Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single) Read Online Free Page A

case something happens,” she said. “I understand that. It just seems somehow wrong that you shouldn’t know anything about the person you came to kill. Does that make sense?”
    “Um,” he said. “Not really. I did say there was no emotional content in the work.”
    “But,” Amanda said, “that makes me just a dead pig in a pen.”
    “Amanda, you killed your own business partner with a cleaver and are in the process of allowing a complete stranger to dispose of the body.”
    “I did,” she said. Her eyes were flicking side-to-side, very fast, unfocused. “I did do that. And when I said ‘help,’ you could have said ‘call the police.’ Because he had a gun, didn’t he? I could have claimed self-defense. Home invasion. Even though he had a set of keys. But you didn’t say that. Because you would have been questioned as part of
their
process. Of course you would have been. You broke into my house too. And you might be dressed like a generic service employee of some kind, but I bet you didn’t arrive in America dressed like that. So it was in your best interest to help by doing the job you came to do anyway, thereby guaranteeing my silence.”
    Mister Sun sipped his espresso, quietly calculating space and seconds. He didn’t require a weapon for his job. His intent had been to steal into the room, silently approach her, stamp a foot into the back of her knee, and cleanly snap her neck as she collapsed.
    He could still perform a similar operation from this position.
    “You are a very intelligent woman,” he said.
    “I’m good with problems. Breaking things down. Step by step. It’s how code works. Logical procession.”
    He gave her a smile whose warmth was not entirely false. “Would you like to finish learning how to break down a dead body?”
    Amanda’s head cocked to that querent angle again. “There’s more?”
    “Amanda, we haven’t even gotten him out of your house yet. Shall we follow the process all the way to the end, before we go our separate ways?”
    “I don’t like that.”
    “Don’t like what?”
    “The way you said that last part. Like we’d never see each other again.”
    “We won’t.”
    “I don’t like that.”
    Mister Sun’s phone vibrated in his pocket, just once. He realized that that would be his girlfriend, responding to last night’s text. He elected to ignore it, and smiled at Amanda again. She smiled back. He liked her smile immensely.
    In the bath was a white body and a couple of gallons of pink muck. Mister Sun reached under the sheet and tugged the plug out. The bath began to drain, sounding like an extended and ugly strangulation the whole time. He gave the cold faucet a half-turn and suggested to Amanda that a couple more blasts of the robot-perfume air freshener might be in order.
    “So why have we drained all the blood out of the bastard?” Amanda asked.
    Mister Sun had torn one of his heavy sacks off the roll and was shaking it open. “Because it’s going to make it much easier and cleaner to joint him.”
    Amanda just looked at him. “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
    “Well, we need to make him simpler and more discreet to transport. Also, every step has the intent of making him harder to identify in case of an interruption. You knowwhat you might also find interesting? It may seem that I brought a lot of gear in here, but it’s all very inexpensive. If you shopped around, you could probably dispose of a body for under a hundred dollars.”
    He pulled the sheet off the bath. Amanda was moved to give another long spray from the can. Mister Sun folded the sheet as best he could, and stuffed it into the open sack. He tied the sack off and put it to one side, and then pulled another one off the roll.
    “Right, then,” he said. “Head first.”
    There was always a little extra blood during this part, which is why he left the water running as he put the KA-BAR clone to his client’s throat and began to slice through meat and ligament, all