A tire iron. It wasn’t that she thought it would look better wrapped around his neck or shoved into an orifice and then wrapped around to fill in the front of his tight denim jeans that were already packaged heavy. She just felt the bluntness of a tire iron would work better at smashing his head with its perfectly manicured bowl cut into a bloody pulp than something else, like, say, the screwdriver she held in her hand as she tried once again to explain to this bastard that the body he found in the back of his car after it spent all night in her repair shop was not something he should take to the police.
Of course, trying to explain to him the body was that of her ex-husband and she would rather he took it to the nearest opening into the mouth of Hell was not going to work either. This man really did not look like the kind of man who would believe Hell had several mouths in this little town she called home.
“You did what?” The man asked this last question with such a lack of calm that Toni felt her head would be shredded by the sound.
“I killed him.”
She said this with such gravity that she felt he could not help but realize the seriousness of her words. The look on his face was not of fear, but incredulous shock. Why he had not gone to the police in the first place but returned to Toni’s Plane, Tractor, and Auto Repair was beyond her comprehension. But here he was, standing in front of her, pointing at the bloody remains of her ex-husband in the trunk of his car and, of all things, demanding an explanation. Toni almost thought maybe he had done this himself once or twice because of the lack of seriousness with which he took the corpse.
“I heard that the first time you told me,” he shot back at her. “What I want to know is why is it in my car?”
“I had no place to put it and I merely forgot to remove his body before you picked up your car last Thursday.” It was Monday and Toni wondered how it had taken him so long to find the body in the first place. “He’s only been in there since Tuesday night and it’s not like you had anything in your trunk in the first place. His body fit perfectly once I removed that one leg. See?”
She pointed to the missing leg on the corpse and then she stuck the screwdriver into the back of his head. She knew he was about to say something. Every man tries to say something smart about a dead body. She was tired of trying to explain herself to men. This one was not a nice kill, not like killing her ex-husband had been. No, he went down easy. One shot to the back of his head and he was down like a sack of potatoes. This man, oh no, he could not go down easy. Once the screwdriver lodged itself in his skull, he had to flail around until his head struck the back passenger side window and shattered it. How was she supposed to explain that to his wife?
“Now she had to go find one of those mouths of Hell again. Third time this year too. Just her luck. With all the tourists this season, maybe no one would notice one more gone. It never worked out that way though. There was always some donut-eating cop in town from some other jurisdiction who just had to investigate the old sand pits to the south of town. This town was never friendly to outside cops. The cops here knew better than to run out and try to sift through that much sand. So, of course, nothing was ever found and one more tourist cop turned detective wannabe left Diablo’s Breech empty-handed.”
Toni knew—like everyone in this town knew—the sand pits never coughed up what they held, and for good reason too. Diablo’s Breech was not merely named during the gold rush years of forty-nine because of the sweltering heat factor during the mining months, but because it did have one major claim to fame that no one outside the city limits believed.
Diablo’s Breech really did hold the mouth to Hell. In fact, one could say this town had all the orifices of Hell in its backyard.