Page 44 of The Secret Dinner

“I already gave you the solution,” she said. “Steal a new body.”

Miguel looked up, exasperated. “Do you have any idea what we had to go through to get this one? I told you all to just put a stop to this whole thing! There’s still time to cancel the dinner and give back the money.”

“That’s out of the question,” I insisted. “We need that money. We spent that money!”

Miguel got up and reached for the clock on the wall. He held it up to show us, his hands trembling. “The dinner is in nine hours!”

“Your bitching is really getting on my last nerve,” said Cora. “Go get a body and I’ll break it down. I can go even faster this time.”

“You’re out of your mind!”

Miguel smashed the clock on the ground and began flailing his arms, breaking two glasses that were on the drying rack before I grabbed him from behind.

“Stop it!”

We were all on edge. Nobody moved to pick up the pieces. All that work for nothing. The rotting meat just sat there on the counter, blood seeping through the plastic and dripping into the sink. Plink, plink, plink.

“Will somebody please throw that away?!” begged Miguel, putting his hands over his ears.

Hugo, who until then had been leaning quietly against the wall with his arms crossed, suddenly stirred. I thought he was going to throw out the meat, but instead he went to the front door, grabbed the keys to Bukowski, and fetched two black garbage bags from the laundry room. He called the service elevator while Cora and Piglet gathered the rotten meat in another bag.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

Before slamming the door behind him, Hugo turned to me with unrecognizably cold eyes.

“I’m going to fix our problem.”

3

I spent the next few hours trying in vain to get some sleep. My body had reached a breaking point, but my mind was still racing, trying to find someone to blame for the rotten meat. It was shitty luck for the freezer to break down that night, of all nights. Piglet always said: The best way to get out of something is to blame someone greater than yourself. That’s why religions are so successful. It’s a sort of relief to imagine some higher power in control of our joy and our tragedy. But not even God could be blamed for the mess we’d gotten ourselves into. The responsibility was all ours.

Lost in thought, I heard my phone vibrating on the nightstand. I glanced at the screen: Mom. That was the last thing I needed. I let it go to voicemail. The phone rang seven more times—Hilda wasn’t easily deterred. I was about to shut it off when Hugo called.

“I’ll be home in five minutes,” he said. He sounded tense. “Go out the back and meet me in the garage.”

I changed quickly and headed down the hallway. Inside Piglet’s room, you could hear his heavy breathing and Cora giggling. How could they be fucking at a time like this? I went downstairs and double-checked if the building’s security cameras were still disabled. Luckily for us, they were. In the underground parking garage, Hugo had backed Bukowski up to the service elevator. He was wired, shifting from side to side, his eyes wide.

Hugo popped the trunk and half his body disappeared into the car, struggling to move whatever was inside. A limp arm dangled out of the trunk and I immediately recoiled.

“What the…?”

“Come on, help me out!” he shouted.

Inside Bukowski’s trunk was a body, covered in garbage bags—one over the head, the other over the legs. As soon as I touched the corpse, my hands were soaked in fresh, still warm blood. Clearly the person had only been dead a few hours. A shiver ran down the back of my neck. Where did Hugo get this guy? When our eyes met, he looked away.

“Come on, hurry up!”

In desperation, I obeyed. We carried the body in silence to the elevator. As we went up, I closed my eyes, pleading with God for it not to make any stops before our floor. Once we arrived, Hugo ordered me to hold the elevator door while he got a rag to clean the blood dotted on the floor. We lugged the corpse to the back door.

“In the laundry room,” I said.

There was no way we could do the butchering in the living room again. The dinner was in a few hours, and I still had to set the table and tidy everything up. With my help, Hugo removed the plastic bags. I stared down at a Black man, about forty years old, with shabby clothes and an unshaven beard. His skin was filthy, and even with all the blood he gave off a strong odor of dirt and piss. The left side of his face was completely disfigured, a flap of dead skin hanging from his cheek. Looking down, I could see that his entire left side, from thigh to armpit, was covered in road rash.

“How’d you find this body, Hugo?”

He pretended not to hear me and shouted for Cora and Piglet. I stood in front of him and gripped his shoulders.

“Tell me … What did you do?”