32
Rosmarinus officinalis is a member of the Lamiaceae family or volatile oil family and takes pride and place in my herbarium. We identify plants by their flowers, nuts, and seeds, but we become accustomed to seeing the minute differences under the naked eye of their leaves, too. To many, there is little difference between mint and lemon balm until you smell them or until they come into flower, but we know. We, the ones who work alongside the plants, can identify by sight because the more you look at the finer details, the more you see, and then you can never unsee it.
You can never unsee it.
I laid the flowering rosemary sample on the paper, laid another sheet over the top, and then placed a heavy book on it to press it dry. On the corner of the sheet of paper, I had written the botanical and family names and the date I harvested it. Robust herbs, particularly those in the Lamiaceae family, dry and press well and tend to maintain their scent.
Footsteps coming down the hall pull me out of my utopia, and I snap my head up and glance at my dresser, where Til is hidden in the bottom drawer. The footsteps stop, and a door is unlocked, squealing open and closing. I breathe a sigh of relief and turn toward the window to gaze out at the night sky, littered with lights from the apartment blocks across the road where the man fell to his death. Or was he pushed?
With Gabe on my mind, I checked my phone for a message from him with the time and date of our dinner date, only to find two messages instead from Z. The first message arrived twenty minutes ago, and the second ten minutes ago, and I must’ve been so submerged in setting up my herbarium that I failed to hear my phone beep.
Z: Been summons from Smiler. R u free tonight?
Z: Rae!! Get back to me ASAP if you want the job.
Me: Yes. I want the job.
Several minutes fly by before a text comes through from Z: I’m on my way over now. I’ll text u when I arrive.
Jeezus, Smiler, and co have been busy lately. This would have to be the third assassination in two weeks. Again, I like to convince myself the people being knocked off are bad guys, but I have no way of knowing, and I deliberately avoid the news and missing persons reports. The money is good, and that is why we do it.
Quickly, I yank my T-shirt and shorts off and slip on an old pair of grey, baggy sweatpants with holes in the knees, a wrinkly old T-shirt, and a pair of washable fabric sneakers. Z supplies the PPE gear and cleaning products, so all I have to do is turn up and work.
The message from Z comes through on my phone just as I’m tying my hair up. It’s late, just after 10 PM, and since I’ve been jumped in my apartment block before by Lyons’ paid dickheads, my fingers twitch towards my dresser.
“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” I mutter to justify my decision to myself because obviously too much time alone has turned me into a nutter, “and the thief says I have to get used to it in my hands, like a second skin.”
As I check the magazine, I remember Blake told me to empty it out before putting it away, so I reload it quickly, chuck it into my bag, grab my phone and keys, and head out the door to meet Z.
“Is he in a bad mood or something?” I ask Z when I spot her waiting outside my building entrance. She’s wearing a black T-shirt over her ample bosom that reads I Scissor Yo Mama, and I don’t bother asking what the hell it means.
“You know the rules…I ask no questions,” she replies, “so I’m told no lies.” She points to her white van across the road, and we check the traffic before crossing. Coincidently, she’s parked right outside the apartment where the man had fallen onto the roof of a car. It’s weird how quickly life returns to normal as if the incident didn’t happen in the first place. The car with the smashed roof has gone, the dead body is gone, all the cop cars and their orange cones and police tape have gone, and here we are several days later, walking along the crime scene without a trace that a crime took place here.
Z sniffs and glances at me sideways when we climb inside her van. “Have you been rolling in the grass again?”
“Earlier today, or more accurately, kneeling in the dirt. Why?” I ask. “How can you tell?”
“Or is it your deodorant?” she mumbles, starting up her old van, which never fails to go. “Jeez, fuck, Rae, why don’t you wear a normal fragrant like Cashmere Mist or Amazon Rain.”
I place my hands to my nose and inhale the scent of rosemary, and I realize she’s talking about that. “Seriously? Grass? There’s a world of difference between culinary herbs and grass scents.”
