“If I’ve got the money to retain your services, then I’ve also got the money to find your number.”
For the briefest moment I pick up on someone in the background, a slightly deeper voice whispering something.
“Who is that?” I snap.
Another long pause. When the woman speaks again, her tone has shifted completely, much more casual and relaxed. “Listen,” she begins, “I know it’s strange to get a call like this, but there’s not enough time to move through the usual channels. This needs to happen now.”
“Tonight?!” I scoff.
“Five million dollars,” she reminds me.
I let out a frustrated sigh, my disbelief steadily growing. “Fuck you. There’s no way this is real.”
“It’s real. The ten percent up front is already in your account,” she replies flatly.
I laugh. “Sweetie, how would you even know what account to put it in?”
“Does it matter?”
I pull my phone away from my head, blown away by theaudacity of this caller, then curiously open my banking app.
When I see the most recent deposit, my breath catches. “Oh my God,” I murmur.
I refresh the app, as if this might somehow reveal an error in the code, then again, and again. The payment remains. My mind is working frantically now, sorting through a whole new cascade of information and context. “How do you know I won’t just take this money and run?”
There’s a little more hushed talking on the other end of the line, the deeper background voice returning for a moment. They add a few unintelligible words, then disappear.
“Because you’ll never be happy with second place,” the caller finally says. “That cash in your account is good enough for some people, but five million is the blue ribbon.”
This time the number really hits home, no longer bouncing off me in the chaos of the moment but actually puncturing my skin and sinking deep. I’ve had plenty of giant paydays in this morbid line of work, but none of them come anywhere close to five million dollars. Certainly not in a single night.
Finally, I break, letting out a long sigh. “Alright, what kind of flowers am I getting you?”
“I don’t think there’s a code for this one,” she replies.
“Something personal?”
The voice hesitates. “I want you to bring me the body of Eddie Michaels.”
A Star Like Me
Money is malleable, a shape-shifting unit of value.
It can be physically manifested in glorious pale green stacks, or a bag of gold coins, or pixelated digits on a screen—if that’s your preference.
To some folks, that value represents a luxury sports car; to others it’s a night with a roof over their heads. Sometimes it’s a new kitten, or a croissant, or a Fortune 500 tech start-up buyout. It’s anything you need it to be.
Right now, as the night continues feeling a little too easy at every successive turn, it’sassurance. If the circumstances were different, I’d have long since called this whole thing off, but the five hundred thousand dollars of up-front cash in my bank account is doing a bang-up job of coaxing me onward.
That money represents an even better life for Marlo.It’s a private school and an Ivy League college. Most of all, it’s moretimewith her. And, of course, more time to develop my social media empire. Once tonight is over, and the goods have been delivered to their mysterious buyer up in Lake Arrowhead, I’ll never have to scam another morgue.
Five million dollars goes a long way.
Still, the simplicity of tonight’s plan is concerning, a feisty little gnat buzzing around in the back of my mind. I can’t help feeling the slightest bit anxious about the way this journey was laid out for me, my biggest payday ever for the least amount of work. It doesn’t quite add up.
Things didn’t begin so lopsidedly simple, though. When the offer initially came through, my biggest concern was brass-tacks logistics. Just because someone gives you an outrageous amount of cash to do something, that doesn’t mean it canactuallybe done.
Swiping random bodies from funeral homes is my bread and butter, but the city medical examiner’s office is a whole other story. When the average person dies in any number of average ways, their corpse is swiftly carted off for a memorial, because average deaths are rarely worthy of criminal investigation. However, when the circumstances are suspicious or foul play is suspected, the first trip any cadaver takes is to the medical examiner for a full autopsy.
