The next.
The next.
The next.
He counted fifty heads total. This would be a horror show, but the heads were all sealed inside medical-grade coolers and were jacked full of formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde, which made their skin turn a familiar if otherworldly greenish gray: When LifeCore was going to move product for medical research or university study, the clients would sometimes ask Ruben and Miguel to preserve them in this way, so Sal had seen a row of heads like this in the past. With regular injections, they could sit on these shelves for years, probably, if the cooling hadn’t gone out.
What Sal couldn’t figure out was how or why this dentist had all of this cadaver stock. Kales kept nothing. What didn’t go to LifeCore was either buried with the bodies or disposed of in the legal way, Ruben running a clean operation to stay kosher with Melanie Moss and the rest of the state investigators. Surely the dentist wasn’t licensed for this shit. How could he be? How the fuck was he going to get rid of fifty human heads?
That was, it turned out, the least of the problems. Sal closed the cooler and stepped through the maze of shelves until he found Jerry standing in front of double doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY/FLAMMABLE/NO SMOKING. The floor—concrete throughout the warehouse—was covered in a sheen of pink liquid that ran from beneath the doors and drained toward the southern wall, where it disappeared into the drywall.
“The fuck is that?” Sal asked.
“Nothing you want to get on your skin,” Jerry said. He pushed the doors open and inside were twenty industrial freezer units used to store materials at or below zero. There was an inch of fluid on the floor, each freezer dripping more every moment, the room broiling hot. On the shelves surrounding the freezer units were buckets and open coolers filled haphazardly with body parts, mostly hands and feet and sheets of skin. Sal gave them a glance. The word that came to mind was molting.
“I think before the power went out,” Jerry said, “the cooling system must have busted because when I got here, the fan was blowing hot air. I mean, it was maybe 90 degrees in here. I think that caused the defrost, and that knocked the power out. We’d need to get someone out here to look to be sure. I’m not confident this place is even on the grid, to be honest, Rabbi.”
“Don’t bring anyone in this fucking place,” Sal said.
“I wasn’t going to call Nevada Power,” Jerry said. “Boris, he’s got guys. KGB fuckers. All leather coats and hand-rolled cigarettes, I mean, not Jews. The opposite of Jews. What is that word for those fuckers who ran us out of Europe? Not Nazis. The other thing.”
“Cossacks.”
“Right. Cossack motherfuckers. I mean. They built the warehouse.”
“They did a great job,” Sal said.
“The dental office was already here. The warehouse was just sitting empty. Dental office is on legit power, of course, but everything else, god knows who is getting juiced for it.”
Sal looked down at his feet. “This shit is eating through the booties,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “We shouldn’t be breathing this. You get light-headed, it’s time to move.” Sal had been light-headed since getting out of the truck of frozen meat four years ago. “I made the mistake of opening the freezers, hoping I could save some of the product, but I couldn’t. And then that made everything worse.” He shined his flashlight behind one of the freezer units. “The fluids are leaking through the floors. And there’s no way the smell isn’t filling up the club downstairs. I’m worried these fuckers might have attached the cooling system to the main plumbing of the building, which might then cause problems if someone flushes a toilet.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “Maybe the streets run with blood and golems rise from the gutters. Who knows at this point.”
Sal was surprised there weren’t coyotes circling the building. He opened a freezer. There were plastic containers filled with eyes. The sheer volume had Sal confused. How was this possible?
“You do business with these people?”
“You’ve been gone,” Jerry said. “I got bills to pay.”
“Where do they get the parts?”
Jerry shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“These fucking Russians,” Jerry said. “They’re not like us.”
Sal opened another freezer. There were hearts and lungs and kidneys and livers stacked like at a butcher shop, each bleeding into the next.
“Jesus,” Sal said. He slammed the door shut. He’d seen all these body parts before. He just hadn’t seen them smorgasbord-style.
“I told you.”
“No, you didn’t. You said they’re not like us. You didn’t say they had fucking liver cutlets.” The next freezer: Long bones. Spines. “Who are you selling this shit to?”
“Mostly overseas,” Jerry said. “I go through a guy in New Jersey. I think they ship primarily to Afghanistan and Brazil. Wherever there’s a war or elective plastic surgery and they need cadaver bones.”
The next freezer: more heads.
“What do they need all these fucking heads for?”
“Scientific study,” Jerry said. “Testing new lotions and oils and drugs and such. It’s either human heads or cocker spaniels, and people don’t like burning cocker spaniels. It’s a burgeoning business. All these new FDA regulations about testing on animals, no one wants fucking PETA walking in circles in front of their offices. So they’ve got sites in Mexico and off-book sites in the United States. It’s a real problem.”
“They use human heads?”
He shrugged. “People donate their bodies to science. It’s science, I guess.”
Sal looked at the heads closely. A woman with earrings. A man with a cross on a tight gold chain seemingly melted into the flesh under his chin. A teenage girl with a diamond in her nose.
“Give me your flashlight,” Sal said. Was that . . . dirt? The decapitation cuts looked ragged, having just done some similar work of his own, in the dark, and with much more precision. “Are these Russians robbing graves?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said.
“Yes you do.”
