Low Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

and set the roll aside. If blood continued to ooze from the head it would be contained. Also, Simon did not want to have to look at the corpse’s face and see that mouth hanging open, as if on
the verge of speaking. What exactly do you think you’re doing, Simon? Don’t you think you should be calling the police? He did not want to have to see those closed eyelids which looked
like they might open at any moment. I can see you, Simon. I know what you did – and I won’t forget. I saw it all and I will tell everybody.
    He dragged the body out of the way and laid paper towels over the pool of blood where the head once was. He stood silently and watched the paper towels fade to red. Once he got most of the blood
soaked up and the bloody paper towels into a black trash bag, he got on hands and knees with spray cleanser and a scouring sponge and scrubbed away at the red-stained floor. Because the
polyurethane finish had been worn off by years of use, blood had gotten into the grain of the wood and Simon couldn’t get it all out, but he scrubbed what he could for several minutes,
putting all of his weight into it. Once he’d gotten the floor as clean as it was going to get, he threw the sponge into the trash bag with the paper towels. Then he removed his blood-stained
T-shirt and threw that into the bag as well. He tied the top of it closed.
    He used a coffee mug to bang a nail into the wall outside his apartment and to the left of his front door. Then he tied one end of a shoelace to the doorknob and the other end
to the nail. He’d found the shoelace in a drawer in the kitchen, but had no idea where it had come from. Once it was tied in place he nodded. That, he thought, would keep the door from
swinging open when he was out. When he was in, he could prop a chair in front of the door to hold it closed. Tomorrow he would buy a padlock to keep the door shut. He didn’t want Leonard or
any of the handymen he hired to come into the apartment, which meant he’d have to fix the door himself.
    He looked around to see if he’d drawn anyone’s attention with his late-night noise-making, but the corridor was empty save for him.
    He grabbed the trash bag and headed for the stairs.
    He parked his car in front of a 7-Eleven, the fluorescent light from inside spilling out through the dirty windows, splashing across the sun-faded asphalt of the parking lot.
He stepped out of the car, carrying the trash bag, and with it he walked around to the back of the convenience store where a dumpster sat smelling of rot. He threw the bag into it.
    He stood squinting just inside the door for almost a full minute before his eyes adjusted to the bright lights of the convenience store and he could make out the rows of chips
and pork rinds and candy bars and magazines, all foiled in bright blue and green and yellow packaging.
    Once his eyes adjusted he made his way to the back of the store, where a white freezer with steel doors sat, a picture of a polar bear holding up a bag of ice on its front. He opened one of the
two steel doors and looked inside. He counted eighteen seven-pound bags of ice. He thought his bathtub held sixty gallons, which meant there were about a third as many bags as he needed –
give or take. The bags were shy of a gallon, and he wasn’t sure exactly how the cubes would pack. About a third of what he needed, minus however many gallons a body took up.
    If you rounded down and said a gallon weighed about eight pounds – a gallon of water actually weighed eight-point-three-five pounds – and if you assumed a person weighed about the
same – eight pounds per gallon of meat – then Shackleford, if he weighed a hundred and eighty pounds, and that seemed about right to Simon, would take up another twenty-two and a half
gallons of space himself. So to fill the tub Simon needed another twenty or so bags of ice in addition to what was in this freezer.
    ‘Is this all the ice you got?’ he asked the man behind the