The Way Of The Horse
A Neigh-Noir short story. Seriously. | Crime Fiction
I’ve forgotten what number story this is since I started writing and releasing them in this newsletter almost two years ago. But, Hey! Welcome back. Happy 2025!
This year, every story will be accompanied by a lovely illustration from a very talented friend and colleague,
.I had been messing with AI to create all the previous images, and though that was fun, I think this is even better! I hope you enjoy his art as much as I do.
Without further delay, I give you “The Way Of The Horse.”
The asshole wanted the wheel alignment checked again—as if I wasn’t busy enough pulling the small body wrapped in plastic like a burrito out of the trunk of his car. He stood there, looking smug six feet from me, hands in the pockets of his black jeans, a slick leather jacket over a crisp white tee, and his large round eyes hidden behind black wayfarer Ray-Bans, an incompatible contrast with the musty garage with more dust, dirt, and busted cars than customers.
I imagined my face was the hue of red beets as I deposited the corpse, a woman, as far as I could tell through the polyvinyl wrapped around her face, next to my reciprocating saw in the center of the paint booth. Plastic sheets hung from the ceiling and covered the floor. My lower back, tired of the fifty-two years of awkward positioning while working on cars, cried for relief.
“Feel like helping?” I asked Bill, the asshole, as I walked over to the trunk of his black Audi E-Tron GT, a curious pick for a hitman, and eyed the large corpse still crammed in there like the random assortment of crap in my junk drawer at home.
“I got’em in there. You get’em out,” he retorted.
To call the corpse large may have been an understatement. The poly sheeting he was wrapped in, though thick, was clear, so I could see that the corpse was a BIG BOY, maybe pushing four hundred. His neck looked as wide as my thigh. My sciatic nerve twitched at the thought of moving him.
“Not sure I can.”
“You’re not leaving’em in there.” The dark green tint of the lenses of Bill’s shades added to his look of contempt. His overly groomed eyebrows raised above the frames.
I sighed and grabbed Big Boy’s feet. I yanked hard but only saw the car’s body yank back with me. This dude definitely loved his Pop-Tarts and Twinkies.
“He’s fucking heavy.”
“I know. I put’em there.”
“So help me out.”
“I already t-told ya,” he shot back.
Bill was extra assholy today. I imagined many were afraid of him, especially if they ever saw how he handled a gun and leveraged the violent nature of such an instrument to extinguish the life of a fellow traveler with the ease he did, but I wasn't.
I stormed over near the corpse of the woman, grabbed the reciprocating saw, and pulled the overhead extension cord with me as I headed back to his “electric vehicle” bullshit.
He perked right up.“What ya doing?!”
“I can’t lift him by myself,” I pointed, “sooo…I’m going to chop him up. In here.”
“Alright, relax,” he said.
Bill quickly joined me at the trunk. I set the saw down, let go of the chord, and wrapped my hands around the thick plastic knotted around the Big Boy’s feet as Bill reached in and grabbed around the knees. Together, we pulled.
“Better get my car on the rack after this,” he demanded through gritted teeth.
“I don’t think the computer will find anything,” I grunted.
Bill grimaced as the body slowly scraped across the trunk floor. “The steering is t-touchy again. I’m telling ya.”
“I checked it last week.” I felt the blood rushing to my face as my muscles strained. I may have forgotten to breathe.
We had the big boy’s legs out over the bumper. His belly was caught on the lip of the door lock. Bill grabbed the corpse's arms and attempted to lift him while I pulled.
“You didn’t fix it.”
I felt momentum give in to gravity as the body loosened from the trunk's grasp. Bill let go as physics did the work. My ass crashed into the floor as the corpse flopped out with a thud, its plump head slapping off it, the rigor mortis unforgiving.
“Fuck!!” I grimaced as I grabbed at my tailbone. “It didn’t need fixing.” “You mechanics are all the same,” Bill said as he closed the trunk, pulled a pack of Parliament cigarettes from his jacket pocket, and smacked the top of the box into his right hand.
“Find a new one.”
“Then, I’d have to pay.”
The twinge in my sciatica turned to a full spasm as I pushed off the floor. Hunched over like Quasimodo, I grabbed the big man, dragged him across the plastic sheets, and laid him next to the woman.