She pulls out in a hurry as we’re often on edge when we have a job to go to, just because we don’t want to get on the wrong side of who we work for. “It’s all the same to me, except the stuff we smoke,” she says, pulling up to the first set of traffic lights.
“I brought Til,” I confess.
“Why? Are you expecting to be plundered and pillaged tonight?” she asks, half joking. “And I hope you’ve got the safety cap on because if one of Smiler”s men turns up and you accidentally shoot him, well...you know, you can kiss your dreams goodbye when you’re buried six feet under.”
“Yes, I put the safety cap on,” I groan at her. “And who cleans up the blood and guts of the cleaners anyway when the cleaners have been killed? See, you’ve got to think these things through. They’re unlikely to butcher us-”
“Us?” she barks. “They’ll kill you. Not me. You.”
“So, will you’ll clean up my brain bits and shit and blood,” I clown around.
“Yes,” she answers teasingly, I think. “I’d do just about anything for money.”
“So sweet,” I say sarcastically.
I spot the shore of the lake with streetlights, and the single light of a lone boat floating on a sea of black catches my eye on the endless horizon.
“Same location?” I ask Z since we seem to be going in that direction and the impending doom of what we’ll find when we get there as we draw closer to the house of horrors.
“Yep,” she answers, and I sense her growing anxiety. It’s a job that can mess with your head if you’re not careful, but luckily, we have each other to lighten the load and crack inappropriate jokes.
She pulls up outside the decrepit old house smothered in overgrown shrubs and roses. It’s pitch dark because the two nearest streetlamps are not working. It’s always been this way, and we assume the bulbs were smashed to keep the house in the shade.
Z takes out her flashlight from the glovebox and flicks it on to open the back of the van to take out our supplies. A shiver runs down my spine when a black SUV cruises past. We know who it is and ignore it because playing dumb is part of the gig. They don’t pay us to have opinions or take note of the hitmen behind the blacked-out windows.
“It’s just one body,” Z whispers as I grab the plastic trolley of cleaning products while she seizes the mop and bag of PPE gear.
We know our way well in the dark, so Z lowers the flashlight until we’re at the front door to avoid arousing suspicion. No one in this forgotten suburb cares what their neighbors get up to anyway. Z finds her copy of the key, slips it into the keyhole, turns the lock, and pushes the door open with a freaky squeal that makes me jump.
Immediately we’re hit with the heady scent of hospital-grade disinfectant from when Z was last here, but it doesn’t come close to the repulsiveness of the stench of blood, piss, and shit all mixed together.
“Well, lookie here,” Z mocks, flashing her light at the old kitchen table as she closes the door behind us and turns the lock. It’s another single red rose laid out for someone to notice.
I sigh. “Oh, the romantic side of serial killers,” I mock, having no interest in touching it because, like Z always says, it might be booby-trapped. Besides, my hands are occupied with steering the trolley of cleaning products.
I follow Z down the hall to the basement door, and she pauses before opening the door to say, “Are you ready?”
“I’m never ready,” which is the answer I always give to this question. Nothing can prepare you for the gory, vomit-inducing mess that greets you when you get down there, but it’s the smell—it’s always the smell that gets to us the most—the stench that lingers even hours after we’ve left the scene.
Z pushes the door open, and that distinctive metallic scent meets our nostrils, and my stomach turns. Swallowing down rising acid vomit, I follow Z down the stairs, where she reaches for the string that dangles from the light and flicks the basement light on.
“It’s not so bad,” she states positively as she steps down the wooden stairs, and my view of our job ahead becomes clear. And she’s right, it’s not as bad as other times. The wall and floor are splattered in blood, and there’s a scarlet drag mark from a body being pulled along. And that’s it.
“We should have this finished in no time,” I add to her upbeat optimism, noticing Smiler’s signature, a smiley face drawn in the drag mark on the floor—an interesting sense of humor for someone who bludgeons people to death.
