23
Coroner Chen Yong surveyed the mess. His usually clean autopsy spaces were filled once again well to overflowing. Once again, it was all thanks to what Dr. Yong felt was the government’s discredited and criminal tampering with the health care system. He wondered how many more useless nights he would have to spend opening corpses, cataloging their infirmities, and photographing disease processes in their organs and brains. Would there ever be an end to the outbreak of Obama Care revenge killings? Dr. Yong was beginning to think they would continue to happen for a long time now that they had started. Once something like this began, it was usually difficult to stop it.
Detective Branch was sitting in the corner’s autopsy laboratory completing his reports. He was back to working on a desk, because Chen insisted on his autopsies being witnessed by a policeman. He wanted them not only entered into the detective’s computer but written out by the detective’s own hand as well. Such pen and ink documents never failed. Chen didn’t trust computers when it came to crime records. He’d seen them screw things up that way. Observations could literally disappear into a computer’s void and never be seen again. Detective Steve Branch swallowed and kept himself busy variously typing and then writing each report in long hand. What did he care anyway? Put in the hours and get paid. It didn’t matter much to him as long as he had a fat wallet stuffed with cash at the end. This was like old times when police officers used to document the perpetrators and their victims using their half-chewed pens and pencils as they filled out miles of police forms. It reminded him of cops long dead. Their old salty spirits once waded slowly inside the decrepit ghosts of police work. All of them were dead now. All that remained was the classification of death, the suspects, and whatever else pertained to the extinguished life forms lazily reclining within Dr. Yong’s exquisite scalpel explorations.
“How did we luck out twice in a row like this?” Detective Branch asked Dr. Chen Yong. “Do you think its karma or something?”
“Ah, karma. I am surprised an American would use such a term. Are you using it to force me to like you more, detective?”
“You are too smart, Chen. Old Mr. Branch can’t put one over on you, can he?”
“Nope. It doesn’t work that way.”
“I guess that’s true. So, you caught me.”
“Want to know your punishment?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t get one. You are punished enough having to listen to my Chinese accent when I speak with you. Such confusion is the smallest form of much needed punishment,” Dr. Yong said. Then, he laughed. “I like making Yankees uncomfortable. It’s the least I can do to help you attain your spot in heaven, Steve,” he said. “You do know heaven, don’t you?”
“Theoretically. I’m not sure I want to go there, however. All of my friends are doing their best to go to hell instead. I think that’s probably the spot best suited for an ex-detective like myself, if you get my drift.”
“I get your drift.”
“Any new discoveries?”
“I have found a number of disease conditions, not to mention some tattoos, moles, and other errata. There seems to be no end to the little vicissitudes of my investigations. Of course, each one demands that I stop to type it up and check the spelling and that you do, too.”
“Bummer. I hate it when that happens. Besides, you could be seducing some little maiden who wants to know what it’s like to be inside a bed with a Chinaman.”
“Such lucky maidens,” Chen said, smiling, then laughed. He winked, indicating a private joke between the two of them was in the offing. “I love it when their curiosity gets the better of them causing me to perform the Chinese gashie washie inside them,” Chen giggled. “Making sweet love to a beautiful woman properly is a tough job, you know. But someone has the ultimate responsibility to pump them into oriental limbo.”
“You are a true genius,” Detective Branch told Chen. “I told my side kick once that you are an evil genius. Don’t put anything over on Dr. Yong, I warned him, because that man is capable of holding a thousand Chinese grudges. The idiot wanted to know what a grudge was, of course. I think he had a good idea it was something bad, although he never indicated whether he knew it or not. Know what I mean? Anyway, I like to keep the guy on his toes while he ages like old wine, so I never let on about the true meaning of words that he does not know. I want him to seek the Google god for that.”
“I speak with that god all the time. Especially when I am doing a cross word puzzle.” Chen’s scalpel made another incision. His patient’s skin parted neatly to reveal to him the next layer he was going to cut into.
“I figured you were a cheater.”
“Oh, I am. I figure it keeps things even, because there’s no way that I can learn the meaning of every term in the English language.”
“You are a cheater, because you describe the dead, even though you are alive,” Detective Branch said. He smiled. Pretending to be falsely profound was rather amusing to him. “Most people know the dead only when they become one.”