Bill lit a cigarette with a zippo and continued, “I just want it fixed.” A cloud of smoke poured from his mouth
“We’ll see what the computer says,” I paused and glared, “didn’t I say not to smoke in here?!”
“Yeah. And I don’t give a rat's ass.” He took another drag with that stupid smile, “You trust the Computer?”
He liked to push buttons for the power trip; murder apparently didn’t give him enough of one. I took a deep breath and exhaled.
“Yeah, I trust it. Put that in the trash this time when you’re done,” I mumbled, “I’m tired of finding them on the floor.”
I pulled my box cutter out and knelt over the corpse of the woman—the plastic split like the red sea against the sharp blade. On the other side was a pale and freckled angular face of mid-twenty-something. Her dirty blonde hair was frazzled. Her arms were adorned with track marks. She was pretty, even if she was a little worn from her afflictions and the bullet holes now crusted in her sternum and forehead.
The asshole always did them like this—a remnant from his time as special ops in the Middle East and Africa in the early aughts. At least, so I’ve heard.
He asked, “You ever think about horses?”
“This isn’t like some stupid, ‘What's Your Roman Empire crap,’ now is it?”
“Nah…It's about horses.”
“What about them?”
“They were the machines before we had…machines.”
“They aren’t machines,” I stated, “They live, breathe, eat, and…shit.”
I knelt over Big Boy and sliced through his polyethylene cocoon. He was in his early fifties. His face and arms were heavily tattooed—his t-shirt and oversized slacks were stained by food and blood.
“We used them as such…they plowed fields, fought our wars…got our asses from t-town to t-town,” he took a deep drag of the cigarette and let out a river of smoke in his exhale as he pondered, “Not that different from cars, really.”
I sliced and ripped off the fat man’s dirty clothes and moved over to the woman to do the same. She wore a tight dress; underneath, she wasn’t wearing a bra or underwear. A faded tattoo of a bird lay inside of her right hip. I didn’t know the species.
Fifteen years of this work creates a tough stomach. However, she turned mine into bubbles. I felt the noxious gases stir in my belly and expand. A burning sensation in the esophagus, a clear sign of the return of my acid reflux. It forced a cough, then a burp.
“Your point?”
“They were the workhorses of our society. Then, one day we got tanks, cars, tractors and shit. No more need for horses. They were useless.”
“A lot less horses died,” I remarked, “and now they're free to pursue other endeavors.”
“They’re just…decorative farm animals. The rich collect’em as pets…t-to parade around occasionally.”
I wiped my face with the back of my greasy work glove and stood up. “Yeah, well, maybe they’re happy.”
“He was happy until I sank some slugs into him,” Bill pointed at the fat man, “He worked for Il Capo.”
Il Capo, the boss in Italian, though no one in “the business” I knew spoke the language, was why Bill and I were stuck working together. I only met him once when he offered me more money than I had ever seen pass from one hand to another. All he required was my silence and willingness to turn my trade of fixing cars into a trade of entombing corpses within them.
I was never the best mechanic or business owner. I took the money.
I understood at the time that not many others would, even though, if presented with a choice, they would be surprised by what they would be willing to do for the right stack of greenbacks. Most people don’t ever get a chance like I got. I wasn’t going to waste it.
It’s not that I condone murder. I’m not even sure if pressed, I could pull the trigger and take a life. But the world, at least the blue marble that orbited the sun where I existed, was a violent and dark place. Il Capo was going to kill whether I cleaned up his messes or not.
I walked over to the hazmat suit hanging up on the one wall and asked, “What he do?”
“Didn’t ask,” Bill said as he took a final puff from the cigarette and pressed it against the sole of his shoe. He flicked the butt out onto the cracked cement floor of the garage.
“You piece of shit! What did I just say?”
“Your garage is a dirtball,” he remarked while stretching his hands out, pointing at the unorganized arrangement of scattered tools, parts, machines, and cars.
I was never good at organization or deep cleaning. To the chagrin of my mother, God rest her soul; I was never good at listening when she demanded me to help do it around the house or in my room. The couple of scum mechanics I could trust who helped keep up the appearance of a working car shop weren’t much into cleanliness either.
“So what?! Pick it up!”