We find a clean corner and put on our PPE gear, covering ourselves head to toe in protective skin. Then, I pour disinfectant into the bucket and head back upstairs to fill it with water. I can hear the muffled sound of my phone ringing in my bag, but I’m too busy to answer it.
I feel my way in the dark down the hall of shedding floral wallpaper to the kitchen, place the bucket in the sink, and feel for the faucet. Headlights of a vehicle outside stream into the kitchen, and I instinctively know that it’s one of Smiler’s lackeys checking on us as he did when we arrived.
Once the bucket is filled with water, I carry it back down into the basement, and we begin our arduous task of scrubbing, cleaning, and mopping away every spot of DNA.
My phone beeps twice while we’re working, but I ignore it because I don’t want to touch it with unclean gloves. This strangely therapeutic work leaves me with a sense of satisfaction afterward. The scarlet color vanishes before our eyes with every stroke of the mop or lash of the scrubbing brushes, and the sickly aroma disperses, drowned in disinfectant.
We completed the job faster than usual, and Z glanced at me, disappointed. “Don’t expect to be paid the same as usual.”
“That’s fine,” I say, eager to leave because this house creeps me out—not just because of the deaths that occur here but also because of the constant creaky sounds of old foundations and pipes.
We strip our PPE gear off at the top of the basement steps before Z pulls the light cord, and we’re steeped in darkness again. Feeling our way following the moon”s dim light, we enter the kitchen and exit the house quickly, locking the door behind us.
“We’ve got company,” Z murmurs, and I know she means the black SUV parked across the road. They always arrive as we leave to scrutinize our work. Tonight is unusual, though, as they were here before we arrived and seemed to stay the entire time—watching. Waiting.
I swallow over a lump in my throat, thinking about the single red rose resting on the kitchen table. I wonder what message they’re trying to convey or if it’s a message at all.
We throw our supplies into the van, slide the door shut, and quickly climb inside the cab. My heart refuses to rest until we’re clear of this suburb and my entire body has been scrubbed clean, removing every lingering filthy sensation.
It isn’t until we drive by the lake again that the atmosphere lightens, and Z mutters about the latest Tarantino movie and the word ‘genius’ thrown about several times. Weirdly, this is when I remember that my phone beeped several and I reach into my bag to hunt for it.
There are two text messages and a voicemail from Cormac asking me to call him ASAP, and I wonder if this has something to do with his father asking me to have dinner. It’s just after 1 PM, and the last message came through after midnight, so he must be angry about it if he’s messaging me in the middle of the night. Perhaps a line has been crossed with his father.
I decide not to reply until I’m alone and back in my apartment, fearing an argument will break out and I’ll be forced to apologize. I’d rather save Z the earful of our drama and me succumbing to the charms of a handsome man.
“You know you can quit any time,” Z says out of the blue. I’d understand. I mean, I don’t want you to, but I’d understand.”
“I don’t want to quit,” I tell her, wondering where this is coming from. “Well, honestly, I’d prefer a job just as well-paid doing something that didn’t involve cleaning up dead peoples’ blood and guts, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Okay,” she sighs as she turns down my street. “I believe you. You seem a little sullen tonight. That’s all.”
I chuckle. “I wasn’t thinking about that tonight. My mind is elsewhere on class, assignments-”
“Men?” she butts in.
“Yeah, some of my head space contains men,” I admit, although not necessarily men I’m attracted to since a large percentage of my head space contains The Four.
She pulls up outside my apartment building, and I open the door and slide out of the passenger seat, planting my feet firmly on the ground. “Thanks, Z,” I say, trying to sound upbeat, but my tone remains solemn and flat.
“No problem,” she replies, just as gloomy as me. “Have a good night.”
I run across the road, use my swipe card to open the building’s glass doors into the foyer, then step inside the elevator. A lone woman is never safe, even in a building with good security, so I feel for the hardness of Til for comfort.
Once inside my apartment and my doors locked on the chain, I sit on the edge of the bed and reply to Cormac’s message.
Me: Hey. What’s up?