I made the call. I told my guy, I’ll call him Mason Doty which is completely made up, that I was in the neighborhood and could see him if it was necessary. That was simple code for me having enough money to make it worth me stopping by his house. “Yeah, come on over, man.” He said in a raspy voice. I would imagine that at 7am I had woken him up. Funny thing about money, it has a way of making people not care about the little things in life. I told him I would be there in ten minutes.
I looked in the rear-view mirror. My face was a mess; bruises on the front, side, and I’m sure the back of my head. I ran my hand through my hair and still felt the moisture on my scalp from my shower. There was no point in trying to hide anything now, I thought. He’s gonna be pissed at me, but he probably won’t kill me.
There was another reason he trusted me, about six months ago he made me help him bury a body. It’s not exactly what I had in mind for that night, but it’s what I had to do to stay alive.
I was at his house to pick up when there was a knock at the door. Mason looked surprised and looked at me as if I knew who it could be. “Who the fuck is here?” I shrugged. We both knew it wasn’t the C.O.P.’s. They have a way of being very sneaky, and then very loud when they come into your house, I had seen that before, too, but that’s another story.
Mason stood and went to the door, “Who’s there?” his voice was tense. “It’s Ryan, I need to talk.” Mason mouthed a word that I couldn’t make it out, it kind of sounded like bocksucker. He unbolted the door and let in the new guest. Ryan appeared around the corner and I could tell he had had a rough day. I didn’t really know him but for what Mason had told me about him which was very little except for that he had a bit of a gambling problem and he really liked to get high. Mason shouted, “What the fuck are you doing here without calling?” Ryan replied, “I lost my phone. I lost everything.” Ryan started crying and told a cheap story about being robbed at gunpoint in the parking lot of Walmart. Even I didn’t buy it. Without warning, Mason flew into a fit of rage and began pummeling him in the face until he hit the floor at which point he got on top of him and started to choke him. And he just wouldn’t stop. There was a little struggle but I saw the lights go out almost immediately; the blood to his brain was cut off and it shut down his body in sort of a survival mode. Of course the brain knows it’s dying, it just has a really stupid way of telling the rest of the body.
There was no last breath until finally Mason let go. Then sort of a gargled wheezing escaped from his chest, and his head tilted toward the floor. What I didn’t expect was his eyes flying open and his tongue slowly start to stick out at the same moment he released his bowels into his pants. It was comical, and I couldn’t help but laugh at him and the situation. “He shit his pants!” Mason looked at me and I got the feeling that he wasn’t a first timer. It also wasn’t the first murder I had witnessed, and Mason knew that so I think that may have helped me survive.
I was defenseless against the weaponry he had at his disposal in his home. He quickly got up and grabbed a knife from under his mattress and came toward me. He grabbed my collar and looked in my eyes and said, “Give me your hand.” Fuck. I knew I was going to get cut, but I knew I wasn’t going to die. He made a deep gash in the palm of my hand, not too deep for stitches, but deep enough for a good release of D.N.A. He then told me I had to stab Ryan’s body a few times. He knew he didn’t need to get any of his guns out to make me comply. I used the handle of the knife in my hand to stop the bleeding as best I could, and I got up and positioned myself over the lifeless body. I gave it all I had. One, two, three times I stabbed deeply into the corpse. There was still enough pressure in the body to allow for bleeding, and soon there was a terrible mess before me. I thought it was odd how easily the human body could be penetrated, and I wondered if I was capable of doing this to a living person. I turned around to find Mason standing there with a tarp. “We need to get him in your trunk while we can still fold him.” It made sense to me.
I was covered in blood but it was dark out, and I had to run through the alley to get my car and park it out back of his house so we could drag the body out. I backed in and shut off the lights. We made the trip with relative ease and I took off my shirt and threw it in the trunk. I took a quick shower in his house and he gave me a fresh set of clothes before we headed out to the darkness surrounding Rochester.
We spent three hours digging a deep grave for the now stiff body. My hand was a bloody, blistered mess and would need medical attention but never receive it. In with the body went the knife and my bloody shirt: incentive. I would never tell the cops anyhow, but I’m sure Mason felt better about me being alive, and that’s what mattered. It took another two hours of filling in the hole and carefully landscaping the area over the former pit to make us comfortable enough to leave. The car ride back to his house was a quiet one, not even the radio could clear our minds of what we had just done.
I had that murder in my mind every time I went over to Mason’s house and this would be no different. The big exception being that I never came over with excuses, only money. He might be upset that I was in bad shape, but $9,000 in my pocket said he would laugh it off. I was wrong.