I pulled the hazmat suit off its hanger and slipped it over my coveralls. I zipped it up, grabbed the goggles, gloves, and N-95 mask off the floor, and put them on.
“Man, you’re funny,” Bill said as he waved away my frustration and leisurely strolled to collect his litter.
“Funny how?”
“Funny that your so anal about putting corpses in the right vehicle, but the garage is a mess.”
“Whatever.”
I grabbed the saw and the overhead extension hanging near me and walked to the lying stiffs in their birthday suits. Like countless others, I needed to dismember them into pieces that fit in the hidden compartments and spaces of a vehicle’s frame, body, and dashboard. The places few would ever feel the need to look, and none would notice anything different. The vehicle would then be shipped to China, Taiwan, or Eastern Europe and sit in a junkyard until the second coming, perhaps even after.
There was an art in picking a car as a deceased final resting place. It was about matching a corpse's perceived personality to the vehicle's make, model, and color. I had a catalog of vehicles distributed haphazardly throughout the shop and in the back lot.
I turned back to Bill as he re-entered the booth, “Do horses mourn?”
“Never thought to ask.”
His stupid rant about them got my mind dwelling on their very nature. Like, are they happier now they aren’t coerced to work, or do they feel like the forgotten tools at the bottom of a drawer or toolbox?
Bill continued, “But I could imagine, like us, some don’t, some do.”
I returned my gaze to Big Boy. His tattoos were all over the place, from stupid drunken designs that he may have done with his own intoxicated hands to intricate art pieces attempted by pretenders. His hair was unkempt. His mustache greasy.
“It would scare me t-to end up like them.”
I looked back at Bill. For once, his greedy smile was gone as he leaned against the trunk of his car, picking at some grime stuck underneath his fingernails.
I pointed at the two bodies, “Them?!”
“No,” he scoffed, “we all end up like them! I’m talking about the horses.”
“Ah, an easy life wouldn’t be so bad.”
He shook his head and glanced up at me. “I need work. Keeps the demons out.”
“Aren’t you the demon?”
“Only for the unlucky ones.”
I shrugged, plugged in the saw, and dropped down next to Big Boy. Regardless of what vehicle I got for him, he would need to be quartered and his limbs halved. It would be the only way he’d fit.
I had a P.T. Cruiser in the back of the garage that I wanted to get rid of; it's such an ugly car. I disliked them more than mini-vans. I pressed the trigger of the saw, and the shrill squeal of it covered the ripping and breaking of muscle fibers, cartilage, and bone. My hazmat suit quickly lost its white sheen. My heavy breathing fogged the goggles and made the inside of my mask feel like a Louisiana swamp.
P.T. Cruiser it was going to be.
Big Boy lay in 16 to 18 pieces. I stood up, and the crick in my lower back sent a jolt through my spine. I bent over my hips and reached for my bloody boots; it gave me a morsel of relief.
There was a time when the thought of dismemberment would make me queasy. I never liked exceptionally violent movies, but I was a Tarantino fan and found the violence in his films funny.
This work wasn’t funny, but the bodies I got, well, they were bodies. The people who once resided in the flesh and bone were no longer there. If every human has a soul, and I had doubts, it had long since departed when a corpse arrived here.
“YA FUCKWAT!”
“Huh?!”
I pulled the goggles, speckled with pieces of Big Boy, off my face, and looked at Bill, bent over, glaring at something on the back bumper of his car. His sunglasses were off. His eyebrows scrunched around his large round eyes as he licked his right thumb and proceeded to attempt to buff something out.
Vile and spit shot from his mouth as he looked at me. He yelled, “You scratched my fucking car!”
My eyes rolled into the back of my head as I walked over to the “scene of the crime.” The frantic squeak of a moist finger rubbing against painted metal my soundtrack. Bill moved his hand away so I could take a look.
“You see?!”
I saw it, alright. A tiny gash, the thickness of an iPhone charging cable, and the length of half a penny that chipped some paint, revealing the metal panel underneath. Most people would never have noticed. It could have come from anything.
“It wasn’t me.”
“YEAH! Ya did!”
“It could have been anything!”
Bill grabbed me by the chest of my hazmat suit, chunks of tissue caught into the crevices of his fist, and pulled me violently toward him. I was inches from his face. “You drug the bodies out of the car,” he said through gritted teeth and spit, “right across this bumper!”“Maybe…you did it when you put them in,” I replied, “or maybe, even a time before that.”
