He had to make an example of them. Not paying was disrespectful. He liked to think it was giving them a chance to be brave.
“I tell you what, Critter Joe: you’re going to make that decision eventually, because you know the alternative is going to be a whole hell of a lot worse,” he said, gesturing to the table.
Critter Joe looked down at the two objects again. Ahead of Michelsen’s left hand sat the old electronic board game Operation, a torso of a man cartooned onto a tin board in a flat rectangular box the size of a medicine cabinet. Holes had been cut out of his body over the location of vital organs—roughly speaking. In each hole was a plastic organ that had to be “removed” by metal tweezers, without touching the sides of the hole.
They’d come with joke names, but Merry had covered seven off with masking tape. Each of the remaining five had been relabeled accordingly: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, eyes.
Normally, hitting the side of an organ cavity just set off a red lightbulb in the “patient’s” nose.
But Merry had a different rulebook altogether.
“I see you looking at that there Operation game and I see them possibilities in your mind’s eye, Critter Joe. Them permutations,” he said.
There was a light giggle from the other side of the trailer’s open-plan living room/kitchen, where his bodyguard and a pair of goons sat, waiting to resume a card game.
“I see you doing the necessary calculations. I see you considering that with Operation, you get a chance. Pick a card, pluck an organ. But no hands! So… not a good chance, mind. However…” he leaned forward conspiratorially, “… if you can hold them tweezers real steady between them few teeth you’ve got left, you might get a clean pick. And then you get to walk out of here, free and clear, no debt. All that worry, gone. All that debt, gone, lickety-split.”
Critter Joe drew in a breath sharply, his eyes widening at the prospect, the tip of his tongue moistening his lower lip. He owed close to three grand and had nothing left to sell; the idea of erasing his debt…
“You can buy a lot of meth with the three grand you owe me, Critter Joe. Or… well, if you don’t want to take your chances, you can always play ‘Spin the Sig’.”
In front of Michelsen’s other hand, a Sig Sauer pistol’s trigger guard had been placed over top of a metal letter spike, so that the gun could be spun around in a circle. Under it was a colored card, a pie-chart of options, each triangle listing a different body part. “You play the pistol… you know you’re going to get shot. But it won’t be fatal, in all likelihood, and you’ll still owe me my cash money, plus interest. You play Operation, maybe you get away scot-free.”
Critter Joe inhaled deeply, the notion reaching down deep in him, anticipation welling up.
“But if you hit the sides of a hole and a buzzer sounds…”
Critter Joe looked down at his emaciated, grubby torso.
“I know what you’re thinking. Can I make do without a kidney? Without my eyes? ‘Cos you sound that buzzer, and that’s what I’ll take. ‘Course… you pick a ‘liver’ or ‘heart’ card, your future will be real brief. Ah! I know! I know… you’re worrying about whether I’ll ever get my money back, good soul that you are, should you perish and depart this here mortal coil. But don’t you fret none: a healthy heart can fetch a good buck in L.A.”
Critter Joe’s face blanched at the prospect.
Michelsen’s eyes narrowed. “Mind you… you won’t be around to find out how well I did. That’s the problem with organs, I guess. Body don’t function without ‘em, mostly.”
Merry was especially proud of the ‘eyes’ target, he’d told people. He’d clipped an extra little hole out of the tin board himself and found a tiny ceramic set of peepers on a ceramic rat model. They were precious, he’d said, just like his momma’s miniature doll collection.
“So you go ahead and draw a card. Or… you play Spin the Sig, take your medicine, come back in two weeks with my cash money.”
Critter Joe reached out towards the Operation game. But his hand stopped halfway there, frozen by indecision.
He frowned, staring at the hand. He was probably noticing how much it shook without his first fix of the day, Merry figured, that first acrid puff of methamphetamine smoke. He looked down at the tiny set of tweezers connected to the board by a thin wire.
The tip of his tongue traced the few mossy remaining teeth he had left. Merry could see his gears turning, trying to imagine holding the tweezers steady between his front teeth but also squeezing them together, the pressure, the chance of them slipping.
The expression shifted from hope to dread. He’d heard about Operation, everyone had. And they’d all heard about Cody Dufresne just a few weeks earlier, how he’d lost his liver but then bled out, unable to afford proper care.
He hung his head. “I’ll Spin the Sig,” he said, defeated.
Merry leaned on one elbow and felt a swell of disappointment. Old rich guys would pay a hundred grand through a Dark Web broker for a healthy heart to transplant. Critter Joe’s probably wasn’t that healthy after nearly a decade on meth—he was only in his twenties but looked fifty. But the buyer wouldn’t know that, and there was no recourse if a stolen heart failed.
It eliminated buyer remorse and made it the best kind of business deal Merry could imagine: a free product, a big payday, and no recriminations.
He sighed. “Alright then. Go on, get it over with,” he muttered.
Critter Joe leaned over and spun the pistol.
The barrel stopped on “left hand.”
Merry felt his annoyance grow. “Dang, not even a knee?” He shook his head. “I am too goddamn kind to you, Critter Joe! Too goddamned kind by half.” He stood up and slipped the pistol off the spike, working the slide to chamber a round. “Left hand, palm out like you’re begging for food,” he ordered.
Critter Joe held out his hand then closed both eyes. He opened one, squinting hard as he looked down, waiting for…
The bang was loud, his scream almost its equal, the bullet tearing through the center of his palm, destroying tendons and ligaments. Critter Joe collapsed to one side, moaning, clutching the wound as blood poured out onto the linoleum floor tile.
Merry nodded towards his goons. “Go on, get him a dang bandage before he bleeds out. Then get his ass out of here. I don’t want to see you in Oildale again, Critter Joe! Not unless you got something for me. You feel me? You’ve got two weeks, by which time the interest will have it up to five grand, cash money. You come back empty, you play Operation.”
His phone buzzed. He retrieved it from the track suit jacket pocket as they dragged the moaning junkie away.
The number was familiar.
He hit the green button and put it to his ear.
“What you want?”
The voice was calm, professional. “We have a matter that might complicate things. Our mutual problem was not dealt with, apparently, at least not completely. There’s a new player, a lawyer named Bob Richmond.”
“Uh. A lawyer?”
