Dead Pig Collector (Kindle Single) by Warren Ellis Page A

effectively invisible among the long and languid creatures littering the lobby’s low sofas and strangely louche silvered beanbags. Checking in was always a painfully drawn-out process. The staff were far too culturally rarefied to be seen to be working for a living, and there was a girl in a fish tank directly behind the reception area. This was debris from the Mark’s days as an artistic and trend-setting location. Someone had decided it would be charmingly bohemian to keep a mostly naked girl in the fish tank at night. It was, he always felt, a saddening indictment of Los Angeles culture—or, rather, an illustration of how Los Angeles had no culture of its own, just a large collection of misreadings of the artistic histories of other, proper cities.
    He wasn’t pleased with himself for appraising the girl in the tank. He thought of her as half-pretty, the sort of girl one would find modeling for art classes in dire community colleges. Putting her cheap panties and her ex-boyfriend’s shirt back on to wander around the easels afterward and wondering how grotesque she must really be, to have summoned up the deformities whacked down in merciless charcoal strikes. She lay on her untoned belly in the tank, yellow calloused feet slowly waving in the air, wearing an orange dollar-store bikini thong and picking at a MacBook Air encrusted in stickers.
    He soundlessly apologized for his spite, ashamed of the poison that’d bubbled up in him over the three or four hundred seconds he’d been standing there, but checking into the Mark and having to look at the body in the tank was always difficult for him. Mister Sun killed people and disposed of their carcasses for a living.
    Mister Sun’s room was blessed with a balcony and a vertical ashtray bolted to the exterior wall. The room itself was as expected: a broad slab of a bed dressed in tired clothes, carpet trodden thin, blank walls lightly pitted by ten years of corrosive sweat in the air. The balcony was indeed a blessing, though. It hung from the face of the hotel that was turned away from the noise of the city, overlooking a tree-fringed disc of churnedmud that a previous client had told him was a dog-walking park. It looked thoroughly medieval to Mister Sun, and he wondered how many dogs had died there. Still and all, it was pleasant to stand there on the balcony and smoke, obscured from the sight of the city, letting the Los Angeles early evening thaw his bones a little. With one thumb he batted out a text to his girlfriend that she wouldn’t see until morning in Greenwich Mean Time, thereby completing the day’s necessary tasks. He warmly anticipated the delivery of the food he knew was good at the Mark, the carpaccio and the sliders, and a few hours of American television before a decent night’s sleep. He had to kill someone in the morning.
    And a beautiful morning it was. Mister Sun took coffee and porridge—which the locals insisted on referring to as “oatmeal”—in the diner-style restaurant off the hotel lobby. He discreetly swallowed two loperamide tablets with his coffee. Those, and the low-residue foods consumed over the last half-day, would limit his bowel movements, which he preferred when working. He checked his message again on the phone. His client had spoken. The photo was of the client himself, a baggy-looking man with red-rimmed eyes, giving the thumbs-up in front of his own manic grin. The text laid over the image read “Getting it done!” Mister Sun presumed this was some kind of hearty encouragement. It was far from the first time he’d conceived of his client as a bit of a dick.
    After breakfast, he visited the reception desk and asked if there might be any mail for him. There was. A large cardboard envelope. He made a point of opening it in front of the receptionist, stripping off the pull tab to reveal a thick screenplay, shrink-wrapped. He rolled his eyes, and the receptionist smiled sympathetically. He smiled back, gave a good-natured