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

the way around the neck until he met his first cut. Putting the knife down, he grabbed the head under the jaw and began to twist. He was rewarded by a little crepitation. With a tight smile he twisted the head the other way, working it, and then pulled. The client’s head, contained inside the sack, came free with a loud smack where the spine parted company with the skull.
    This time, Amanda did actually clap her hands, as if she’d been shown a mysterious and spectacular magic trick.
    “Did you want your knife back?” he grinned, cradling the head and its thin run-off over the bath.
    “Please say we can stay friends, David,” Amanda said.
    Amanda’s dishwasher thrummed away in the background. The Chinese chef’s knife was terrific, and had gone through the client’s head without a notch, nick, or scratch. It would continue to perform admirably for years to come, and throwing it away had seemed to Mister Sun like a terrible waste.
    The stupid gun was in there, too.
    The head was in a sack, liberally sprayed with a cheap aerosol oven cleaner whose active ingredient was lye, and Mister Sun was working with the KA-BAR knife and a hammer on a shoulder joint. He was making short, careful strikes, as he didn’t want to spatter the place with bone chips.
    Amanda was talking about her business. It appeared to be the sort of classic mismatch that kept Mister Sun self-employed. The business didn’t exist without her skills and perceptions, but it didn’t move without his client’s money. This tension torqued until it became clear that the whole machine of the company had locked fast and was beginning to smolder.
    “He’d threatened me with everything he could think of, I suppose,” Amanda mused. “But if I left the company, money and intellectual property came with me. He couldn’t force me out, and he couldn’t scare me out. I guess having me killed seemed like the best option.”
    “What I don’t get,” said Mister Sun, “is this: He was just the money, right? You were the brains. Why would he want you out?”
    “Monetizing software, especially software with a social purpose, is disgusting. Licensing it, I can accept. We did fine from government licenses for some of the things I built. But sticking ads on everything? Making it so you had to look at ads just to open your phone?”
    The client’s right arm came off, a little more wetly than Mister Sun would have liked. “You were selling services, though.”
    “We were
providing
services. We rented tools to the government in order to provide services to people. Do you know how much easier it is for me to interact with people through devices? How could anyone monetize the easing of human contact?”
    “He wanted to cover everything with ads? That is kind of repellent,” Mister Sun said, making a start at sawing off the dead body’s left arm.
    “It occurs to me now that his life would have been simpler and richer with me dead and a bunch of new hires implementing his wishes.”
    “One of my uncles once told me you have to spend money to make money,” Mister Sun said.
    “Did he pay you a lot of money?” asked Amanda, who did not smile.
    “I charge a fair price,” said Mister Sun, hacking through some intransigent muscle, “but I don’t advertise. Word of mouth only. Human contact.”
    “But there’s no human contact with you, is there?”
    “An aunt of mine would say that I am currently engaged in the most intimate human contact of all.” He tore through the meat, and began to attack a socket with knife and hammer.
    Amanda watched him with glittering eyes, impassive. Mister Sun placed his concentration back on his work, feeling as if he’d impulsively broached something badly.
    After an industrious couple of hundred seconds, the left arm came away. The only sound in the room seemed to be Amanda’s breathing.
    A head and two arms in one sack, two legs in a second sack, and a torso in a third, all coated in oven cleaner. The gun was out of the