Copyright©2002 by Mark Crockett
All Rights Reserved
“Wake up, bitch, your tests are back.”
The force of the slap across her face rocked the old high-backed chair to which Mimi Driver was securely bound with duct tape. The high back of the chair (and her head) hit the nearby wall, narrowly missing a half-filled bag of IV solution that hung from a nail. The solution fed into her petite body through the brachial artery on her bare right arm. The chair seesawed for a moment before settling upright. The duct tape covering her mouth somewhat silenced her scream of pain and surprise.
“You’ve been busy, home girl. You test positive for gonorrhea and syphilis...now that’s something you don’t see everyday. You also have a nasty case of hepatitis ‘B.’ Kind of a hazard in your line of work, huh? Oh, and you’re pregnant. Congratulations.”
Her vision blurred and the general disorientation was coming back to her. The man’s voice, muffled by the facemask and clear plastic eye shield he wore, droned on as he read from his checklist while Mimi’s tears soaked her swollen face. She had been trapped in this room, bound to this chair, for almost two days. She now knew she was going to die here. He put down the paper he was reading from atop a large, closed styrofoam cooler behind him, then turned to face Mimi.
“So, what do you say? Ready for a little chat?” he said as he adjusted the drop of the IV cocktail that kept her nauseous and, when he didn’t wake her with beatings, semi-conscious. Then, in one smooth motion, he ripped the sodden duct tape from her mouth and stepped back to the cooler. Mimi vomited almost immediately. He opened the cooler while she retched, removed a large plastic cup filled with blood-tinged ice water, and threw it on her face. The shock of the cold water hitting her face caused her to inhale some of the liquid and left her coughing and gasping for air. He threw the cup and wad of tape onto the puddle of fluid on her lap.
“Well, you done?” he asked.
She coughed again, then spoke in a thick, slurred voice.
“I’m sorry...don’t do this. Please. I don’t know nuthin’. I never saw you...I’ll leave town...just let me go...” She hiccupped, then began to whimper.
“That’s it?” he asked.
She tried to focus the blur that was her vision. She could hear a faint echo when he spoke as she looked in the direction of his voice. All she could make out in the low light was his outline. He was tall. And green. The clothes he wore were green.
“Don’t…kill me.”
The slap this time was far more vicious, bouncing her into the wall again and toppling her and the chair to the floor. The force of her fall ripped the IV from her arm, leaving a jagged, bleeding tear. The left side of her face hit the floor with enough force to break her jaw in two places. The pain cleared the muddiness enough that she could see him clearly as he stood over her. He was wearing green hospital scrubs with blue booties covering his feet. He was rubbing his gloved hands. She saw that the gloves were taped to his sleeves.
“Shit, that hurt,” he said as he massaged the hand he struck her with. He flexed his hand, then looked down at her.
“Frankly, baby girl, I expected a bit more out of you. I’m disappointed.”
He walked behind her, grabbed the back of her chair, and sat it upright. The motion of righting her chair caused a loud, high-pitched wheeze to escape from her bloodied, swollen lips. Crossing to the front of her, he noticed by the lop-sided angle that her jaw was broken.
“No…you’ve been a party I shouldn’t have gone to,” he said as he reached into a black backpack behind the cooler, taking out a roll of duct tape and a sharpened Philips head screwdriver with a five-inch shaft. Using the tip of the screwdriver, he caught the beginning of the tape and pulled it out to a two-foot strip. He did this three times. When Mimi heard the tape tearing, she started to moan and began rocking side to side in her seat. He stuck the tips of the tape to the front of his shirt, then tore off a much smaller strip and circled behind Mimi. The sound of the roll of tape hitting the floor behind her stopped her rocking. He held the screwdriver in the same hand from which the tape had fallen.
“I’ve got to be back at work day after tomorrow, so girl, it’s time for us to hit the road.”
When Mimi turned her head toward the sound of his voice, he looped the first strip of tape under her chin and fractured jaw, pulling it up and back quickly, stopping her scream before it could start. As she kicked against the tape holding her legs, he secured her head to the back cross board of the chair. Avoiding her struggling and bound hands, he moved to her left side and knelt down. When he put his hand on the remains of her wet, soiled top, her kicking became more frantic. He giggled beneath his mask when he tore a gapping hole in the side of her blouse. As her bruised face started to darken from her efforts, he slid his hand up her side to the space between the fifth and sixth rib. He placed the tip of the screwdriver there.
“This is gonna hurt.”
