Hunting in Harlem by Mat Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

salesmen always inspired in Snowden the same feeling of revulsion.
    Lester stopped in front of a door on the third floor, dropped his tool bag and started unzipping it.
    "You want I should ring the bell?" Snowden put his finger on the black button, looked over in anticipation of clearance.
    "You can if you want to, but he won't be able to hear you." Snowden did, so did so, hearing the stiff chime echo on the other
     side.
    "Why's that, he deaf?"
    "No. He dead." Lester stood up with a crowbar in his hand, poking its bucktooth into the minute separation between the doorknob and jamb.
    "Oh shit. I'm sorry." Snowden heard himself and immediately wondered who he was apologizing to.
    "Don't be. He was an asshole. He wasn't supposed to change the locks," Lester strained as he leaned into the metal. The sound
     of his actions and words echoed from the tin ceiling to the marble floors around them.
    Snowden took hold of the middle of the crowbar, leaned his own weight into it as well. The wood around the lock began to splinter
     along with the doorframe it was attached to. Before they could get theirs open, another door unlocked and opened three yards
     to the right of them. The head was so close to the knob, Snowden thought at first the person was elderly, but when a voice
     called behind her, a moment of distraction let the door drift inches farther. Though a child, the first stages of puberty
     had already begun elongating her legs out of proportion with the rest of her body, the man's T-shirt that already hung far
     above her knees would clearly cease to serve as a nightgown by the following summer. Her braids were the long elaborate strands
     of a woman, but the yarn woven in, its pink and primary colors, was more representative of the girl who wore them. Lester
     said, "Horizon Property Management, nothing to worry about," but the girl was already closing the door, disappointed by the
     sight of them.
    Snowden felt weird being in the dead guy's apartment, guilty for thinking of him as just that, "the dead guy." These are the
     dead guy's condoms on the coffee table, note the deceased's optimism. This is the dead guy's remote control, its batteries
     would outlive their owner. This thing they were both sitting on, this was the dead guy's couch.
    "The deal is, a lot of people die in Harlem." Lester removed his Cigarillos tin from inside his breast pocket, lit one. His
     cigarillos lasted longer than regular cigarettes, stunk worse than regular cigars. "A lot of people die everywhere - everyone
     dies, to be truthful - but when they die in Harlem, in a Horizon property, we have to clean up afterwards. We got a license
     with the City of New York Sanitation Department, a special-use permit for the industrial cleaners you can't get over the counter."
    "Is the dead guy in the apartment? Is that what you're going to tell me?" Snowden felt weak, not for what he just asked but
     for the way Lester laughed at him.
    "Relax, this is an easy one just to get you started. He didn't die in here. It's just, this is your special project with Horizon.
     You'll be paid bonus money for these hours, since Tuesday's your day off. There's a lot of older folks in Harlem, a lot of
     people living risky lives, we get jobs like this pretty regularly."
    "I can handle it." Snowden nailed the point home with nods.
    "Good. Thing is, this has also got to be low profile. We have all these people coming back to Harlem now, real estate market
     booming, vibrant, but it's fragile, see? A lot of it's PR, public perception. Death, that's not something people want to hear
     about. Especially people looking for a place to live during a housing crunch. Who wants to know they're moving into the home
     of someone that just kicked it?"
    "No one. So I'll keep it quiet."
    "Exactly. The other two, your coworkers, don't even tell them. The point is, Snowden, to protect the client, the neighborhood.
     People are always looking for bad things to say about Harlem, let's not even