashlight through the planters in the front of the house, his face one of intense police seriousness.
The news cameras, of course, ate it up, filming him as if he were on the trail of something hot. ("Jim, I can only speculate what they're looking for out there…He looks intent on finding something. Perhaps it's some sort of clue that will shed some light on this gruesome scene!")
When he came back inside, the cops were all enjoying their camaraderie, laughing it up like some tight-knit club, and I felt the envy scorch me from my place on the floor.
"They should make you guys a reality show," I said with a shuckand-jive grin, indicating that I was in on the joke. But instead of laughing, they turned back into serious policemen and went back to their work. I returned to scrubbing, reminded that I was just a lowly janitor.
Miraculously, at 6:00 a.m. Misty showed up, looking tired, and I tried to convey to her how I hadn't slept all fucking night. The work was mostly complete by then, but she had arrived in time to help scour some baseboards and furniture of residual splatter. At that point I was exhausted and my head was throbbing; I needed sleep. And then Dirk called.
"Hope you're not too tired," he said, sounding cheerful and rested, the bastard. "A Motel 6 in Compton called. They've got a suicide."
I approached Misty delicately, hoping that now, after the three or four crime scenes she'd helped with, she'd be game to tackle one alone.
"I've actually got to get to my other job…" she said with a shrug. "If I call in sick and my boss sees me…"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I interrupted, cursing the news media once more. I was alone once again.
We finished the murder house by 7:00 a.m., and I gave Misty the shitty job of scrubbing the blood out of the front-porch bricks where the mom and daughter had fled the scene. I was worried about staining, due to the porous nature of the grout, but of course I wasn't too worried, as we'd included my standard clause in the contract.
As we packed up and left, it signaled to the media that the show was leaving town and they, too, packed up, scavenging after their next kill. I spit on the front lawn at their departure. They'd probably at least have some downtime before their next breaking story. Lucky bastards.
* * *
As I drove alone to the Motel 6 in Compton, the bed of the truck already filled with stained carpeting and bags of blood, I was happy for the work. We'd pulled down a nice paycheck on the homicides; Dirk had at least done that right before leaving me hanging. And the Motel 6 gig, while not exactly a sizable payday, well, I was just grateful that ol' Tom Bodett didn't know anyone from the Orange County Public Guardian's office.
I thought about stopping for breakfast, because my stomach was growling over the sound of the radio, but I knew my finances couldn't yet account for that. I was a pathetic, hungover, exhausted, and broken sight, having just cleaned up multiple murders, and I didn't have enough pocket change to buy a Sausage McMuffin, hold the egg.
In the daylight Compton is not such a bad place. It is a classic low-income area with all the trappings—worn-down people walking aimlessly up and down the sidewalk, escaped newspaper inserts blowing up and down debris-spotted streets, and rusty chain-link fences keeping trespassers out of dirt patches where factories once stood. Now even weeds didn't last there. In the early morning it doesn't seem like the dangerous stomping ground of legend from so many rap songs, more like a dying town that cultivates only weary unrest. Now, I'm sure there are certain areas of Compton that I would be foolish to navigate even in the daylight, a goofy white man out of his element, but none of that was on display.
While it wasn't the location the company put on the front of their brochure, the Motel 6 at least looked hospitable. There was no violence there, rather, just everyday suicides. I cleaned up the room quickly, finding a nasty-looking syringe between the mattress and the box spring. It wasn't the first one I'd found at a Motel 6, and I wondered if it wasn't their version of the mint on the pillow.
The guy at least had the good sense to kill himself in the bathroom, which was easy on cleanup. Motel 6 clearly had learned over the years to use nonporous material in the bathrooms and easily removable carpeting in the rest of the unit. Like moths to a flame, so go the despondent to off themselves at Motel 6.
I didn't have to take the mattress, which I vocally thanked the dead guy for; by that point in the morning, I couldn't exert a single bit more energy than was absolutely necessary. I was past thirty hours of no sleep, dehydrated as hell, worn down from my hangover, and ready to drop.
I called Dirk from the parking lot, intent on asking him if I could just drive his truck home and swap him vehicles many, many hours later. I was already going to have a bitch of a time getting from Compton back to Fullerton in the traffic of the 105, which seemed to last all day, rush hour or not.
"You're not going to believe this," Dirk said, his happy-go-lucky cadence sounding to me like dripping shit. "Corona PD just called… Someone threw up in the back of a cop car…They need you, man."
