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

shrug, and tucked it under his arm for the return to his room. Only in Los Angeles would the production of a screenplay be an instantly forgotten piece ofinformation. It marked him as unspecial. Just another of the ten million people aimlessly orbiting the movie business.
    In his room, kneeling at the single low table, he pulled away the shrink-wrap. After the first five pages, the screenplay had been cut away to create a boxy space in the middle, which had a pair of car keys affixed there, bound securely in tape. Mister Sun already knew which vehicle to look for, having memorized a photo sent by the client through the self-destruct app. The vehicle would have been parked yesterday, when the client put this envelope into the mail. It was time to begin preparation.
    The rollaboard case was half-filled with fat, transparent plastic worms: clothes bags that bore a black fitting for a vacuum cleaner tube to suck them into a compressed log. The vacuum bags generally allowed him to pack twice what he needed into a quarter of the space.
    Not long after, Mister Sun left the hotel, wearing clothes under his shirt and suit. Out front, he put on his shades, smilingly confirmed with the attendants that the Chateau Marmont was indeed a left turn down the road because good God he had so many annoying meetings to sit through there today, and left with the screenplay tucked under his arm.
    A gentle three-hundred-and-sixty-second stroll brought him to a parking lot in the lee of a dying strip club, where he found a short white van of nondescript age. The keys opened the back of the van easily, and he quickly appraised the contents. Everything on his shopping list seemed to be in there, right down to the old blue baseball cap and the battered sneakers stuffed in a disposable grocery sack, which he took. The keys were a little more argumentative about opening the driver-side door, but he convinced it, hoping this was no more than a sticky fluke. Inside, he put the grocery sack at his feet and pulled from his suit pocket a folded vacuum bag. He wrestled off his jacket, shoes, and, mostawkwardly, his pants and shirt, and serially pushed them into the vacuum bag. Under the shirt and pants he was wearing a plain T-shirt and thin two-piece mechanic’s coveralls, in blue. The bag went into the passenger-side footwell, and he carefully got the sneakers on his feet.
    The van didn’t want to start. Mister Sun bit back his fury. How was he supposed to go and kill someone in a vehicle that didn’t work? How much longer was he going to draw attention to himself by making the damn thing grind and groan in front of a fucking strip club of all places? “You’re a dick,” Mister Sun hissed at the dashboard, and strongly considered killing his client after the job was done. He’d been paid in advance, after all.
    The damned thing eventually caught, but it didn’t sound happy about having to move. It may as well have been a sick horse, coughing and stuttering all the way out of the lot.
    An estimated six-hundred-second run to the job took him almost a thousand seconds, and so Mister Sun was almost vibrating with hate by the time he parked up in front of the scene of the job. He threw himself out of the van, slammed the door shut with murderous force, tore open the back of the van, pulled on the disposable latex gloves, picked up the toolbox and the messenger bag, took what he needed from them before hefting them, and stomped up to the front door of the property so deeply angry that he knew he wouldn’t even enjoy the day’s work.
    He had learned the layout of the low, detached house by heart, and had memorized the daily schedule of the occupant as provided to him by the client. He mimed pressing the doorbell with one hand while he worked on the lock with the tool in the palm of the other. The door popped. He silently pantomimed being greeted by an occupant, just for the look of it, and slipped inside.
    He took five seconds to close the door its last