He threw his weight forward and shoved me contemptuously into the paint booth’s wall. The plastic rustled. The thin metal behind it rattled. Nerve pain shot up my spine. I saw red and threw a fist—an honest reflex. It plowed into Bill’s hawkish nose.
He let go.
“Goddamit,” I cursed as I shook my hand, trying to relieve the aching knuckles.
“Motherfucker,” Bill muttered, bent over and hovering over his knees like someone about to puke. His hands covered his mouth and nose, blood pouring out of the latter and dripping on his Ray-Bans, broken in two, on the ground.
“I think ya broke it.”
He spat out blood and flicked it off his hands. “That was a bitch move.”
“Fuck you. You grabbed me.”
“SHUT UP,” he demanded as he straightened himself and leaned back. A stream of red painted from his mouth down his neck.
“Whatever.”
I shook my head, pulled my mask up, and walked over to the woman. In some ways, she looked a lot like Heather—a high-school crush whom I never even kissed, just the kind where you imagined a moment together, then a life, all because you said a few words, enjoyed the perfume she wore, and made her smile once.
I could imagine a life where she wouldn’t end up at the end of Bill’s gun, in the rough hands of Il Capo, or at the mercy of her next fix, which made it hard to think about her in pieces and crammed in between metal sheets and polyvinyl. But I knelt anyway and pulled the trigger of the saw, pushing its blade just above her left knee, and grimaced.
“Aaaaahhh. I got a fucking headache.” Bill’s whine barely audibly over the gyration of the sawblade as it cut through flesh and bone.
I wanted to put her in something special. A car that would allow her to soar, perhaps, even be free of the shadows that once haunted her. Life, as it was for most, may have been unkind, but maybe death didn’t need to be. As I moved onto her arms, I thought about a warm wind blowing through her hair and pictured my Dad’s 95 Mazda Miata. It's pearl white paint and slim frame, a bright angel on a windy road.
“You’re…a….motherfucker,” Bill muttered.
I hadn’t driven it since his funeral. It sat in the back lot, and I was sure it would never be driven again, at least by me.
I did quick work on her slender frame. I pulled off my goggles and ripped off my mask. I turned around to see how the broken-nose crybaby was holding up. He stood five feet away from me with his stained white tee shirt, pieces of paper towel shoved up his nose, and his black 9mm pistol in his hand.
A cigarette lit in his mouth.
Two hollow bangs assaulted my ears. Thirty seconds later, I felt a deep searing in my chest, a warm liquid filling my lungs. I coughed and looked down.
Two holes, oozing with blood, marked my sternum. I dropped to my knees and hissed, “Assho…
I choked on blood. Bill slithered closer, let out a puff of smoke, and smiled. He rubbed his temples with his left hand, slid it down his face, and stretched his jaw. His eyes wandered as his fingers scratched at the four o’clock shadow on his chin.
“You were fucking up, Jesse. ” He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and waved it around like a wand. “Getting sloppy. Letting evidence hang out in the garage.”
He grabbed one of the woman’s hands, examined it, and then whipped it over his car and outside of the paint booth.
“Leaving…marks on cars t-to try and…alert authorities.”
“Liar..,” I gurgled. Gathering air was difficult. I felt what I could gather bubble up through the blood dribbling out of the wounds in my chest.
Bill leaned down close and glanced around the room. He whispered, “Yeah, I can sell that.”
Everything started to spin. I fell towards the floor and put my hand out to brace. It landed in the red pool of my blood, so I slipped and met the floor with my chin. Bill kicked me over with the heel of his boot.
I looked up.
The bright fluorescents in straight rows on the ceiling blinded my eyes. I couldn’t decide where to look—Bill’s face or the lights. It was all confusing—a fire spread from my chest. Things fell in and out of focus.
He raised his pistol again. My eyes crossed as I looked into the void of its barrel.
I didn’t hear the sound of the second shot. I didn’t feel the bullet penetrate my skull nor bore through the gray matter of my brain. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, no montage of beautiful memories, nor a fond love for a long-forgotten nostalgic moment. The only thing I saw before the eternal darkness began were horses.
Fucking horses.