Dr. Yong reached into the thorax of his patient and placed the man’s heart onto the table. It was just the right weight. The problem was the hole that entered in one side and exited out the top. It had been shot through by Ralph Adams. The man, whose name was Ted Benson, had been killed along with his son and daughter. To Chen, it was just another senseless murder, a meaningless assignation with death. It had no meaning. Nothing ever had much meaning when it came to these curiously unspeakable crimes.
“Death by gunshot,” Dr. Chen said. “Ted Benson. He died alongside his daughter Samantha and his son Ruben. We don’t know yet why. It really doesn’t matter, I guess. Does it?”
“Nope,” Branch said. “Not one bit.”
Dr. Yong sniffed Ted’s heart. It smelled like fresh meat. What else would it smell like? We were all just pieces of protein sewn together with sinew, blood, and liver. Nothing else counted. Ted’s entire life was nothing but the biology now resting on Dr. Yong’s autopsy table.
The scalpel never lied. It entered corpses like words sailing silently into the biting coldness of an unwelcome wind. As usual, his scalpel would become a victim’s final lover. It cut them even deeper than a woman’s acid tongue. It always eventually tore out their hearts, lifting them like treasured jewels from their chests as it revealed to a trained mind like Dr. Yong’s everything that had ever happened to them in their brief lifespan. When Yong’s job was finished, he sewed them back together. He saw to it that their disconnected organs rested peacefully inside them albeit totally askew and unattached.
More than one hundred victims inside his morgue had died at the hands of Ralph Adams. He was yet another grieving husband whose life and soul had been ripped apart by the thoughtlessness of the American hegemony as it enforced its newest rip off which almost everyone now referred to by repeating over and over the pathetic mantra of Obama Care. It reminded Dr. Chen Yong that we all lived in a society based solely on greed in which only profit mattered. People were nothing apart from the money that could be made from them. No one counted unless they were rich and profited by the gore of war and medicine where trillions of dollars flushed back and forth between the economic units at the bottom and those into whose wallets their vital funds flowed.
“Maybe I should put in for a transfer, Steve,” Dr. Yong said with a whimsical tone of voice. He flashed his bloody scalpel in the air for dramatic effect. “Perhaps I should resign after I finish with the last victim of this crime. There’s lots of vocational opportunities for an ex-coroner, you know. I might even take that terrific position advertised in the newspaper. In fact, it’s right here. See it? I could be a Walmart greeter. Can’t you just imagine the joy?”
“Not really, Chen.”
“No? Why not?”
“I just don’t think it’s you. That’s all.”
“Where would you see me, if not a greeter at Walmart?”
“For one thing, I think you’d make a good madame at one of the local loose lad
y homes downtown.”
“You are right! I would make a perfect madame! Great idea!”
Yong’s scalpel cut into Ted Benson’s daughter, Samantha. It’s razor sharp blade swam easily into her youthful flesh. Easy as pie. It entered her chest as soft as butter cleverly parting her thorax to each side the way a wedding cake knife slithers home into an exquisite morass of white icing. Her joyful insides opened in a long smile. Each of her organs immediately revealed their intricate pleasures.
Dr. Yong disconnected the attachments and hauled up her many treasures much like a fisherman happily hauls tuna onto his moving boat. Soon, each organ glistened atop the stainless steel examination table where he turned them carefully and squeezed them for tumors. “These organs are very nice,” he said to no one in particular. “Healthy organs are a thing of great beauty, Mr. Branch. Just look at that liver. So nice. No fattiness in it at all. She was a healthy eater and never touched either a Big Mac or an alcoholic beverage. That’s for sure.”
“I certainly admire your professional delicacies, Dr. Yong,” Detective Branch responded. “These little meetings we have from time to time in your comfortable and friendly morgue have allowed me to witness the fantastic manner in which you approach your job. As a matter of fact, sir, I think you’d be a fool to give all of this up for the Walmart job.”
“I think you are right. I do enjoy my work.”
“I know few people who are as profound in providing the services expected of them as you are Dr. Yong,” the detective continued, droning on half in jest. “I think you’d be a idiot to give up a minute of this line of work. You seem so joyfully suited to it. I doubt if anyone could ever replace you. In addition, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather talk to during these endless autopsy sessions. Your mind is a wonder to behold. That’s for certain.”