* * *
Torrance to Compton is not a bad trek, but West Compton out to Covina was about the length of civilized Southern California. My eyes fluttering from exhaustion, I nosed the truck for the long drive east.
We had our contract with Corona PD, so it wasn't just a simple case of "Can't do it; see you on the next one," and I knew that. I also knew that it would be a small miracle if I made it out to Corona without crashing the boss's truck. I might even have done it on purpose, but with no personal insurance and no company insurance, if I got hurt on a job, Dirk and I used to joke, we'd have to bury me in the desert.
They say there is truth in every joke, though, and I repeatedly slapped myself in the absence of caffeine to stay on the road. (That can't be something you want to see driving next to you: a scraggly looking motherfucker with a truckload of bloody carpet and trash bags, jabbering aloud and slapping himself as he tears down the road out to the middle of nowhere.)
Corona PD, if I haven't told you, sucks. Aside from their having a bunch of asshole cops and an uncovered parking lot where the patrol cars bake in the desert sun, they only called us out for the really nasty work. Whereas Orange PD once called us out over a prisoner spitting on the back window of a patrol car, Corona PD made sure that whenever we were called out, we worked for our money.
I've cleaned up vomit before, many times, in fact. I'm not quite the connoisseur of puke that I am of poop, and I was extremely tired and already at the end of my rope, but let me assure you that none of that held sway when I looked in the backseat of the cop car and realized that this was, without a doubt, the most heinously violent, chunky, rancid, smelly, wretched, slimy, multihued vomit that has ever existed on this planet.
Honest to God, I should have saved a cup of the stuff just to convince the naysayers and beat all claims to that title. I cannot imagine the putrid demon soul that unleashed this nightmare hose of chuke (chunky puke) across the backseat, windows, floorboards, and beneath the plastic seat dividers up into the front seat, but for your benefit I will try.
I imagine it was a woman, black widow-like, because I'm sure that some of the upchuck consisted of hunks of former mates and bits of her offspring that didn't crawl out of the nest fast enough. She was a big lady—had to be to contain the sheer amount of hurl that was spread rich before me. I imagine that she had ratty, dirty, long, curly hair; wicked pustules threatening to burst off her overstretched cheek meat; and an incredibly surly, loud, and brazen disposition.
Anywhere else I might have considered her as a candidate for a biker skank who nobody wanted on the back of their chopper, but this was Corona, and there was a good chance that she was the mayor of the city. Also she was wearing a straw cowgirl hat. Why? Why not.
I set to work scooping, yes, scooping up the volume of throw-up. I worked tirelessly under the blazing sun to do so, constantly averting my head, willing my nostrils not to pick up the scent of the cooked barf.
One time at the frat house, we found some of Phil's mom's homemade chunky turkey soup left over from a Thanksgiving that had been several months ago and rotting in the fridge. Instead of leaving it in its large plastic bag and properly disposing of it, we instead emptied it into a bucket, where the smell of the stuff made several guys retch.
Of course, any and all puke was collected in the bucket, as well as the urine of all present parties. One guy even took a shit in the bucket, creating a revolting mixture that we all somehow forgot about and left sitting on the patio when we went off to drink. Several days later we remembered it was there and threw it into the street for the street sweeper to slop up. I will forever remember the way that mess churned and sloshed as it was collected in the spinning brush of that street-sweeping machine. And yet the puke in that cop car in Corona was way worse.
I finished hours later, the remnants of the stink keeping me alert for my drive over to Dirk's office to retrieve my car. It had been a long day, too long, and made worse by my drinking. I had cleaned up four bodies and some insanely bad yak, but I had survived.
That night, I tumbled into bed feeling complete, like I'd done a day of honest work, and rest would be the greatest reward. It was how I imagined farmers and firemen and other hardworking blue-collar joes felt at the end of a long day. I could feel a measure of pride in myself as my eyelids slipped shut and sleep came.
My cell phone woke me up early the next morning, yanking me from deep slumber. I was refreshed, having slept from 4:30 in the afternoon until that jarring, irritating ring, but it interrupted me from a scummy, lascivious dream where I was a sultan and in command of my own girls' roller-derby team. Let's just say that I made them keep their skates on…Where the dream was actually headed, I'll probably never know, because goddamned Dirk woke me up.