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Repeat Business
by Terry Black
[Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April 1990]
Salvatore "Knuckles" Dermicelli awoke to the sound of a yowling
cat.
Bleary-eyed, he got out of bed, donned his bathrobe, threw the
front door open. With a scrabble of claws on linoleum, Pesto darted
between his ankles and scurried for the kitchen. Knuckles leaned
out, grabbed the morning paper, took the nickel-plated .45 from his
bathrobe pocket and plugged the fungus-faced zombie, shambling up
the driveway.
"God, I hate Mondays," he said.
He went into the kitchen, put some coffee on, sat down to read the
paper. The headlines held no surprises. Someone had left a
Schwinn-bomb in the bike rack outside Sears; the controversial new
sex tax had narrowly cleared the Senate; researchers had discovered
a new form of AIDS, transmitted only in the presence of a chaperone.
Knuckles had to page through half the paper to find any mention
of the three roving corpses he'd mowed down yesterday. The only
reference was an oblique one:
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MORTICIANS PROTEST REDUNDANT FUNERALS
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by Dennis Pike, Times Staff Writer
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Pittsburgh (UPI) -- In a sharply-worded statement at
a press conference today, Morticians spokesman Donald
Longtooth complained about the frustrating chore of
having to bury the same corpses over again.
"It's an outrage," he said. "Just yesterday we had to
rebury three bootleg deaders, found murdered -- if that's
the word -- miles from their supposedly final resting
places. We had to put 'em back in the ground,
reconsecrate the soil, everything. But the next-of-kin
don't pay those expenses -- we do."
Longtooth called for stricter policing of graveyards
and body banks...
Pesto was bitching again, impatient for his Kal Kan. Knuckles
opened a can, glopped some into a bowl and stuck it under the
feline's nose. Today's zombie was, what, the twelfth -- no, the
thirteenth -- of Knuckles' ex-targets to bedevil him. Dammit, he
thought, don't they know I'm retired?
Wearily he straightened up, wincing at the pain in his leg. It
wasn't enough that the dead bodies of everyone he'd ever snuffed
for the Mob were climbing out of their graves to pester him. No, on
top of that, his bursitis had to start acting up.
Welcome to paradise, he thought bitterly.
"Try to stay off it," said Doc Tisdale, examining Knuckles' knee.
"Cortisone injections will ease the pain, but it won't get any better if
you keep running around like someone half your age."
"I had some...ah...unexpected business," said Knuckles, thinking of
Fungus-Face and his undead cohorts. "Besides, Doc, I hate this 'life of
leisure' crap. I go stir-crazy, sittin' around the house."
"Just be glad you made it to retirement age," Tisdale pointed out.
"Most fellas in your line of work wind up feeding guppies in the
Monongahela, or dumped in a gulch for some not-so-sanitary
landfill."
Tisdale wrapped an Ace bandage around the ailing knee. He
wasn't really a doctor, of course; the Mob physician had been
bounced from med school, after an incident involving the Dean's
daughter and a doctored cocktail at the local frat house. But Tisdale
had a knack for seat-of-the-pants first aid, and he wasn't fussy about
reporting gunshot wounds.
Knuckles longed for the glory days, a time of raw flesh wounds
and frantic backroom surgery. The current spate of geriatric
disorders was a blow to his self-esteem; he hadn't been shot at since
the Tortellini hit, back in -- Christ, was it twenty years ago?
Those had been good days, happy days; trading bullets with rival
gangs, garroting squealers -- one on the steps of the courthouse! --
and generally raising nine kinds of hell, as Knuckles deftly bum's-
rushed his "clients" into the afterlife.
Not that any of 'em stayed there.
Continued on the next page
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