Mangled Meat by Edward Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

thing: he’d have to take action...
    Call the police? And tell them what?
    Get in the car and look for the girl?
    That would accomplish nothing.
    Heyton’s brain felt dead as clay when he eventually dragged himself up...and took action.
    ***
     
    What in God’s name am I doing? the words groaned behind his mind. The deed ensued like a dimly remembered nightmare; he felt out of his body. With empty waste-can liners, he managed to securely seal the thing within a number of layers, bags within bags.
    If someone walking by sees it, they’ll think it’s just a small bag of trash...
    But it wasn’t a small bag of trash, was it?
    The abstraction stalked him like the ghost of a murderer. Worse than the impression, though, was the simple hot weight of the bag.
    I’m carrying a dead fetus in a garbage bag...and putting it in my car...
    Most of the organic remnants were still wet, so cleaning the toilet had been easy. He triple-checked the room—in dread from the possibility of forgetting something—then checked out and drove away.
    Once on the road, he jettisoned the pen out the window.
    But the parcel lay beside him on the passenger seat. He thought of a fresh package from the butcher’s, and groaned. Some arcane logic told him to get rid of it miles away from the motel, miles from the decrepit neighborhood and its horrors. Deep thought continued to elude him, his brain engaged on its own sort of auto-pilot. Had he not been able to remain detached, he knew he would’ve cracked up by now.
    More alter-ego thoughts mocked him: Dead baby in your car dead baby in your car dead baby in your car...
    “Shut up!” he screamed at the windshield, knuckles white on the wheel.
    A convenience store on the corner seemed to beckon, its front window bright with light but no other cars in the lot. Look normal, he pled with himself. He walked in, bought a paper from the amiable clerk, and went back out. The large dumpster on the side of the store sat with its lid flapped open.
    Heyton moved very deftly. He didn’t get back in the car; instead he leaned in, grabbed the parcel, and lobbed it into the dumpster via gestures nearly balletic.
    Then he slid back into the driver’s seat and saw the clerk through the window, none the wiser.
    “God forgive me,” he muttered.
    The whisper of his guilt would not relent: You just threw a baby in the garbage you just threw a baby in the garbage you just threw a baby in the garbage...
    Heyton shut the voice out of his head and drove off.
     
    ***
     
    Guilt weighed him down as he checked into the convention center just past dawn. The room was four-star, unlike the charnel-house he’d just fled. Why should I feel guilty? he finally challenged himself. I didn’t kill the kid, she did. The kid’s death is HER responsibility, HER crime. Shit, the only crime I committed was solicitation, and I wound up getting robbed before a sex act could even take place!
    The placations took away some of the edge. An awful tragedy, yes, but it would’ve happened anyway... If not with me, with the next john. Or worse, in an alley somewhere.
    The fetus would’ve died regardless, he assured himself.
    He wondered where the girl had gone but the answer was simple. Right back onto the street with my money and Rolex... She’d pawn the watch and spend everything on crack, and when the money was gone she’d be plying her trade again.
    But nine pounds lighter now, he reminded himself.
    With each minute that ticked by in the clean hotel, the more impossible it all seemed.
    During the breakfast hour, he ran into some competitors. Most offered phony smiles and begrudging nods, with lines like “Congrats on Texas” or “Good job yesterday.” One, however—from a software house in Ohio—smirked the truth at him: “None of us stand a chance after you sold Texas, Heyton. You’re top of the heap now—just remember, the air gets really thin up there.” Heyton would’ve been amused by the sour grapes had he not still been