A Good-Looking Corpse Read Online Free PDF Page B

always the same black metal, always the skull and crossbones.
I wonder who else gets those barrels
? It costs me $400 a barrel to have the contents completely burned, so Alan, even with his celebrity status, is sharing barrel space with the biohazards of more common folk.
No personal first-class privacy barrel for him
. In this case, it is carpet hunks soaked with soupy guts I had cut from the home of an unattended old man. He’d suffered a heart attack and decomposed into his carpet while waiting on a call from his estranged daughter. It was a call that never came. The old guy’s landlord had discovered him, then hung around outside to talk my ear off about the old man’s sad life. As if to confirm the landlord’s tale, an answering machine inside, near the stain of the body, which blemished the carpet with a “snow angel made in cream of mushroom” look, blinked zero. The sad thing was, over the two weeks the man had rotted, apparently not a single caller had left a message, not even some scam telemarketer. Now the old-timer had the dubious distinction of having his guts burned in the same incinerator with a movie star. Hooray for Hollywood.
    Settled, and changed into street wear that isn’t emblazoned with the Trauma-Gone logo, I slip into the Charger and back it out onto the narrow patch of asphalt that is my parking lot. A glance at my cellphone informs me that I’ve missed several calls and texts from Ivy. I don’t answer them because it will make her think I am heading home. I am not. No, right now I need some “me time.”
    I sacrificed a perfectly good heroin habit for Ivy—or really, for everything Ivy represents: longevity, stability, a relationship, and life. And it was worth it—but all that comes with a price. The day-to-day routine of coming home for dinner, eating a pleasant meal, talking about our respective days, doing the dishes and then watching some television as we drift into sleep—it isn’t me. Initially, I tried it and it had seemed like a sort of vacation from my reality—a goofy, surreal peep into normalcy. But by the middle of the fourth week, when it started just feeling like my existence, I lost my cool. I began to stay at the office later and later, surfing the Web, absorbing any knowledge that sounded worth a damn, until I couldn’t stare at the computer screen any longer. That’s when the drives began. Heading out into the black nights, cruising dark streets with the windows down and the radio up, I get lost. Side streets, backstreets, alleys, I barely slow for Stop signs and red lights as I run the Charger through the landscapes of this good/bad city. I push myself, testing my knowledge of its roughly five hundred square miles and my willingness to soar through its streets. It feels wrong—running my car so hard and fast, to skirt the limits of what is breaking the law and what is edging toward criminal recklessness. It’s the sort of action that got Holly Kelly killed. And yet…I can’t stop. I need this like I need air in my lungs. Simply being out of prison doesn’t cut it like it used to. You’d think I could just appreciate not being in a cage, but these little explorations through the urban sprawl are a necessary part of my freedom these days….I just worry that the time will come that this habit too will need to be escalated and what that might look like. Boredom has never brought out the best in me. But for the time being, the drives keep me calm.
    Only when I begin to feel selfish about my time away from her, only then do I turn the Charger and head home to Ivy.
    Ivy, on the other hand, has taken to cohabitation in a way I simply haven’t. She likes a sort of Donna Reed thing—cooking a meal and hearing about my day—with the caveat that I listen to her stories right back. She’d taken a gig working for a private investigator—the sort of cornball that followed cheating husbands around, exposing petty criminals and doing occasional bail-jumper work. Ivy