Body Surfing

have been used as a cum rag at some point or another, and, though Jasper did his best not to visualize these sessions, they were present in all their graphic detail. It was not a pretty sight.
    “Jarhead,” he said aloud, “buddy, you are one sick fuck.” Deep inside him, he could’ve sworn he heard an embarrassed chuckle.
    It was getting better now. Jasper felt almost sane. He found the charger, plugged it in, snapped the phone onto it. His thumb hovered over the keypad. The only time he’d ever dialed Q.’s number was when he put it in his phone book, but it only took a millisecond for him to access that memory now. He punched in the ten digits. The sound of ringing was extraordinarily loud in his ears—Jarhead had, of course, turned the speaker volume up all the way.
    “Come on, Q., pick up. Pick up.”
    “Yo. This is Q. Apparently I’m not in the mood to answer my phone so go ahead and leave a message. I’ll call you back, if you’re sexy. Peace.”
    “Fuck!” was the first word Jasper said to his best friend after he died. And then the words started rolling out of him: “Q. Q-ball. It’s me. It’s Jasper, Q. Feldspar. We met in second grade when Billy Lethem tied your towel around your face with your belt and beat you up till I pulled him off, and the night before you killed me you showed me your $29,000 watch and we drank half a bottle of your old man’s Scotch. You had the Fanta. I had the Gatorade.”
    Jasper caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror. Saw that Jarhead’s penis, soft now, was still dangling from his boxers.
    “It’s really me, Q.,” he finished up. “And I really need your help.”

13
    M iranda Atkins shoved her cigarette in her mouth, punched in the code that set the alarm, and ducked out the front door of the Qusays’ eerily empty home. In her haste, she dropped her keys, and cursed loudly in her native Cockney. You had to turn the bolt within sixty seconds of arming the system or the alarm would start blaring, the front gates would seal shut, and she’d have to wait an hour for the local constabulary to show up and free her. She wasn’t in the mood to get trapped here again. Not tonight. Not with that carcass in the driveway. Really, she asked herself, retrieving her keys, locking the door. What kind of man brings something like that home?
    She stared at the car as she made her way to her Camry. She couldn’t help it. Both doors had been pulled off by what-was-it-called, the Jaws of Life, and even in the dim glow of the low orbs scattered about the Qusays’ front garden you could see the blood staining the leather seats. So much blood. Good God almighty, so much blood. She wondered if it would come out. Not that you would ever actually clean it or anything. But say you wanted to. Would it come out? She’d recently been turned on to OxiClean, but maybe good old lye would do it. It would be a challenge, that was for sure.
    Maybe Borax. Or naphtha.
    She was almost past the wreck when she heard the ringing. A faint sound, emanating from deep within the car. Under the bonnet, it sounded like, or in the boot.
    A phone. Someone’s phone was still in the car.
    Perhaps it was the gin fizz she’d sipped after she finished up for the day—no sense paying for it when she had the Qusays’ bar at her disposal—or perhaps it was the spookiness of the purple sky, the tendrils of fog rising off the river like the ghosts of drowned swimmers, but her mind immediately filled with an image of a body in a coffin six feet beneath the ground, the face green in the glow of a cell phone’s screen, the breath thin and ragged as it prayed for someone to answer, for someone to realize they’d been buried alive. Jasper maybe, or what was that girl’s name? She never could remember. Sila! Yes, that was it. Silly name, Sila. Poor thing. Poor dead thing.
    “Sorry, luv,” she chirped to the ringing phone. “Ain’t no one gonna answer that call.”

14
    Q . hated sleeping in his parents’ Beekman Place apartment. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the place: it was a 5,000-square-foot duplex with a pair of enormous terraces overlooking the East River. But his parents didn’t maintain an eight million-dollar apartment just so they had someplace to sleep when they came to the city. Oh no. It was their shag pad. Not his dad’s or his mom’s. No no no. They shared it, through a complex arrangement Q. did his best to know nothing about.
    But here he was. His session