“Your pandering has been noted and appreciated, my friend. If you keep this up, I might be persuaded to fix us another batch of coffee.”
“What a friend, you are, kind sir.”
Dr. Yong called his secretary on his cell phone. “We need some coffee, Mable,” he said into the phone. “Why not make us about eight cups for starters. I have a lot of fans in line here, and Steve needs some fortification in order to make the cut, so to speak.” He put the phone down.
“Good help is so hard to find, Steve,” he said.
In a few minutes, the coffee arrived, and the old stuff was carted off as Detective Branch and Dr. Yong watched Mable’s pretty ass rambling back and forth through the door.
“She’s nice,” Branch said.
“Very.”
“I guess we could all use a little more help, especially if it comes in such a nice package.”
“Indeed.”
Dr. Yong continued working. He arranged more organs, made notes, and took photographs. “This one’s a bit messy,” Chen said. “Unfortunately, the poor thing died of a gut wound. Very painful usually. She probably cried a great deal, especially with no one there to help her.”
“What kind of help?”
“Morphine.”
“I see. She stinks.
“Yes. It’s a gut shot. The lower gut.”
“Gotcha.”
“Right. I guess nothing more needs to be said. I’m going to place her goodies back inside as best as I can, then sew her up.” Chen restored the air with a scented spray, then closed the girl’s Y-shaped incision with his fine needlework. He picked up towels which he dipped in a chemical bath and cleaned her exterior skin, removing the blood and returning her outer form to a semblance of her previously pristine purity. “Looks much better,” Chen said, as he admired his work.
“Cleanliness is next to Godliness or so Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World which I was forced to read in my college English class. In fact, I learned from that novel how love is merely a trained behavior meant only for physical pleasure and nothing else.”
“What should I type?” Detective Branch asked his friend ignoring the doctor’s futile attempt at strange humor. Besides, Branch had never read Aldous Huxley’s book and had no plans to do so anytime soon.
“Cause of death is one gunshot wound. Injuries to sides, back, and lower intestine. Bullet not found. Seems to have passed through.”
“That should do it for her. She was really beautiful.”
“Yes. She still is. A real dream girl. I would consider someone as beautiful as she is to be a trophy date to be quite honest.”
“I agree. She’s a hottie, all right.”
Dr. Yong washed up and put new gloves on. “The next victim is Ted Benson’s son, Ruben,” he said into his phone recorder. “Age 25 as verified by his driver’s license. Mildly athletic build. Several tattoos. Two foot Harley wing tat inked across his back. Very nicely done, I might say. Small, sexy butterfly to the upper left of his pubic font. Marijuana leaf tat just below his chest plate. Extensive damage to the left side of head indicative of a 9mm bullet entry. No exit wound visible.” Dr. Yong washed and shaved Ruben’s head. Then he dried it, before using an electric saw to open his cranium by cutting a round circle right through the man’s skull bone and extending it all of the way around. He then removed the head’s upper occipital covering much like carefully lifting a manhole cover from the street. What remained below was Ruben’s brain. With a few cuts, Dr. Yong was able to lift it out and place it on the examining table. He poked inside the brain with his finger. “Extensive bullet tumbling proceeds through the brain matter. Bullet curves off to the left. Bullet found halfway through. I’m extracting it now with a tool.” He dropped the bullet into an open dish, which produced a loud metallic clink, then transferred it into cleaning solution. He picked it from the fluid and noted its pristine color. “Bullet is clean. Slightly misshapen upon impact.”
The body cavity was uneventful.
“Some bruising inside body cavity consistent with violent fall followed by significant cramping during victim’s death throes.” He sewed up the cavity with his fine needlework, replaced the brain inside the skull and sewed its shaved skin tightly together to hold it shut forever. He peeled off his gloves and washed his face and hands, changed into his regular clothes, then came over to Detective Branch who was finishing his report on Ruben Benson’s autopsy. “Cause of death is brain injury from 9mm bullet found inside same.”
“Gotcha.”
“Time for din-din,” Chen said. He grinned from ear-to-ear. “I feel like a Coney Island in a bun. I want one with lots of chili slopped over it. Sound good?”
“Sounds great!” Detective Branch answered.
“Good! Let’s do it.”