Hero

porcelain with a thud.

With the running water from the shower she was able to wash any excess blood down the drain, but she knew she’d have a bigger problem with the woman’s torso. Rachael Williams had been a big woman. Natsinet realized this as she was cutting through the hip joints to separate the legs. The woman was big boned. Probably part of her natural body chemistry. Which meant she was going to have to divide her torso in half to make carrying her out of here easier.

Natsinet paused in her work, suddenly realizing she had nowhere to store the body, and headed through the darkened living room to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. A staff assistant at Hospice Nursing had made sure there was food for the nursing staff who would be providing onsite care. There was a jug of milk, some half and half, a couple of Tupperware containers that held leftovers, and a carton of eggs. She opened the vegetable drawer and was surprised and rather pleased to see that Rachael had put a serious dent in what had been a well- stocked supply of broccoli, carrots, and lettuce. Not that eating healthy would do her good now; the bitch was dead. Natsinet opened the freezer. There was a frozen pack of chicken legs, a couple of boxes of pre-prepared frozen meals (Weight Watchers), and a carton of ice cream. Natsinet stood in front of the refrigerator, thinking. Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer store one of his disarticulated victims in his refrigerator and freezer? If she moved some things around, she might be able to fit Rachael’s body parts in both compartments. It would be a stretch, but she had to try.

She turned her attention to the sink and flipped on the overhead light. After some poking and prodding she found a switch that turned on the garbage disposal. Natsinet grinned. With a combination of the refrigerator/freezer and the garbage disposal, she had a way out of this. Pour the blood and organs like the lungs, liver, and pancreas down the garbage disposal, store the limbs, head, and as much of the torso in the refrigerator/freezer tonight. She could probably even flush smaller organs down the toilet. Then she would have to clean the carpet, get the blood out of it. She would be working all night, but she was pretty sure she could pull this off. She would also wait until the early dawn to see if that thug was still hanging around outside. He’d have to go home sometime, and once the coast was clear she would carry body parts out of the house wrapped in plastic trash bags and dispose of them in the dumpster at the back of the building, making sure they were well buried within the rest of the garbage.

With a new sense of purpose, Natsinet started rooting around under the sink for some cleaning material. She had to clean the carpets as much as possible before the blood dried and set in permanently (of course, if that happened she could play it by ear and pay somebody to come in to rip up the old carpet and install a new one— she’d pay for that out of her own pocket and keep Mrs. Smith nice and doped up while the job was being done). She quickly found carpet cleaner, a plastic bucket, and some rags. She went into the living room and turned on the light. Blood spattered the living room wall, the front door, and one of the chairs and an end table. There was a huge blood stain on the living room floor, a big gob of it actually, right where Rachael’s head had once lain. For the first time Natsinet cursed herself for losing her temper so quickly. It was going to take a minor miracle to remove all this blood so it would appear nothing happened.

Natsinet got to work, still nude. No sense getting dressed now since I still have that bitch’s body to deal with when I’m done, she thought. Four hours later the walls, the door, and the furniture were free of blood and the carpet was scrubbed clean. Natsinet stood in the kitchen, her chest and face sweating from the exertion of scrubbing the blood out of the carpet with hot water, carpet cleaner, and chemicals. She’d made so many trips to the kitchen sink to pour dirty, bloody water down the drain that she couldn’t count them. She glanced at the digital clock on the counter. It was two-thirty a.m.

After checking Adelle’s vital signs and noting them in her chart, she headed back into the living room, pondering her next move.

If only that nosy bitch hadn’t shown up, Natsinet could have gotten out of this situation in a less precarious way. She would have found the right drug combinations that would have triggered another stroke, maybe a heart attack, and the old lady would be no more. She was pretty sure the nurse had not told anybody she was coming by here, but she couldn’t take that chance. She wondered if any of those hoods across the street had seen Rachael enter the apartment. She had to assume they had. She also had to assume that some of them had police records and couldn’t be trusted.

Rachael approached the closed curtain that covered the window overlooking the street below and peered outside. The street was empty. Those gangbangers were gone now.

An idea was forming in Natsinet’s mind. She crossed the apartment to the bathroom. Rachael’s clothes were piled in the sink where she’d put them after Natsinet took them off her prior to dismembering her. Her purse lay on the floor. Natsinet picked up the purse and rifled through it, finding a set of keys. Her fingers ran across the black surface of a car alarm key fob.

Keys in hand, Natsinet went into the second bedroom where she was sleeping while taking care of her charge. She dressed quickly, pulled on a pair of tennis shoes and, as an afterthought, picked up the gun, which she’d left in the room. She’d wiped Rachael’s blood and strands of hair off it earlier in the evening. She slapped a full clip in and made sure the safety was on, then jammed it in the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt. Then, with Rachael’s keys in one hand, her own keys in her front jeans pocket that contained the key to the apartment, she stepped outside, locking the door behind her.

She knew she would have to make this quick if she wanted to avoid detection. She darted out of the building and, holding the key fob in front of her, began pressing the disarm button. She turned left, heading east, walking down the sidewalk, key fob pointed at the cars parked along the curb as she pressed the button, trying to see which vehicle might be Rachael’s.

Nothing.

Come on, come on, you had to have parked somewhere, Natsinet thought. She made it to the end of the block, looked both ways. The coast was clear. Making a random guess, she turned left again and headed up the street, depressing the disarm key and five houses later she got a reply: a blink of headlights.

Sighing in relief, Natsinet ran up to the car, pressed the key fob again. This time she heard the disengaging of the car’s locks. She took a quick look around and was surprised to see nobody out. She approached the driver’s side door and got it open quickly. The vehicle was a Toyota Camry, a nice one. If it wasn’t brand new, it was well cared for. Somebody would appreciate this car once they saw it. Moving quickly, Natsinet leaned inside, inserted the keys in the ignition and turned the key one notch to power on the electrical system. That not only confirmed these keys belonged to Rachael’s car, it would allow her to roll down the driver’s side window to make the bait more enticing.

She pressed the button of the power windows, let them go down halfway and stopped. Then she pulled the keys out, shut the door without locking it, and headed back toward the apartment.

Her nerves were on fire when she let herself back into the apartment. She leaned against the locked door, trying to catch her breath. Natsinet was positive that Rachael’s car would be stolen by eight o’clock. Probably by one of the punks that was hanging out in front of the house last night. Next step was to work on getting the rest of her body out of the apartment.

Natsinet glanced at the clock. Two fifty a.m. Only a few more hours until daybreak.

Figuring she’d better make the best of it, Natsinet stripped her clothes off in her room, and headed back to the bathroom to resume her work on Rachael.

By four o’clock, Rachael’s blood and most of her soft tissue organs except for the stomach and intestines had been poured down the sink, ground up in the garbage disposal, and flushed down the toilet.

By five o’clock Rachael’s torso was cleanly bisected below the fifteenth lumbar vertebrae, and the limbs themselves were wrapped up in newspaper and ready to be stored in the freezer. Fifteen minutes later, the bisected torso was wrapped in plastic garbage bags; the head now sat in the kitchen sink, ready to be bundled up for storage.

Natsinet stood in the kitchen, her muscles screaming in agony. She’d never been put through such a heavy workout in her life. She knew that most of her exhaustion probably had to do with the stress. She was looking out the kitchen window, trying to track what had to be done next when it suddenly came to her. No sense taking the body out now. People are already out and leaving for work. They’ll see you take a bunch of garbage bags out to the dumpster. No, your best bet is to wait until tomorrow night real late, two or three in the morning. Get rid of her then. Besides, waste management will show up six hours later to pick it up. Then you’ll be free and clear of her.