Crime Scene

The day started like most days — with murder. The only thing that made this day any different was that I walked into the middle of it while it was happening. My name is Mike, and I'm a Crime Scene Cleaner.

What was peculiar about today was how quiet it was. Almost too quiet. I got to work at the usual time and made myself a snack. A fistful of vitamins and a black coffee. The girls weren't there, which was unusual for them. Any other day they'd be bugging me to pay attention to them, but today I was met with silence.

Hot coffee in hand, I went looking for them.

"Charlie? Mabel?" I called.

They are sisters. Left for dead in a snowbank almost two years ago. Jenn and I took them in and gave them a job. Their job? Watch the shop when we weren’t there. Report anything unusual. This was the first day in all that time they weren't there when I got to work. Strange. There were very few clues, but I had my suspicions.

An open window. A light rain. The sun trying to sneak out from under the horizon.

I retraced my steps to the kitchen. There was no sign they'd eaten.

I made a lot of noise as I grabbed a spoon and a can of food.

THUNK! TINK! CHUNK! I tapped the spoon on the can.

Nothing. No girls.

I headed back to the open window and did it again.

TINK! CHUNK!

A low growl escaped from the mist.

Putting the can and spoon down on the window ledge, I made my way outside, and there they were. Mabel crouched under an awning, staring at her sister across the yard. Charlie stood, back arched, something trapped under her feet, her pupils the size of doubloons. It was a body.

Charlie looked at me. Looked at the body at her feet. It twitched.

Charlie grabbed it and threw it across the yard to her sister. Mabel jumped into the air, did a spinning-dragon-kick, and sent it flying back to Charlie. Charlie trapped it under one paw and looked directly at me. Her head tilted. She lifted her paw. The body twitched. Charlie picked it up and punched it across the yard and onto the roof.

Mabel sprang into action, grabbed the mostly lifeless body from the eaves, and ran back into the house through the open window.

"Mabel, nooooooooo!" I cried in slow motion as I tried to block the window.

It was too late. By the time I got back into the house, Mabel and Charlie had a very dead mouse between them.

"Good girls!" I cooed, recoiling. "Did you kill a mouse? Such good mousers!"

At which point they each grabbed an end of the mouse and tore it in two.

"Nooooooo!"

With the surgical precision of great white sharks, they separated the body into several pieces, chumming the carpet with mouse guts, then each grabbed a favourite part and went running to different parts of the house, trailing blood and mouse parts everywhere they went.

"Dammit, girls!"

Rubber gloves. Cleaning agents. Paper towels. I tracked the carnage from room to room.

Mike Dargie, Crime Scene Cleaner.