Dead on Arrival

‘Maybe you oughta wait here,’ Netty said. ‘I’ve seen lots of dead bodies.’

‘What?’ DeMarco said.

‘I was a nurse in Vietnam.’

‘Oh. Well, I’ll be all right. I’ll look with you.’

They found him in his bedroom, lying on the floor, fully dressed. His right hand was on his chest.

Netty made a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue and shook her head. ‘I told him that if he kept eatin’ fried chicken every night of the week and didn’t lose some weight, this was gonna happen.’

DeMarco looked around the bedroom. He didn’t see anything out of place — other than a dead man on the floor with a waxy gray-green complexion.

DeMarco called the police using his cell phone. Netty said they should wait outside, but DeMarco said, ‘Why don’t we just take a look around first? You know, see if everything looks okay.’ Netty started to say something, but before she could, DeMarco said, ‘And maybe you oughta go home and put that gun away.’

‘You got a point there,’ she said.

After Netty left, DeMarco made a quick tour of the main floor of the small house. He didn’t have time to go into the basement. He didn’t see anything out of place — no sign of a struggle or a burglary — and was in fact surprised to find that Rollie was a fairly neat housekeeper. In the second bedroom, a room Rollie apparently used as an office, he looked at the papers lying on the desk, mostly bills Rollie hadn’t gotten around to paying. He found a brochure for a paint-gun place, one of those places that latent homicidal maniacs go to, dressed in camo pants, and shoot each other with paint balls.

Actually, DeMarco had always wanted to do that. He thought it might be fun.

He looked through the drawers in the desk, using his handkerchief not to leave prints, and found Rollie’s checkbook. He ripped one of the deposit slips out of the back and put it in his shirt pocket.

There was a large metal safe in the room, about six feet high and three feet deep with a big combination lock. DeMarco tugged on the safe’s door but it was locked. He guessed it was a gun safe, knowing of Rollie’s interest in firearms, said interest being apparent because next to the safe was a bookcase filled with gun books and magazines.

He was turning to leave the office, figuring the cops would be there any moment, when he noticed something lying on the floor, next to the desk, as if it might have been blown off. DeMarco picked it up. It was a four-page pamphlet, printed on glossy paper, and appeared to be some sort of right-wing rant about how whites were becoming a minority in America and how they had to fight back. He looked around the room but didn’t see any more literature like that. He thought of taking the pamphlet but then decided not to. Instead of putting it back down on the floor where he’d found it, he dropped it in the middle of Rollie’s desk.

Netty Glenn was standing outside on Rollie’s porch, smoking a cigarette.

‘I don’t usually smoke,’ she said to DeMarco. ‘Horrible, nasty habit. But dead bodies — they bring back memories.’

‘I’ll bet,’ DeMarco said. He was thinking that this was one interesting woman; he bet she’d been a looker when she was younger, like the nurses in the movie M*A*S*H — except she’d been the real thing.

As they were standing there, DeMarco noticed a big RV parked on the grass next to Rollie’s house, on the side of the house he hadn’t seen until now. He couldn’t help but notice it because the thing was as long as a city bus.

‘When did Rollie get that?’ DeMarco asked Netty.

‘Just last week, poor bastard. He was telling me — geez, I guess it was the last time I saw him — how he was already mapping out this trip he was gonna take out west when he retired.’

‘That looks like a pretty expensive rig,’ DeMarco said.

‘He said it cost him forty-two five. It’s used, but it’s only got a few thousand miles on it. Ain’t that life,’ Netty said, flicking her cigarette butt away. ‘A guy finally buys his dream machine, and the next thing you know …’ She concluded by just shaking her head.

‘Can I ask you something about Rollie?’ DeMarco said.

‘I guess,’ Netty said.

‘Was he some kind of racist?’

‘Why you asking? Because he shot that Muslim guy?’

‘No, not because of that. I saw this pamphlet on his desk from some white-power group.’ Then, because DeMarco had claimed to be Rollie’s friend, he added, ‘I just never thought he was into anything like that.’

‘Well, I don’t know about any pamphlet,’ Netty said, ‘and I never heard him talk about stuff like that. But he was kinda scared. Every time a new family would move into the neighborhood — and if they weren’t white, which they usually weren’t — Rollie would say something to me about how he hoped we weren’t gonna start getting a lot of crime and drugs in the neighborhood. But I never heard him goin’ around sayin’ nigger, nigger. Nothing like that.’

It took the cops about twenty minutes to get there, two cocky young guys in a patrol car. They told DeMarco and Netty to wait for them on Rollie’s porch, then walked quickly through the house. They couldn’t have spent more than five minutes inside the place. As one of the cops was calling for the medical examiner, DeMarco asked the other one, ‘Will they do an autopsy on him?’

The cop shrugged. ‘Not my call,’ he said. ‘But what would be the point, a fat guy with his hand on his heart?’

And rest in peace, Rollie.

26

Hydrofluoric acid is a chemical compound that exists as a colorless gas or as a fuming liquid. It is used to etch glass and clean brickwork and to make refriger ants and herbicides and pharmaceuticals. It’s also used, in very large quantities, to make high-octane gasoline.

When hydrofluoric acid is released into the atmosphere, it has a propensity to form a toxic aerosol cloud that will drift for miles, and exposure to this gas can result in lethal damage to the heart, liver, kidneys, and nervous system. It blinds and it burns and it causes pulmonary edema. But the description of its effects he liked best was one he had heard on an American television show. The man on the show had said, ‘It’s a terrible death. It’s one way you don’t want to die. It just melts your lungs.’

The refinery on Lake Erie kept as much as eight hundred thousand pounds of hydrofluoric acid on hand.

The refinery had once been located on the outskirts of the city, but as the city grew it became surrounded by homes and schools and shopping centers and office buildings. Due to the huge lake and the thermal effects it created, there was almost always a breeze — and it blew primarily in the direction of a housing development in which mostly white people lived.

Another television show — they learned so much from American media that they didn’t really need an intelligence-gathering apparatus — had described how vulnerable refineries and chemical plants were to attack — terrorist attack, as they put it. And they were. They were shockingly underprotected, considering what they contained, and the biggest weakness was not the physical security — the fences and cameras and alarms. The biggest weakness was the people who were paid to protect the facility.

The guards at this refinery dressed in dark blue uniforms and wore paratrooper boots and at first glance seemed quite impressive. Automatic pistols, Mace, oversized flashlights, and batons hung from their belts. But these men — and even some women — were laughable. Most were middle-aged, few had military training, and many had been rejected by police forces in the region because they failed to meet even the minimal qualifications required by local law enforcement. But more important, they had nothing to do. They occasionally conducted drills that disrupted refinery operations, but their primary function was to annoy the people entering the plant by performing perfunctory searches of backpacks and lunchboxes. Other than that, they sat. They sat all day and all night, waiting for something to happen, and they’d been sitting for so long doing nothing that they had long ago stopped expecting anything to happen.

‘You see,’ he said to the boy, ‘how the guard never walks into that area. It’s dark there, and muddy too, and