The Darkest Evening of the Year

sure.”
    “Billy, I’m having a rotten day, don’t bust my chops.”
    “Well, you know cremators better than I do. You say it’ll do the job, that’s good enough for me.”
    Before he could move, she snared the logic unit with one hand, swung it up and into the cremator as if it weighed less than a dead cat. Juliette hated cats, and more than a few of them had most likely gone through this Power-Pak II.
    She was a beautiful woman and hard and strong, but she was not a good person.
    “What kind of rotten day?” he asked as she closed the cremator door and fired up the burner.
    “Gunny wants it to get more serious between us.”
    The thought of those two in bed seemed, to Billy, to be about as serious as sex could get, except maybe if a grizzly bear tried to get it on with a puma.
    “He wants to dump the wife in San Francisco and marry me. She’s Chinese, has some connection to China’s military-security apparatus, and she collects knives. I don’t know what Gunny’s thinking.”
    “Gunny has a hopeless romantic streak,” Billy said, which was true.
    “Tell me about it. He says, just shacking up with me doesn’t fulfill him like marriage would. I’m his destiny, he says.”
    “I could talk to him.”
    “I’m nobody’s destiny, Billy, except mine. The thing is, I’ve been thinking of ending it with him even before this, but he’s as tight with Harrow as you are, and I don’t want Gunny getting pissy and bad-mouthing me to Harrow.”
    “He’s maybe not as important to Harrow as you think.”
    “Is that right? Well, anyway, he’s such a big sonofabitch, he scares me.”
    “We go way back, Gunny and me. I can talk to him so he doesn’t get a mad-on for you.”
    “Could you? Would you? That would be great. He’s up on the top floor, making dinner.”
    She maintained a large and beautifully furnished apartment above the funeral home.
    “I could go up there and see him,” Billy said, “or you could get on the intercom and ask him to come down here.”
    “I just redid the kitchen cabinetry.”
    “What was wrong with the old cabinets? They were beautiful.”
    “Too dark,” Juliette said. “All that egg-and-dart crown molding. I wanted a lighter, more modern look.”
    “Are you happy with it?”
    “Oh, yeah. It’s gorgeous.”
    “Good cabinetry can bust your bank these days.”
    “That’s what I’m saying.”
    “So ask him to come down here.”
    She used the intercom in the garage, just outside the door to the crematorium. “Hey, Big Gun,” she said, “are you there?”
    Gunny’s voice issued from the intercom speaker: “What’s up?”
    “I’ve got a really fat dead guy here I need some help with.”
    “What about Herman and Werner?”
    They were her brothers and business partners.
    “Viewing hours are over. They went home,” she said. “We weren’t expecting a stiff.”
    “I’ve got to keep an eye on the rack of lamb.”
    “I just need help getting the stiff into the cooler. One minute. He’s a big old hog of a guy or I could do it myself.”
    “Be right there.”
    Because it had to accommodate a casket, the elevator was large, but quieter than Billy expected.
    When the doors opened, Gunther Schloss looked as big as a steer in a rodeo pen.
    He said, “Shit,” and Billy shot him three times while he was upright, once while he was falling, and four times as he lay half in and half out of the elevator.
    “Is he dead?” Juliette asked.
    “He ought to be.”
    “You want to check for a pulse?”
    “Not yet,” Billy said, and shot Gunny two more times.
    He would have shot Gunny four more times, but no rounds remained in the pistol.
    Billy ejected the empty magazine and snapped a full one into the pistol, and during that quarter of a minute, Gunny didn’t move.
    “Okay, he’s dead. I guess that was the easy part, after all.”
    “It could have gone different,” Juliette said.
    “It could have, you’re right. But I’m fifty now, and the part that’s getting not so easy for me is this hauling-them-around part.”
    “Piece of cake, Bookworm. In this business, I’m always moving dead weight.”
    She went away and returned in less than a minute, rolling a state-of-the-art hydraulic gurney.
    Only the push of a button was required to lower the stainless-steel bed of the gurney until it was two inches from the floor.
    With little difficulty, Billy and Juliette wrestled the corpse facedown onto the stainless steel.
    She pressed the button again, and the bed