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Garbage, Inc.

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The doorbell rang at two-thirty in the morning. Jack, still awake, shuffled to

the door in his blue-and-red-striped bathrobe, the weight of death and waking

dreams heavy on his legs.

"Who's there?"

Stupid question, he knew damn wellwho's there. They found out.

Somehow they always find out.

The doorbell was replaced with impatient knuckles knocking against the

metal storm door.

"Hold on. I'm coming." But those knuckles woke a sober reckoning within Jack, and he stopped just short of the door and eyed his funhouse reflection in the brass doorknob. He had told himself he would pay for the crime, if he got caught. At the time it seemed a moral enough decision, but now that the cops were at his door, he didn't want to answer it. He deserved to get away with this. It was, after all, not his fault. She had to die.

The knocking turned to a pound and Jack looked back to the kitchen, towards the back door, a possible escape. But how far would he get? Half the East Stroudsburg police force was probably outside. Murder tends to bring them in droves. Jack took a deep breath and reminded himself there are worse things than jail.

He opened the door.

A man with long, dark hair drizzling over his crocodile-green eyes and

wearing a navy-blue jumpsuit filled the doorframe. "I'm here for the pickup."

"The what?"

"Pickup. C'mon, buddy, I'm swamped tonight. I don't have time." The

man lifted a rectangular box with a digital display that looked oddly small

compared to his ham-hock wrists. "This is 1129 Lower Lake View Road?"
"Yeah."
"Says here you got one Hispanic female, age twenty-four. Where is she?"
"I don't know what—Hispanic? Where did you say you're from again?"

"I didn't." The man pointed to a tag over his breast pocket with an oil-

stained index finger, the nail chipped and yellowed.

"Garbage, Inc." Underneath the company name was a picture of a truck towing a body bag. "You maul 'em we haul 'em," the man said. "Hate that phrase. Boss makes us say it. Says it makes the whole experience moreuser friendly."

"You're a what? A garbage man?" Jack asked.

"Sure, whatever, buddy. Where is she?"

"Oh, right, back here. I left her in the garage. I was going to ... well I don't know what I was going to do with her exactly—dump her in the lake out back, I guess."

"That's the problem with your types," the garbage man said, ducking as he entered the house, his boots hollowly clapping the wood floor. "You start off good, but you can't stick the landing. You don't just leave the body in the—