With a loud grunt, he pushed the screwdriver up to its base through her flesh, the intercoastal muscle layer, the parietal pleura, and directly into her left lung. Her chair left the floor for a moment with the force of her struggle, but her bounds held. He quickly removed the screwdriver and placed the smaller strip of duct tape tightly over the hole he’d made. Breathing hard, he jumped up and used the tip of the blood-slick tool to cut her head and neck free. She gasped so hard that he, now backed to the cooler, could hear her fractured jaw crack make little pops. Her kicking had almost freed her left leg, and he now sat on the floor near the cooler to watch her. Within three minutes, the veins in her thin neck were bulging above her flesh like thick piano wire from the tension pneumothorax he had caused. It took another two minutes for the increasing pressure in her chest cavity to collapse her injured lung to the size of a baseball. Another two minutes collapsed the lung further, pressing it against the heart and great vessels. After two more minutes, the compressed lung squeezed the last beat out of her heart. She died with the left side of her chest slightly bloated from the internal air pressure.
He watched her for another minute before he got off the floor and, using the tip of the screwdriver, cut both of her arms and legs free. With a push, her body fell to the floor face down. He turned her onto her back, stripped off what was left of her clothes, then pushed the chair to the side. He pulled the backpack and then the cooler between her opened legs. Looking at a cheap watch he had taped to the top of the cooler, he started to whistle a tuneless melody. He opened the backpack and neatly started to line up his tools next to the body. Looking again at the clock, he began to move faster. He had a lot of work to do and wanted to be finished before morning...
* * * * *
It was the cold night rain in the Little Beirut section near downtown Phoenix, Arizona, that kept most of the homeless in the vacant buildings that filled this area of town. Centered between the 7th Avenue Police Precinct and the State Capitol complex, Little Beirut was the no-man’s land that even the police didn’t venture into after sunset. Dotted with more abandoned buildings and crumbling long vacant schools than the light industry it was zoned for, this was a place that, save for the transients gathered there, you did not go. In the shadow of the largest police headquarters in Arizona, every type of illicit activity known was produced, packaged, and served to an eager clientele. Rape, homicide, and drug peddling were nightly rituals whose remnants were addressed only in the brightness of day (with several squad cars present).
The Montovie Men’s Hotel (on the corner of 11th Avenue and Madison Street) and the Drawbridge Christian House (a men’s shelter and halfway house on 13th Street and Jefferson Road) held the few men trying to escape the insanity of the streets and stay clean (physically and drug-wise). The only women in the area were the hardcore crack and met amphetamine whores or the very few who followed their men into the nightly shelter of vacant buildings.
One of these coupled men, known on the streets as Chickenhead, was walking in the night drizzle looking for his girlfriend, Mimi Driver. It had been four days since he had last seen her. He was beginning to wonder if she had finally made good on her constant threat to go back to someplace in Texas (he didn’t remember where). It wasn’t too unusual for her to disappear for a day or two, but in the last seven months, they had gotten closer, and she would let him know if she would “be leavin’” (that’s what she would call her tricks) and where he could meet her afterwards. Ten years older than her twenty-eight years of age, he really felt that he needed to look out for her.
Chickenhead had haunted these streets for almost seven years and had no fear of them. Six foot tall and rail thin, his long, dirty red hair stuck out of a taped-up bill-less black baseball cap. He knew intimately the mindless chaos that lived here and tried to pass on this knowledge to Mimi. She rarely listened. He loved her anyway.
After leaving the Home of the Savior soup kitchen earlier that evening, he walked the street, leaving word with people that he was looking for her. It was almost 3:00 a.m. when he started back to their flop on the second floor of the abandoned Grace Court School on 13th Street. The rain had stopped around 12:30 a.m., and the water and cold had soaked through the three layers of shirts and cheap pants he was wearing. A car passed him. He saw its brake lights brighten twice about a half block ahead and stop just down from a streetlight. Chickenhead stepped into a nearby door and watched.
“Fool,” he said aloud. The only people on the streets this time of night you don ‘t want to meet, he thought.
Wearing a long, dark coat, someone got out of the driver’s side, opened the back door, and quickly dumped a large bundle onto the sidewalk. The driver whipped the coat away from his legs, jumped back into the car, and sped off.
Chickenhead knew instantly that it was a body. After the car drove off, he hurried down the block toward the body, staying close to the shadows. A slight drizzle started by the time he reached the body. As he left the shadows for a closer look, he saw that it was wrapped in black plastic garbage bags. The bags were torn where they had scraped the sidewalk, and an acrid, chemical smell stopped him a foot or so from the body. And the sight of shoes sticking out of the bottom of the bags. Mimi’s shoes. He was on his knees tearing at the plastic and screaming when he cleared the wrapping from her head.
He stared at her for only a moment before he tried to stand, stumbled, then fell onto the ground next to her, whining. Unable to stop
himself, he looked at her face again. Above the dull shine of her bloated face, stapled to her forehead, was a twenty-dollar bill...
Email Mark at mark.crockett@worldnet.att.net
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